Category: Life

It’s like the twelve days of Christmas, except:

2: Number of lamps my mother-in-law sent over because they weren’t working.
1: Number of lamps more broken than when they were received.
1: Number of electric shocks received (so far).
0: Number of lamps repaired.

They’re old touch lamps, and they were not working (as reported to me). I took one out and put a bulb in it. It was permanently on, apparently. So, no problem. I would just replace the socket with a turn switch socket.

Except! The socket is not easily interchangeable; the base and insulation sleeve of the existing lamp are designed for a lamp which does not have a switch, and the base attached to the threaded tube doesn’t seem to come off easily. When I gripped it with a pliers to turn it to try to loosen it, I broke the base attached to the lamp. Almost enough to fit the turning switch into it, but not quite.

So what to do?

Leave it partially assembled on my work bench for months or years is the way to bet.

By the way, the design above is available for purchase along with many other designs you can see on Nico Sez. They make great Christmas gifts, I hope, as everyone is getting a Nico Sez shirt for Christmas.

UPDATE: Uncharacteristically for me, after walking off a bit of frustration, I went back and determined that the base, broken as it was had to unscrew from the threaded tube somehow. So I gripped it with the pliers, a couple of different pairs, actually, and it broke off until I managed to actually break off the threaded part as well. The base from the replacement socket threaded right on, and within minutes I had the socket wired up and I’d similarly taken apart the other lamp, broken off the other base, and replaced its socket as well.

Sometimes, you have to break something to fix it. Advice I need to remember sometimes along with what would a professional do? (which is often to make additional cuts or holes in the wall to make things easier trusting in their ability to patch drywall or make those fixes in addition to whatever I’m trying vainly to fix without the additional steps).

When I announced my triumph to my beautiful wife, she said her mother would have wanted the touch functionality repaired, as she would have a hard time bending and turning the switch by the bulb. Oh. Well, I guess we have two new lamps for Christmas.

UPDATE 2: Moments later, Facebook weighs in with its assessment of my electrical repair skills:

Thanks, I need that vote of confidence from dubious algorithms.

I have posted about the Christmas Straggler for over a decade now. It’s generally a single Christmas decoration overlooked when packing up after Christmas which gets overlooked, and it does seem to happen every year. My posts generally occur in January or February. I don’t know how that reflects upon my housekeeping skills in the past, but I’m still mostly doing the housekeeping grind, although the lower level is only getting a full cleaning every two or three weeks–which means that anything I find whilst dusting this year I will report in…. January or February. So whatever the timing of my posts say about our housekeeping, I guess it will say it again.

But, gentle reader, this is the winningest Christmas Straggler ever, so far. Maybe.

We rearrange the living room slightly for Christmas. We turn the sofa so that one edge of it touches the wall and it faces the fireplace and the corner where the tree goes. This is not on the lower level, where we slightly rotate the furniture every decade or so; this is the main level with the record shelves and console stereo. When we first moved in, the sofa was this way all the time, and we had a television in the corner and a toy box behind the sofa (and generally toys all over the floor to better inventory them). When the boys grew older and got access to the lower level, we rotated the sofa so its back was against the wall and the mostly unused 22″ television is off to the side. We only rotate the sofa now for Christmas.

At any rate, I got the trees out this weekend, and moved the end table and little flower arrangement that hides the unused coax port on the wall, and….

That is one of the fake Christmas tree needles which has somehow lurked in the corner of the living room since…. Well, I don’t exactly know when.

Now, when we pack up after the holiday, we vacuum thoroughly where the tree was and where the sofa is going to go against the wall for the next 10.5 months. And we do vacuum the living room regularly–my son does it weekly, and I’ve done it a time or two over the course of the year. I’ve swept and Swiffered the tile in front of the firebox a couple of times over the year. I even cleaned out the firebox once this year (we don’t use that fireplace as its mantel is too close to the firebox and it lacks anything but a portable screen before it).

So where do these needles come from? Are they caught under the baseboards? Up the chimney waiting for a downdraft? In some nook in the sofa until they’re shaken out?

