Category: Life

I mentioned last month that painting the fence and tending the pool left me with a number of empty buckets in my garage and in my driveway, and I was not sure if I knew what I was going to do with them.

Well, this weekend, I used a bunch of them in lieu of saw horses to keep the new record shelves I was building out of the grass so I could paint them.

Also in Nogglestead news: I have finally built the record shelving that I’ve needed since, well, before I got deluged with free records in May.

I have three short stackable shelves to fit the empty wall in the parlor where we used to have a CD holder. But my beautiful wife took it to furnish her office downtown, giving us space for more record storage.

But! She gave up the office before I built the shelving, so the CDs are now in our foyer.

I hope to put the longer set of shelving under our console stereo. However, in the middle of the night, I spent far too many brain cycles thinking, “Aw, man, I measured for the length of the stereo, but what if the shelving is not as deep as the stereo? What will I do then?”

I guess I will find out this afternoon when I bring the shelving in.

And then I guess I’ll finally put the buckets in the shed with the extra wood that I bought for the shelving which I did not end up using.

Will this be enough to make me comfortable going to the book sale next weekend and buying a stack of fifty cent records? This, too, will be TBD until I get all the records off of the desk in the parlor (and maybe out of the boxes under the desk in the parlor which we received as part of my mother-in-law’s downsizing two and a half years ago–not to mention the box or two of my mother’s pop records which have been in storage for a long time as well).

The cardboard twelve-pack cartons that convince you they’re soda dispensers.

They’re oriented so the cans are on their sides, which means that if you tear them to act as a dispenser by tearing the top of one end comes off with perforations, it leaves a half of the end glued to hold the cylinders in. However, one often over-tears or loosens the glue holding the bottom part of the end, leading to unwanted dispensation.

Also, they ensure that they consume the cubic volume of 12 cans in your refrigerator whether they contain 11 cans or only 1.

My oldest has taken to bringing them home and opening them according to the instructions. After which I empty them and stand the cans on their ends properly in the refrigerator to make room for delicious leftovers, and that lasts a couple of days until the next twelve packs arrive.

when I lived there: Public housing is home: The story behind the stories of Greentree apartments in Milwaukee:

Through the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, I spent 15 months capturing life at Greentree, a low-income housing complex that sits on 14 acres on Milwaukee’s north side and is home to more than 700 residents.

An apartment in there was my first home, where my father fished my first bike out of the communal dumpster.

We moved into the housing projects about the time I was four.

After finishing my death march of painting all of my fence in a single year, I had another project to tackle: The toy box in the pool area that we use to store pool toys and floats.

It started out as a recepticle for my young children’s outdoor toys. You know, big plastic trucks, various balls, a wiffle ball set, a batting tee, a big ball-with-handle for bouncy rides, plastic lawnmowers, and so on. As it was built to hold large toys and with the thought that young boys might climb it, I built it strong. And, let’s face it, fine furniture at Nogglestead, at least the things I build, are really just two by fours screwed together (see also the record shelves I built five years ago). Although the toy box had some two by twos and one by threes screwed on it as well for some reason. Aesthetics? Extra stability? Who knows.

Well, my boys outgrew the outdoor toys, so I painted the toy box red and moved it to the pool area where it could hold the pool toys, noodles, floats, balls, dive toys, and such.

Over the course of a decade, the dripping toys made their mark on it. I noticed that the base of it was rotting at one side. So I thought I would bang out a couple of boards and replace them and repaint it.

Oh, but no. The rot was not just the end of the boards on the bottom, but also the framing holding the walls to the sides and the smaller boards at the bottom as well.

So my youngest and I completely took it apart, cut down the rotting boards, and rebuilt a new similar structure from the remnants, and painted it red again from the same can of paint, and:

It’s smaller, but that’s okay. Even though I’m personally spending more time in the pool these days–I try to hit it once a day, but that’s fallen to only a couple times a week this month–it has lost its enchantment for the boys, who hit the pool four or five times a day the first summer we let them swim without us. I have been told that the oldest got into the pool for the first time this year last week, and the youngest has let us drag him out there a handful of times. We haven’t had anyone over to swim in a long time. Maybe once last year?

So it might be the last time I deal with the pool fence and certainly with this toy box.

And, I am pleased to say, the garbage men did not balk at a little scrap wood in the bin. Which is another story in itself.

But what shall I do with this small amount of red paint I have remaining? Put it back in the garage for the next round of garage cleaning, which is on track to be a multi-year project.

Ah, Brian J., you might wonder, what has your fecund imagination invented to worry about today?

