Category: Life

As you might know, gentle reader, for major pieces of wall art, I’ve favored prints of master works from, er, the masters, starting with three prints I bought in college on a fresh new credit card in 1990 (The Man with the Golden Helmet by Rembrandt, Christina’s World by Wyeth, and A Saturday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat) which I got a deal on (3 for $18–and by the time we paid them off, in probably a decade later if we consider the money paid to the credit company first-in, first out, we probably paid $100 each for them including interest). Or personal relics which were gifts and/or inherited from family members now likely departed. My beautiful wife, however, favors consumer art which is mass-produced art of a topical theme, whether it’s the mere decorative squares and textures, Mediterranean landscapes, or Mediterranean cafes.

We have two such works in the bedroom, and, gentle reader, they are the same picture.

• Cafe facing out: ✔
• Alley upstage right: ✔
• Shopfront on right facing left: ✔
• Covered cafe tables: ✔
• Flowers: ✔
• Awnings: ✔

Basically, the artistic expression difference is packed dirt vs cobblestones, ainna?

Ah, I cannot talk; I inherited two H. Hargrove prints from my aunt and then bought another at a garage sale, and we still have two on the walls (one has been stored to make room for one of the cafes above). So they come from a personal relic source and not just a catalog or home goods retailer.

Because I like to look at them and think about them, not just have them as visual background music. But maybe that’s just me.

Well, after watching all those Bruce Lee movies, I planned to go into my martial arts class yesterday morning and say that I’d watched them and picked up some bad new habits for sparring:

• A lot of kung fu kata peacocking between strikes.
• Happy feet making like Irish dancing before beginning.
• Making single strikes instead of combinations, and making them big so the people in the last row can see them.
• Using my forearm to block everything: Spin heel kicks, bo staffs, sticks, speeding trucks, anything. And the forearm stops them cold.
• Hooting when I strike. You’re supposed to exhale to tighten everything up, which leads to the “hi-ya!” Which my school has seemingly stopped emphasizing. As it stands, I already make martial arts sound effects a lot of times when I strike.
• Thumbing my nose mid-bout. Although it will be harder to do with boxing gloves on.

At any rate, I didn’t get to lay the spiel on anyone since renshi asked me what I was listening to (my question to him often is “What are you listening to?” because, in the past, he’s been in charge of the martial arts playlist and picked out metal). So I had to talk about the new Frozen Crown CD instead.

And, as part of our warmups, we had to run to the edge of the mat, do a couple pushups, and then run back. Across the room, kyoshi joked with someone about doing them on fingertips like Bruce Lee, so down on my side of the mat, I tried it. And I could.

So that has been delighting me and bringing a smile to my face since. Because, you know, I am just like Bruce Lee. Although I will likely never get to one finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.

And, the same day, I was listening to my workout playlist whilst dusting the lower level, and Eminem’s “Monster” came on, and it mentions Bruce Lee.

Fame made me a balloon ’cause my ego inflated
When I blew, see, but it was confusing
‘Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf

Again, it’s an illustration about how outsized an influence Bruce Lee had. The man only made a couple of movies, but what an impact on the culture that he’s mentioned fifty-some years later in a martial arts class.

Ah, gentle reader. I fell into an Internet lead generator and feel dirty.

I’ve worked for one, and I might again, but I try to avoid them when I can because I don’t like someone making money off of my contact information since I’m not making any money of my own. And my experience with what I thought was a real company that had subcontracting appliance repairmen but was probably just a lead generator where independent contractors bought my job took a turn for the worse when a repairman drove down from Marshfield, an hour or so away, to give me an estimate which was more than the washing machine cost. So when I need something, I don’t do an Internet search only to see that the six or eight (or more) top results are funnels. I do the right thing: I remember who advertised on the radio or whose trucks I have seen nearby (but the cost of buying leads might be built in).

So: We need a new roof at Nogglestead, and given our current circumstances, we were going to need to finance it. I called the roofing company we’d selected, and I expected the estimator to come with application paperwork because the last time we did something like this–but that was probably 25 years ago. The adjuster told me I could use the Web site to apply for financing through their partner.

So I got on the Web site, and the link in the heading navigation to financing was broken–it led to a 404 error on the Web site of a local bank. So I thought the “partner” was the fancy tool used by that bank. A little later, I got to exploring the Web site a little and found another financing link which led to a form with the tool’s name on it. I entered basic information, and….

