Category: Life

I have said that Nogglestead has the trenchcoat schtick, where you can find anything at times somewhere (in the linked example, I found a jump ring on the kitchen counter that I could use to make a pendant out of an English pound coin).

But sometimes the things one finds are of dubious utility.

I’m on a multi-year project to slowly clean out my garage which is not impassable but is getting there. For too many years, it’s been a life of “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it” even if that is atop something else just put down instead of away so that after a few rounds or strata of that behavior, you cannot find anything. Or even the multi-year process of cleaning the garage involves taking things from the shelves and sorting them into bins and then determining I need more bins, and then leaving the bins scattered around the floor for weeks until I get additional binnery which I just set down atop other things when I unload them from the car (combining the best from “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it”).

Also, as I’m culling things, I’m building up a solid bank of boxes of items to donate to charitable garage sales and whatnot (but they only arise once a year or so, so I cannot clear them as they go).

So, basically, I’m moving the clutter and reorganizing it and, once in a while, throwing something out. But not a lot. Maybe a couple of cubic inches every couple of months move to the garbage bin. I even finally discarded the child-sized foam martial arts sparring gear that my boys have not used in almost five years and have since way outgrown. The web-drenched martial arts bags, though, remain on the pile.

Whenever I think about buckling down and doing it, I’m overwhelmed. Which means the “process” is mostly me wandering around and nibbling at the margins. It came to a head Thursday when we had a garage door man in for a bit of repair, and he asked if I had any bolts. Ah, gentle reader, I have several sizes of carriage bolts that I have used, this summer, for repairing my gates–along with matching nuts and washers. But when he asked, I could not find them. Hours later, it occurred to me that I’d used a bucket to carry them to the places where I used them, so instead of looking for them in bins under the piles on the floor, I should have been looking for buckets under the piles on the floor.

So while the garage door man worked, I wandered around the garage, wondering where, again, to begin.

And I began by taking this from one of the built in shelves:

And putting it into a box on the rick of donations that we’ve gathered.

Model rocket wadding? Why do we have this? I don’t remember the boys having model rockets at all, although I don’t remember every gift they received (or even that I gave them) which they might have messed with for a day or so and then set aside. I haven’t seen any other parts of model rocketry in the garage. I just…. don’t know.

So it goes into the donations bin in hopes someone will find a quarter’s worth of use out of it, but….

Well, I wish every decision I had to make was this easy.

You would think it would be just as easy to determine a fate for every pine board that our family has broken in martial arts classes testing over the last fifteen years would have an easy solution, but no. I think I need another bin or two to contain and consolidate the collection. So I will leave them where they are for now.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, gentle reader, but our holiday trunk this year will be used car salesmen. So I have been haunting thrift stores trying to find not only loud sports coats and shirts for our family to wear but also a cheap used Little Tikes car for our tableau.

I went to Red Racks, and I had trouble finding the men’s apparel because it was on the opposite side of the store from the other clothing. As I wandered, I found the toys section and one of the standard orange Little Tikes cars for $20. Perfect! I might be done shopping the first week!

So in my rotation through the store, I found the men’s section and sourced an ugly yellow plaid shirt, and I was passing through the records section on the way to the toys. I half-heartedly flipped through some of them, and as I headed to the toys, some guy was wheeling the car to the cash register.

So I know how this feels.

I cannot tell you how many of these I have seen at garage sales this year because I was not looking for them. Now, I can tell you how many I will see: 0.

Doesn’t help that cross country season runs right up to the Trunk or Treat, and I won’t have much time to crawl yard sales looking. But we’ll think of something else if we don’t find one or two.

Ted Gioia laments the loss of American arts, including jazz music, opera, books, and whatnot from the middle part of the century (Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?), but he says:

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books.

Clearly, he has not been into a local library recently.

I suppose university libraries still have old books in them–depending upon how old the university libraries are themselves–but I am pretty sure I have long lamented how few books are in the local library branches here and how many of them are skewed toward contemporary books–and how you would have to order the classics via inter-library loan.

I mentioned when I wrote about recent housekeeping practices at Nogglestead that I dust upstairs every week (fallen to mostly every week) and the downstairs every two weeks (mostly).

But the practices mean that two things are not dusted often at all.