I have no idea, but every once in a while, one of these little plastic needles emerges, whether on the main level or on the lower level where we also have a tree.

Just to mock our housekeeping practices.

Or, I suppose, I could reframe it and think it’s just to give us a little bit of Christmas often in the middle of the year.

But, I suppose that it does our indict our housekeeping in that although I saw that needle on Saturday afternoon, it was just during the composition of the post this morning that I went upstairs to pick it up. Although in my defense, the youngest was supposed to vacuum that room on Sunday but had other pressing matters–playing football with his brother and going to the gym–and I cannot help but note that now that I have assembled the tree, the carpet beneath it has many more fake needles now. Which are undoubtedly crawling to their years-long hiding places even as I am not watching.

Jeez, I must bore people telling everyone the same thing over and over again.

Instapundit posts:

SO MANY DRAMATIC WEATHER TERMS THESE DAYS: Expert: ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Pounding The US Will Be Strong And Unpredictable.

We used to just call them winter storms, or blizzards.

Man, I’ve posted:

• The 21st Century, Where All Weather Is Above Average (2019)
• Sounds Better Than A Bomb Cyclone, Anyway (2020)
• Come On, We Need To Call It Something Scarier (2021)
• ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Is So 2019 (2022)

What, I didn’t harp on it last year? Was the weather really that mild? I dunno. That was all the way last year, and this year has been a long one.

But, unlike weather personalities, maybe I should learn a new schtick.

When I watched Shanghai Knights two years ago, I mentioned that I had not watched this film. So when I came across it at a church rummage sale this summer, I picked it up. And as I’ve been working evenings on my part-time contract of late, I haven’t had much chance to watch films. But I thought I’d watch one last weekend, and so I did.

So: The high-level plot of the film is that Chan’s Chon Wang is an imperial guard for the Chinese emperor with his eyes on the princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) who does not want to marry the man selected for her. She runs away with her tutor, who leaves behind a ransom note–instead of actually running away, she is being kidnapped–and she is delivered to an exiled former imperial guard running a set of Chinese laborers in slave conditions in Nevada. Three current members of the imperial guard are sent to America with a ransom, and Chon Wang gets sent along with them–the higher ups hope the foreign barbarians will relieve them of Wang.

When he gets to America, Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon leads a band of outlaws to rob a train. The new guy in the gang kills Wang’s uncle, the interpreter for the imperial guards and who let Wang come along. It leads to a train-borne Jackie Chan fight and to a couple of encounters between the characters where each is at an advantage to the other, but they eventually team up after another Jackie Chan barroom brawl. They team up to find the princess (and maybe to get the gold), and then a couple of set pieces involving a native American woman that Wang married by mistake who rescues them from several predicaments, and they get the girls and the gold. finis!

An amusing film. I cannot help but note that in the film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal China’s heritage and treasures (which is so many Chinese-influenced or Chinese-financed East Meets West films of the last, what, forty years?). So that was nice. And it did have Lucy Liu in it.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Shanghai Noon (2000)” →

On Monday night, my beautiful wife and I were talking about an upcoming Christmas-themed trivia night, and I was not enthusiastic about it as my Christmas trivia is probably wanting. After all, at the Thanksgiving potluck last Sunday, they offered Thanksgiving-themed trivia, and I/we only got 70% of the questions right (the other couple from the North Side Mindflayers were on their own and did better, but they do carry the team in actual trivia nights).

So Monday night, I said that the best that I could hope for was to be asked in what films now-standard Christmas songs appeared, and I mentioned that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” appeared in Meet Me In St. Louis (which I watched last year).

And suddenly, Facebook was all like….

Because of course it was. But then St. Louis Magazine was all like….

St. Louis Magazine is listening to me, too?

So I briefly thought maybe it was just a news story that Facebook thought I would be interested in because Facebook reads my blog and knows I just saw the film and is maybe not listening to the keystrokes forming this post even now.

But that’s just what they want me to think.

