Category: Life

Black-headed vultures have been moving into Missouri for some time; I’ve seen coverage of them in the local papers, magazines, and probably Larry Dablemont’s columns for a couple of years now. And I know the problem is getting serious as the Missouri Department of Conservation has been running ads in the aforementioned sources (minus Dablemont) saying that if you black vultures are a problem on your property (they’re known to attack living livestock), you can get a permit to kill them (the vultures). I’m under the impression that livestock producers think that step is optional, but if the state is saying maybe it’s a problem, then it’s a bad problem already.

At any rate, I did not get a photo of them, but I did see a trio of them in a field along the farm road that becomes Miller Road in Republic while I was headed to the gym this morning.

And when I got home, I saw this pygmy emu:

I bet this is the same turkey (not turkey vulture, which is the native vulture known for its bald head like a turkey) who crossed my farm road ahead of me the other day.

It’s good to see a turkey as they’re fairly infrequent in my back yard. But it’s odd to see one by itself; usually, when we see them in the valley by the creek down the road aways, you see more than one at a time. Perhaps this is a tom. Larry Dablemont would know, and he would then tell you that their numbers are in fact decreasing and that the state of Missouri doesn’t care since it makes money from turkey hunting permits and they, the government people, tend to work from computer models about populations rather than actually spending a lot of time in the icky woods.

At any rate, just a couple of bird sightings here that are atypical.

Ah, gentle reader. I am reaching a point where I’m starting to think Do I need to buy any more books? or Do I want to buy any more books?. The stacks of Nogglestead are crammed full with little room for further additions. And at the rate at which I’m reading small paperbacks now that the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge is complete…. I mean, I’m starting to think I might not be able to read the thousands of books I already own in my lifetime. Do I really want to add more to the backlog?

Fortunately, though, a twee challenge for myself exists. Last year, I went to three of the four Friends of the Christian County Library book sales (Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). But I missed the one in Ozark, the original location when the Friends of the Christian County Library only had two sales a year in Ozark, because it fell in April, before the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s spring sale. As I often have recently.

But this year, I was a little more attentive, and when I discovered it was this weekend, I ditched a computer conference in Arkansas to attend (and I ditched for other reasons as well, but as a side effect, I was able to attend).

It was not at the library but instead was at a building in the park right across the street.

It was $3 bag day, but I only got two small bags’ worth.

I got a couple of books:

• Gunships #4: Sky Fire which looks to be part of a men’s adventure series.
• Diagnosis Murder: The Silent Partner just in case I didn’t have it. Turns out I do, and I’ve already read it. Something to sneak onto the free book cart at church, I guess.
• Angles of Attack: An A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War by Peter Hunt about a pilot in Desert Storm.
• Pindar: The Complete Odes in case I don’t already have them. If I do, this doubles my chances of finding it. Not that I’m likely to go looking for it; more likely, it doubles my chances of just picking it up sometime.
• Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell. I didn’t have this already, I can honestly say didn’t have this already as I have all the Sharpe’s books together, and this one was not there.
• Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. I have one or two by or about Lawrence of Arabia; not sure if I have his book or not. I do now.
• Love in Ancient Greece by Rpbert Flacelière translated by James Cleugh. Looks to be a scholarly work.
• What If? 2 by Robert Crowley (not the Randall Munroe version. I knew I’d seen and maybe bought a copy of the first one in the distant past. Apparently, I have already read this one, too. The people at church are making out pretty well from this haul.
• The Stingaree by Max Brand. Apparently, I’m into Westerns now so why not try some of the other big authors? No Louis L’Amour books in evidence today.
• Learn to Play the Guitar by Nick Freeth. It might be a children’s book which might be just what I need since the other books haven’t done me any good.
• Gus Shafer’s West with a forward by Dr. John M. Christlieb. An artist and sculptor. To help me envision the scenes in the westerns I read (as though Frederic Remington and Charles Russell could not. Sooner or later I’ll read the Time-Life set, too, maybe.
• Sweden: The Land of Today with text by William Mead. Given that it’s from 1985, it’s the Land of Back Then by now.