I use Swiffer Dusters for dusting, which comprise a handle and a disposable synthetic feather duster that’s probably coating everything I own with deadly microplastics and probably only knocks the dust to the floor so that the vacuum can redistribute it at a later time. But: When I’m dusting the upstairs, I close the gate to the lower level so I can dust it, and I can reach the large piece of Ethan Allanesque bourgeois art with the extended handle. And when I go downstairs, I stage the box of dusters on the table down there as I go since all the books and videos down there tend to take two or three (or four sometimes on mostly weeks).

So I tend to overlook the light fixture and the Packers objet d’art on the lower part of the stairwell. Probably for months at a time.

So there you go: Should you happen to visit Nogglestead, now you know where to run your finger to embarrass your hosts.

So I posted on LinkedIn yesterday:

Because prompt engineering is nothing to figuring out Infocom’s parser back in the day, much less completing one of their games (which I only finished Deadline using a hint book because I didn’t have the patience to figure out the parser and navigate the obscure challenges in the games).

Facebook memories today coughed up a Zork-themed post featuring two former commenters here from 15 years ago, back when they were reading the blog and commenting here:

I keep intending to clear some space or reconfigure my office desks so I can hook up a Commodore 64 or Triticale’s Commodore 128. I sure was able to lay my hands on much of the Commodore software I still have from, uh, a couple years ago. Just to dabble with it briefly and probably put it away again.

I sent a picture of my youngest in his Hallowe’en costume to my brother. The costume includes a loud shirt and a loud sports jacket, and I then asked my brother if he remembered how we got hand-me-downs from the White family who lived next door to us in the projects. Which was true; I was pretty fly for a white guy as I got not the latest fashion, but the late fashion, which was why I wore bell bottoms in 1981–because they fit, and because Dewayne had worn them a couple years earlier.

“Weren’t they black?” he asked.

I had to set him straight about some of our neighbors and schoolmates:

• The Whites, the Browns, and the Blacks were all black.
• The Sorensons were white.
• The Kolacinskis were yellow.

My brother’s best friend was in the latter family, whose father was obviously of Polish extraction who married a Chinese woman, and the three children looked more Chinese than Polish.

Milwaukee, neh?

It was a time of America being a melting pot, unlike the stew(ing) metaphor that superseded it.

I recently purchased a furniture clamp so that I could glue the seat of a table chair which had split at a seam. Well, I could have glued it, but I needed a furniture clamp to hold it together by the sides, not just the top and bottom.

But now that I have a furniture clamp, I have lots of furniture to glue.

Case in point: The table from the set with the chair which needed gluing had a couple of seams that let go. These were on the feet of the pedestal of the pedestal table, horizontal seams, and both pieces of the split feet remain affixed to the pedestal.

So we took the leaf out, inverted it on a couple of sawhorses (so we would not stumble over it in the darkness), I bought another furniture clamp, and I glued them.

Clamping vertically, that is, to hold the pieces together, was difficult due to the curve of the feet, so they did not end up with a real tight or even even join, but they’re better.

In addition to inspecting the setting of the clamps, Nico really wanted to get into the hollow center of the pedestal–to the point I figured out how I would take the table apart to get him out. In doing so, I discovered that the feet pieces were not affixed with dowels but with bolts, so I could probably have removed them and glued them better apart. If they don’t hold, I’ll do it right the next time.

At any rate, I now have two furniture clamps of different sizes, so maybe I will start constructing fine furniture (although that would require more tools and/or training on my part).

But I can’t help but note that two items from this set have needed gluing this year. So perhaps the glue is hitting its expiration dates in it. Or maybe these pieces suffer extra stress when sliding/moving them since they’re on carpeting and not tile, leading to different torquing stresses. Or both.

So what was my point? Eh, probably “Look how handy I am!” And/or “Look at Nico, doing the sorts of things which have earned him his own Web site.”

Those of you who have followed Jack Baruth for any amount of time know that he is a connoisseur of fine, expensive watches. I am not.

But when my old Apple Watch stopped holding a charge, I thought about whether I would replace it. Mostly for two reasons:

• We’re still running on a lean mixture here until I fill out my work schedule. Or maybe permanently if we get used to it.
   
• I’m thinking about de-MBAing my life a little. I mean, the Apple Watch, even my old one, tracked a whole host of metrics–stand goals, active minutes goals, exercise goals…. All arbitrary and determined by an algorithm I didn’t know. Still, I found myself working to hit those goals even if they didn’t make sense in doing so. Like getting up and walking around the house when I awakened in the night to get a stand hour in case I had a long nap or long meeting later in the day. I mean, I can tell how I’m doing by how I feel and how much exercise I’m getting (currently: not much) by how I feel and whether I have the good muscle soreness or how I sleep at night. So do I need to hit artificial targets determined by Cupertino? Or am I just nerfing on this because I’m not getting my allotment of martial arts classes and gym sessions anyway? Time will tell.

