Author: Brian J. Noggle

As I mentioned, I cleaned my store room last weekend, and as part of the cleaning process, I actually disposed of some items in the store room which I will probably never use.

One bin contained phone and Ethernet cabling supplies. I bought some Ethernet cable ends, crimping tool, and wall plates twenty-five years ago when I took hardware classes at the community college and thought I might pick up some free lance work running cables. I (badly) pulled cables from my office to that of my beautiful wife in our home in Casinoport (which included running some conduit pipes the length of the house in a ceiling cavity). I ran Ethernet cables between our offices in Old Trees as well following the phone lines outside the house. And although I got a bid for professionals to do it here at Nogglestead, I ended up running 30′ of cable between our offices and drilling holes in the wall instead of using wall plates (the professional bid was $1000 in 2009 dollars, which is something like eleventy billion in Bidenbucks). I’d originally ordered a kilometer of Cat5 cable, but I sold that at a garage sale at some point in the early part of the century. Somehow, though, I ended up with smaller spools of Cat5 and phone cable, but to be honest, it was not likely 1 Gigabit cable, and as everything is wireless these days (and Nogglestead might well be my last house), so I thought I’d get rid of the cables. I somehow also had a small box of coax cable, so I bundled them together.

A church group has called for donations for its fundraising rummage sale, so I thought about including it with the several boxes of bric-a-brac that has been cluttering my garage for years (somehow, we miss the annual fundraiser some years). But instead of dumping it on them, I called the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a retail store where Habitat sells donated building materials. The guy who answered the phone had to go ask if they would take the cables, but when he came back, he said he would.

So I ventured up there on a Saturday morning, and I’m sorry I did.

The place was a zoo. A jacked up pickup truck had broken down or something and was blocking part of the entrance not only with the truck but with people clambering around it and under it. The parking lot was too small for the number of vehicles there. People were just parking willy-nilly and wandering through the parking lot without looking. I found an actual parking spot and had my youngest grab the box of cables, and….

The guy receiving the donations was completely dismissive of our donation. He reluctantly took it off of our hands and said they could probably recycle it, but he might have thrown it in the dumpster when we turned away and tried to navigate our vehicle out with minimal property damage and loss of life.

You know, excessive gratitude for little donations like this embarrasses me. However, disdain or annoyance at my small bit to try to help, that boils my blood every time.

The food pantry that my church supports is on the north side of Springfield, which means it’s a bit of a drive for us, and I used to take our old canned goods up there. But the volunteers there ranged from indifferent to annoyed, so I started dropping stuff at the food pantry in Republic where they’re generally pleasant.

It’s almost enough to make me less kind.

And at least the crap is out of my store room.

of free time on the Memorial Day weekend.

Oh, gentle reader.

I have recently added little air filters to a couple of rooms in the house, particularly where cat litter boxes are present (during the recent reign of litter box averse cats from the previous generation, we added cat litter boxes in the living room up stairs and in a corner of the den downstairs to give the old cats options, and we’ve left the one in my office where the kittens were sequestered during their first days in the house). And I have been pleased to note how much the little $50 devices knock down the dust in those areas, so I thought, “Why not put one in the store room?” as this room holds three litter boxes (and, indeed, for a long time were the only litter box location in the house).

To put one in the store room, I would have to find an electrical outlet, presumably one behind the boxes of miscellania on the shelves. Hey, I was planning to swap out the cat litter boxes for fresh litter and to mop the room anyway. Why not dust everything at the same time? It’ll only be a couple of hours, ainna?

Oh, but no. Gentle reader, it took me over 10 hours to remove, dust, vacuum, mop, dust again, and replace everything. Steps included:

1. Removing old cat litter
2. Dusting and moving out all boxed old computers, comic books, old files, those bins of cables I cannot yet part with, and personal memorabilia as well as unsorted loose items meant to be put in the appropriate place “someday.”
3. Removing shelving units
4. Sweeping the floor
5. Mopping the floor
6. Hosing off shelving units
7. Setting up fresh cat litter boxes
8. Sort the, er, unsorted items and put them into the proper bins or boxes
9. Dust (again) boxes before returning to the store room
10. Dispose of certain items earmarked for donation or other, er, disposal

Not included: Dusting my office where I put the boxes and whatnot while I swept and mopped.

My goodness, almost fifteen years’ of cat litter leaves quite a patina on everything. Not everything had been undusted in that time–I’d dust or wipe things as I got into them or whatnot–but the fine, fine dust on everything stuck to my hands such that I had to wash them like Lady Macbeth to keep from leaving dust on things I was dusting. And a couple of the shelves had an inch or more of cat litter under them where the cats had scratched and where the thrown litter had fallen through the holes in the shelving.

As I started the room reassembly, I groused about it or demonstrated frustration with the fact that it would eat up my Memorial Day, and she asked me if it was worth it. And: I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s going to see it, and nobody at Nogglestead will notice (as I’m generally the one who goes into the store room. But, c’mon, man, it needed to be done. Which I wonder if it isn’t thematic of my whole existence: Doing what needs to be done, but nobody sees it.

At any rate, look upon my works, ye mighty, and join my despair:

I hope the new filter can keep up with the cat litter dust. And that I can keep up keeping the new filter clean.

And hopefully after a few more days, I will stop smelling that dust.

Or maybe I need to read the manuals or online help or related articles. But whenever I try to take night photographs with my iPhone, I am very disappointed.

For example, on Sunday night, we’d had storms, and fog began to rise from the moist ground. Across Nogglestead, the 4th family to live in the first part of Whitaker’s Folly since we moved into Nogglestead keeps their front porch light on. From my vantage point on the glider on the deck, I see the light diffused through the fog behind the a lone tree standing in our field, and it’s an interesting shot.