What if a coronal mass ejection hits the earth and is mistaken for an act of war by a nuclear power?

It might keep me up at tonight. If we make it that long.

(Inspired by a post at Silicon Graybeard.)

Well, gentle reader, I have done it, and I want a cookie.

I mentioned in the beginning of July that I was painting my fence this year, albeit slowly, as part of cleaning my garage.

In past years, I have started with, what, fifteen or twenty gallons of paint in the orbit of my close-in back yard, but I’ve generally turned fence painting into a multi-year endeavor. I’d start out with the outside of the whole fence, and that would end up taking a couple or three weekends of painting four or five hours each day, and by that time, I would decide I was done painting for the year. Then, the next summer, I would tackle the inner part of the fence. I’ve only painted the fence inside the pool deck once, in the cycle that started in 2020. And this does not count the time it would take to paint our rather large deck which also tends to be on a multi-year cycle. Judging by the color, I painted the deck portion during the 2020 cycle, and it must have been in the spring, as I also painted the vertical surfaces that border my beautiful wife’s flower garden, probably before it had grown. But I must have turned to the outside of the fence at that time, as only that part of the outside of the deck is Mission Brown, the 2020 color. The remainder of the exterior of the deck is Russet Brown, the 2016 or 2012 color.

This year, instead of spending four hours on each weekend day, I instead spent an hour or two (or three) most days so far this summer to march around the fence lines.
Continue reading “Besieged By Buckets” →

It’s been over a week since I’ve had to repair a major appliance at Nogglestead (the dryer and more). It must be time again!

This morning, when I opened the dishwasher to empty it, I heard a ping, and suddenly the door was heavy and a bit loose.

A little investigation indicated that the door spring on one side had broken. I mean, I can say it like I knew what it was right away, but it took a little probing and prodding to figure it out.

Who am I kidding? Nico told me what was wrong and how to fix it.

So I’ve ordered the spring ($35 for OEM? Eesh.) and will likely have to unhook and move out the dishwasher to replace it when it arrives.

And hopefully not introduce any leaks when I put it back.

Well, I’m not bragging. No, really. Because it was more a week of attempted repairs at Nogglestead.

Continue reading “The Week In Repairs At Nogglestead” →

…it would have been about right.

I mentioned in 2018 that I had been saving aluminum cans since we moved to Nogglestead, and I only had half of a garbage can full at that time.

Well, my boys have discovered canned soda, and the oldest has been buying it himself for a while. So we ended up with a full can, a large bag, and a partially full bag (and a crushed piece of downspout which was only a couple years old and cost more than pennies when we had it installed). As scrap yards are not open on weekends here in Springfield, we loaded them up and took them to the near north side of Springfield this weekend, and we got…

$19.25. Which is about a dollar and a quarter per year that we’ve been collecting the cans.

55 pounds sounds about right. But that tare weight: 20 pounds. They took all of the cans out of the bags and cans and put them into cages so they could see what was in them before weighing them, so it’s not like they had to account for steel garbage cans. Do they normally apply that much to account for the moisture in the cans? Or did they rook me of $5 to increase their profit that scant amount? I mean, the scale doesn’t have numbers on it; it’s connected to a computer that I couldn’t see, and I didn’t get a receipt from it until I got my receipt and money at the window in another building.

I am a cynic and a misanthrope to even think it, but I am a cynic and a misanthrope.

Of course, today, I come out to sort my other recycling into the bins I take to the government recycling center (that is, an alternative route to the landfill for my refuse which keeps me from having to have two waste containers for pickup), and my son has put a Diet Coke can in it. I could add another bin or small can for me to take an accumulation to the city recycling center (which accepts aluminum cans dropped off as well as paper, cardboard, steel cans, and plastic). But, more likely, I will start the process all over again. But when the time comes some years hence to redeem them, I will not make a special trip. It is certainly not worth that.

One of my favorite mini-games in the role-playing game of life is to count how many magazines in the racks at the grocery store checkout stand have Taylor Swift on the cover.

On a recent trip, I thought the answer was three (the range generally runs between three and six) when my son pointed out that she was also on the cover of one of the digest-sized puzzle magazines. So it was. Four.

I thought about picking it up, and at the last minute did throw it onto the belt. And now I own it.

Mainly, I wanted to see how they could make a Taylor Swift-themed sudoku–what, did they only fill in the 8s and 7s? But, no. The regular sudokus are regular sudokus, but apparently, they have invented a “picture” sudoku, presumably for puzzle fans who don’t like math, and these have little images kinda related to women singers.