So I dug into my bureau for old watches (including a daddy watch) that I wore before my FitBit… what, seven or eight years ago?

Of course, after that length of time, the batteries were dead. In the olden days, I’d take it to the shopping mall and one of the guys at a kiosk would have sold me a new battery and would have installed it. But if I’m not going to the gym, you know I’m not going to the mall (well, unless it’s an antique mall). So I popped open the backs and got the memory sizes, and…. Of course, I did not have any button batteries of that size in hand.

I mean, I have all sorts of button batteries of various sizes from remotes, children’s toys, and other things, but not for actual watches. But since they’re sold in ten packs on Amazon for $6, I order ten and they linger in my battery cabinet for…. Well, archeologists will eventually have to tell you when they’re done lingering, as I’m unlikely to use them all.

So now, look at la-di-dah me, with two watches from which to choose:

Of course, I only wear the silver one because a brown watchband might indicate I would have to match it with something. And color-coordination in clothing is not a skill of mine.

So now I have 8 more of these batteries in the cabinet. I can take up watch repair (battery replacement anyway). Or, if I live for thirty years, perhaps I can replace the batteries on these watches four more times. And they’ll likely spend most of that time in the drawer where they’ve spent the last half-a-decade-and-more since I don’t wear this kind of watch in the house, and I don’t leave the house all that much.

Glenn Reynolds on his Substack: Report from the Other Side.

Yeah, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been hit with the aging stick myself lately–and I’m over a decade younger than Instapundit. My kids are fixin’ to be adults (the youngest is a senior in high school now). I’m not getting to the gym or martial arts as much as I would like–and it’s not because I’m buried with work. I just can’t be arsed sometimes.

Although, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough, you have probably seen variations of this post for, what, ten or fifteen years by now?

I guess it’s just who I am. Probably rooted in the fact that I’m now not long from 60, where so many of my matrilineal family died.

I guess this is the Saturday morning reminder to step away from the computer. And perhaps the housework which fills Saturdays as well.

If you reveal these 3 things in an interview — you most likely won’t get hired, says CEO.

To sum up, the three things are:

1. ‘I want to start my own business someday”
2. you “value work-life balance.”
3. Another thing that should be kept under wraps in an interview — although it’s a common experience with many corporate workers — never say you were let go as part of your company’s recent layoffs.” [I am not sure where the quote actually begins since the paragraph ends with a quotation mark, but there’s not an open quotation mark–ed.]

You know, the first trips me up. I already own my own consultancy, and interviewers will ask if I’ll still do contract work, and I say, “Well….” And I explain how sometimes former clients and friends will ask me for a little help with something, a couple hours a week for a couple weeks, and I’ll take that, but not another full time contract. But the truth does not satisfy them as much as the lies told by people who will actually do just that.

The second doesn’t trip me up.

But I dodged the last when I quit my last full-time job. The company I worked for was absorbed into the parent company, and they let go the operations staff and management and kept the engineers. But they didn’t have any QA engineers, so they were not sure what to do with the two of us. They decided to turn us into full-stack engineers (along with the front-end engineers), but I looked at the collection of 250 engineers brought into the mothership from the other companies, and I knew that somewhere along the line, that number would be trimmed. A lot. So I was kinda given the option of being “managed out”–that is, they would give me a software engineer title (but not the pay, natch) and start the process in motion to let me go, which would have involved writing me up for not being a good software engineer and putting me on an improvement plan (whatever they do in big corporations) that I would not meet and then they would let me go. It would get me a couple extra months pay and maybe an annual bonus, but I said, nah, I have my pride. Which means I can honestly answer that I’ve not been laid off (except for my first job, but that was a headcutting for the stock market move–my manager there worked his network to get me a second job, and he convinced them to hire me even though they’d just hired the two technical writers for their open positions).

But you know what does trip me up?

I am probably too comfortable in the interviews. I overshare stories of my experience, I draw parallels and explain evolutions when they just want me to declare I have such and such experience. And I can be a little glib.

I’d like to try to improve on this, but I have not had even a screener in a while (and that one was to prove that Americans could not do the job). Still, I applied to a couple of interesting-looking jobs today, and I’ve got two active part-time contracts, and I’m making progress on my next mobile app project. So don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Jeez Louise, everyone has been slagging on that imported communist who would be mayor of New York:

One little probably spur-of-the-moment and probably impromptu TikTok video later, and suddenly everyone is Hans or Franz.

