Author: Brian J. Noggle

Reader’s Digest has a trivia quiz every issue. This one had a couple of questions that caught my eye.

First, the bonus question drove me nuts because I’d just read on a blog somewhere about the name of the guy. Wait, see page 22? I read it in this very issue of Reader’s Digest which is kind of like a printed blog.

But, anyway, it’s question 8 that made me raise my eyebrow. Female reindeer have antlers. Actually, it’s the answer that made me raise my eyebrow.

Fact; reindeer are the only deer species in which females have antlers.

[Laughs in Ozarkian]

16-point deer harvested in Missouri turns out to be doe

So perhaps the answer is that all reindeer does have antlers, but reindeer are not the only species where antlers appear on does.

So, to bring you up to date to the calumnies befalling Nogglestead. Remember our misadventures this holiday season so far:

• The falling garbage disposal of Thanksgiving
• The completely Noggle Family Christmas credit card fraud adventure wherein it took almost two weeks to receive a new credit card, but it did arrive in time to prevent me from having to rely on poorly but hastily executed crafts for Christmas gifts
• The passing of another friend now confirmed by his sister who got into his Facebook account to let people know

So what has befallen us lately? Continue reading “To Keep The Spirit Of The Holidays Alive, I Just Need To Write The Check” →

Patrice Lewis asks:

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled across an article entitled “Americans Panic-Buy Firewood And Stoves Amid Energy Crisis”: “The global energy crisis has led to a spike in natural gas, heating oil, propane, and power prices, making the cost of heating a home this fall/winter very expensive. As a result, Americans are panic buying cords of wood and stoves to deflect soaring fossil fuel prices.

…

Have others noticed this? Is anyone transitionng [sic] to wood heat this winter in response to energy prices?

Well, I wouldn’t say panic buying, but I did lay some extra wood up.

Although I haven’t even bothered to light a fireplace candle the last few nights as the daytime temperatures hereabouts have been in the upper 60s or lower 70s for the last week. Which does not warrant a little flickering light in the family room no matter how early it gets dark.

Still, in one of the phrases that my boys will someday say “My father always said,” it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

The headline/title is full of uncertainty, including the word friend, clearly.

Continue reading “I Think Another Friend Has Died” →

I mentioned that the son of one of my wife’s friends is a wide receiver at Ohio State University. So after I saw a couple of posts on Saturday, I thought that Buckeyes jerseys with his name and number on them would be a good Christmas present for the family. So I did a little Internet searching, and although the big retailers didn’t offer his name on a jersey, I found a store that offered custom jerseys and let you choose from members of the current roster. So I selected four different jersey styles and added them to the cart. Although the store had a PayPal logo on it, it didn’t offer it as a payment option during checkout.

So I entered my credit card information with a touch of trepidation, but I’ve been fairly lucky with online stores to this point, so….

The browser’s address bar goes to some Chinese processing company and ends with a screen that says System Exception. And, nothing. No email confirming the transaction, oh boy.

A little while later, my beautiful wife asks me to look at something. The credit card company has sent her a potential fraud alert. A payment to some company name not visible on the Web site in the amount of the transaction. I told her to decline it, which put us on the fraud path, which cancelled my existing credit card. I should get a new one sometime soon.

The best possible result is that this was simply a Chinese manufacturer that hid its name behind an American sounding storefront and was not actually harvesting Buckeyes’ fans credit cards.

But what makes this a particular Noggle Christmas story is that I told my wife what I had ordered, and she told me that her mother had been caught by the same site. My wife, unknown to me, had thought that a #86 Buckeyes jersey would make a good Christmas gift for me, so she asked her mother to find one, buy it, and wrap it for her. And her mother, who is fairly Internet savvy, ordered from the same online store. And her credit card company processed the payment without a potential fraud alert, and she had to not only get a replacement card, but she had to work with her credit card company to get a refund.

We have a history of getting each other the same things for Christmas, so we kept in the spirit of that by getting each other credit card fraud for the holidays.

In other news, my holiday spending and one-for-me, one-for-you protocol has been suspended for the nonce. Ah, well, everyone has enough from me already anyway.

Thanksgiving dinner was served late at Nogglestead; my beautiful wife was a bit under the weather and was napping when she meant to put the turkey in the roaster. As it was only the four of us this year, we were very flexible. So we ate late, 7:30 or so, after dark. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberries, and gravy.

As is my wont, I finish the meal the fastest, and I got started on the dishes. It wasn’t lost on me that in addition to the normal detritus we were going to wash down the garbage disposal, we were including some bit of mashed potato boiling water thick with starch effluvia along with the resultant remnant mashed potato paste and store-boughten brown gravy. I got to thinking that the last backup at Nogglestead, earlier this year, came on an evening where we’d had a nice Sunday dinner but that required a lot of dishwashing.

Apparently, plumbers call the day after Thanksgiving Brown Friday:

“The term Brown Friday, the first time I heard about it was probably a few years ago,” said Chad Farrell with Roto-Rooter Plumbing.

Local plumbers say the day after Thanksgiving is one of their busiest days of the year. That’s because many households experience drain and pipe clogs in their bathrooms and kitchen sinks during the holiday.

So that was in the forefront of my mind as I washed the large turkey platter and the large turkey roaster pan. I thought I might send one of the boys down to the bar sink to watch for backup while I finished the dishes.

Then I turned on the garbage disposal, and when I turned it off, it drained really quickly. That’s the new garbage disposal I installed this summer, a little oversized perhaps, and not the whisper quiet one because I didn’t want to spend $100 to have ten seconds of whisper quiet every couple of days instead of normal volume garbage disposing.

Now, the linked article says stay away from using your garbage disposal, and I do, for the most part stemming from my time in Old Trees, where the wastewater lines there backed up several times a year. I was aghast when I saw my recently passed (two years? already?) aunt putting whole potato peels down the disposal there when helping with dinner.

So I flipped on the disposal just to clear out whatever bits of effluvia were slowing the draining (hopefully, it was that and not a blockage down the line somewhere). Then I rinsed a dish, and the resulting water drained quickly. Notably quickly. I was surprised and pleased.

Until.

Until my beautiful wife, barefoot, brought over some dishes and noticed the floor was wet. I checked to see if it was rolling off of the counter top, but no.

I looked beneath the sink. The garbage disposal was sitting on a can of cleaner and hanging by its PVC discharge tube. Apparently, over the months, it was unbalanced enough or loose enough to vibrate itself off of the mounting ring that holds it to the sink (its whole weight hangs from the sink, which seems risky enough engineering to me as it is). And the contents of the sink were inside the cabinet and on the floor.

Ah, gentle reader, there is a life lesson in this: Do not worry about what might happen, because something entirely different is likely to go wrong.

I remounted the disposal–the bucket and wood that I used to lift it into place were still together in the garage as I am slow to clean the garage and don’t tend to put things where they belong because other things that don’t belong are already there.

So I will go into this holiday season not only thinking about my dwindling extended family, but also my seeming incompetence to do basic home maintenance chores without disastrous results and spoiling the holiday.

If anyone needs me, I shall be outside, wishing for holiday snow that rarely comes to these lands.