Coincidence starts with the same letters as COINTELPRO. C’mon, wake up!

I am not sure where I picked this book up; it is not included in a Good Book Hunting post, so I might have gotten it before I started them, or I might have gotten it at a garage sale where the small number of books I bought did not warrant a photo and comment. At any rate, I will not try to calculate how long has passed since I first read this book, but it was probably longer than The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I went through my real Gregory McDonald phase in middle school and high school where I borrowed the books from the Community Library. Although I reckon I could have read it at college. Or even later; it’s entirely possible I will find the book already in the read books section of the library when I try again to organize it.

So this is the third of the Inspector Flynn books. Flynn is a Boston homicide detective, but he gets called away a lot on special cases (presumably, the preceding two books and maybe Confess, Fletch where he also appears). He is awakened in the middle of the night by a police commissioner who instructs him to drive to a remote location and tell no one. And to come alone. So of course Flynn brings his sidekick Cocky, a medically retired policeman, and they discover that the commissioner is the guest of a secretive Rod and Gun Club where wealthy and powerful men come together to re-enact boarding school traditions and to be weird. One of their members has been shot and killed, and they have moved the body to a local motel that poses as the front for their two-thousand-acre retreat. They’ve brought Flynn in to discreetly investigate, but stymie him when other members start dying.

The cover says that it’s a novel with murder, and I think the main theme of the book is poking at the power brokers of the world or caricatures thereof. Amongst the club members who are suspects (and sometimes victims), we have a judge who wears a dress and makeup when at the lodge; a Senator who drinks heavily all day and all night; a nudist who wears nothing; and cold players determining the fate of companies owned by other members. Given the setting (an isolated hunting lodge) and its language/style, it must have seemed like quite a throwback to Agatha Christie and other protocozies with an American Poirot minus the facial hair investigating.

So it winds up within its 198 pages with perhaps not so much as a true whodunit–or maybe I just did not see the clues which in retrospect pointed to the killer because I’m not really into that genre these days and am out of practice for not so much clues in the story but clues in the writing.

At any rate, it was okay. I wonder how much my tastes have changed and evolved from when I was in the 1980s and limited to what the Community Library had in abundance. I am pretty sure I read a number of Dell Shannon/Elizabeth Linnington books back then and, well, read more than one (I read one, Blood Count, earlier this year and was pretty disappointed). I have to wonder what I would think of Fletch books now (I read three in the omnibus Fletch Forever, in 2011). I haven’t read a pile of McDonald since these book reports began which probably testifies to the memories my cells have about what I think about McDonald these days. Coupled with the fact that you don’t see many of his books in the wild any more–at least not where I browse fiction, which is the smaller library book sales predominated by recent thrillers and Westerns. But the peak of McDonald’s sales were in the 1980s, and those who bought him originally have emptied their houses long ago.

At Powerline, the post is entitled The high cost of low-heeled joy.

I know, gentle reader, you get the allusion, but I will quote the post for those who reach this site via Internet search. I need all the Traffic I can get:

Someone may want to rewrite Traffic’s look at the dark side of the music business (I think) in “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” to cover Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Something like “The High Cost of Low-Heeled Joy” might work.

Ah, c’mon, man, are you even a blogger? You could have gone with The High Cost of Round-Heeled Joy to get the Shakespearean-era allusion in there and to cast aspersions on the political candidate’s alleged sordid sexual history. Shakespeare + Traffic in the same blog post? The ticket to mad hits and .000000018 cents in ad revenue, baby!

Ay, me.

You know, I was too young to know Traffic in its heyday, but when I was a bagger…. Oh, I’ve told that story before, the last time someone on the Internet alluded to it (probably).

After 21 years in blogging, gentle reader, I am bound to repeat myself in my dotage. You are very polite to keep coming back and listening politely or perhaps scrolling past grampa telling the same story again.

