Category: Life

Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure.

I mentioned Bandit last year; he was a puppy with too much energy to be left in a trailer all day whilst we were at school and when my sainted mother was at work.

But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?

At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.

From Lileks today recounting a previous communal living arrangement:

One night my roommate, a very normal fellow who was also an absolute weed fiend and once put the phone books in a trash can, put a target on the can, and stood in his closet at the far end of the dorm room and fired his rifle at the target, was making tea, and put one of those immerser coils into water.

Not the weed fiend part, but:

One summer weekend when we were visiting from Missouri, my father wanted to take us shooting, probably down at the quarry where we would some other time go. But: His wife had taken the checkbook, perhaps to thwart his plans. This was in the days before ATMs were common (in Milwaukee, they were called Tyme machines, and to have access to one cost a touch of money itself). The way to get cash on the weekends would be to go to a store where they knew you, in his case West Side Liquor, and write a check to CASH, and they would give you money out of the till. But you had to be a really good customer, and my father was.

So: He took an old cardboard Tide laundry detergent box, stuffed it with newspaper, and got out an old .22 rifle–the bent one? Perhaps. Perhaps it was not bent yet. At any rate, he moved some furniture from the wall in the room in the refinished basement which would later become my bedroom during my college years, took position at the bar all the short way across the small house, and told us we would aim for the dot over the i in the brand name. He fired one round and then went to look at the Tide box. He’d hit that tittle, all right, and the bullet had passed through the Tide box completely and embedded in the wood paneling of the wall behind. It was the only round fired that day.

Man, the past was a different place, ainna? Growing up in the working class and with a father who was rather fond of his beer. I mean, I was there, and I can hardly recount it because…. Who does that? Well, not me, not now.

As I might have mentioned, I am working through a stack of old Ideals magazines which I have accrued from book sales or have rediscovered in my chairside magazine rack as my liminal before-bed reading. It has often, but not always, been my habit to read just a little bit in my bedroom here at Nogglestead for a little bit before turning in. For a while, I had a large lamp on the bedside table, and I read the Bible, part of the Book of Mormon, and some nonfiction there. That was years ago; since, we have moved things around, and I can’t actually think which lamp it would have been–certainly not the blocker project lamp, which is actually on my to-do list for finally finishing up after a decade, although I might have to repaint it from scratch. But this time, I’ll know that acrylic paints dry in hours, not days, so I will move faster on it. When I get around to it. Someday.

At any rate, after the bedroom makeover or remakeover or whatever happened to that lamp, we’ve moved a chair in the corner, we received a lamp with a bad switch when my mother-in-law moved one of her recentish moves; in 2023, probably, Nico swapped out the switch to a kind that she would not have wanted, so it ended up by that red spinning chair.

So I’ve been reading poetry there at night, chapbooks, college literary magazines, complete collections, and so on. I winnowed the stack of literary magazines to just Ideals, though, as I was not looking for a lot of prose right before bed. Just light verse where I could read a couple and leave off.

These particular issues are from the 1980s mostly, and I have a preponderance of Mother’s Day issues because they made great gifts apparently. They stretch from their final years in Milwaukee and beyond to the first couple of years in Nashville. We see some editorial shifts over the years; some issues have recipes, prose, travel items, and “reader submissions” where readers submitted poetry, and those published got $10 (which is more than most poets make today on publication). But, sometimes, they feature something else: Pages torn from the magazine.

Ah, gentle reader, do you remember an era when people would tear poems out of their magazines or their newspapers and put them on their refrigerator or on their bedroom mirrors? I think I came at the end of that era–it was something the preceding generation(s) did, and although I might have done it once or twice, it’s not a regular thing. Of course, I suppose that could be partially because newspapers and magazines do not regularly publish poetry these days. The same people who regularly interacted with nice, serviceable, lightweight poetry probably also dabbled in it.

But not me. Although I can discard a lot of magazines which I’d rather keep from current subscriptions (First Things and New Oxford Review come to mind), I cannot mar a copy of a literary magazine or Ideals. I have a lot of former textbooks with highlighting, underlining, and marginalia, but my “dialoguing with the text” days did not extend past college where the professors really insisted on it. I received an embossing tool for Christmas a couple years ago (maybe a decade, but not so long ago when you’ve gathered several decades in memory), but I have not stamped my monogram into any books. Nacho cheese dust is a different matter, I admit.

I have always kind of thought that I was just a caretaker for these books and magazine, that I was holding onto them for the next generation. I’m not sure that my boys will want them, although the oldest is starting to read again. He recently asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae–of course I do (on the to-read shelves). When the youngest was in fourth grade, he boasted that whatever book his teacher mentioned reading we already had (although this was no longer true when they went to public high school and some of their reading became more current topically). Wouldn’t it be nice if they retained some or all of this library to have that same opportunity for their children? If they have children. If they read.