Since I had some room, I stuffed a copy of Dating for Dummies to put on one of my boys’ bedrooms as a joke. I put it into the older son’s (who has no trouble dating) under some papers, but he spotted it immediately, so he’s putting it into his brother’s room. Which might hurt the younger as he is just now getting to the dating age but has not yet gone on a date.

I also picked up some DVDs because they were basically free:

• The Transporter 3; I am pretty sure I have seen the first two (and just bought a copy of the first in 2023).
• The Black Dahlia. Not the Blue Dahlia, which is the Raymond Chandler movie.
• The Replacements
• Ocean’s Twelve; I think I’ve seen it back in the movie-going days.
• The Bourne Supremacy; I might have seen it in the movie-going days.
• Basic Instinct; I think I DVRed it at one point.
• The Quick and the Dead; some Substacker just mentioned the film, so now I have it. And apparently I’m set if I want to go onto a Sharon Stone kick, I’m set.

All told, $6. But I did have a ten spot on me as well, so I re-upped my membership in the Friends of the Christian County Library. I’m only in two such groups now. Well, one, maybe; I think my membership in the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library membership has lapsed until our income stabilizes.

For a brief moment, let me enjoy my tsundoku.

A week or so every spring, the setting sun in the afternoon is aligned just right that it comes in through the lower-level patio doors and travels behind the bookshelves in the hall between our offices–a gap of no more than an inch at the widest–and strikes the wall just to the left of the curtained doorway that leads to our store room:

We call the store room “The Cat Litter Room” as most of our litter boxes are in there.

But it also holds a store of old Texas Instruments and Commodore computers as well as forty- or fifty-year-old video gaming systems.

So maybe it really is pointing the way to some ancient treasures.

Actually, we might not see it daily every year as a cloudy evening will block it.

It’s kind of like our pew at church in early service. In spring, the rising sun can come in through the stained glass and strafe us in the back pew. In fall, it can happen twice: Once before the time change and once after switching to Standard Time. We can watch the sun get closer over the course of a month, and then once it’s done with us, its rise is too early to bother anyone else. Come to think of it, the light in the pew and the light in the hall coincide.

Nothing important like NOTICING YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE FROM TARIFFS OR TODAY’S OTHER NEWS, but something I’ve noticed over time that the other residents of Nogglestead or the back pew have not.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a couple of calls on my cellular phone which I ignored. The computer-voiced, and not even AI-voiced, message indicated I was in heapum trouble:

Oh, noes! A agarbagemalgation of legal terms, no indication of who or what or an actual phone number, and an immediate need for me to act UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

If you cannot trust that, what can you trust?

I blocked the number and then got the same crap from a different number which I then blocked.

But unknown number, unnamed legal team, and disembodied voice IS NOT GIVING UP.

Oh, morenoes! ESCALATION! They will send me more robocalls HARDER!

I kind of feel bad for the scammers in a couple of years, when the old people will have grown up with the Internet and will trust no one or no bodiless notification from the ether.

But, you know what? 1) How can you feel bad about those people, and 2) People will still have mush for brains in a couple of years and will fall for anything. Perhaps even I, should I reach geriatricity, might with a wavering and warbling voice, believe. But that last is most unlikely in either clause.

I noticed the fire alarms at church have arrows pointing up.

Most fire alarms–if not all of them–are designed for the alarmant to pull down. I looked at the side of the alarm, and it is indeed hinged at the bottom.

The arrows indicate where you’re supposed to pull, not which direction you’re supposed to pull.

I’m not entirely sure on the design. I’d hate for someone to hesitate and cogitate on this in an emergency, where that person might be overcome by smoke whilst trying to tug up.

But maybe I’m the only one who worries about those possibilities.

Facebook helpfully reminds me to vote today.

On the plus side, I did live in one of those counties for a year and a half forty years ago, before I was of an age to vote.

Don’t worry, gentle reader. I am going from from Brookline Station to Brookline today to cast my “No” vote(s).