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. Because I tend to plateau around 45. Coincidentally, that’s why I dodge the question when someone hears that I go to the gym and asks me how much I can bench. I can sleep on a bench for hours, I say.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am an intermittent weight lifter and have been a member of one gym or another for most of my adulthood.

I tend to be diligent in spurts, and then slack off, and then be diligent again for a while. Generally, I tend to get to a certain point and then rather plateau before I slack off. And I tend to plateau right around that 45. And then when I come back to the gym after a couple of months of slacking off, I have to start my way back to it.

In a bit of my defense, my workout is not geared to driving toward a big number max for one or two reps. I tend to want to do a lot of reps at whatever weight. So I can do eight or ten at 45. I have gotten back into the habit of starting reverse pyramids there and then backing off the weight by five pounds and doing eight or ten reps all the way down to the bar. Which ends up being, I dunno, a hundred or so reps total. Not 1 at a couple of plates.

I don’t tend to work with a spotter anyway, so I have to make sure I don’t work completely to the point of failure, or I’ll have to hold a bar at the failure point until some stranger rescues me (it’s only happened once, and that was enough).

Bloody hell, I don’t even calculate the max. I just pay attention to how much weight is on one side. Because that’s all I need to remember, not the calculations of what a man I really am.

This is spoken as a guy who went into the weight room in high school and could not lift the bar alone if it had the heavy screw-on collars you never see any more.

So, yeah, not doing some sort of Internet clout dance on this particular instance. And it’s a waste of time to do so.

Well, unless you have blog-inches to fill.

But the guy was not afraid to lie on the bench, knowing his limitations. How many of the ha-ha! crowd would not?

It was fifteen years ago today that I initially built the outdoor toybox which eventually became our pool toybox.

It was true; I overengineered it a lot because I fully expected toddlers to climb on it.

It was a year ago that I rebuilt it since it was rotting in a lot of places from years of water dripping on its bottom.

And…. It’s ultimately too small for proper sized floats. We’ve only had two this year: A large innertube shaped one that the oldest bought and a leaky mattress type that my beautiful wife bought for $2 on clearance at Walmart.

I’ve still gone out most days, or at least a couple of times per week. The wife likes to go out to the pool in the afternoons when she can. The boys have only been into the pool a couple of times, and one has had a couple of friends to swim once.

Our pool is an underutilized space for sure–and, as major systems have come overdue for replacement at Nogglestead coincidentally when our income is running on a lean mixture–we realized that the pool has been the only thing we’ve spent money maintaining in our time here at Nogglestead.

And the toybox? I shall probably deconstruct it sometime soon and turn it into additional record shelving or leave it in its component parts in my garage and/or shed for years.

But, briefly, it held plastic sports equipment, a giant bounce-on hopalong toy that I used more than my young children did, a plastic lawnmower, and whatnot. And then for longer it held a rotating collection of floats, including water wings and other toddler-sized floats, balls, and dive toys for longer. But nothing now.

To be honest, when I saw the Facebook memories, I thought I’d share the story of rebuilding it, but then I found I already had. Pardon the indulgence about musing about the same thing again one year later.

Wilder today posts about H1-B abuse and says:

But in some tiny newspaper in the middle of BFE, the company puts out a want ad. This ad isn’t meant to be seen by anyone nationwide, rather, its sole purpose is to be “proof” that the company looked for an American. The idea is that only their preferred Indian candidate will know about the opening and the very specific procedures and job code to apply. Then, bang, the company has proof that no qualified American exists and they can hire Poojeeta Ramdash whose uncle runs the division.

Jeez, does that explain the job posting for an SDET I saw in the Stone County Republican?

The Jack Henry world headquarters is not in Stone County; it’s in Monett, which straddles the Barry and Lawrence County line. I emailed the recruiter and never heard back. Perhaps part of the plan.

Interior decorator reveals five ‘ugly’ things you should never put in your home — and you probably have all of them

Let’s treat this as a quiz, ainna?