Ah, but likely not. I won’t be marking, discarding, or donating my books during my lifetime (unlike some reified potential in the garage and maybe, soon, my closet). Well, except for those duplicates I find and put on the free book cart at church.

As to my poems, I suppose it would be pretty to think someone would tear my work out of a magazine for their mirror, but that’s…. Unlikely. My latest publication appearance was in an online university literary magazine (still up in 2026 but maybe not in 2027). Not a peppy little uplifting poem to brighten one’s every morning. Well, maybe one of the two is. But. I guess the best I can hope for is that someone reads them at all.

I guess I need to make a checklist of Ideals magazines that I can use out in the wild to see if I’m buying the same ones over and over again (which happens). Maybe something to mark whether an issue is missing pages so I can look for a more complete copy. That would require two things: One, organizing my collection (not too bad now since it’s only a stack about 12 inches tall, the equivalent of a modern branch library’s philosophy section when you strip out the Buddhism. Two, I need to finish my upcoming game and build an app for just such a thing. Maybe next week.

I thought it looked like an interesting job: QA Automation Lead with lots of eCommerce experience. Jeez Louise, I have all sorts of flavors of that. So I applied.

But the job had a wrinkle: It wanted me to write a cover letter answering questions like the most challenging thing in my life and how I overcame it, something something, and the last three books I read.

Oh, yeah. I was all on that. I listed The Space Trilogy, The Law of Gun Barrel City, and River City, P.I., the James R. Wilder book I just bought and whose review is forthcoming, and in looking back at the blog here, I see that I’ve forgotten To Rise Again At A Decent Hour.

Which happens. I was working from my spreadsheet list, and I’d failed to enter the title in the annual total. Sometimes, when I get to the end of the year total and start building the Year in Reading post, I’ll find that I wrote a report for a book that I didn’t put in the annual list, or I’ll have put something in the list which I failed to write a book report on. The latter is less likely, though, as completed books end up on the desk for a cover scan and a book report (sometimes sitting on them for a week or more, as the latest Wilder book indicates–I finished it on July 25 and have yet to write the report for it. In my defense, it’s sitting on the scanner glass, so it’s a little out of sight.

So: I have made a mistake which will undoubtedly result in my rejection. I kid! I kid! Because I’m probably already laid low by a “knockout” question.

What is a knockout question? Silly person who is not job hunting at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. A knockout question is where you answer honestly a question like “Do you have three years experience in Python?” or “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” It’s a simple switch that lands you in a reject pile without any context or discussion. No, I don’t have three years in Python, but I have experience in numerous languages and some noodling in Python (building a functional API using Flask, setting up a test suite and writing beginning tests in a proof of concept). But, no: To eliminate the great mass of applications that frictionless applications have made possible, they knock out applicants based on meaningless binaries. Which is just as well as HR assistants screening applicants don’t know what those things mean either.

I actually got that second one, “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” this week. It was the third step of the process: The first was the application, the second was the 50 question test with word analogies, spatial reasoning, math, and whatnot–they never tell me the score of those which is a damned shame, because I would be pretty proud of the results each time. But step 3 was three knockout questions, the third of which was one of the “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love AI? Answer 11 or higher.” questions. To be honest, it’s more work than you need because most of the modern frameworks scaffold up a project for you pretty easily, and you’re not going to get a lot out of LLMs which lack awareness of your application unless you, I dunno, share login credentials with them which seems like a bad idea. And last year, I worked on a project where my manager used AI to scaffold up a project he did not understand and could not troubleshoot when I tried running the project on Windows (he’s a Mac, and so on). I troubleshot to the limits of LLM capability, or at least I stopped when ChatGPT said, “Okay, we’re going to have to rewrite Playwright…..” The ultimate solution was to run it in PowerShell instead of using the command line because of the different ways dependencies were resolved, or something. You see, I could answer intelligently why not, but it’s a boolean. True or false, and false is buh-bye. I said no and clicked submit, and the next screen said After careful consideration, nah, bro. Well, not exactly, but the “careful consideration” was not.

At any rate, the knockout question after the hour’s effort of cover letter was: Are you in Canada?

The posting on the job board said Remote – Worldwide. The posting in the Application Tracking System (the winner by knockout!) said Colombia. The application asked if I was in Canada. Was it a knockout question? Who knows? I have not been rejected yet, but it might be their policy only to hit the No button after hiring someone (After careful consideration…..) or not at all.

But I guess I will find out. Or not.

So many of the “career coaches” on LinkedIn and whatnot offer the same advice: Tailor your resumes for each job. Research the companies you’re applying to. Write targeted cover letters every time. Which might have made sense in the old days, but now you’re just wasting more time on jobs whose automated processes are seeking to winnow out the greatest number of applications they can for arbitrary reasons. So, nah. I’ll do it sometimes, and I’ll do the assessments sometimes if they’re fun practice tests for if I ever decide to take the Mensa test. But two hour screen-sharing camera on coding exercise video recording? Nah. Feesa etho.

