Category: Life

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.

So, I’ve been looking for quality assurance work for over a year now, so I guess I have a little room for a bit of a cri de cœur about it.

Continue reading “Job Huntin’ in 2026” →

“What, Brian J., does your to-do list look like at the end of the day?”

Ah, gentle reader, incomplete. Incomplete. As you can see, “Potatoes” is on the list for what might be the 25th consecutive day, but it is getting more likely that I will complete it. Some months (in multiples of twelve, maybe) ago, I found a recipe for oven roasted potatoes on the Internet, and I liked it, so I did it a couple of times. When I fell away from it, my beautiful wife cut the recipe to fit to a 3×5 card and put it into one of her recipe boxes. I tend to fold the recipes I want to use again and tuck them into the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. So for a while, I didn’t have access to the recipe I liked, and Find it again on the Internet was a prerequisite for the task. But! Sometime in the middle of the month, she found it for me and set it atop her recipe boxes in the kitchen. Then! It disappeared; I don’t know if it went back into the recipe boxes or something more sinister. Now! She has rediscovered the recipe and put it on my desk (where it has a greater chance to be lost or something more sinister. But the oblong spheriods are back in my court. And if I don’t cook some today, I will have to write Famous for Potatoes on my list for January 26th.

I have not done a “room” on TryHackMe. In a while. But I’ve added it to the list recently in case I need to pivot to cybersecurity from quality assurance to find a job (spoiler alert: probably). I did, however, figure out that the “AttackBox” option doesn’t actually work these days, and to do a room, I’ll have to spin up a virtual (on the Web) Kali Linux device. Which means I can pick up where I left off now when I left off… What, two years ago? I will need some review. I think I took some notes, but in the interim, I might have discarded them.

FreeCodeCamp.org offers online courses in basic (not BASIC) programming in a variety of languages. I completed the HTML/CSS one and got a little certificate for it…. five years ago? Ah, in the interim before my last full-time position. I also started the JavaScript one as it was the language I was noodling in at the time, but I abandoned it because it was very time consuming. These five (apparently) years later, it remembers where I was in the course, but it cleared all previous work I had done, so I have to start over. Which, okay, I can speedrun it, but: Now it has “workshops” where you do a little program going line-by-line, where you have to write a variable declaration and then a console log using whatever concept/method the lesson covered, and now it’s very time consuming. I am closing in on 10% done after a week, so speedrun is not the word to use. I thought I’d plough through JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python fast because a lot of “job postings” indicate they prefer “experts” in a language, and I have a hard time considering myself an expert in any of these languages, even though I’ve used them a bunch. But time will tell how long my patience holds out on these things.

GTO Spec refers to writing a data model and identifying a set of screens for a new project I’m thinking about so I can prompt an LLM to scaffold it up for me. It should be easy. Why am I procastinating?

A number of the chores are part of the Choose Your Own Grind protocol; I clean the upstairs and the bathrooms weekly and the downstairs every two weeks (generally). Cleaning the bathtubs and the shower was on the two-week schedule but has fallen to a once-in-a-while schedule. As this is week two, today’s list includes dusting and vacuuming downstairs, but….

Not depicted on the list: Since my boys have given up reading now that they have phones and computers (hold out as long as you can, young parents), I decided we would cull their bookshelves and move the two full-sized bookshelves from the youngest’s bedroom, formerly their shared bedroom, to the downstairs. For years, I’ve been stacking oversized art monographs and coffee table books haphazardly on bookshelves in the main living area, and my wife had mentioned it looked cluttered. So I thought sometime in January, after the Christmas decorations were up, we would tackle that. So, yesterday, we did. I gathered five boxes of children’s books for donation (the bookshelves were still stocked with, well, not board books, but with books written for elementary and middle school students); a bedful of adult books which he wanted to keep or I, in sorting them, decided he would keep; a half bin full of old school workbooks, old magazines, and torn up books for recycling; and three boxes of books I wanted to keep, which includes books of mine that ended up on their bookshelves, comic books that they’d bought or I bought for them when we went to the Comic Cave, and books they owned which I wanted to keep, maybe for grandchildren. We moved the bookshelves downstairs, and I got the art books/monographs/binders we have instead of scrapbooks onto one set of bookshelves. Today, I will tackle the audio courses; I will sort the books in the boxes in my office; I will move the donation pile from the living room (where my wife went through them to see what she wants to keep) to the garage and will restack/repack the donation boxes in the garage; and I will use my week’s allotment of semicolons even though it’s not Sunday.