Bolded are the things I have:

• Televisions. We only have two: One in the upstairs living room which has not been used since 2020, when we played Karaoke Revolution on the PlayStation 2 as the kids’ music class during lockdown. We will probably remove it from the living room in the near future when I finally refinish the end tables and coffee table that I’ve been saving for a rainy day.
• A Microwave. How do you say, “I’m urban, and I go out to eat/order delivery and then discard the remnants.” in TikTokian?
• Laundry hanging to dry. We have wet towels, occasionally swimwear, and things that cannot go into the dryer hanging from convenient fixtures most of the time. Limited, I guess, by when our laundry equipment is down for one reason or another, which seemed all the time until we recently bought expensive “professional” quality things, which means “all the time” is postponed for a year or two.
• Overhead lighting. Although we don’t tend to use it all the time, we have canned lights downstairs and fans upstairs. So we’re guilty of this. I’ve only recently discovered turning on lamps to diminish the darkness in the corners of the house.
• Unused candles. We’ve got a dog candle that I bought for my sainted mother when I was eight at the Wisconsin State Fair and a scented candle my beautiful wife got as a gift somewhere in the little mirror shelf in our dining room, a pair of taper candles in holders that I inherited from my favorite aunt in the living room, and a heart candle-without-a-wick that I made for my beautiful wife as a gift when I was making candles (she does not like fire) in the bedroom. I think we have one or two others in our other knick-knack collection in the clock downstairs which I received as gift–maybe for being the best man at my brother’s first wedding? Regardless, they mean something and are personal relics. One presumes that a 35-year-old professional decorator, influencer, and TikToker is blessed to live in the eternal evanescent now. Although, to be honest, I don’t know him, but I’m not impressed with the depth of people who live on the Internet.

So a perfect five of five.

One wonders if books would come in sixth or seventh in the list, not to mention shelves of videocassettes, DVDs, record albums, or CDs on display. Or fitness equipment. Or, icky! sports team memorabilia (remember, gentle reader: You can see a Packers logo from just about any point in Nogglestead).

But I live in a house that I live in. Not one I’ve designed for Internet clout/clicks or even real-life approval by people who assess based on that sort of thing. If they don’t go to the bookshelves and see what kinds of books we have to make their determination, we don’t have them over. Which is why, I suppose, we don’t have people over. Or perhaps the ones who do come and would normally judge people by the books they have are overwhelmed at Nogglestead. I dunno. What was I saying?

As I mentioned, my boys and I trekked out to my brother’s place a week ago. My boys wanted to do some fishing, and they not only did some fishing, but also did some catching. Me, I hung out with my brother and his wife. And we walked the edges of his property, 25 acres of lightly rolling hills with some woods at the edges, an old barn, and, as mentioned, a fishing pond.

As we walked, we talked about:

• The cross-fencing he removed because a previous owner had run cattle, but they were in the way of hay cutting; I mentioned Nogglestead had been cross-fenced at one time, and that I found the lines where the bottom strand of barbed wires were still buried back in my metal-detecting days (which, to be honest, were like two: I looked for and found a tiller pin I lost, which is why I bought a cheap metal detector, and two, the day I ran it over Nogglestead’s margin nearest the Old Wire Road and found only the barbed wire, which I initially thought might be buried power lines (double parentheses, but I now know to look at the electric lines from the road to the security lights to the actual drop which are overhead, but then I was ignaint)).
   
• The fact that we had enough cherries for a pie and might eventually get enough blackberries for a pie if we could be arsed to go pick them.
   
• That the boys and I were sorta doing the Rural Missouri Missouri Snapshots contest this year, and that we’d gone to the Nathan and Olive Boone Homestead State Historical Site for photos, but the closest actual State Parks to us are Roaring River State Park and Table Rock State Park (state forests and other Missouri Department of Conservation areas do not count as locations where you can take pictures for the contest.

We left on Saturday morning after that walk, and after I got home, my Facebook feed was all like:

C’mon, man. Along with with the Travis Kelce post I mentioned earlier, that is four posts that Facebook showed me within a day of talking within earshot of a phone with the Facebook app installed (and perhaps even running).

As the Philosopher said, “Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

On Friday, the coverage for the regularly scheduled Saturday “grassroots” protest was not only hyped in its own article but had a slot in the “things to do this weekend” feature.

And, no follow-up about how it went.

Which probably means smaller than the previous one, which was pretty small to begin with. A search of the local television news brings up a couple of pieces about the regularly scheduled “grassroots” protests in a couple of distant cities.

Not a mass movement.

Ah, gentle reader, it has been fifteen years since I posted about a gallery of the Noggle library, and this post is not going to revisit the state of the library. However, I do want to note that the brown, unfinished shelf that housed the woodworking books and magazines has come in doors.