But with my iPhone, it’s:

I took several shots with several different settings, and that’s the best of the lot. It has a sort of Impressionist feel to it, but if only I could have captured it more clearly, I think it would have been a better shot.

I’ve thought from time to time about taking up photography as a hobby–enough that I have acquired more than one tripod–and I have one or more books on photography in the stacks. And I once tested a photography class sharing Web application when my best client took a photography class and founded a startup to support it as one does. But I’ve never gotten serious about it. Or serious enough to actually discover what those little icons on my phone’s camera app mean.

I guess that’s a story of my life: I thought about something, but did not pursue it with vigor.

I might have mentioned that life is a bit transitional here at Nogglestead these days. The boys are getting older (one has graduated), so they don’t need their dad as much–as a matter of fact, I see them too little these days as they go about their endeavors. And my job situation is uncertain, and it’s taking its time to resolve and might for some time yet.

So, in my uncertainty, I have seized upon something I can control to make myself feel more in control, and that’s taking care of Nogglestead.

In the olden days, when I was watching the boys most of the time or immediately after they were both in school full time, I cleaned the house metronomically. I swept every day; I cleaned the bathrooms completely on the weekends and the bathroom counters on Wednesdays as well. I painted several rooms. I mopped and vacuumed weekly at least.

But with the contracts and the employment, the housecleaning slowed. Dusting happened every couple of weeks. Dusting or vacuuming the lower level fell to once a month. Yard and garden work, at least my part of it, fell to half-hearted plantings in the spring. Sometimes, especially toward the end of the previous vinyl liner, pool cleaning and maintenance occurred intermittently. In my defense, some of this was delegated to teenaged boys who would prefer to do other things over the summer than work, and we were to busy and, frankly, inattentive or lazy to insist.

But now? Again with the metronome. Pool on Fridays. Dusting upstairs and bathrooms on Saturdays. Cleaning the hall floors on the weekends. Dusting and vacuuming the lower level every other week. I’ve started mowing the lawn every week or ten days (which will slow in the drier summer), and I have started completely weed trimming and edging Nogglestead. Mowing is three to three and a half hours each time, and the trimming/edging is two to four hours spread over a couple of days/charges of the battery packs we have for the trimmer.

And you know what? Everything looks nice. And I’m a little eager for time to pass so I can start these chores over again. But I will enjoy the tidiness of Nogglestead while it lasts.

Hopefully, things will even out again, and Nogglestead can fall back into untidiness.

Ah, gentle reader. As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he’s holding the line on aging. Well, not in my popular culture knowledge. I’m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger. I guess I’ve always had an old soul when it comes to that sort of thing. I’ve always read old books, whether capital-L Literature or old suspense and science fiction. But, still, I’ve done martial arts classes with people much younger than me, and I’ve had my children in school with children whose parents were ten years younger than I am. So I might have been fooling myself, but I thought as long as I had kids in school, I was young.

But, oh, gentle reader, the oldest has graduated from high school. And even before that event, I’ve been letting the old man out by expressing the way we did things in the 20th century. To whit:

• On a recent visit to the dentist, I was confronted by a new hygenist who was young and pretty. And although I am happily married, it is the way of the Man to puff out one’s chest a little in this situation. However, at the end of the visit, she scheduled me for my next four-month-cleaning, and I said it was the easy one since it was in the same year. The hard ones were the ones that occurred in the next year, because I would not have the calendar yet upon which to write the appointment.

  Silly old man! In the 21st century, people put appointments in their phones nowadays. Although I do put appointments in a Google calendar for work, it’s still not my default for doctor’s appointments. I still write them on the wall calendar in the dining room. I’m the only one who does, though, so I never know what’s going on with my beautiful wife or my children.
   

• One of the organizations for which my wife volunteers had a game night to bring together IT students from various universities with the members of the IT organization. She had trusted me to buy soda and water for the event, and I bought something like four cases of soda and a couple cases of water for the projected 30-60 attendees. I didn’t think it was too much, thinking college kids could easily drink three or four sodas over the course of a three-hour event.

  The treasurer of the organization brought along the big ledger checkbook for the organization to write an expense check for another member. “And a big bag of quarters in case we run out of soda so we can pop down to the vending machines,” I said, ever the jester.

  But the gentleman, older than I am and a manager/executive for many different firms in his career, pointed out that the kids used their cards at the vending machines. Of course they did. But I come from an age where Cokes were not quite a dime, but Vess soda could be had for a quarter from a vending machine.
   

• I mentioned my brother got married. He and his wife also closed recently on a nice slice of land which has a nice pre-fab house on a foundation along with twenty-five acres of land which means he has accidentally on purpose, perhaps, but it’s nice.

  Also, it is a new address, so I wrote it in my address book.

  

  The address book was a gift I received when I graduated high school a couple of years ago. I wrote in it the addresses of high school friends and family members with whom I would correspond throughout high school and beyond (I still double-check my grandmother’s address in the book even though she has lived in the same place for a couple of years now.

  The address book itself now contains more scratch-outs than confirmed addresses, and an Excel spreadsheet maintains the shrinking Christmas card list, so it’s a more accurate and useful representation of street addresses of people with whom I regularly (annually) correspond.

  But I still put this address in my address book.

  Which makes me think I might need to update the centerpiece of the Family Bible as well with wife and children’s names. Which seems fitting as they’re about to head out on their own.

As if these examples enough were not enough to indicate I might be approaching middle age, the wedding videos and photos themselves did.

And I guess I might as well embrace it. After all, it’s not like I’m getting any younger or getting any more sincerely interested in the concerns of the younger amongst us.