And! I will do these things before I dust and vacuum downstairs as the not-depicted-on-the-to-do-list project, which I did after cleaning the upstairs, left detritus on the floors upstairs so they had to be swept and vacuumed again.

Also, not depicted: Writing long blog posts about the whole effort. Sometimes I do add blog posts to the list when I have an idea but not the immediate drive to write a post (I started this one before breakfast, but that was an hour ago–I should get to the things on the list). Also, the normal chores of daily life including laundry, dishes, some cooking, et cetera. And the shoveling which I might undertake (and which will take four to six hours should I choose to partake in the joy of being outside in the snow–six inches instead of the 20 they predicted, but enough to leave southwest Missouri snowbound for three or four days, except for delivery drivers (my oldest ordered pizza last night, but from the shop in Battlefield, so not a long drive for the poor rascal) and people with, you know, real jobs.

So: Will I update you tomorrow? Eh, probably not.

The last couple of weeks, I have been diligent in creating a to-do list to guide my days since my contracts have gotten a little thin or gone into remission, and if left to my own devices, I’ll doomscroll and refresh job boards (professional doomscrolling) and end up with nothing done.

So I’ve started making lists of discrete tasks to accomplish throughout the day. Sometimes, they’re chores. Sometimes, they’re repeated tasks.

I’ve been using the free giveaway notepads that various charities send me as part of fundraising pitches. For the most part, the charities get nothing because 1) If they’re big enough to buy my name on a list and send me monthly come-ons with little printed gifts, they’re too big and 2) Runnin’ on a lean mixture, man.

So I end up with a list, and I cross out some things (but too often carry them over to the next list). Currently, in heavy rotation, I have St. Jude’s Research Hospital, who has me on their Whale list either because 1) I ran a (less than) 5K supporting them in, what, 2021? It was the weekend I then drove over to Poplar Bluff to help my brother remove the shingles from his roof–pretty sure it was after his first wife died or 2) because my sainted mother supported them (she met Danny Thomas once and interviewed him, perhaps at a fundraiser for St. Jude’s). Or 3) Because my name is out there as a Whale from the before times.

So, the current notepad has something extra in the footer. The word hope.

Yeah, thanks, no, that is not on my to-do list, thanks. Please do not add things, generic tablet designer.

Also, note: Since beginning this a couple weeks ago, I have actually used up one of these notepads. Which is amazing, honestly, as in the past, I’ve jotted later-inscrutable words and phrases on them before they get pushed under a printer or pile and get exhumed later with little comprehensibility, only to have the top sheet removed and the pad put back in the set of recent unused arrivals.

My goodness, if I keep this up and can use up one every week before a new one arrives, perhaps I can start making way on the backlog or even the drawerful that contain my sainted mother’s name on them (and maybe some with my long-departed aunt’s) which I inherited almost seventeen years ago and could not discard then and cannot discard yet (because if I open that filing drawer, I might not be able to close it again.

Oh, and if you’re keeping track, the number of to-do lists I’ve actually completed? One or two. Maybe more, but I would not take the over on that bet. Potatoes, that is, roasting a double batch of oven-roasted potatoes, has been on the list for most of January, the Whole 30 era. Fortunately, the more perishable eggs has been on the list a couple of times and has been removed as I’ve actually cooked them.

From a piece in St. Louis Magazine entitled A guide to taking a Viking river cruise along the Mississippi from St. Louis:

Day 4: Stop in the Quad Cities, Iowa, the “Breadbasket” of the United States. Visitors will begin their day with a visit to the John Deere Pavilion and Deere family homes. Afterward, guests can choose between an optional tour of local farms or stroll through the city itself, visiting the Figge Art Museum or the Quad City Botanical Center.

Technically, the Quad Cities are, get this, four cities. The list of attractions includes stops in three of the four: The Deere things are in Moline; the art museum is in Davenport; the Botanical Gardens are in Rock Island. Only Bettendorf is omitted. I wonder if residents of the area think of the whole region as “the city.” I presume not since there is a river to cross to get from Davenport/Bettendorf to Moline/Rock Island.

