Author: Brian J. Noggle

So, the weekend before last, I mentioned moving some books from the table beside the sofa upstairs which had been on the table for years, mostly untouched–I’d placed them there whilst I was awaiting my high-school-aged son to come home from closing the restaurant where he worked at the time so I could read them while waiting.

Well, a week after I cleared it, other books moved in.

I have finally convinced my oldest, for whom we waited but now he’s almost done with juco, to not only watch videos on things but to read primary sources, of which Nogglestead has many.

So he’s started to nibble at them, and he’s stacking them up. The copy of Meditations is the one I gave him during the coronavacation in 2020–the one I read in 2019, not long after we moved to Nogglestead, was a Classics Club edition, one of the only ones I’ve read. Jeez, sixteen years…. Maybe I’m due to read it again myself.

Still, I hope he continues to actually read, or at least continues to start to think it would be a good idea.

On this day in 1972 (Richard Nixon’s first administration, gentle reader–basically pre-history), I was born eight weeks early and weighed four pounds, four ounces. Which was about too small to survive in that era. The doctors gave me a 50/50 shot of surviving the first night.

Ah, but, gentle reader, an even more statistically improbable event occurred 25 years later.

A poet in Columbia, Missouri, read a poem I posted on a newsgroup and asked me where you could read in St. Louis. Which was right in my wheelhouse because I knew all the places, which nights of the week they were, and what kind of crowds to expect. I would later quote an Iron Maiden poster to her, she would come to St. Louis to read on a Sunday night (on the very day that Brandt’s turned their weekly open mike to a bi-monthly)–so we walked around St. Charles and the Central West End for a while, and I was greeted by name by two different groups, so I must have seemed like quite the poetry big cheese at the time (and she had to come back the next week, too), and then I would recite the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her mother the first time I met her.

At any rate, my oldest is currently in a “girls are icky” phase. He’s dated semi-seriously a couple of times and has had many “appointments” with young ladies his age, but he’s starting to think modern girls aren’t all that.

I thought that, too, in the middle 1990s. I thought you had to pick either a smart girl or a moral girl, but that modern (1990s) girls had little overlap. But, as the philosopher says, out of the blue one appeared who was also hot.

I guess sometimes you have to trust the process you have no control over.

When we were kids, our exposure to foreign cuisine came from the grocery store. Pizza came in boxes with doughy crusts, sweet tomato sauce in a packet, and desiccated cheese. And Chinese food came in a can. And to this day, I can still hear the jingle “La Choy makes Chinese food…. swing American!”

We got these things, along with Rice-a-Roni, sometimes, and they were always a treat. A break from the Hamburger Helper that was the staple. My sainted mother was many things, but a cook she was not.

As my beautiful wife is traveling this week for business, I picked up a can (well, a package of two cans taped together). But instead of going with the chow mein, which is probably we got annually or twice every three years, I went with the sweet and sour chicken.

And…. bleh.

Decades later, I have a more sophisticated palate, having eaten a variety of different cuisines at various levels of competency. But there are definite limits in what you can put into a can, and this is it.

Although perhaps I didn’t do it right–I didn’t rinse the vegetables enough, and I absolutely messed up the rice by thinking the 1/2 cup scoop was 1 cup (leading to some very wet rice).

Maybe I’ll try again with the chow mein. And add a little red pepper to it. Maybe beef instead of chicken.

But, man, the 1970s. We lived there. It was different.

Warm winter weather prompts early plant budding, but frost threat remains in Ozarks. The slug on the home page says:

Meteorologist Nick Kelly breaks down why some might consider holding off on planting even though we’re back in a warm stretch.

Are you new here? Actually, many might be.

In years past, I have planted too early in that first bit of warmth, only to see my live plants struggle through a cold snap. But never in February, gentle reader, never in February.

One of the benefits of having lived at Nogglestead for sixteen and a half years is that I’ve seen the ebb and flow of the seasons. So I know that it will get cold again in March, and maybe April yet. Last year it was cool and rainy into June before warming up. So I will plant from seed sometime in March. Perhaps some broccolini, which Susan Lamb has been researching and writing about for the Stone County Republican.

I did walk out yesterday to look at the sole remaining peach tree in the front yard; it is indeed budding. But we’ll probably not get blossoms this year, much less peaches, because the temperature dropped to -10 degrees one or two nights. And I walked through a swarm of bugs taking out the trash last night. I’ve heard tell that warm snaps like this are good to keep the insect population down in the summer because they hatch and die in the next cold snap before laying eggs. We will see. It would be nice to sit outside in the evenings again, a habit I’ve given up the last two years because the bugs have been bad.

The old joke about the flood, sorry, the parable of the drowning man, goes:

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”

“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”

God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

That’s longer than it was in Readers Digest. But.

I mentioned in September 2024 that I received a packet from an heir hunter outfit who informed me, with some degree of truth but the exact amount of which I remain uncertain, that a distant relation with an estate died without a will, and I could sign with them to put in a claim. Well, the heir hunter managed to gather 12 or 13 of my closest distant kin to sign on–including my brother, but not my mother’s sister. The estate published for the required weeks in the Mound City News. A claimant put in a charge for an unpaid bill in January 2025, but the online court docket shows nothing since.

Well, we must be getting close to some sort of resolution, because we received a second packet from the heir hunter last week, telling us we still have to time to sign on.

I have spent a sleepless night overthinking it, but my beautiful wife has conducted some research that indicates that if I don’t put in a claim, that bit of money might go to the state’s Unclaimed Property fund. So maybe we will look into introducing ourselves to the Holt County Court after all.

I might have mentioned that I’ve been cleaning my desk, mostly, over the last couple of weeks, slowly, in between doomscrolling and whatnot. Well, in between trying to vibe-code an app that will sell more than three copies (I think all three of my apps in the Apple App Store are up to three copies each, so…. win?)