At any rate, I did find the discrepancy in my book accounting, and I am pleased to say that I’m at 54 books for the year. But it’s almost August. I’d better fall upon some art monographs and poetry chapbooks, stat.

Well, there is more to the story than that.

So when I run errands in town, I reach out to my mother-in-law, 84-years-old and living independently not far from church, to ask if she needs anything from the market or to see if she wants me to do anything for her while I’m in town. In this regard, “in town” can mean in any town because she does not want to be a burden on us, so any time I’m going anywhere that does not involve a gi or a shower afterwards, I ask if she needs anything.

I was actually headed to the “eastern” part of Springfield (which is now the middle part of Springfield in some parts of Springfield these days). Barnes and Noble and Staples on Glenstone Avenue. So I asked her if I could pick her up a copy of the latest issue of Metal Hammer while I was out. She demurred.

I was disappointed with my visit to Barnes and Noble. I was looking for a book on the CompTIA Network+ certification, and I circled the store a couple of times before finding that the computer books section has shrunk to about 24 inches on a single shelf–almost as small as a public library’s philosophy section–and the selection had books on the Security+ and A+ certifications, but not the one I was looking for. The store did not have a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which I had noticed on my mother-in-law’s table on Sunday, and I have seen/heard it mentioned several times “recently,” so I hoped to score my own copy. Too soon, too soon, my mother-in-law’s copy will be available to us, but I’ll let the oldest have it if he’s still reading (and if he’s over the fashionable anti-zionism of the current day). I also considered buying a copy of Writers Digest to price its advertising in case I want to spend a couple bucks promoting Wunyo Submission Tracker the old fashioned way. So: No Network+, no Frankl, but it did have the most recent Writers Digest. For $10. Instead of buying just the magazine, I flipped through its last pages and found little in the way of classified ads.

And no Metal Hammer magazine, either. The music section was given over to special edition collectible collector’s issues for individual artists, which I guess can have a longer shelf life than a regular magazine.

So, later in the evening, I texted my mother-in-law that I could not have gotten Metal Hammer for her after all. And she responded that she thought I was referring to an actual magazine, and….

Ah, gentle reader, I have been holding out on you.

I have mentioned that books tend to accumulate on the little table beside my chair; however, at some point, I got a little magazine holder, probably to “refinish” it, and placed it back there. And that, gentle reader, is where magazines go for decades. I am pretty sure that I have worked through most of the magazines that I picked up (at that same Barnes and Noble) when I was first publishing John Donnelly’s Gold so I could send review copies (one, Suspense magazine, reviewed it). I have a couple of crossword puzzle books which had been my sainted mother’s. And I had a copy of Metal Hammer magazine from some years ago:

That’s the December 2019 issue.

You see, the magazines languish down there because I do not read magazines there; I read books in that chair. I read magazines in the chair in the parlor or the rocking chair on the front porch. I haven’t actually put magazines down there in years, either, so they’re just…. languishing.

I sent the photo to my mother-in-law, and I then looked at what else I have in the magazine holder.

Two issues of Ideals magazine.

Which is good; I’ve been reading old copies of this magazine that I’ve gathered at book sales as my liminal bedtime reading in the bedroom. However, I found that I had seven different Mother’s Day issues, and months of paeans to idealized mothers was kinda wearing on me. My sainted mother kept a roof over our heads and food in the kitchen, but she was never to my recollection anything like the mothers in these poems. So it will be good to interleave some other holidays. As it stands, I actually have an Ideals Christmas collection beside the reading chair–I started it, what, in 2024 as a possible “Christmas” book for Christmas time, but it’s two hundred pages of prose telling, basically, the exact same idealized paean Christmas in my youth story. So clearly I bogged down on it.

So for fun, I texted my mother-in-law that the Metal Hammer magazine was in with two old (and they’re older, not 1980s) issues of Ideals.

“Wow! Mom loved them.” she replied.

Her mother, born in, what, 1910? loved Ideals. And she, my mother-in-law, more into literary fiction and Viktor Frankl, does not.

Ah, gentle reader. I have to recalibrate my terms. Now that I am getting to grandfather age (my grandmothers and mother would have been grandmothers by this numeral), what I’ve previously called “grandmother poetry” should now be called “great-grandmother poetry.”

Ay, me.

Robert Stacy McCain, who is now just The McCain, says as an aside in a post about the current Madison mayhem and its cause célèbre:

If you fell on hard times, would you become homeless? Almost certainly not, because you have friends and family who would take you in until you got back on your feet.

Ah, gentle reader. That is not true for all people, and I don’t wonder if it’s not an increasing number of people.