Aren’t I Mr. Knowledge from having been to Davenport twice in the last two years? And I haven’t even read the history book of the area that I picked up in 2024. But that and the final Ben Wolf novel are definitely in the short queue before October this year.

And I looked at this article with some interest. Mrs. Noggle would like to go on another cruise after 27 years, but I’ve been a bit reluctant. So I kinda priced this one out and… Holy Huck Finn: $30,000 and 30 days for a round trip. I guess the Caribbean it is. Someday.

Facebook must know this story already to have presented this to me:

I lost on that word in 8th grade in the spelling bee, the feeder that could have taken me to Washington, D.C., although probably not–the words the kids win on these days are crazy. Maybe they were easier forty years ago, but I would have topped out maybe in districts at best. Maybe state, but probably not.

But I lost very early on threshold when Mr. Biedenstein, my 8th grade teacher and later (but still in the 1900s) became mayor of the new town of Byrnes Mill (old town, but newly chartered or whatever), when Mr. Biedenstein pronounced threshold with three Hs.

Not that I am bitter or anything.

Actually, no. Although I dominated the class-based fun-and-games from 8th grade Speech and Drama class games Alphabetics (not unlike Password) and Show-Offs (not unlike charades) and on to Honors Western Civ’s Jeopardy! my senior year of high school, when it came time to do actual competitions with other schools, I did not do so well. I did not study, so I got bounced out of the Civics/History trivia competition my senior year of high school very early.

I am pleased to note, however, that when I attended my sons’ Scholar Bowl tournament at their high school, I found I would have cleaned up on most but the fast-calculating math questions.

So I have that going for me, which is nice.

I mean, why not spell it right out, unsolicited email? Sus, indeed.

Ah, gentle reader. It started out so promising.

The day we left for Branson last week, that is, late Sunday morning, my beautiful wife was preparing to roast some pecans in the oven when she heard a pop, and the oven did not heat up. Ah, heating element again.

You might remember the saga last year:

To be clear: Apparently, this part shipped from St. Louis, Missouri, two days later (December 28), and:

• Arrived and left the carrier facility in St. Louis twice.
• Arrived in Kansas City on January 1, and then left the facility twice.
• Arrived in Springfield facility January 2, last Thursday, twice.

And there it sits. It is still scheduled to arrive by Wednesday, after I ordered it and twelve days since it shipped from St. Louis. Which is a three hour drive away. For some reason, it was routed through Kansas City for a week.

I guess I did not follow-up on that experience, but that particular part was shipped from St. Louis unpadded in a 1″ tall cardboard box which arrived bent, and the heating element in it was bent 20 degrees itself. So, unusable. I was able to return it even though the Amazon seller was a Ukrainian(!) company shipping from St. Louis or something–probably used parts from a junkyard or something. But they gave me a refund, and I got a heating element from a US-based (maybe) source and installed it.

Well. It lasted a year. But I ordered another from the same seller on Amazon (ending my tweehad against them for the moment)–getting ready to leave for the week, I felt too rushed to look at appliance parts sellers themselves on the Internet, and it was only when I was in Branson that I thought I hope I didn’t just order from the Ukrainian company again. But it came properly packaged and intact.

And since I had already done this and because it’s basically two 1/4 bolts and two screws to attach the leads, I had the oven up and running in under a half an hour.

So, on Sunday, I decided to crack open the refrigerator. Again.

Pretty much since we got the refrigerator, it would rattle when the compressor/evaporator fan stopped. But late last year, it started getting louder and rattling longer, so I figured I would take a look at it. Which means I would have Nico take a look at it.

A couple of years ago, I successfully defrosted the frozen drain line from the frost-free freezer, so I was unafraid.

I’d done some research, and the things on YouTube (which featured far younger refrigerators than this one, which is 26 years old and has metal parts in it) indicated it might be dirty coils or ice buildup on the coils leading to the fan nicking the ice. It might have been motor bearings. We cleaned it out, and it looked as the fan was running smoothly, but it did rattle when running. The shaft holding the fan on had a couple millimeters of give where it could go into and out of the motor that far. I guessed that it would be something we could live with whilst I researched maybe replacing the fan and/or motor.

