Category: Life

So I have started tinkering with a set of words on a page, and I was trying out rhythms, and I came to a bit of an issue.

The word juggling. Is it two syllables or three?

YouTube offers a variety of videos just saying the word. Try this one:

Still not sure. Is it JUG-gling? That’s what the letters indicate, but the combination of sounds together makes it sound more like JUG-gul-ING, ainna?

I am sure I have mentioned that I pronounce words I learned from reading incorrectly. I have to wonder how many of my poems are actually incorrectly stressed when someone smarter than me reads them because they know the words from the sounds.

Ah! Therein is the bit of humor. Nobody at all reads them. So my ignorance remains safely hidden.

Vultures.

I haven’t seen any vultures around in weeks. Roadkill along my farm road is untouched. A fawn up by the corner where they used to have the horse with the star on its head, standing alone in its pastures for years, has lain beside the road for weeks. A raccoon a couple miles up the road by the Quonset-hut-with-a-gym church on the corner has been there longer. And a couple other miscellaneous squirrels remain in the roadway.

It used to be that the turkey vultures would pick things clean pretty quickly–heaven knows they reduced one of our outdoor cats to a skeleton in a day.

But, recently, black-headed vultures have moved into the area. An invasive species, black-headed vultures are known to take young livestock and other small living prey in addition to predeceased animals.

They replaced the turkey vultures in the area briefly, and although I saw them around for a short time, I haven’t seen them recently.

I don’t wonder if the black-headed vultures didn’t chase off the turkey vultures and then man-led efforts eradicated the black-headed vultures, leaving a void.

I checked with Larry Dablemont’s blog since my weekly paper subscriptions with his column have lapsed, but it doesn’t look like he posted anything about it. A quick Internet search doesn’t yield official news of any sort.

Just some personal observations and idle speculations here.

Facebook has fed me some semi-relevant slop:

I didn’t click through to educate the fellow, but that’s a Republic school. It’s named after General Lyon, who died at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. The other elementary schools are named after General McCulloch and General Schofield (and they face each other across a street, two miles from the later Lyon Elementary, because Republic built all of its schools together back in the day for the ease of bussing or something, but that seems weirder than what that dull man posted).

Republic’s mascot is the Tigers. As are so many mascots in Missouri since the flagship university, Mizzou, is home of the Tigers.

Sparta, though, is home of the Trojans.

In 2023, I was feeling a bit low in early November, so I bought a little resin Santa and put it on the mantel to see if and when my family would notice.

I did the same last year with a little “winter village” figurine because it was only four bucks at Walmart.

This year, I’ve done the same:

I guess I’ll have to be careful if I keep buying the four dollar ones from Walmart to make sure I don’t get a duplicate. Or do they release fresh new figurines every year? I dunno.

Have I listened to Christmas music yet? Well, one of the records I picked up recently had “Sleigh Ride” to start the second side even though it was not a Christmas album, so, yes. And I listened to Jessy J’s California Christmas and Erin Bode’s A Cold December Night while reading last night. So, yes.

Christmas shopping? Not yet. As the years go on, I seem to be getting lazier and lazier about it.

UPDATE: Should I have marked this post as NSFW since I put the figurine next to Rodin’s The Kiss? We had that in our place in the projects in the 1970s, and I believe they have or had a casting of it at the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I would assume it’s kid-friendly. But your workplace might not think so. Try not to flaunt the fact that you have a workplace, gentle reader. It is unkind.

Ah, gentle reader. Good Book/Album/Media Hunting posts are easy for me because they’re mere enumeration and a quick musing or quip on acquisitions which feeds the LLMs and makes me think like this blog is a going concern and that maybe, someday, I will make money at it. Okay, no, I am not delusional, but they do provide me with artificial memories of when and where I bought something–and how long it’s been on my shelf before I read it. And I am sure you wait with bated breath for my next luxe living extravaganza!