I probably will bag this and throw it into a collectible magazine bin. I mean, I don’t do puzzles that frequently. I have several crossword puzzle books that I inherited from my sainted mother which still have more of her handwriting in them than mine. I have a collection of old GAMES magazines from when we got a subscription for our young son who liked games (but preferred dot-to-dots). Wow, that’s been a while; GAMES merged with another magazine in 2014.

Not that anyone will collect anything in the future, but it will be a little something to burn to keep warm when needed.

Ah, gentle reader, as you might know, I hate to part with anything. But as part of my recent urge to very, very slowly clean the garage and other events have led me to repurpose or get rid of a couple of things.

For example, the Scipio Africanus tour shirt which I bought in 2020. You know, this one:

Nico, the kitten (who is now two years old but forever a kitten) likes to jump on my shoulders to ride around the house or to get atop the bookshelves or game cabinet, so many of my t-shirts are now getting holes in at the top of the chest or upper back.

It’s a shame because it was a cool shirt; for some reason, at dinner the other night, my oldest son brought up the general with the elephants, and I mentioned that Scipio beat him and some of the tactics at the Battle of Kama. Which is more than he was hoping to learn while eating. But I wore the shirt and showed it to him, and it turned out to be the last wearing.

I’ve cut it into scrap cloths for cleaning so I’ll still have it near me.

Also, I “cleaned the garage” by putting a couple of Green Bay Packer automobile floor mats in the trash.

We received them as a gift probably more than a decade ago, and they were the floor mats in our Highlander. The rubber backing on them was pretty thin, so they started breaking down and curling several years ago. The Highlander became the oldest’s default driver, and it was totaled in an accident in December. We brought them home when cleaning out the vehicle in the tow lot, but the breakdown of the backing meant they were not likely to go into another vehicle. So, what, eight months later, I have discarded them.

It’s a two-fer: A gift, and Green Bay Packers paraphernalia, so it’s surprising that I did. But I kiind of felt like they deserved an official retirement ceremony at the local Green Bay Packers pub or something. Not just getting dumped into the trash bin. But there they are.

I know, you’re riveted by the minutia of Nogglestead. But me getting rid of anything is remarkable. And so much of the garage cleaning so far is throwing out a couple of things and recycling some glass. Eventually, we will have a clean garage. Maybe in 2030, but more likely after my estate sale.

Sometimes you tell the day by the bottle that you drink, the Philosopher has said. And sometimes you can tell how I spent the day by the smell on my hands.

Not that I am asking you to smell my finger; however, many times you might see me smelling my hands to see if I have yet washed them enough to get a scent off of them. Most days, I only have one scent to worry about, but some days, most often Saturdays, I stack up tasks that end up trading one smell for another (or not, if the first smell was dominant).

So, this weekend, what did my hands smell like? Not that you asked, but since you haven’t ewwwwed on to another page or post yet, let me tell you.

1. Skimmersam and chlorine.
   I cleaned the pool early in the morning, which means that my hands got a combination of chlorine and organic decay from the things caught in the skimmer baskets. Although the skimmer baskets do have handles, so I don’t have to touch the grass, bugs, frogs, and occasional other critter in the basket itself, I do pick up a bit of its scent that handling chlorine tabs does not completely cover.
    
2. My boxing gloves.
   Or, worse, the inside of my boxing gloves which smell of years-old and fresh sweat. I’ve tried to clean them, putting absorbing powder in them, but it might just be part of the material now, to forever scentedly scar me after a martial arts class. Because, let’s face it, I am unlikely to wear them out and buy new ones.
    
3. Salsa.
   After a shower after martial arts class, I mostly neutralized the smell of the gloves and made myself a bit of lunch which was cheese “burritos”–basically shredded cheese and Pace Picante sauce or salsa microwaved until the cheese is melted. Whilst eating them, I tend to get a little salsa leakage onto my hands. This is the least difficult scent to wash off.
    
4. Gunpowder.
   I have tried to get the whole family to the range for a pistol safety class for a while–how long? Well, I had us signed up in January 2021, but I had a sniffle and wanted to postpone because we still weren’t sure that sniffles didn’t kill other people around whom you sniffled and besides you didn’t want to be judged as evil for sniffling around strangers. But at that time, the instructor was going to be out for some number of months, and it took me over three years to make it happen.

   But I did, and the boys had a great time, and my beautiful wife got over her initial trepidation.

   How did I do?