And I came to the birthday cards I received last year.

I get two birthday cards these days. One, mailed, from the martial arts school I’ve attended for…. fourteen years now? That many/is that all? They used to also periodically send out cards with encouraging notes as well, signed by one of the instructors, but I haven’t gotten one of those in a while. Perhaps they think I’m plenty encouraged as it is. Maybe too encouraged.

The other, from my mother-in-law, I tend to receive hand-delivered. In the past, it’s been passed along from my beautiful wife, generally, who saw her most frequently of us. But she’s been coming to church with us almost weekly after her fear of The Deadliest Thing Ever!!!1! passed and after she got a hip replacement and can walk again. She often includes a check for a dinner, presumably at Piccolo or Avanzare here in town, nice Italian restaurants.

But…. That’s it. And it’s been that way for a long time–my aunt who passed away in 2019 was the other holdout who did traditional things like that into the 21st century.

I thought of this, of course, because this year’s card from kyoshi arrived. So the cards have been on the desk, under piles or under bins and organizers, for a year.

Will I place them in the binders which act as scrapbooks of Nogglestead, where I can review them in their succession? Or will they float around on the desk for another year?

Time will tell!

As I mentioned, I had the end label sticker for a Vanguard Atari 2600 cartridge on my desk for a while, and I was going to do something about it, but I didn’t find the cartridge missing its label in the drawer beneath the television, so I metaphorically shelved the idea of affixing it to its cartridge….

Well, until I had a little time yesterday afternoon, when I got off my duff and went into the storeroom. And laid my hands easily on the box containing our overflow Atari cartridges. So I got them out, dusted each one of them, and found the cartridge missing its label. As Vanguard starts with V, it was at the bottom, natch.

And, in the process of unboxing them, I knocked the labels off of the ends of five other cartridges.

Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I glued these labels back on as well.

Jeez, Louise, I have a lot of Atari cartridges.

So now they’re on my desk, and who knows how long it will take for me to schlep them the fifteen feet to the box in the storeroom. So the Vanguard label is not technically off my desk at all.

Eh, well, someday, it will be. And someday I’ll get around to writing the “10 books that influence me” and “10 albums that influenced me” blog posts that were a thing, what, ten years ago? Which have stood at 6 and…. well, I cannot find the albums one right now, but it’s under a printer or something. I should write out those/that post sometime with fewer than 10 entries just so I can get it off my desk.

Also, memo for file: The box also contains an un-end-labeled Galaxian cartridge. So that label might still be floating around on my desk somewhere as well. Even as relatively clean it is, it’s still a black hole that sometimes emits something from the long past.

I’ve had a label for an Atari cartridge floating on my desk for a couple of years. Well, not too, surely. But I did some filing a week or so back and rather worked to clear the desk, so I thought I would take the appropriate step of gluing it back onto the cartridge. But, I was surprised to discover it was not a label for Galaxian.

Because for a while, I had a Galaxian label, but I must have finally just put the two or three minutes in a row it took to reunite it with its proper cartridge.

I tried it with this label, but the Vanguard in the drawer under the television had its label.

Which means I have overflow in a box in the store room with a Vanguard cartridge (one of the other three others I have) missing its label. And I cannot be arsed right now to go looking for it.

So I put it into a little tub of odds and ends in the hutch above the monitor. Which contains many such tubs. And many such odds. Probably as many ends.

But it’s one step closer to a cleaner desk and one step further from an interesting Five Things On My Desk post.

In 2019, I posted about the book accumulation points of Nogglestead.

Since then, we’ve not spent that many Sundays watching football, so the sofa-side table in the family room table only has video controllers on it (although it holds my collection of read literary and Ideals magazines on it.

But we’re going to talk, briefly, about a book accumulation point that has come and gone: The side table by the sofa in the living room.

When my oldest son got his first job in high school, he sometimes worked until closing, which meant he could be home 11:00 or later, and my beautiful wife and/or I would wait up for him. So I had a selection of books and magazines on that table, generally browsers, poetry, or magazines which I could pick up and put down.

Eventually, he got a different job where the fast food joint closed at 9pm (and later jobs with more regular hours), so I didn’t as often sit there in the living room under the fairly dim lamp to read.

But the books and magazines remained there since that time several years ago. As part of the weekly (mostly) grind, I have dusted them the whole time in the interim, but it’s only in Saturday that I put the unread Readers Digest onto the stack of unread magazines in the parlor and only yesterday when I moved the books and decks of cards from the table.

I took the bookmark from an introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas and put it back on the shelf; I think I started reading that on my trip to the Dells in 2022. I put one of my two books on Tai Chi Walking with the bookmark intact onto my reading chair side table–if I took the bookmark out if it now, I would probably not every restart it, and it’s not like I’m missing much by forgetting what I’ve already read (and I have another book on Tai Chi Walking around here to polish up the skill should I need to). I also put the book of prayers that was someone’s personal time capsule on the side table by the chair–I’ll get back to nibbling at it, but my experience in the past is that you really don’t get much from powering through a bunch of prayers all at once.

As to the remote control–to be honest, I’m not sure what that’s for. I will probably throw it into the bin in the storeroom with several decades’ worth of orphaned remotes and a couple of optimistically acquired universal remotes that were not. But that might be another couple of years.

I have mentioned before the slow pace of change at Nogglestead. I mean, I’m the only one who really notices these things, I think. The rest of the family is rather screen-bound (and I waste too many hours doing nothing on my computer, too, don’t get me right), so maybe it matters less to them. I dunno. But if you put something on a table or desk at Nogglestead, it might be there for a very long time indeed.