Because I do not rely on Facebook as any source of truth whatsoever.

So I like to carry a small disposable lighter on my person when I leave the house. Because if I’m ever in the situation when I need to make a fire (for an emergency survival situation, gentle reader, not because I dislike someone’s politics, because I am not young and or easily led by the permanent professional and optimized cacophony of the Internet), I want to be able to make a fire easily.

In the past, I’ve grabbed a three pack of small lighters at the checkout stand at the grocery or the Walmart, and I’ve kept them in my pocket provisioning drawer. I lose them here and there when they fall out of my loose pockets when I’m sitting various places–I probably have a bunch hidden in the chair in the parlor or beside the drivers’ seats of my vehicles–but I lost the last of them a couple of weeks ago.

When I went to replace them, I couldn’t find them at the checkout stands any more. I mean, you used to find them everywhere with the candy bars and chapstick.

But Walmart has dramatically cut its point-of-sale merchandise to basically candy bars, and I couldn’t find them at the Pricecutter. So I made a point to look for them.

I found some at the courtesy counter.

They’re now $1.50 each, not three for a dollar or three for a buck fifty.

Given that I’m going to lose them, I certainly don’t want to buy refillable collectible lighters or anything with personality.

But…. I guess it’s just one thing I’m used to being ubiquitous that was ubiquitous geographically but not in the time stream.

Maybe I should pay as much heed to not losing them as I do to the other things in my pockets.

At Nogglestead, I have promulgated a simple rule about the common areas: If an article of clothing is horizontal, it’s going into the laundry basket atop the dryer to be washed.

For example, in this tableau from December, the black sweatshirt is going into the laundry, but the jacket and oversized sweater are not:

This mostly applies to my beautiful wife these days, as she is prone to putting on and taking off overclothing in the house and laying it aside, leaving sweatshirts and the like in various rooms. My boys no longer take their pants off immediately upon entering the home, leaving them in the living room. And I mostly ignore their rooms–the oldest does his own laundry, eventually, and I only step in to take wet towels off of the younger man’s floor these days and exhort him to pick up his dirty clothes in all other circumstances.

As for me, the only occasion where I might leave clothing horizontal occurs when I put on my gi for a martial arts class and will put my blue jeans back on after the class. I leave my jeans on the bench so I can put them back on after class. They’re in no real danger of being put into the laundry because 1) I’m the one who picks up stuff in the household and does the laundry and 2) I pay a local tough guy to protect them while I’m away.

So, anyways, now you know a little more (than you ever wanted to know) about the daily life at Nogglestead and the arbitrary protocols therein.

It was a struggle this morning to pay my propane bill as I apparently have the wrong password stored in my password manager and the forgot password functionality did not work. And one either the Register, Sign In, or Forgot Password pages (I forget which, but I hit them all), the CAPTCHA was all like:

They go through an awful lot of trouble to make sure the right person is paying the bill.

I’ve said at my electric co-op, where I’ve made a recent habit of visiting in person to pay my bill, if someone wants to pay my bill, let them. You don’t have to be to strict making sure it’s me.

The job application asked for a URL to a site to which I’d made a significant contribution to in quality assurance. And I played an exchange from the first episode of the British comedy Red Dwarf played in my head:

Holly: They’re all dead. Everybody’s dead, Dave.
Lister: Peterson isn’t, is he?
Holly: Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Not Chen!
Holly: Gordon Bennett! Yes, Chen. Everyone. Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Rimmer?
Holly: He’s dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.
Lister: Wait. Are you trying to tell me everybody’s dead?

It makes my resume sound like a litany of carnage, but many of the companies I’ve worked for full time with products of their own have been acquired by other companies or rolled into parent companies, and the products I worked on might remain in bits and pieces deep within the tech debt of legacy code somewhere, but they’re not readily available, and my contributions are no longer readily apparent. Or the startup shuttered after a couple years or was bought by another company no one has heard of. Or the consulting company rolled off a contract I worked on, a contract with 250 people, most of whom would have forgotten my name if they ever learned it once I was no longer on the list of meeting attendees.