But it seemed like the fan was running more frequently than previously. Several times an hour, it rattled for the length of the runtime. After I closed it back up, my wife said it sounded different. Perhaps I left the sheet metal on the back a little loose? After dinner, I thought to look at the temperature controls to see if maybe they might have changed. And the freezer was set to the absolute lowest setting. A-ha! I thought. When I tried to dial it up, though, it resisted and then popped. But now the fan was permanently on. Not good.

So, after a couple hours of listening to the beating of his tell-tale heart rattling fan, I had us move the contents of the 26-year-old refrigerator to the 45-year-old drink refrigerator behind the bar downstairs while we explore our options (buy a new refrigerator with an expected life of 10 years).

Not without some self-doubt, gentle reader, not without some self-doubt. My father’s handy angel on my right shoulder encourages me to fix it (and expresses silently doubt that I can), but that might involve a cycle of ordering a $60 part, nope, that’s not it, ordering a $60 part, no, that’s not it until I listen to the devil of modern disposable culture on the left. So, yeah, we’re getting a new refrigerator.

Next internal conflict: Do I keep this refrigerator to try to fix it in my spare time? Well, no. The garage does not have room for it. And maybe I should actually get into the habit of taking care of things before I get these ambitions. So, no, they’ll haul it away and either recycle it or fix it and resell it. Which I could do myself were I so inclined, but history has shown I have not been so inclined.

Maybe the theme of the year should be Get away from the damned desk and take care of things.

At any rate, I have ordered an extra heating element for the oven. Which might end up cluttering the garage and its museum of parts for appliances Brian J. fixed but then got sick of and replaced (with several dryer wheel kits for an old Whirlpool dryer and tub suspension rods for a Samsung washer).

And, wait a minute. Does the exhaust fan motor sound different?

Ah, gentle reader. The bath toys.

It was 2013 when 2013 when I lamented that my children would grow up and not want Mr. Bubble baths and their bath toys:

I’ve already gamed it out: the older boy will one day decide Mr. Bubble is for babies, much like he decided at one point that Sesame Street is for babies, and that will be that. Perhaps the younger will hold out hope for another dash of the Mr. Bubble at some point, but he’ll follow his older brother’s lead, and he’ll stop asking for toys in the bathtub and for bubbles.

Eventually, the toys will get cleaned up and donated to a church sale or some such collection, but the last bottle of Mr. Bubble will just migrate to the rear of the cabinet. Periodically, I’ll clean and rearrange the contents of the cabinet, but I won’t want to dispose of half a bottle of Mr. Bubble. Eventually, I’ll say I’m saving it for the grandchildren, but I’ll not really know if I’m to have my line continue or if I’ll live to see it.

I mentioned in 2021 that the toys were gone:

I know, gentle reader, I suffer more last times for everything than actually occur (for example, the bottle of Mr. Bubble mentioned in The Future Forgotten Bottle of Mr. Bubble actually got used up, another secured, and that one used up, so there is currently no half-empty bottle of Mr. Bubble to be forgotten, but the bath toys are long gone now).

Ah, but as I noted in 2024:

But in 2013, when writing about The Future Forgotten Half-Empty Bottle of Mr. Bubble, I mentioned their bath toys, and in 2021, I said the bath toys were long gone, but I must have meant that their playing with bath toys was long gone, as the bath toys are still in the bin under the sink in the hall bath.

No more.

In this, the year of our lord 2026, I have taken the bin out, discarded the sponges, and bleach-washed the toys for actual donation.

The impetus of this drastic action: I needed the bin. My oldest, a man now (albeit a young one), has a collection of grooming products with which he clutters the vanity in the hall bath. As part of my cleaning this weekend, I wanted to put those things in the bin and under the sink. So I finally dealt with the bath toys.

In 2024, I also mentioned old videos:

But as I am who I am, I accumulated a bunch of videocassettes and whatnot for my children. Actually, I bought a bunch before we even thought of having children when I was doing the Ebay thing around the turn of the century.

So I have a bit of a conundrum now: What to do with the portion of the Nogglestead video library (and book library) which is geared toward children? So I box them up and store them for eventual grandchildren? Try to sell them (who watches old videocassettes these days except me?).