Ah, but not a lot of acquisition going on here. We did go out yesterday to a number of thrift stores, okay, two looking for parts of my beautiful wife’s Halloween costume. Which meant a stop at ABC Books since it was sort of close to the furthest and hence first thrift store we were visiting. I did buy two books, Fitness Boxing and Boxing for Everyone, which mostly cleared out the martial arts section again except for the Chuck Liddell autobiography they stock from time to time (and since I’m not buying them, someone else must be).

But that’s it.

I had hoped to go to the coin show at the Relics Antique Mall this weekend to pick up a foreign historical coin, perhaps another coin from Japan or the Roman Empire or maybe a shilling from the Elizabethan or James I era–how cool would it be to own a coin that might have been used for admission to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre? Ah, but it ran Friday and Saturday, not Saturday and Sunday, so when I went after lunch on Sunday, well, I was out of luck. Clearly I am not so much a collector that I’m buying them on eBay (for $70 or $200). But I would pick one up for curiosity sake.

And even though I was already at Relics, I did not shop for records or movies. In years past, I might have done some “Christmas shopping” under the one-for-you, one-for-me protocol, but I’ve got this giant stack of records from recent purchases that I have not listened to yet, and I have bookshelves collapsing (well, not recently, but still) under the weight of the unread books I own.

Am I growing up? Or is it just a phase I’m going through? I guess we’ll find out.

One thing I did buy was some firewood. Two ricks, essentially.

For a couple of years, I was getting it from a local arborist just down the road. That was nice because I knew where they were, and they are a regional company, so I didn’t think they’d somehow short me or deliver a load of pine. But last year, they stopped selling firewood. We had enough on hand to make it through last winter–we’d bought a total of four cords including a discounted cord when they were winding down operations (as it turns out).

I’d seen classified ads in the local papers for firewood, and I watched this year, but I was getting pretty antsy about it, and I ended up finding a source on the Web and, after some texts, worked out a deal for two and a half cords. Then, of course, that week, two different sources appeared in the papers. But I’ve taken delivery of the first two ricks from the Internet company. Maybe I’ll take cords from each to see which is best. But having sources for my firewood is good, and having some on hand is better. Because it could be a cold winter.

So: That’s what I’ve bought. And two boxing books. Which I hope to read soon.

Adaptive Curmudgeon does not like what he sees in the mirror: Am I The Pallet People:

Years ago I started hacking pallets apart. I “made” nail-free kiln-dried camping firewood. I’d blast through a bunch of pallets in an hour or less. I’d get about 50% useable firewood (in short lengths) and 50% nail ridden health hazards. The firewood went in a new, clean, dry trash can where it stayed dry and readily available. I hauled the junk to the dump before it wound up embedded in my truck’s tires.

* * * *

I started wondering if I could get good useable “project” wood out of pallets. I’m not low on funds now but I will be soon. Could all this (free!) wood keep me occupied and off the streets? Lots of people use pallet wood but often they’re making decorative things. I don’t make decorative things. Nor do I have access to really excellent pallets.

Last summer, after restacking the firewood to a smaller footprint (it rests upon pallets upon cinderblocks to hopefully confuse the termites), we had a number of pallets that were not in very good shape, so I thought I would break them apart for just such decorative creations as AC tut-tuts. So the youngest and I got to work with crowbars, hammers, and pliers to not only break them apart but also to pull the nails and staples so I could use them for woodburning.

Aw, but, c’mon, man, we know what I’m really using them for: To clutter my shed until I get my garage clean enough where I can do anything in it besides park a vehicle and a lawnmower.

Am I the pallet people? No, I am of the pallet people. And I have bad news.

Ah, gentle reader; I have been on the alert for the “no truck with” slangism since the 1990s, and I have come across it twice in books I’m reading or I have recently read, one from the 1920s and one translated in 2007 (you’ll see in the book reports, gentle reader, eventually).

But I also want to point out that the inestimable Kim du Toit used the very phrase today:

Needless to say, the U.S. will have no truck with this nonsense — at least, the current generation of U.S. leaders won’t….

Have I ever seen the phrase where someone or something has truck with? No, it’s always the negative.

MfBJN will keep you up-to-date on appearances of this phrase. Check back often!