• The Enterprise Information Integration solution? Rolled into the bowels of a RedHat offering somewhere, maybe.
• The pharmaceutical modeling company? Changed names, maybe still does the same thing, but I was working on a special project for a German client that was not public facing and might not have ever seen the light of day.
• The digital marketing agency? Acquired by another and probably no longer serving the brands that kept us up late into the night.
• The library software company? Bought by a larger firm, its desktop offerings thrown overboard for cloud solutions most likely.
• The online marketplace we launched defect-free? Shuttered after a couple years of obscurity.
• The major apparel retailer where I was a subcontractor to a subcontractor on a small upgrade project? Still around, but the bits I worked on, briefly, have probably been replaced by now.
• The government contracts? The first was a contract looking for something to do; the second was not actually a development contract but a managing contract, so it was not clear what to do with the testers on it. The government contracting company itself has gone through one of the periodic pupae stages where it goes into the chrysalis as a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts and then emerges again as a small, probably service-disabled woman owned company available for contracts preferring small companies.
• The Jumbo mortage servicing company where I worked for only equity? Apparently, it still has a Web site, but it’s not clear if it’s doing anything.
• The company I just left? Merged into its parent company and its product was shut down about this time last year. I worked for a while at the parent company while they tried to think of what to do with the engineers from our company, but I left as they did not actually have QA engineers in the parent company, and the automated test suite I wrote for what our engineers was working on probably didn’t end up in use.

Et cetera, et cetera.

The worst is applications that want contact information for your supervisors. I mean, some of them are retired by now, if I could find them. And the minute I stepped out of the government contract, I was forgotten.

I brought this subject to my beautiful wife, and she pointed out that the two contracts I currently have are up and running, and I guess that’s correct. But one is a team lead position for a test suite that is not publicly available although the product is (it’s complicated) and an edtech that is members-only.

Jeez, Louise. It’s bad enough that long-term remote work can be very isolating and kills your professional network (distant work colleagues are not like people you see in the office every day, no matter how many Zoom happy hours you throw), but I look at my resume full of workplaces and offices I actually visited, and it looks almost like something made up. No big companies (not many tech companies came out of St. Louis and retained their identity).

But, man, what have I been doing here?

Well, not a quiz per se, but yesterday Lileks posted a screen grab from the original Taking of Pelham 123:

Ooops, sorry, that’s something else, and Travolta was in the remake, not the original.

Here is what Lileks posted:

And I thought: “Hey, I’ve been in a physical book store in my life!” Wait, no, I thought: “I have that book.”

Later book club editions that I bought in 2008 and will read…. someday. Undoubtedly, they’re way out of date for modern things but are still appropriate for things that still actually work.

Neo posted this video, 10 Old House Styles No Longer Built Today, on her open thread today:

As you might remember, gentle reader, when we lived in Old Trees, we took our baby-at-the-time out walking for sometimes four hours a day, so we covered a large portion of the area. And of the ten styles included in the video, there are only three that I cannot remember seeing: Atomic Ranch, Brutalist, and Shotgun Shack.

Which is not to say that you cannot find them; it just means that I cannot remember seeing them, although the area had several smaller houses which might have been Atomic Ranch or Shotgun Shacks, they might have been torn down for bigger houses by now.

You might think that all-steel Lustron houses would be hard to come by, but we had one across the street and two around the corner from our house just off the highway. Not as many as Brentwood, another suburb of St. Louis, but enough that I recognize them.

Well, he is breakfasting on a hunk of French bread and cheese (not French), so….

All signs indicate yes.

(See also: a crust of brown bread as a snack.)

Ah, again. Facebook is starting to show me contacts with whom I’ve not had much truck in a long while (because Facebook generally prefers to show me suggested posts and whatnot) but whose expressed opinions are disproval of the current administration (which is a little over a month old and has already apparently ruined everything).

I mean, we’ve got the professional poet whom I knew 25 years ago who disapproves. We don’t comment or like each other’s posts–why is she back with her disapproval?