I’ve run just this simulation for myself in my mind; as you know, I am currently “between contracts” and have been without full-time work in my field for almost two years now (but only contractless for a couple of months). I am not especially close to anyone in my family except, almost by my almost-monthly letters to my grandmother who is now on hospice care. I’d thought I could bunk with my brother, but he’s on an income so fixed he cannot do any extra driving to meet me in Hartville or Houston when I’m taking one of my regional trips (kinda suspended currently because he has inspired me, and because I have martial arts classes scheduled almost every day). If my beautiful wife decided to boot her unemployed husband who lays about doing martial arts classes, taking care of the house, and developing twee little apps that sometimes sell, and once in a while multiple copies…. Yeah, if she kicks me to the curb, I will be fluxxed.

Not good to dwell on the scenarios; I can only do my best, and if it happens, I can only do my best.

Ah, enough of that. Let me read some Lileks to cheer up.

Twice yesterday I read about old soda vending machines that were chests where you slid the glass bottles in slots.

First, Lileks on his Substack:

It would be my most specific pop memory for years, until I found myself working down South as a seed salesman for Northrup King in the summer of 1979. I drove the highways and backroads in an unairconditioned van, stopping at small towns and suburban grocery stores, taking orders and picking up the wire racks they no longer needed. In one hamlet I pulled over for gas. Blazing day. There was one of the old pop coolers, the chest type where you’d slide the bottle down a metal trench line to an opening. They had Nehi. I’d never had a Nehi. I’d only heard of it from M*A*S*H, as it was Radar O’Reilly’s favorite beverage. Well, when in Rome, Georgia, etc. Popped the cap on the bottle opener, and took a sip.

The second was in River City P.I..

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of these devices before, but I read about them twice today.

In case you’re wondering, here’s kinda what they looked like:

Another thing for me to consider collecting and fixing up, but I’m not doing so much of those things these days, so probably not. I have a garage to clean and a couple of nigh-thirty-year-old refinishing projects to handle first.

Well, it wasn’t that good in terms of purchases, but perhaps that’s actually better for me. James R. Wilder was coming for an early book signing–both in that he’s usually here in December and because the signing was at 10:00am. I took my oldest, who wanted to stop for lunch and go to the Ross department stores in town (both of them) as well. But with a belly full of sushi and vegetable egg fu yung, he kinda demurred on going to both locations of the department store–especially as the southeast location was a zoo. But we stopped by Relics, briefly, in a search for a gift for my mother-in-law’s upcoming birthday (not for my beautiful wife, whose birthday is a week later–I have her covered pretty well, no Facebook-advertised catchkes involved).

Here’s what I got:

I got:

• The new Wilder book, River City P.I., which takes place far later than the other Harbison mysteries and focuses on a relative of Chet Harbison, the main character of the other books, who becomes a part-time investigator in Cape Girardeau. I managed to only talk to Wilder for a couple of minutes, and I sold him a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold. I’m pretty sure my best sales tactic is to jam authors whose books I buy at ABC Books–I think Mr. C. also bought a copy. Also, he mentioned his cover guy does the covers and layouts for his books for $400, which hopefully means that he’s selling hundreds of copies of each book. Good on ‘im.
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Yes, gentle reader, I have bought this book from ABC Books and have already read it. But this is a really pretty book, only $7.95 for a hard copy with a pretty dust jacket. So I will read it again.

At Relics, I stopped at the new record booth with the jazz records I found earlier this month, and I looked through the last part of the alphabet. I got Tell It Like It Is by Stacy Rowles with Jimmy Rowles. It’s a woman playing trumpet. I cannot get in trouble buying an album like that. I didn’t find the gift I was looking for, so I might be back or prowling other venues this week.

So, thirty bucks and another forty for a buffet lunch. And some of the rapidly diminishing time with my oldest son. Which is worth more, even though I am unlikely to remember this particular excursion.

So my beautiful wife and I watched a couple of Network+ Certification training videos on Thursday night.

She is accumulating a number of certification letter sets behind her name on LinkedIn, and she’s brushing up on her network skills which she is light on (she’s got lots of process stuff and actually taught a community college section of the A+ Certification preparation). Me, I got an A+ certification around the turn of the century, so old that it’s no longer recognized (the new program has requirements to do the continuing education thing and to recertify periodically, but I got mine in the olden days, before the certification-as-a-service and everything-is-a-rental-or-subscription world took hold. Since I’m between contracts, I’m thinking of maybe getting a couple of these low-level, inexpensive (only $400 for the exam–cheep!) so I can apply for starting cable-puller jobs and not get hired for those because I’m old. Or, mostly because I have the time and I’ve historically been a good test taker. The intro streaming classes we watched were under 10 minutes each and were kind of a review–when I got my A+ certification in 2000, I was taking community college classes of my own, scattered among hardware and networking and different programming languages.

So, to watch the videos: Apparently, we have free access to a Dion Training course hosted on Udemy because our library offers Udemy classes for free. So my wife could watch them on her iPad. And I pointed out we could stream them on the big television using the Roku and the iPad’s sharing (but you cannot do this with football games, gentle reader, as I learned several years ago). So she did a proof of concept a week ago, and on Thursday was a little flustered because she did not remember what nested-app-and-menu-path on the iPad and what nested-app-and-menu-path made this work. After only a few minutes but demonstrating the dread that it was not possible or she would never find it, we watched 40 minutes of intro to how the course (a $300 course on Udemy, I guess) and explanation of the exam (following this course and watching a couple hours of the day, I could be Network+ certified in thirty days–wow!).