Not sure why my beautiful wife put Braunschweiger on the shopping list, but Braunschweiger she will get.

You know, we have been married for a couple of years now, and I am seemingly less equipped to read her handwriting than when we were younger. Of course, I have trouble reading my own handwriting at times. But I posit a thesis: Handwriting is used less to communicate between people these days and is more used for only taking notes for one’s self or for making lists. So it’s becoming, generally, less legible for other people to read than it had been.

Ozarks pumpkin harvest is less than normal so far: Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity

Ladies and gentlemen, the pumpkin harvest at Nogglestead:

One pumpkin smaller than a baseball. Our watermelon harvest was similar, but apparently the deer have cleared the melon bed pretty good as the autumn has approached. We had one mound of pumpkins, one of watermelon, and four of cantaloupe which did produce three or four melons for us.

The subhead says Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity. We had plenty of that. What we lacked for much of August and September was rain which is what fills them.

Overall, the gardens of Nogglestead provided us with about what we could handle, actually, except for tomatoes. I had a couple of zucchini per week for much of the summer from three mounds. I had a late harvest of a pound or two of radishes which was about what I could eat. We had enough cherries to make one pie before they disappeared. We never did get a blackberry harvest suitable for a pie. And I haven’t actually dug out my potatoes yet, so who knows what lies beneath.

The deer, though, made out like the hooved bandits they are.

Thirteen years ago, I said:

I’ve had the shell of that empty Sears monitor sitting on a desk in my garage since then. I haven’t settled on idea what to do with it. Fishbowl? Make it into a fake fireplace-style decoration? I’ve also got the shells of a number of LCD monitors that I’ve planned to put corkboard in or whiteboard cut down from larger ones I pick up, but I’ve not jumped on that either.

So much of the multi-year garage cleaning project is being overwhelmed by the sheer number and volume/cubic footage I have of craft materials of various stripes that I’m not entirely sure I want to give up just yet. I mean, what can I do with the computer monitor shell? I’ve removed the cathode ray tube and electronics. I could, I suppose, make it into a corkboard or a whiteboard using the bezel and scrap the rest. Or maybe look for an LCD screen that fits it which I can put a Raspberry Pi in it for a digital picture frame or something. But it’s not been pressing for the last thirteen years, to say the least.

Pretty sure I did something with the eMac bezel though.

I’ve added a new t-shirt to the CafePress store:

You can order one if you’re so inclined here.

Strangely enough, my CafePress store has proven to be the most profitable endeavor of my “throw it out there” attempts at passive income. I’ve had it since 2004 when I made some off-color bumper stickers and then some political things which never sold. But when I started adding IT things badged with QA Hates You, I sold a couple–especially Project Manager Wall Clocks which have sold enough that I got a check from them back when they were new and which still sell steadily enough to cover the costs of having a CafePress storefront.

The Nico Sez line of apparel? I bought one to see how they would look. I’m wearing it as I type this blog post, actually.

The two apps I have on the app store? I sold one copy of Boxing Drill Companion to someone in Eastern Europe on the day I released it. I sold two copies of Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker: One to my beautiful wife, and one to her mother (who uses it every day, by the way, so: yay(?)). Which is almost $3 in revenue against $99 for an annual Apple developer account.

The books? Yeah, build your brand online didn’t work; not only did I spend $300 for a cover, but I sent out 50 to newspapers, magazines, and bloggers and got, what, five reviews? I’ve sold fewer than 100 copies of it and a handful of copies of the other books, but I’ve done my own covers for the others and have not sent out review copies except to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Contest or whatever it’s called. Which might explain one of the reasons that I haven’t written much long form in a while.

And this blog? I think I got a check from Google AdSense once over a decade ago. Against the ever-increasing costs of hosting and, fortunately, no longer the cost of updating the SSL certificate, but, yeah, not a profit center.

With apologies to Stephen Crane, a poem:

A man said to the internet,
“Sir, I exist!”

Maybe I should focus on more Civilization IV. I lose less money that way.

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.