It almost seem like fait accompli that I would read this book after listening to the audiocourse The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin during a long car ride in early October. But I spotted the Classics Club edition and not the Harvard Classics edition that I bought in in 2020 when I assigned it to my boys to read during their long, long vacation from in-person classes. I’m not sure either of them actually read it, but the oldest has been looking for Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations which I also got in cheap editions for the boys about that time as well. Wait, that’s digressing.

So: Whereas the audiocourse was a long, full biography on Benjamin Franklin, Franklin wrote his actual autobiography in chunks. Part of it he wrote when he was young and was trying to capture what it was to be on his way up; the second part was written decades later when he was an accomplished businessman and influencer in Pennsylvania; and the last part of it was assembled from some notes after Franklin’s death. So this book is not the Director’s Cut. Or maybe it is. But it’s more than an autobiography as it gave some others time to do a bit of hagiography was well.

Still, it’s an amazing story: Franklin, born into a very large family, eventually becomes apprenticed to his brother a printer, but he breaks his apprenticeship and goes on the run from Boston to Philadelphia where he becomes a printer, eventually a writer and owner of a printshop, and he moves and shakes with the important men in the colony (but not necessarily the decendents of Penn who really owned the place). He makes the most of the opportunities he gets and speaks up on the virtue of industriousness (but, as we know from the audiocourse, although he described the virtues he espoused, he never completed The Art of Virtue). The autobiography, as I have mentioned, focuses mostly on his early life and mostly the business life as that is the example he was hoping to set. When get to page 246 of 300, we’re at 1756. His role in the events leading up to the American Revolution, the Revolution, his ambassadorship after, and his brief retirement get almost a page for each year depicted. Of course, this last was the bit the least assembled and polished by Franklin, and it’s at a high level summary. But, still, what a life.

Given my current position, hammering on the theme of personal industry was inspirational. My favorite aunt once said I had hustle because I had a full time job, a sideline of selling estate sale finds on Ebay, and thoughts of running a vending machine route or video game route. I somehow lost a bit of that ambition, probably after having a blog that did not turn profitable, publishing books which have not earned enough to cover the cost of the first book’s professional cover, trying to write a couple of software applications but getting stumped at certain points and doubting anyone would use them anyway, putting together a collection of fine fashion which has not sold a single t-shirt except to myself, and other bits of “hustle” that did not actually pay out. I have some ideas for other sidelines, but I’m not sure that they would pay out more than they cost, and certainly would unlikely pay me much in net revenue. But Franklin’s example leads me to thing maybe I should.

I read this book once before, probably in my college years–I think it was required for a class, but I’m not sure which one it would have been. I really need my transcripts to jog my memory of what exactly I took in that collection of English classes which was almost too many credits in one discipline to allow me to graduate. No, really.

At any rate, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The text is very approachable, although the sentences are longer than you would get in a Don Pendleton paperback or a Jeff Kinney book designed to get kids to read. But I’ve found that it’s easier to read than English prose from the same period. And a pleasure to read as well. I’ll have to read this again, probably when I find the copy which I bought in 2020 or one of the cheap copies I bought for my boys.

And I’m going to just stop trying to guess what the longest time between re-reads is when I re-read a book. I mean, this book is, what, thirty years give or take? A while, indeed.

So on my way to market today, I heard “You Keep Me Hanging On” on the radio, the local robostation that places the greatest hits of 80s, 90s, and whatever from its home computer office in a shack somewhere in Iowa or something, and I tried to remember who sang it.

“Kim Wilde,” I thought. “No, wait, Kim Wilde did ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. Who was it?”

That’s a warm up for my self-doubting dithering that has become a hallmark of my Trivia Night answers. The moment where I confused myself and changed my answer from “Unchained Melody” to “Unchained Medley” and tried to convince my team to change the team answer in the exaggerated earnestness of the truly, pathetically mistaken and prepared to be only a little smug when we got it wrong and to have lost by only a point thwarted by the sound-minded team members, and we ended up winning by a couple of points….