I dunno. I guess Facebook has an interesting idea of whom I want to see anyway. I get posts from an ex-pat with, erm, modernly special child or children, with whom I worked twenty years ago. I get my cousin the yoga teacher who just married a woman.

I also get this Twitter friend whose webinar I attended this month, but who probably could do without my Internet acquaintance:

Jeez, man. Tell me your job depends upon government funding without saying those words.

Facebook is not nudging me to more modernly approved opinions. I’m getting nudged to not bother any more.

I’m pretty sure I’ve grabbed my best one-liners from Facebook and put them onto the recycler tour posts here anyway.

One of the things I’ve been diletanting with with my extra free time the last couple of months trying to build a mobile app using Flutter, which is a framework that’s supposed to be write-once, run-anywhere (where have I heard that before?). Between ChatGPT and me, we’ve actually completed something and got it approved by the Apple App Store.

It’s a little thing that lets you pick boxing or footwork drills and then run them where the app (in my voice) calls out the numbered combos and the strikes if you want to hear them.

It’s not a big thing, and I expect to make about the same off of it as I make from this blog (more, actually, since I don’t actually have to pay money every year for its continued presence, and $0 is greater than negative hundreds or thousands after a couple of decades).

But it does represent the first application I’ve actually completed in, what, 25 years?

I often have ideas for applications or Web sites that I start messing with until I get to a difficult problem which I can’t figure out or find an answer to. Where I shelve it to come back to it later. And often, I don’t.

I mean, I have a project I’ve had the idea for for a decade, and I’ve started writing it in a couple of different languages, but hit a spot (JavaScript promises or having to re-write the front end in a different framework like Angular or Razor) where I just let it go.

But the Boxing Drill Companion? I tried writing it in Swift/SwiftUI natively for iOS (iPhones), but ran into difficulty handling the audio playback (it requires playing the same audio files over and over but in different order for a duration of time). But, last year, in a job interview, someone asked me if I had experience with Flutter, and I said, “No,” (and didn’t get the job). So I (we, with ChatGPT) tried it in Flutter.

To be honest, the LLM has made the difference, I think. Instead of a Web search that yields ten years’ worth of Stack Overflow answers, it gives me a couple of quick answers presumably up-to-date which I can try out and ask further questions if needed. It doesn’t always get the answers right–I got the correct solution for the last problem I was having myself after ChatGPT could not give me the right solution after three tries–but it is pretty helpful. I’m going to miss it when the AI boom collapses.

At any rate, it was briefly gratifying to complete a thing. And then it was followed very quickly by the normal sense of “If I have done it, it must be easy. If I have not done it, it must be impossible.” sentiment that is part of my core operating system.

I’m not talking about the people on the Internet, who are generally nuts (me included), but rather roasted nuts with sugar or caramel on them.

They’re pretty common at festivals and whatnot, generally with a free sample which I tend to avoid. But my beautiful wife received this pack of them in a gift basket she received for a speaking engagement. She tried one and passed them off to me, and I put them in my office. I’ve often had a bag of almonds or a jar of cashews or in headier days, a jar of mixed nuts (oh, the decadent luxury!) for little afternoon snacks, but since the great long walk off of a short pier, employment-wise, last year, it’s been one of the budget trimmings.

So I had this in my office, albeit briefly as it was only four ounces, and….

I realize these things are supposed to be “healthy” snacks, but with a dusting of sugar, c’mon, man, this is candy. Just a little chocolate and binder short of being a candy bar.

Not to slag on the producers of this particular product, but definitely not for me.

But….

Slow-roasted by hand? Jeez, Louise, do not get your recipes from ChatGPT! Use a pan!

On Facebook, I posted this photo with the caption “Hopefully, this $60 worth of kindling will last us the rest of the year.”

I was waiting for someone to say You paid $60 for kindling? which is not the case.