Yesterday, on Facebook, I get:

An ad for the training company.

It was my wife’s iPad, my wife’s library account, and her free or subsidized login to Udemy, but the Roku account is in my name/email address. So I think I can know it was the Roku. Either parsing the content of the video or reading the metadata and selling it to Facebook to present me with those relevant ads.

But, ah, how used to it we are getting! How normal it seems!

And: I think I quipped somewhere, probably on Facebook, that it’s nice that Facebook shows us people’s birthdays on their birthdays, but we could really use some advance notice to buy cards or presents. Well! My Facebook feed is full of Chinese catchkes and t-shirts in the weeks leading up to my wife’s birthday. So, good? Although I’m unlikely to click through ads and buy from shops of unknown provenance these days. But they’re good for gift ideas: SHE LIKES CATS. Which is my knowledge which trained Facebook to give me this valuable insight.

Tech. Meh. I should maybe become a shepherd. I saw a house on one of my regular driving routes has new tight fences and baby goats. I wonder if they’re hiring.

In the past, it took several days to get my apps through the Microsoft Store process. This one went through in an hour.

It’s basically a little app to track your writing submissions to magazines and whatnot. After I transitioned from a notebook to an Excel spreadsheet in 2020, I’ve found it a little challenging to know what I have that’s available for submitting and to see where I’ve submitted things. This app makes it easy and warns you if you try to submit something to a place a second time, if you try to submit something that’s been published elsewhere, and if you try to submit something somewhere before it’s been accepted or rejected elsewhere.

Of course, now the trick will be to use it myself and to separate the database I use from a test database if I have to build and test it again.

Whenever Lileks posts an entry Main Streets: Remnants of the American Downtown, I like to check to see if I’ve been there before.

And I have:

• Berryville, Arkansas in 2021 and 2024–and remember to carry cash, because a couple of places on the square, including the book store, did not take credit cards into the 2020s
   
• Sarcoxie, Missouri (which he posts about today). Sarcoxie is the exit you take off of I44 if you’re going to a middle school basketball game in Avilla, Missouri, which we did a couple of times. You can take US96 due west, or you can take I44 southwest and get off at Sarcoxie and then take US37 north. They take about the same amount of time due to the higher speeds but greater distance via I44. A couple times, though, when going the I44 route, we stopped in Sarcoxie. Sarcoxie is one of those pseudopod towns where the big highway runs outside of the existing town, so the town annexes land to reach out to an interstate interchange. We’ve eaten at the gas station Subway more than once. One time, we went south into town itself and could not find somewhere to eat, so we probably ended up at the gas station Subway again.

I definitely have better chances in southern Missouri than Wisconsin because I’ve had more time to wander in a car down here, but if he picks a distant suburb of Milwaukee, I might have a chance. Although many of them do not have the traditional downtowns because they’ve grown up later.

What if the political drive to ban data centers actually saves American businesses when the AI bubble bursts, and the capital expenditures to BUILD BUILD BUILD occurred more in other countries, leaving their economies even more shattered?

Is this glass half full? Is the glass half empty? Who cares? It’s somebody else’s glass.

As I might have mentioned, I’ve been reading some Alexander Pope recently (I read a 100-year-old textbook copy of The Rape of the Lock, and I later found another 100-year-old edition). After all of that hyperlinked living, I found another 100-year-old textbook copy of Alexander Pope, and I’ve been working through it because it contains “An Essay on Criticism” in it, I decided to read it and the other poems in it to count it for another book in the annual total plus a brief Alexander Pope schtick on the blog, and….

So I might have mentioned, I’ve been working on an audiocourse on ancient Egypt, which… mentions “The Rape of the Lock”. I don’t think that the professor quite got the point of “The Rape of the Lock” as he mentioned it as part of a lecture on Egyptians tearing their locks out in mourning, which is not the point of “The Rape of the Lock” at all, but anyway….

I picked up a fiction book to work through while reading the Pope (blocking because I’m lazy the other thick books on my chairside table which I should be reading), and it mentions Queen Nefertiti of Egypt. Aw, yeah, the main wife of the “heretical” Pharaoh Akhenaten. I know the difference between Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, brah. And, briefly (set to expire in December of this year), I can tell the difference between the 18th and 19th dynasties of Egypt.

But, ya know, dang. How learning reinforces learning.

Interesting looking job on LinkedIn; self-hosted application, though, is non-descript and does not mention the job title or function. And step two is:

Sign up for a paid monthly subscription and put some money, as little as $5, in it?

Erm, no. NO harder than job applications with subsidiary third-party applications of unknown provenance to determine whether the employer would get a tax credit for hiring me, applications which require my social security number right out of the gate.