Ah, you know, sometime in December, I culled the video library of a number of these titles. But I left them on the floor by the video shelves, obscured by the unused weight bench in our family room, and it was also only this weekend where I put them in a box and put them onto the table downstairs because I expected my beautiful wife might want to pick through them. Mr. Popper’s Penguins with Jim Carrey. Which I didn’t watch with the boys even when the youngest was in his penguins phase. I think I have the G.I.Joe complete cartoon series box set in it; I might have to pull that one out. But it will likely remain on the table for weeks if we don’t need the table for something else in the meantime.

But these two things do underline the slow pace of change at Nogglestead. Which is to say nothing changes, and that leads to some weird sense-of-time dilation in my own head for sure.

Perhaps part of my get away from the damned desk theme for the year should be to make some changes around Nogglestead. Maybe finally paint the shed red as I’ve hoped to for some time. Maybe clean the garage, which is an effort I started last year and got away from.

I’m actually writing a poem on this theme. Well, I started a poem on this theme. But I’ve set it aside as I have finished the first part of the two- or three-part poem and will pick it up again when I get a good feeling for the turn in it. Or, given my recent (as in, within the last sixteen years) history, maybe never.

Ah, gentle reader. The annual tradition continues. After we hurriedly put away the Christmas decorations in early January, we find some decorations that have escaped notice and need to be put away later. Since I cleaned the whole house this weekend, I think I got a pretty good handle on what was left behind this year.

The sleighbells on the door.

This is almost an annual tradition, and I think that we had them on the door for most of the year once.

I have mentioned the story of before, so I won’t bore you with it again. In addition to the stiffness of the belt leather holding it these days, we don’t hear them jingle because people don’t tend to come through our front door. We open the door once every couple of weeks for packages, but the number of guests to Nogglestead these days is not very large. And those who come often come through the garage.

The Winter/Christmas Village Buildings.

To be honest, perhaps my beautiful wife, who collected the tchotchkes whilst I wrestled with unwrapping the well-wrapt lights on the upstairs Christmas tree, did not recognize that these winter scenes were now Christmas decorations. After all, it’s possible she has noticed them before Christmas individually–I buy a Christmas decoration before we have the Christmas decorations out to cheer myself and to see if anyone notices, and I bought the church in 2024 and the coffee shop 2025. So she might have thought they were just part of the décor.

By the way, has anyone noticed? Well, as part of our actual Christmas decorations, I found a new tchotchke on the mantel which I’d never seen and didn’t acquire. So I think my oldest has noticed and added one of his own.

A couple of boxes for decorations.

I pulled these empty boxes when undecorating the tree. One of the boxes is for a Chewbacca ornament which I don’t know that I have ever seen (not the Easter Chewbacca, which did not come with a box). The other is a little hearth candle holder which I’ve seen, but is one of the decorations which I’ve not been eager to put out because of young children (no longer young) and kittens (no longer kittens, but still kittenish chaos on twelve paws).

I guess at some point, we put the decorations out, and when it came time for the rapid deChristmasification, we put the decorations away but not in their boxes.

You know, gentle reader, I think this year we will have an audit of our Christmas decorations. We have so many that do not actually get put out for one reason or another (or horizontal surfaces are limited and cat-patrolled). So perhaps we should sort them, divest ourselves of some, and make sure to properly box the ones we will keep. Properly box until the next time we take the decorations down.

A little oil lamp.

This little piece of unknown inheritance was located on the bookshelves behind the television, and when my wife swept the lower level, she did not look closely to the bookshelves since most of them are double-stuffed with books.

At any rate, they are all put away now. And as part of the housecleaning, I played a game of “Christmas ornament or cat toy?” Ah, gentle reader, as you know, to a cat, they are one and the same, which explains why sometimes Christmas ornaments are found months later in an opposite corner of the room from the Christmas tree. But, dang it, don’t they sometimes look the same. A little bell and a tailing ribbon. Uh…. No place for a hook, cat toy? I think I’ve answered correctly in all cases so far.

So this should be the annual Christmas Straggler post. But, as always, no guarantees. Stay tuned for further updates (if any).

(Previous Christmas Stragglers covered in 2012, 2013, 2018, 2019, 2021, ,2022, and 2023.)

Ah, gentle reader, you are correct. It was quiet around here for a couple of days. You might have panicked, if you even visited Monday through Wednesday at all, thinking that I, like Wirecutter or Animal, had hung it up or drastically reduced the output. Oh, but no such luck for those relying on the Chinese Large Language Models training themselves up on the inanity that this site has provided over the last twenty-three (almost) years–if your legal brief prefixes with the clause “As the Philosopher says” while quoting a Richard Marx song, it’s as good as a watermark–I have not quit. But I did take a little trip down to Branson.