Immediately I was presented with a list of 400 different loan offers from Internet lenders of various stripes. And my inbox was immediately blitzed by marketing emails from the tool and from the people to whom it had sold my information.

Aw, hell. So now my name and Social Security Number are everywherer on the Internet again.

So, yeah, no. I went back to what I should have done in the first place: Go to my various banking institutions and see what their offerings are.

I don’t know why I’m so averse to lead generation and management. It does, almost, make one’s life easier if one doesn’t want to research services in their area. But the cost of buying leads is now priced into services everywhere, so it’s not helping me enough to offset that.

So I have released two apps to the Apple App Store this week:

Goal-Task-Chore is a to-do list app which not only lets you add one-time tasks to the list and to mark them off but also lets you create multiple-time chores which can appear on the list at intervals you set and Goals, which are groups of step tasks working toward a larger outcome. You can find it on the App Store here. I use it every day, and to be honest, I’m sometimes not pleased with it because there’s always something to more to do.

PhrazeMaze: Proverbs is like a word search except you have a whole phrase or sentence to find in the letter grid. This particular app has 120+ puzzles from the book of Proverbs in the Bible. You can find it on the Apple App Store here. If it proves to be popular, I can easily build similar apps with different puzzle phrazes.

So, to launch them, I announced them on LinkedIn and Facebook (and here, obviously). And if they sell four copies each (total to me: $5.60), they’ll be the biggest selling apps I’ve produced.

I’ve been attending this weekly entrepreneur meeting which features a presentation from a new businesses on Wednesday mornings. One of the questions that the audience, generally coaches and other service professionals who would sell to the presenters who are generally coaches and other service professionals trying to sell to the audience, one of the questions that the audience often asks is “What is your social media strategy?” Because someday I might pitch my apps to the group, I’m preparing my answer rant in that regard:

You know, I had an email newsletter in 1997 which got me…. nothing.

I had one of the top 500 blogs in 2004, and after many years of posting, often multiple times a day, when it came time to sell books, I sold…. What, 100? 150? Mostly on Kindle, and certainly not enough to pay for the cover of the book (professionally designed) or the outlay on books I sent to magazines and various bloggers for review and comment–not to mention 16 years of hosting (starting with the move from Blogger in 2010.

I joined Twitter in 2009 and was active there, professionally (well, sorta) for nine years, posting multiple times a day and getting to around 5000 followers organically. And it yielded me, what, a couple of paid writing gigs and a sub-sub-sub-contractor gig that did not go well. Total business closed in almost 10 years of social mediating? Maybe $2000. Which is the high water mark of the “value” I’ve gotten from it.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for over 20 years, and I’ve written articles and posts on it throughout, and although a recent post got almost 40,000 views–which I’ve been told is a lot–I’ve not actually gotten any work from it, whether it’s responses to job posts or people I’ve met there. I’ve been on Facebook for fifteen years or so, and it was not supposed to be a thing to build “my brand,” and it is certainly not doing that any more. Nor is it really showing me updates from people with whom I’ve connected over the years.

So what is my social media strategy for my yet unnamed app venture? To not.

Because they’re structured so that they will take all the content you want to provide for free and, when you want to share something saleable to your connections, they’ll bury it unless you pay the money to boost it (which is thousands of dollars for “impressions” which will probably not yield conversions). TikTok? Instagram videos? Make authentic videos or silly dance videos? What, spend hours and money to sell a $.99 app? No thank you. Doing that, you’re working for the social media platform, providing free (to them) content which might or might not increase its user engagement.

I get it why some people think this is a way to go: Because it’s fun, and it’s easy. Clearly, I’ve gotten something out of writing a blog all these years (mostly memories that I can scroll through). I had fun with Twitter back in the day (and my other blogs). You can spend hours on it and get some dopamine when people like and respond to your content. But that doesn’t necessarily convert. And I get why so many people promote it–because they work in the space, and they will make money off of it if you hired them to do your social media.

So, what to do, what to do? Continue to show the app to as many people in person as I can stand to (which is probably less than could stand it) and hope that one catches fire. Think up an idea for a brand name and maybe spend a couple bucks on a Web site.

But social media? Nah.

So, if you’ve got $.99 and think they look interesting, give the apps a try. Or my books there in the sidebar, for that matter–you can get them for $.99 digitally, too. And as the Philosophers said, “Thanks for your support.”