You know, I “meet” a lot of my clients just via the Internet, and I always have some trepidation before I receive my first payment. But making a payment to apply? Yeah, no. I still avoid, for the most part, submission fees and entrance fees for writing submissions (which puts me out of the running for a lot of target outlets).

So my new BJJ school is a couple of doors down from the Nixa branch of the Ozarks Elder Law branch.

Last Thursday, I stopped at the Republic License Office to get tags for the car, and it is a couple of doors down from the Republic branch of Ozarks Elder Law.

As part of my tour of bill-paying errands, I ended up at the pool store in Nixa, and on the counter, I found…. business cards for one of the attorneys at Ozarks Elder Law. “Someone is telling me I need to make a will,” I said to the pool store employees, explaining the situation.

“You’d better take a card, then,” one of them said, and I did.

And, on Saturday, we sat on a curb in Marshfield for the parade….

….right across the street from Marshfield’s branch of Ozarks Elder Law.

I’ve seen a lot of billboards for them, too, with Lori Crook front and center (that’s a story for another day), but to find myself Thursday, Friday, and Saturday outside three different locations of the law offices…. Well, that’s detecting a pattern in something.

So yesterday, I mused about parades I’d been to since I went to a rather large parade this year. This year, we also had a bit of a fireworks show, of sorts: For the second year in a row, my adult children had some friends over, and they lit off some fireworks. My beautiful wife and I did not watch the show–she because she feared for their safety and me because, like Renaissance festivals, just don’t enchant me any more. Although I’m not sure if fireworks shows ever did; they were just family and communal things we did.

When I was a kid, Smith Park, the terminus of the parade that passed by my grandparents’ house, had a small fireworks show, and we attended it all the time more than once, enough to think it was an annual tradition, but I have no idea how annual it was. Maybe most of my life up until I was seven years old. As I recall, everyone brought blankets, and across the field, the “professionals” lit the fireworks. But it couldn’t have been every year to that point.

Because my father was, for a couple years, one of those “professionals” who had been drinking all day and then went to light fireworks shows over a couple of beers in the night time. He brought us to the shows, the whole family, but instead of us watching on a blanket with the other spectators, we got to watch the show from inside the car by where the “professionals” were. It meant the fireworks were right over us, but this was in the late 1970s, man. I watched parts of more than one show sitting the wrong way on a Chevy Impala bench seat, dangling my head into the foot well. Which was not comfortable even then.

I remember July 4, 1980, though. My mother was at an inpatient rehab facility, so my father took my brother, me, and Rosemary to a job site to watch the Milwaukee lakefront fireworks. Rosemary was or had been married to Bill, the first of my father’s circle to get divorced (and my father lived in Bill’s basement immediately after getting kicked out by my mother in 1981 for being the philandering sort–oh, yeah, now I get it). At any rate, the spot must have been a great view: It was on a sloping roof three floors up. Just the place to take an eight-year-old and a six-year-old for fireworks (although I guess it was not us he was trying to impress). Do I remember anything of the fireworks? No, but I do remember being terrified of falling off the roof.

In Missouri, after the move, we really didn’t go to fireworks shows–my mother was not one to go out after work–but in the trailer park, we managed to get some firecrackers, bottle rockets, ladyfingers, jumping jacks, and other spinning ground things, so that was our fireworks shows in the trailer years.

I went to the lakefront fireworks show once or twice in high school or college, but after college, I’m not sure I have gone to see fireworks since.

After we moved to Nogglestead, we had a clear view of the Battlefield city fireworks, except the ground effects, for a couple of years until the untended fence line across the road turned into an untended row of trees. For a couple of years, neighbors on the next farm road to our west put on shows, maybe even competing against one another, so we got a really nice display there.

In 2019, we spent the night in Poplar Bluff, and my nephew and nephew-by-marriage-by marriage (my brother’s wife’s daughter’s husband) drank, doped, lit off fireworks, and set a bad example for my boys.

One year, I bought some fireworks–the kind I bought in the trailer years–and I realized those are fireworks that are fun to shoot off, but not fun to watch. The next year, I got some of the rockets that burst and whatnot. Eventually, I let my sons light some fireworks themselves once they were teenagers–and they had a blast, literally, even though I made them wear safety glasses. And, in the years since, they’ve taken over their own fireworking. They did it on their own two years ago. Last year, a couple friends from their Lutheran school days came over, and it was the same this year. Enough for them to think every year when it will have been only a couple of times.

But I got to see a couple of the fireworks from the deck, directly overhead. And when my youngest came into the house to secure soft drinks for everyone, I was pleased to see he was wearing safety glasses.

Last Independence Day, I mowed my lawn. We don’t generally do much with on the holiday. But last year, while mowing the lawn, I heard the radio station on location at the Marshfield, Missouri, Independence Day Parade, billed as the oldest continuously running July 4th parade west of the Mississippi. And I thought it might be an interesting thing to go to an Independence Day parade. For we hadn’t been to one since… what, 2009?