But, Brian J.! you exclaim. Didn’t you just take a trip to Florida? I did! That, as I mentioned, was a “marketing package” from a timeshare company which we’d booked early in 2024 and had to use by January 2026, so we had to use it.

This trip, though, was one of my beautiful wife’s “annual retreats” where she books a couple days in a resort in Branson in the off-season and uses the quiet (which means no boys to distract her) to work on self-improvement or focus on her Web sites, conference talks, or whatnot. As my contracts are currently in abeyance for the holidays (hopefully are in abeyance and not have ended), she invited me along. So I went.

We were booked in a one bedroom unit in (The) Falls Village just south of Branson’s main area. I put (The) in parentheses because the resort name appears both with and without the article throughout the property. It’s an older property, decently kept up (subject to change since another bigger, snazzier timeshare company has bought it and seems to be focusing its attention on the snazzier properties owned by the previous company). It has an indoor pool and hot tub, a small fitness center, and is walkable to some places (a cat cafe, a diner that serves live country music with its breakfasts).

However, we spent most of the time in the unit (as planned). For starters, one of her current engagements required a lot of her attention (four hours a day), so it was almost just working remotely from remoter in her case. Secondly, Branson is in the off-season: After the Christmas shows close right after the first of the year, the shows go into remission until sometime in March or April, when travelers (not the Roma sort) start making their journeys again and there’s tourist revenue to earn. Some of the indoor attractions are still open, maybe catering to the occasional field trips and safe from the weather, but we’ve been to the most interesting of them. And, finally, we were not eating out at the restaurants that did not also close because we are doing the Whole 30 diet yet (now on day 87, it seems, but just day nine).

So she worked, and I spent most of three days on the unit’s sofa, reading books (unlike the trip to Florida, where I read magazines to discard). So I got a good head start on the Winter Reading Challenge (although a Facebook memory from last year indicates I was through with six books by this time last year, whereas I am only through three and several fractions).

We did take two walks along Table Rock Lake in the state park on a couple of days, and I did hit the fitness center (what to do with only dumbells up to 50 pounds? Reverse pyramids, my boy, reverse pyramids.) in between, but mostly reading.

I did kind of feel bad because all I was doing was relaxing, and she had to work. She, on the other hand, worried I was not having fun because she was working. We reached an uneasy truce of sorts where we assured each other it was all right, but hoped it was so.

So, a couple notes about Branson in the off season:

• The Walmart and the grocery were on lean mixtures. Without the tourists visiting, they had thinner stock than we expected, especially in meat. Normally, we go to the grocery for groceries and the Walmart for sundries, but the thin meat selection sent us to the Walmart (next door) for meat, and we discovered the Walmart is an old-style Walmart with a very thin grocery section. But we got provisions.
   
• Without tourists, the locals were about the only people about. And the locals are about what you would expect from small towns in Missouri but leavened with some foreigners, perhaps guest workers idling until the season resumes or fortunate guest workers who have year-round employment at the hotels and resorts which are still open.
   
• The resort was really quiet. The building we were in has at least 18 units (some are connectible units which are often booked together, but 18 individual rooms are available) on each floor and three floors. To my Ennglish major math, that’s 54 units total. The first night we were there, only three cars were parked by it (by the night before we left, it was up to six or seven cars, but still not very many people). Additionally, the room was very quiet. Nogglestead generally has some background noise–we’re running laundry all day, the dishwasher is going, the downstairs fridge and freezer run their compressors, and the upstairs refrigerator, which has long had a rattling compressor fan, has recently developed more of a rattle and runs very frequently, so the coils are likely dirty and/or frozen (ask me about it in a couple of days, when I will have fixed it or incapacitated our main refrigerator).

  Although we did some laundry, the laundry was in the vestibule between our unit and the “studio” unit which could connect to ours to make a two bedroom unit. We ran the dishwasher after every meal (prepared in-room), and the utility closet provided an intermittent rattle, but for the most part, the room was silent. We did not bring a bluetooth speaker, and the television did not offer its speakers via bluetooth and offered no music channels, so we could not play music. Just…. A lot of silence.
   