Anyway, it is Kim Wilde who sang “You Keep Me Hanging On” forty years ago:

And you probably already know it was Kim Carnes who sang “Bette Davis Eyes”:

Which is why the North Side Mind Flayers would like to contact you to replace me.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important, forty years later: Kim Wilde or Kim Carnes?

Ah, gentle reader, as you might know–as my analyst would, should I ever get an analyst to pick an answer from all the things which I conceive could be wrong with me from my earliest days–I do not favor blondes with long faces probably because they remind me of my sainted mother. So I’ll have to go Kim Wilde here.

Gentle reader, only minutes elapsed between my post yesterday when I said my cat Foot grunted like a (pet) rabbit and the appearance of rabbit-themed posts on my Facebook feed.

The eyes of Truth are always watching you.

And so are the eyes of Facebook, apparently.

On this day in 2014, I posted:

Some of my behavior leaves my cats absolutely meowless.

Although the current crop does not actually meow anyway. Chimera cries and makes this weird gasping sound like he can’t even; Isis trills; Nico squeaks; Muad’Dib trills a little and raaars; well, I guess Cisco does sort of meow. And two of our relatively recent departures, Foot and Athena, did not meow either. Foot grunted like a rabbit, and Athena made this hideous sound like the pterodactyl in the video game Joust.

What are we doing to these poor cats to make them unable to speak the language ascribed to them by cartoons?

Was it only last year where I bought and placed a little resin Santa on the upstairs mantel to see if anyone noticed? Man, it has been a long year. I guess that’s why I feel as though I have aged so much, although partly that has been not hitting the gym or the dojo often enough.

At any rate, I decided that I would keep the tradition alive (although I honestly thought I’d skipped a year–I mean, this year has gone on forever–in 2024, the days were long, but the year was also long), and I looked for a cheap tchotchke at the Walmart. I found one that was under $2 which is good because I no longer have a fulltime job and am not sure if when I’ll get another.

Behold, the 2024 Christmas Pre-Straggler:

A little snow-covered church. A part of what looks like could be a little tealight-fitting village set which means I can collect them all over the course of years.

As with last year, I have just quietly placed it on the mantel, and we will see if anyone notices.

I might keep the tradition alive next year, but the year after that, the only anyone who might reside here to notice besides me might be my beautiful wife. Unlikely, but possible.

Also, “pre-straggler” is probably not the word I am looking for. I should probably think of something else. But I do have a whole year to mull that over.

I’m a cleaning expert — you’ve been using too much laundry detergent

Ignoring, again, from the self-proclaimed expert voices on the Tik-Tok clamoring from attention, I know, gentle reader, that I’m not using too much. To be honest, I’ve never felt the need to use a whole capful. Maybe when I first started doing my laundry in college, but not in a long time. I’ve recognized that the overage was just rinsed down the drain.

Same with toothpaste. Wait, no: I’m a toothbrushing expert: You’re using too much toothpaste. I just put a button, a small dop on the toothbrush, just enough to see I’ve put something on the toothbrush. It helps I have an electric toothbrush with a small head that only holds a drop that’s about the size of the toothpaste tube aperature. Even then, as I start brushing, most of it falls intact into the sink but I have enough froth to get my teeth clean. People shouldn’t rely on advertising, which feature great big gouts of toothpaste on toothbrushes, as instructions or suggestions for use.

And unlike other dental experts who are on the Tik-Tok who say flossing is worthless, all I have to say is if you’ve knocked something out of the recesses between your teeth while flossing after brushing, you’re more of an expert than they are. Maybe you need a Tik-Tok.

I might have alluded to my precarious job situation throughout the year. The company I worked for was the subsidiary of a larger company, and for a long time, I expected that the parent company would assume the subsidiary into it and probably lay off everyone. So for most of 2023, I was kind of applying for jobs.

Then, in January, it happened: My employer joined the mothership. All non-engineering people were let go (with six weeks notice plus severance, so it was pretty generous). Engineers were assimilated into the big mess that was the parent company (which was integrating three or four companies and their tech stacks at the same time).