This collection was made from the remnants of two of our front peach trees which cost $30 each a number of years ago. One died the year I pruned it. The other was half-dead, so I cut it down, too. Which leaves us with but two peach trees to not produce peaches this year due to any number of factors which has led them to not produce in the past. And probably more for us to discover if none of the known issues occur.

You know what we grow in the orchards of Nogglestead? Firewood.

Oh, and about that kindling: I had filled the box in the autumn, and we made it through the contents of it already. We’re not using “cheaters” this year as we are not spending dollars a day on Duraflame logs. I’m building the fires from scratch, so I’m using more kindling than some years. When I cut down the peach trees this autumn, I left the kindling-sized limbs and branches aside for later breaking into kindling-sized pieces, and I did that last weekend, spending a couple of hours snapping, lopping, and sawing them down and filling the box again. Given that it’s February and has been pretty warm this winter, it should hold us. And who knows what will die in the orchard next year? I might take down the fallen but growing apple tree.

Last week, a…. friend? Fellow I know? died of cancer. He was 51.

Todd was a year behind me in high school, and he was pretty close with Mike if I recall. To be honest, I knew of him more than I knew him. Was more on the jockly spectrum than I was–he was a cross-country runner and wrestler, and I was National Honor Society and writer’s group. I guess he was pretty smart, too, so they tell me, but, again, I didn’t know him in high school that much.

When I was out of college, he was in a gap year between high school and the Navy, and he was in a couple of local performances, including one with the Goldenrod Showboat in St. Charles. I took my girlfriend at the time to go see the performance and the small nonspeaking part he had. I also rooked him into doing a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt which meant that a bunch of people read the scripts to each other to a mostly empty coffee house on Sunday afternoons. One of the open mic hosts had an actors group called Stages St. Louis which did this whenever it could shanghai a play and enough actors to do it, and in my younger, energetic days, I gathered a group of my friends (plus Todd plus one Stages St. Louis actress) and even got another couple of people to come see it. Todd was a little disappointed that it was only that, but he was a trouper and made it to three of the four performances.

I didn’t really hear from him for a long time after that. He went into the Navy, got into the SEAL program but did not make it completely through and became a search and rescue swimmer. After the service, he went Hollywood. We became Facebook friends sometime this century; I sent him a copy of The Courtship of Barbara Holt when he was in Hollywood–partly because he was in it and partly because, hey, maybe he would tell his friends about it.

A couple years ago, he moved back to his parents’ house in Missouri, up in Jefferson County, and he asked me to call him. I spoke with him a couple of times over the phone, hoping to become, I dunno, friends, but….

Ultimately, he wanted me to write his biography with his stories about his time in S&R and as a stuntman in Hollywood. He told me “stories” on the phone which were basically just “I met so and so when I was bartending in L.A.” with no details. To be honest, I don’t remember many of them. You can see him, what, jump over a fence as Steven Van Zant’s stunt double in some film (the one where Van Zant climbs over a fence).

So I set up a Google doc and a process where he could start telling/writing his stories about his tae kwon do classes and his military stories and his Hollywood stories. I made a number of sections and a couple of prompts, and I hoped he’d start telling/typing those stories and that I would maybe ask questions based on some of them to flesh them out and then eventually organize them into an autobiography. But he didn’t touch hit, although he started posting on Facebook that the story of his life was being written. I think he wanted me to interview him a couple of times with a steno pad and turn that into a book.

After some time, when he hadn’t even looked at the framework I set up, so I told him that I could put him in touch with a couple of former journalists who might better be what he was looking for via text, and our contact fell off after that.

He was sick the whole time, of course, although he never mentioned it.

He was a nice guy, and I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to work together on his book. I’m also sorry that I did not get to be a better friend, but he seemed to be looking more for something from me than to be my friend. Unfortunately, I feel that way about a lot of people whom I eventually try to become better friends with.

His death has left me shaken for the whole weekend just because of my remorse–couldn’t I have written his book or at least left him the illusion that I would–and a bit of anger that that’s all the good I was to him. And guilt at making it all about me.

Whatever the lesson is to be learned here, I will continue to not learn it.