Fifteen years ago:

I probably did not intend to include a copy error in that post on Facebook. I was just hearkening back to the fact that, in early proofs of John Donnelly’s Gold, the gun also had that special feature–a revolver with a magazine. It also featured a week that was eight days long.

I’m told it still contains three typos. You’re welcome to order it and find out.

US track star cost half marathon national title, $20K prize after being mistakenly led off course

Although, to be honest, I was nowhere near the top, but at my first Republic Tiger Triathlon (RIP), when I transitioned from the bike to the run, somebody ran through the transition area and out. I followed him, but he was not a participant, and he ran the wrong way down the trail outside the exit. Loud spectators corrected me, but I got a few extra steps in in my quest to climb from the very lastest to the top 50% of finishers. Which might actually have been my best result ever anyway.

Cardinals baseball finds new Springfield home on 102.1 The Won

As I’ve mentioned, the stubby antenna on the radio-playing headphones still going strong sixteen years after I bought them can pick up, clearly, two stations in all corners of Nogglestead: 92.3 which was country and 105.1 which is now “old” country (see also).

But! 105.1 was also the home of Cardinals baseball. Which meant that while I was on the lawnmower or, sometimes, painting record shelves outside or painting the fence, a song, probably a good one, would abruptly end and “The St. Louis Cardinals are on….” would replace it. And not the game–an hour of pregame interviews and things. Ah, gentle reader, I sometimes scheduled my lawnmowing around the baseball games just so they would not interrupt me.

Sorry. I know some of you (Friar) are baseball fans. But although I did grow up having ball games on in the workshop or whatnot, I’d rather listen to music when I am on the lawnmower. And now I won’t have to worry about it.

As long as 105.1 doesn’t become the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today or, heaven forfend, hot country.

So, the weekend before last, I mentioned moving some books from the table beside the sofa upstairs which had been on the table for years, mostly untouched–I’d placed them there whilst I was awaiting my high-school-aged son to come home from closing the restaurant where he worked at the time so I could read them while waiting.

Well, a week after I cleared it, other books moved in.

I have finally convinced my oldest, for whom we waited but now he’s almost done with juco, to not only watch videos on things but to read primary sources, of which Nogglestead has many.

So he’s started to nibble at them, and he’s stacking them up. The copy of Meditations is the one I gave him during the coronavacation in 2020–the one I read in 2019, not long after we moved to Nogglestead, was a Classics Club edition, one of the only ones I’ve read. Jeez, sixteen years…. Maybe I’m due to read it again myself.

Still, I hope he continues to actually read, or at least continues to start to think it would be a good idea.

On this day in 1972 (Richard Nixon’s first administration, gentle reader–basically pre-history), I was born eight weeks early and weighed four pounds, four ounces. Which was about too small to survive in that era. The doctors gave me a 50/50 shot of surviving the first night.

Ah, but, gentle reader, an even more statistically improbable event occurred 25 years later.

A poet in Columbia, Missouri, read a poem I posted on a newsgroup and asked me where you could read in St. Louis. Which was right in my wheelhouse because I knew all the places, which nights of the week they were, and what kind of crowds to expect. I would later quote an Iron Maiden poster to her, she would come to St. Louis to read on a Sunday night (on the very day that Brandt’s turned their weekly open mike to a bi-monthly)–so we walked around St. Charles and the Central West End for a while, and I was greeted by name by two different groups, so I must have seemed like quite the poetry big cheese at the time (and she had to come back the next week, too), and then I would recite the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her mother the first time I met her.

At any rate, my oldest is currently in a “girls are icky” phase. He’s dated semi-seriously a couple of times and has had many “appointments” with young ladies his age, but he’s starting to think modern girls aren’t all that.

I thought that, too, in the middle 1990s. I thought you had to pick either a smart girl or a moral girl, but that modern (1990s) girls had little overlap. But, as the philosopher says, out of the blue one appeared who was also hot.

I guess sometimes you have to trust the process you have no control over.

When we were kids, our exposure to foreign cuisine came from the grocery store. Pizza came in boxes with doughy crusts, sweet tomato sauce in a packet, and desiccated cheese. And Chinese food came in a can. And to this day, I can still hear the jingle “La Choy makes Chinese food…. swing American!”

We got these things, along with Rice-a-Roni, sometimes, and they were always a treat. A break from the Hamburger Helper that was the staple. My sainted mother was many things, but a cook she was not.