Except: The parent company does not have QA Engineers. So they kept the two of us on and kept the whole engineering team on tenterhooks as the parent company was not very clear about the onboarding and expectations for our company’s remaining team members. Over time, it became clear that everyone on our team would have to become full stack engineers as that’s all the parent company had. The two front-end engineers were not excited. Neither was I.

So I quit.

The actual thought process was more agonizing than that. The job market is trash. I broadened my job search this year, and I’ve had only a few interviews. And the only offer I got was for a part-time contract in the evenings. And that, gentle reader, was enough for me to take the leap back to consulting.

So I’ve been a little quiet here as I deal with the fallout from it. We’re going to have to retrench a bit here at Nogglestead, which means tightening our belts even more. But don’t cry for us, Argentina. We’ve got plenty to fall before we bounce. No GoFundMes or Patreon pitches for you. But if you know someone who wants a little QA work done, you know a guy.

You know, gentle reader, it is the simple joys of life. On Monday, I mentioned how I thwart my own contentment.

But I do experience some simple joys, albeit they’re seemingly few and far between, and they’re not only recognized and their passage mourned while they’re happening, but I seem to forget them once they’re done.

Case in point: One day a couple of weeks ago, my youngest and I walked out to look at the garden and around the property.

He is finishing the cross country season, and he’s started applying for jobs. Which means that he, like his brother, will spend more time outside the home than in it, and these simple, unscripted, and ad hoc times together are coming close to an end. Not that we have a lot of them now; it’s only because he was grounded from electronic devices that directed him from his room and online games. So he was eager to be entertained.

I’d planted some cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes in September as I expected we’d have a couple of months before it got cold. After all, it was cool a couple of months later in the year this year, with it only getting warm in late June. So I figured it would be warm a couple of months later than normal and we could sneak in a late autumn crop. Well, we had a surprise freeze one night which ended the cabbage and cauliflower dreams, but it only seems to have slowed the radishes down. Which is fine; I like radishes more than cauliflower or cabbage.

We looked in on the garden, and then we wandered to the opposite side of the property by the wind break. I don’t even remember why. But the Osage orange trees were dropping the hedge balls, their softball-sized inedible (unless things are really bad) fruits. So we spent a couple of minutes picking them up and throwing them at a tree some yards off. We had about the same arm strength and accuracy, I’m proud to say, mostly because I’m pleased with my performance.

A nice little moment which I enjoyed even as I knew they were coming too soon to an end.

And I probably won’t personally remember that day too clearly on my own in a couple of years. Like I don’t remember watching them in the now-long-departed sandbox. I kind of remember running around in the enclosed back yards with them when they were toddlers. But once they were in school and I was back to fulltime work, time has been a runaway escalator to our soon-to-be (in a couple of years, which is the future tense of recently or was just).

I just read something that says that when you remember something, you actually re-write the memory with some modifications, so the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory can become.

Still, hopefully the next book on Buddhism or mindfulness will be the one that silences the double-effect narrator in my head who very vocally mourns each passing moment before it passes.

In the time between now and then, we have had the windy days that have denuded the windbreak, but the hedge balls remain visible through the leaves. Something must eat them or they break down very well, as we never remove them but they’re always gone by spring.

When filling out my address, I sometimes get Brookline Station pre-populated in the city field.

As I have mentioned (most extensively twelve years ago), my post office is up in Brookline, which was a small railroad town on the Frisco line. So I always assumed that the Station referred to the train station up in Brookline.

For some reason, I was looking at a map recently and noticed that it had another entry called Brookline Station far distant from Brookline:

Brookline Station is actually closer to Nogglestead proper.

This history gives an account of the history of Brookline Township (from 1883, so a recent historical account) which indicates that the town of Brookline, which is in the upper corner of Brookline Township, was indeed a railroad town. It does not mention Brookline Station at all.

However, Brookline Station might have been a part of the Butterfield Mail Stage Route.

Fifteen years on, and I’m still learning about the area. Not that my neighbors have deep historical ties; only two or three families in the immediate area precede us in residency.