When I was a kid in Milwaukee, it was just a thing. A small neighborhood parade went past my grandparents’ house on 33rd Street and ended in Smith Park, so we did that all the time at least a couple of years so I thought of it as “all the time.” The parade was chock full of marching bands, veterans’ groups, and neighborhood kids on their bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. When the parade had passed, the neighborhood fell in and followed them to Smith Park for little ice cream cups with wooden spoons.

After my parents divorced, we came to Missouri, and… Nothing happening down here, parade-wise, but a lot of times where we kids convinced, easily-because-they-wanted-the-money, operators of the fireworks stand up the hill from the trailer park that we were 13, and so we did that instead. Many summers, though, we spent in Wisconsin with my father, and his new neighborhood might have had a parade–but I know think that they had a festival, with ice cream and wooden spoons and all, up there. But a quick search indicates that those parks no longer have events, probably to save money and probably because neighborhoods are temporary these days, so who would go to a neighborhood event? Also, they’re probably not very safe these days anyway (say, why isn’t this footage being seen on stateside news outlets?).

After that, what, 1994 ish?–I didn’t go to parades, Independence Day or otherwise, very much. We went to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in St. Louis around the turn of the century, downtown whilst we were living in Casinoport. That was at the invitation of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers, although we never saw him there.

After we had a baby (and moved to Old Trees), we could walk down to the Old Trees parade, and we did in 2007 and, maybe? 2009. It was the first of the modern parades: Light on bands and marching and elaborate floats, and heavy on cars–the Corvette club, the Mustang club, the old cars club. They had a good representation of old military vehicles, jeeps, two ton trucks, and whatnot. Political candidates and local organizations and probably youngsters from the high school vying for a crown of some sort. I rather enjoyed it, and it made me feel like a dad in a family, for sure.

But when we moved to Nogglestead, we’re a bit afield of parades. I don’t think Battlefield, the closest town has one, nor to my knowledge does Republic. So we went through another long draught, for sure, broken by attendance at a Christmas parade in Springfield the year after we arrived (where my oldest saw a girl in his class in one of the Corvettes, so he really thought Springfield was a small town) and one or two in Republic, including one that a couple when the oldest marched with the high school band (the youngest was supposed to his only year in the marching band, but he turned up at the parade without his band shoes and was kept out). It doesn’t help that many of the parades are time-shifted–the Independence Day will come on a Saturday before or after July 4, the Christmas parades are sometime in the beginning of December.

But this year, ah, we would make the trip. Marshfield is not so very far–although it does seem a long ways from home when we are coming back from St. Louis, and Marshfield is almost home but not just minutes away–but our trip to an estate sale last year (already?) put it into its rightful orbit around Nogglestead: A little under an hour by car, so as close as Aurora or Crane, but it seems further because we have to swing out and around Springfield to get there. We left a little after 8 to get to Marshfield, leaving plenty of time to find parking and to walk–which turned out to be just the right amount of time because by the time I hit the head and we walked the (crowded) parade route to find a spot which turned out to be a curb right outside the city courthouse (not the federal courthouse on the corner to the west or the county courthouse on the corner to the east). Right outside…. Well, that’s another story.

The parade itself was two hours long, but: Only one marching band, the high school band. A couple of veterans’ groups on flatbed trucks or trailers–with very few veterans from the mid-20th century wars left. Not depicted: Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Iraq II, or Afghanistan.

But depicted: The Sons of Confederate Veterans:

With a confederate flag and all. Wikipedia unhelpfully sermonizes:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is an American neo-Confederate[1] nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers[2]: 6–9  that commemorates these ancestors, funds and dedicates monuments to them, and promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.

The SCV was founded on July 1, 1896, in Richmond, Virginia, by R. E. Lee Camp, No. 1 of the Confederate Veterans.[3][4] Its headquarters is at Elm Springs in Columbia, Tennessee.[2]: 29 

In recent decades, governors, legislators, courts, corporations, and anti-racism activists have emphasized the increasingly controversial public display of Confederate symbols—especially after the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the 2015 Charleston church shooting, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd. SCV has responded with its coordinated display of larger and more prominent public displays of the battle flag, some in directly defiant counter-protest.

Some of that is undoubtedly true. But not all of it.

At any rate, again, it was heavily motorized–the marching band might have been the only marchers in it. The Springfield Shriners were in heavy rotation, with a variety of motorized vehicles including little trucks, barrels on wheels, motorbikes, and motor trikes spaced throughout the parade. A number of candidate presentations, but few actual candidates. And, at the very end, a number of horses and carriages, mostly promoting a local cowboy church–but nobody scooping horse poop, which was unfortunate. One of the early horses left a deposit right by us, and the rest of the horses decided that was the official horsebox and started going in the same place. Within minutes, our spot smelled like a barn, and if they hadn’t been at the end of the parade, we would have left anyway.