In 2010, it looked like this:

In the decade and a half since, I am not sure I’ve acquired many repair guides, and if I did, they went to the unread stacks. But I did load it up with junk for craft projects that I never got to I haven’t gotten to yet.

But I’m now into year two of cleaning my garage, and I had picked up a plastic shelving unit for use in my office where it didn’t fit (my PCs didn’t fit on it in a fashion where I could have moved my printers under the desk), so I moved it to the garage in the middle of the garage. That made it look junky, so I decided to bring the bookshelves into the house–into my office–and use the wall space in the garage for the shelving.

Well, first, I had to paint it, of course.

The bookshelf has an interesting family-by-marriage history. My maternal grandmother remarried a fellow named Herb when she was in her fifties (old, I would have thought then–given she had only a few years to live, I guess it was truer than I knew). Herb was a woodworker by–hobby? Vocation? He had a professional wood shop that he gave up when they married, and he tricked out the lower level of the house they shared on the flood plain until it flooded, and then he tricked out the basement of their next rented house not on a flooded plain (and the house where my grandmother died–and the last time I saw her, I was so into my new library books that I read in her living room instead of spending time with her while she was bed-ridden–I never knew how sick she was). But Herb did not build this bookshelf.

One of his five or six children built it as a china cabinet in high school shop class. It was not a bad piece of schoolwork from fifty years ago; it’s made of solid wood, which puts it above most of our bookshelves which are particle board and laminate. My mother inherited it when my grandmother died, and I remember it on the exterior wall of her dining room–but when I went to show my beautiful wife a picture of it as a china cabinet in a photo of our family having dinner at my mother’s, it’s not there. Maybe it was on the interior wall of that dining room.

Sometime, I got possession of it; I don’t actually remember when I got it, and that bothers me a bit. I don’t think it was when my mother passed away– I did not take much of her furniture, leaving it along with the house for my brother to deal with. It might have been after my first aunt passed away, at which point my mother probably inherited a nicer china cabinet from her sister.

I say this because when I got it, I took the doors off and removed the center pieces of it to turn it into bookshelves. And I sanded some of the paint off of it. This would indicate I got it pre-children, back when I thought I would get into refinishing furniture (which I really didn’t–which is why the hardware for one of the desks in my office is packaged in the garage–I planned to refinish it 26 years ago, but I have not gotten to it yet, and it’s been in use for probably 24 of those years). When we moved to Nogglestead, it was put into the garage, and there it’s sat for the sixteen years we’ve been here.

Well, I did not stain it, but I painted it with leftover fence paint, and it’s in my office now.

It also has the distinction of combining reference material (the woodworking, home repair, and electronic repair books), books I’ve read (the paperbacks at the top), and books I have not read (things I had stacked horizontally atop the other bookshelves in my office). I’d thought I’d need it for the overflow mass market paperbacks I’d read, but the overflow did not take up much space on it. So I have commingled read with unread. But not my books with my beautiful wife’s books (I say that as though it’s a taboo, but some of the books from my childhood are mixed with her books in the family room).

I stacked the former read paperback shelves atop each other, and the three shelves together eliminated some of the only wall space available in my office for decorations. So the few of my mother’s spoon collection which I actually polished at one time and displayed in a hanging spoon collection display thing-a-ma-bob–well, they’re on my desk again, suitable for a five things on my desk post again. I’ve kind of leaned the other things from that wall–the Jordan Binnington print, a couple of woodburnings I’d given to my aunt and uncle which I got back when my aunt died, and a couple of small paintings that my great grandmother did and which I remember on the wall in the dining room in the house projects–atop the bookshelves.

But there’s no room here for the spoon collection. We’re actually getting to the point at Nogglestead that we don’t have vertical wall space for the things we’ve accrued, so some are in the garage, and some will be in the storeroom.

At any rate, that’s the story of this particular bookshelf. Which is the only heirloom-quality bookshelf we have, actually.

“I hope you like the color,” I said to my wife. Because we have five or so gallons of brown paint left.

And onto the next project: Which is cleaning and organizing the garage, and maybe finally refinishing/staining the coffee table and end tables which my brother gave me in 1999 or 2000 and which I took apart to stain evenly and which we have moved, disassembled, several times. Who knows: When the garage is finally cleaned up enough that I can get to things and that the floor is not covered with boxes, bike carriers and trainers, and donation piles, maybe I’ll get back to actually doing things in it.

Or maybe I’ll wait for 2040 to get around to it. Time will tell.