The weather was unseasonably warm–highs in the upper 60s and low 70s–so it did not feel like winter at all. It was very odd.

At any rate, it was a nice trip; definitely less stressful than flying (and having to get up at 3am to drive an hour to fly). A working washer and dryer (and no complaining offspring) made for a better trip than this summer (and I didn’t try to work on a hotspot, although it was probably better in Branson proper–my wife did it).

I was eager to come back home, though, and as I mentioned, this year’s theme is Get away from the damned desk. So far, so good.

While I was researching yesterday’s post (that is, reading the Wikipedia entry on the Surfside condominium collapse), it (the Wikipedia entry) mentioned that the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse was the most deadly (non-aviation) engineering failure in history (so far). In that disaster, a walkway loaded with party attendees gave way and collapsed onto a ballroom floor with other partygoers under it.

Ah, gentle reader; I remember the engineering failure that caused it.

I read something about it in a magazine, or perhaps in the hotel itself–might we have stayed there on one of our trips to Kansas City over the years? But I think it was a magazine because I remember seeing a diagram like this:

It has stuck in my head over the years. I’d also say it has informed me of my twee little two-by-four engineering projects around Nogglestead, but probably not much.

Ted Gioia posts Why Secondhand Is Now Better Than New, Or how the thrift store suddenly became cool:

Something unusual is happening in the world of gifting. I saw it during the recent holiday season—and you may have too.

The Wall Street Journal noticed it a few weeks ago. People are now buying secondhand gifts. The sheer numbers are staggering—in a recent survey, 82% of consumers said they’re more likely to purchase pre-owned items for holiday presents.

Ah, gentle reader. As you know, I’ve been doing that for a long time–and I’ve mentioned it from time to time especially since I started doing “Good Album Hunting” posts where my Christmas shopping has resulted in more for me than gift recipients (like this post from 2016).

I have found some delightful things for gifts. And because I have often relied on the Gift Schtick, I’ve found it easier to find Duck Dynasty, Dallas, duck, chicken, flamingo, owl, or eagle-themed gifts at second hand stores. Even now, or at least this year, I noticed an awful lot of owls available, which is what I would have bought for my sainted mother.

In my case, it’s not so much quality but other things that have led me to secondhand stores for gifts. But as they grow popular, the prices will go up, and they’ll have less appeal for me.

I posted earlier today about us seeing the policy activity after a local shooting.

Turns out, on this very date 14 years ago, something similar happened.

Man, right about that time, I was assuredly questioning the safety of my new home. In addition to passing that crime scene, right about the same time we had serial killers at church (who came to Nogglestead for dinner after the unfortunate instance of one of their victim’s dying); the coach of the little league team I also coached and my boys played on shot his wife and killed himself; and someone rang our bell at 4am because the stolen car they were driving broke down or something–he abandoned it and fled from the helpful deputy we summoned to try to help while I waited inside the house cradling a shotgun just in case.

Even worse, on this day eight years ago….

My beautiful wife and I are doing the Whole 30 again this year, which will be our third time through it. You know, it won’t really affect my intake much. I won’t cook bacon or breakfast sausage. I haven’t really eaten as many doughnuts as in the recent past. I won’t have the opportunity to throw in a frozen pizza or something else from the freezer for a quick lunch. I won’t be able to cook a can of beans as a handy side. I’ll not have my nightly portion of wine. I won’t be able to snack on tortilla chips in the evening, which is something I do, what, once a week? No melted cheese tortillas or ham and cheese on rye.

I’ll have to be mindful, and that’s what is difficult, especially at lunch time. I can eat all the raw vegetables I want, and all the nuts I want, and meat and eggs. I’ll have to make sure there’s plenty of things in the refrigerator, so I’ll hard-bake a dozen eggs or two and cook extra cheap steak or chicken for snacking. But I’ll make it through, especially since I get to concentrate on the Winter Reading Challenge, which also starts today.

Babbel in the New Year: Lifetime language learning for $199

So the monthly subscriptions must be tailing off, ainna?

I’ve mocked the monthly subscription language places before, saying they’re not geared to help you learn the language–they’re geared to make you come back tomorrow.

Or maybe I’m just bored because in Duolingo, I only got far enough into Japanese to introduce myself and to order green tea and rice. After a couple of weeks.