But, in addition to the normalcy of the stars-and-bars: So. I was gorging on the thrown candy that came our way (except the suckers), and I tucked the wrappers in my shirt pocket. I took a couple of photos and stuck the camera in my shirt pocket. I sent my youngest looking for cold drinks with a couple of Jacksons, and when he came back with free cold water, I stuck the money in the shirt pocket. When I was going for candy, the phone fell out of my pocket, so I put it back into my pants pocket. And when the parade was over, I went to a trash can to empty the pocket, and I mindlessly tossed the money into the trash. Fortunately, another guy was throwing something away, and fortunately (by design), we’re in southwest Missouri where people are generally good, and he said, “Someone’s throwing away money.” So I was able to recover the cash. I mean, he could have just grabbed them himself, but he did not. So I’ll trade having to see “evidence of pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy”–just the celebration of regional heritage, and if you know your regional history, you’ll know it was not homogeneous and it was awfully bloody–for honest people.

But: Having been, we will probably not go next year. It was a whole family excursion, and I think my oldest is coming to realize how few of those we have left now that he’s looking, at a distance but in sight, at moving out.

But: I see on the local news sites stories about a local neighborhood Independence Day parade with kids on bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. Maybe that’s where the real action is. Maybe next year.

Ah, gentle reader, this story is already a week old, and it’s actually the source of the “Pop Pop” schtick (we’ll get to that by-and-by, youngin).

But a week ago, the last weekend of June, my youngest and I went to the White Hart Renaissance Faire just south of Hartville–that is, about an hour east by northeast of here. Now, I have, from time to time, seen flyers for the faire in years past, and I’ve read about them in local media, and I have even put the flyers on the refrigerator. But in years past, the faire has been a single day or a single weekend in June, and many times something else has come up or the day has come and gone before it reached my attention. And, in recent years, I have not seen the flyers for it–my seeing the flyers probably coincided with the years I visited the Comic Cave comic book store fairly frequently.

But the faire has expanded to weekends throughout June, which means I could plan ahead–and delay if needed, which happened this year. I had decided that would be our Father’s Day outing, but storms threatened, so we demurred. But that left only the weekend of the 28th this year, so despite some trepidation about how muddy the faire might be, my youngest and I headed out.

Hartville is in Amish country, so you have to be careful on the county roads out there.

The shoulders of Highway 60 as it runs through Webster and Douglas Counties are wide enough to accommodate the buggies, but you have to anticipate that you’ll find one around every curve and over every hill.

And, you know what? That’s normal here in southwest Missouri. A bit of hubbub has been made around how the Europeans have discovered America, again, and I get the sense that a lot of the Internet is reacting, but they’re still of their previous mindsets that there is one normal for America, but, really, there are many. And it’s interesting to experience the various normalities, and it’s kind of interesting to be reminded of what your normality is.

At any rate, it was a fairly small Renaissance festival, but of course I’m comparing it to the really large on in Bonner Springs which I have attended, what, six or seven times? I went once with Scott, Todd, and Lisa; once with Mike and Scott?; once with my beautiful then-girlfriend; once with my boys, my brother, and nephew; and once with the whole family and my brother’s new wife and his old son. So maybe only five times.

The parking lot was definitely muddy, but the grounds themselves were not bad. The festival featured several stages where medievally themed musical acts, with a preponderance of pirate portrayers, and magicians performed. We got roped into helping out with various tricks. My boy drew a picture on a slate along with others doing the same, and after mixing them up, the magician gave each intrepid artist his slate back. I got to help with the bed of nails bit–the magician laid on a bed of nails, and he asked me to stand on his prosthetic, weight-distributing belly. No problem, I train these balance ball drills at martial arts classes all the time. The only thing, though, is that I’m awful at them. But after a few attempts, I got up on the rotund belly to complete the trick.

The booths were the crafts you would expect. The forge-and-swords tent had a couple of broadswords and a couple of small axes, but nothing I needed for my collection, which was fortunate as they were pretty expensive (although probably I’m pretty cheap). And we did stop by the axe-throwing booth, which led me to my first recent Pop Pop moment: The guy running the booth asked for my son’s name, and then he gestured to me and said, “And this is your…. Grandfather?”

We were there under an hour, all told, and then we wended our muddy way to the highway for a return trip home.

And you know what made me feel the most Pop Pop? I really wasn’t that into it.. Years Decades ago, I enjoyed the festivals much more. I guess I was younger. I was playing role-playing games and perhaps reading more fantasy novels, so I was more in-touch with the lifestyle. I was going with friends instead of family, and to be honest, I was hoping to meet an attractive girl in period costume. A different place in my life.

I won’t say I won’t ever go again–after all, maybe I’ll be able to convince my brother to meet me out there one year–and maybe it won’t be muddy, and maybe I will be with someone who appreciates the thing more than is just going but is counting the time until the next trip into the online mines.

Or maybe Pop Pop is just too old for a good time.