   

   Not bad, but it was just a .22 at 10 feet. Essentially tied with my oldest who had marksman training with JROTC a couple years back. And I’d like to point out I shot faster. Because it’s important that I still sort of win at something sometimes. Sheesh. Those guys have been hitting the gym almost every night, and soon will be able to lift more than I can (who only hits the gym once or twice a week these days,

   Oh, and you might be asking, Is this really the first time you’ve been to the range since 2012? Yes, gentle reader: for a longtime member of the NRA, I have popped off a relatively small number of rounds in my life. Perhaps this will change in the near term. When I can find time to head to the range again.

With those four scents, I am pretty sure that I only missed gasoline from some attempt at small engine repair to hit for the hand odor cycle (GoJo hand cleaner would have been included after the gasoline smell).

I am pleased to say that my hands smell of hand soap this Monday morning, which means I will not keep smelling them, and you will not have to wonder why.

Not that you ever did. But you might now.

Ah, gentle reader. As you might know about me, I tend to put things off, especially home maintenance or repair projects. They will sit for weeks months years, and then I will do them in a short period of time. Instead of a sense of accomplishment, a look what I did triumph, I’ll then recriminate myself for not having done it sooner. And this very week, I have the topper of all stories in that ilk.

In late summer 2009, we had house-shopped in Springfield for a couple of months on intermittent weekends, and we settled on Nogglestead (like our home in Old Trees, we magickally found a house on the very last day we were house-shopping). I made the round trip after the paperwork was in motion for the home inspection and followed Dennis, the home inspector, around the house with my own tools to poke and prod what he was and what he was not (after all, home inspectors adhere to a checklist closely, and they’re paid by the home sellers, so they don’t go off book at risk of their continued employment).

One thing he pointed out was that the insulation around the copper line from the external air conditioner condenser unit to the house, the pipe that brings the cooled, erm, coolant back into the house was breaking down. It was an easy fix: just take it off and replace it with standard pipe insulation. It wasn’t on his checklist, and I didn’t make it part of the nickel-and-dime remediation conditions for purchase. But shortly after we bought Nogglestead, I went to the hardware store and bought two lengths of pipe insulation. And then I put them in the garage, a little out of the way, and….

Almost fifteen years pass.

Gentle reader, I have alluded to the fact that I am in a slow motion process of cleaning up my garage (which includes the slow grind of painting my fence so that I can get the three five gallon buckets of Mission Brown and three smaller buckets of Russet out of the garage). On Monday, I used a cardboard poster tube that originally contained a poster that we framed and gave to my mother-in-law for Christmas probably twenty years ago (when we lived in Casinoport, undoubtedly). It was on the top shelf of a, erm, shelving unit with round things: Rolled up replacement screen material, rolls of kraft paper for landscaping and/or painting, a couple of poster tubes in case I ever got back into the Ebay thing selling movie posters (which I have not for almost a quarter century), and the pipe insulation.

I noticed when running the line trimmer around the house that the line was almost bare copper these days, and it was sweating as much as I was. So it was time.

I got the insulation down, took a scissors and a roll of duct tape, and spent five minutes replacing the insulation. I peeled the remainder of the old insulation off, cut the new insulation down to size, wrapped it around, pulled the tape to the adhesive on the edges, pressed the edges together, and added a couple loops of duct tape, and….

It took almost as long to walk around the house and back as it did to fix the thing.

I probably put it off so long (as with other repairs like it) because I have little experience with HVAC and I was afraid I would somehow damage the unit. The next morning, the fear was almost realized, as the condenser had a weird rattle that it had not had before. However, I discovered that I left the duct tape on the condenser unit, and it was rattling. So, apparently, I have not damaged the unit.

I hate to think how much the delay cost me in energy costs.

But it’s done now, and I don’t think I can even top this procrastination record. And it’s a small step in cleaning my garage as well. So, ultimately, it is a funny (in a sad way) story and a small win anyway.

In video games, “grinding” is doing repetitive tasks over and over to increase your in-game scores or for some in-game benefit, such as mining a bunch to get the materials you need to craft a weapon or better tool.

Real life is like a grind. No, scratch that: Real life is a selection of different grinds from which you can choose. And, as a bonus, some grinds do not lead to better outcomes: some grinds are maintenance grinds which are repetitive tasks that you do just to keep even.

Continue reading “Choose Your Own Grind Adventure” →

No specific callout to Pride month, but, c’mon, man, even we rubes know what you meant by making a rainbow.

The fact that someone didn’t specifically call it out in the social media post might indicate he or she did not want backlash for an overt display. But this is an overt display.

Which does not deserve backlash. It deserves to be recognized and ignored.

St. Louis Magazine presents: St. Louis coffee shops that are great places to work

How many have I been to? None.

I am coming up on fifteen years out of the St. Louis area (so long, and yet not), and I stopped spending nights at coffee shops trying to meet girls several years before that.