As my beautiful wife is traveling this week for business, I picked up a can (well, a package of two cans taped together). But instead of going with the chow mein, which is probably we got annually or twice every three years, I went with the sweet and sour chicken.

And…. bleh.

Decades later, I have a more sophisticated palate, having eaten a variety of different cuisines at various levels of competency. But there are definite limits in what you can put into a can, and this is it.

Although perhaps I didn’t do it right–I didn’t rinse the vegetables enough, and I absolutely messed up the rice by thinking the 1/2 cup scoop was 1 cup (leading to some very wet rice).

Maybe I’ll try again with the chow mein. And add a little red pepper to it. Maybe beef instead of chicken.

But, man, the 1970s. We lived there. It was different.

Warm winter weather prompts early plant budding, but frost threat remains in Ozarks. The slug on the home page says:

Meteorologist Nick Kelly breaks down why some might consider holding off on planting even though we’re back in a warm stretch.

Are you new here? Actually, many might be.

In years past, I have planted too early in that first bit of warmth, only to see my live plants struggle through a cold snap. But never in February, gentle reader, never in February.

One of the benefits of having lived at Nogglestead for sixteen and a half years is that I’ve seen the ebb and flow of the seasons. So I know that it will get cold again in March, and maybe April yet. Last year it was cool and rainy into June before warming up. So I will plant from seed sometime in March. Perhaps some broccolini, which Susan Lamb has been researching and writing about for the Stone County Republican.

I did walk out yesterday to look at the sole remaining peach tree in the front yard; it is indeed budding. But we’ll probably not get blossoms this year, much less peaches, because the temperature dropped to -10 degrees one or two nights. And I walked through a swarm of bugs taking out the trash last night. I’ve heard tell that warm snaps like this are good to keep the insect population down in the summer because they hatch and die in the next cold snap before laying eggs. We will see. It would be nice to sit outside in the evenings again, a habit I’ve given up the last two years because the bugs have been bad.

The old joke about the flood, sorry, the parable of the drowning man, goes:

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”

“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”

God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

That’s longer than it was in Readers Digest. But.

I mentioned in September 2024 that I received a packet from an heir hunter outfit who informed me, with some degree of truth but the exact amount of which I remain uncertain, that a distant relation with an estate died without a will, and I could sign with them to put in a claim. Well, the heir hunter managed to gather 12 or 13 of my closest distant kin to sign on–including my brother, but not my mother’s sister. The estate published for the required weeks in the Mound City News. A claimant put in a charge for an unpaid bill in January 2025, but the online court docket shows nothing since.

Well, we must be getting close to some sort of resolution, because we received a second packet from the heir hunter last week, telling us we still have to time to sign on.

I have spent a sleepless night overthinking it, but my beautiful wife has conducted some research that indicates that if I don’t put in a claim, that bit of money might go to the state’s Unclaimed Property fund. So maybe we will look into introducing ourselves to the Holt County Court after all.

I might have mentioned that I’ve been cleaning my desk, mostly, over the last couple of weeks, slowly, in between doomscrolling and whatnot. Well, in between trying to vibe-code an app that will sell more than three copies (I think all three of my apps in the Apple App Store are up to three copies each, so…. win?)

And I came to the birthday cards I received last year.

I get two birthday cards these days. One, mailed, from the martial arts school I’ve attended for…. fourteen years now? That many/is that all? They used to also periodically send out cards with encouraging notes as well, signed by one of the instructors, but I haven’t gotten one of those in a while. Perhaps they think I’m plenty encouraged as it is. Maybe too encouraged.

The other, from my mother-in-law, I tend to receive hand-delivered. In the past, it’s been passed along from my beautiful wife, generally, who saw her most frequently of us. But she’s been coming to church with us almost weekly after her fear of The Deadliest Thing Ever!!!1! passed and after she got a hip replacement and can walk again. She often includes a check for a dinner, presumably at Piccolo or Avanzare here in town, nice Italian restaurants.

But…. That’s it. And it’s been that way for a long time–my aunt who passed away in 2019 was the other holdout who did traditional things like that into the 21st century.

I thought of this, of course, because this year’s card from kyoshi arrived. So the cards have been on the desk, under piles or under bins and organizers, for a year.

Will I place them in the binders which act as scrapbooks of Nogglestead, where I can review them in their succession? Or will they float around on the desk for another year?

Time will tell!

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.