There’s a reason it’s called Coffee House Memories. Extra emphasis on Memories.

I got this book at the same time as I got The Way at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it make sense given my shopping habits there the last couple of years: Pore over the dollar records, pore over the dollar videos, pore over the dollar audio books, and then glance at the dollar poetry books and maybe literature section, and only sometimes do I make my way to the Better Books to look at old books, local interest, art monographs, and audio courses. This particular book was sold alone and not part of a tied set of chapbooks and pamphlets, which means I paid a whole fifty cents for the single volume. Was it worth it?

Well… It’s a two sets of poems totalling 57 pages. The first set deals with watching high school track meets, and the second set deals with school. The poet was a teacher, and her husband was a coach, so that’s where she got her ideas from. The poems are short, and the lines are very short–three to five words each most of the time, very action-oriented with a dash of imagery here or there. I mean, not bad, but not the best.

And you would think I would be the audience for this. Or sympathetic at least, as I have satten in bleachers this last spring cheering on my son who decided to do track in high school after a year off. The cover image is a track meet from field level with mountains in the background. Our photos are not as exciting. They’re from the cheap seats, and our perspective on our long-distance runner and a bit of the inner football field, maybe, is less descriptive than the photos of old. We can look back on them and say what school or gym they were in in middle school, but in the tightly focused shots this spring, they all look the same. Perhaps I shall try a wider focus next year. Oh, wait, this is a book report. Back to it….

The author has an acknowledgements page where she tells you that four of the poems had previously appeared in four different magazines/journals/zines/Web sites, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Coffee House Memories has an acknowledgements section that is only slightly longer, and I was trying to be a poet at that time–and I really have no pub credits for poetry after like 1997, so perhaps I just don’t know what the market will bear.

Someone, though, thought enough of this book to buy it in 2012 from Amazon for $4.99 plus $3.99 shipping plus sales tax according the a paper folded inside the back cover. I cannot count this as a Found Bookmark; even though it’s a sales receipt, it’s not of a particular place or shop. It’s not even like pamphlets/flyers that came with some of the volumes of various mail-order collections which detail the book and so on. I think I’ll feed this into the shredder presently. Let that be a marker of what I think of Amazon packing lists in books I buy secondhand.

Ah, gentle reader. The garage at Nogglestead is quite a mess. It’s only mostly my fault. As I mentioned and you might remember from years past on this blog, I dabbled in numerous handicrafts back when the television programs Creative Juice and That’s Clever! were on.

I did some beading, I did some glass painting, I did some glass etching, I did some découpage, I made some clocks out of platters and plates, and a bunch of other things. A week or so back, I might have mentioned that I went digging through completed things for a silent auction at church and destroyed some stained glass painted things.

I have not been terribly active in the crafting realm, and that’s partly because the garage is a mess. And part of the reason that it’s a mess is that I accumulated, over the years, materials for projects that I have not completed or done. For instance, I have the slats from the boys’ old bunk beds–they were little 2″ by 1″ (or smaller) sticks that I replaced with two by fours when I built the beds. I believe I’ll woodburn a large design on them, but not yet. I’ve also saved the old hanging lamp from our front porch when I replaced it; I thought I would clean it up and, what? I dunno.

I also saved a large number of wine bottles, jars, and other glass things for etching, stained glass painting, making candles, or something. But over the years, I’ve moved them around a bit when trying to clean the garage, but I’ve not used them. So I recycled a bunch of them, and it looks like I have another bin to sort through and recycle once I clear a path to it.

I’m also considering discarding the stained glass paints I have. Those projects ultimately did not turn out so well. I have a small toaster oven in the garage for curing polymer clays, but most of the stained glass painting I’ve done has been on vases and whatnot, things too large for the toaster oven. And air curing them, which the bottles indicate is an option, has a limited shelf life as I’ve learned. So maybe I should let them go.

Still, it feels a little like I’m giving up on completing these projects. It’s not like giving away books that I think I will never read, but it’s diminishing some possibilities, and for some reason it makes me feel old.

And, I suppose, I could look at it as a step in cleaning up the garage so I have some room to work. Which is likely true, but it’s not a given that the garage will be cleaned in 2024. Or 2025. Let’s not get all up in a hurry in here.

To be sure, it will not look as good as Cedar Sanderson’s craft space. But we have boys aging to men, and we will have an extra bedroom or two likely before I get the garage into any sense of order or even a workshop. Perhaps I can put a desk in one of them and have a workspace.

The next step, or maybe the first: Overcoming laziness and prioritization that puts twee blog posts before meaningful work.