Category: Life

Last Saturday, we went to get new phones. And what should have been the equivalent of purchasing and using a commodity became an ordeal. Continue reading “Pop Pop Needs Pudding and a Nap” →

As I have mentioned over and over again, like a crossfitting Vegan and was all like, “Emilio! Emilio!”, I’ve been studying martial arts for–the statistician in the household told me fourteen years now. We got started with the school when my oldest went to a birthday party hosted at the school at four years old, and we got him registered for the Dragons class. A couple years later, the younger was so excited to start they let him begin his classes at 3 and 359/365. My beautiful wife and I started classes. The oldest, my wife, and I got black belts in the tae kwon do which turned into tae kwon do/American boxing/muy thai/whatever kyoshi thought looked cool at the time. As the boys got older and into middle school, they resisted more going to classes two or three nights a week. In 2020, after having dropped for a couple of years, my wife returned briefly but thinks she broke someone’s nose, and she stopped going, and the boys stopped going as well. I’ve still attended, more sporadically than before, because it wasn’t a family thing any more. But the instructors convinced me I was ready to test for a third-degree black belt in January 2025, but my attendance dwindled to once a week…. Once every two weeks…. No actual visits in last September? Wow.

At any rate, my boys have been watching UFC fights for a while now, and they expressed interest in starting classes in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The school we attended had a BJJ program for a couple of years, but when I was looking, it disappeared.

So I signed them up for a school that one of my oldest’s friends attends, and I signed up, too.

Holy cats, is that a different animal from the explosiveness and cardio-intensiveness of the tae kwon do school. Or weightlifting. A lot of the instruction, especially in the n00bs classes I’ve been taking, involves resistance and holding that resistance for a couple of minutes while the instructor explains something or corrects something. Jeez, Louise, I was left walking like a cowboy after putting opponents in closed guard for long periods of time.

It’s been three weeks, and I’ve been to the most classes out of all of us. The school has n00b classes at 9am on Mondays and Fridays which I attend, and I went to a striking (American boxing) class. I’m not eager to get into a real rolling/sparring match until I can get a better sense of not only how to work in the martial art but also what’s cricket and what’s not.

AND I have tried to be more diligent about attending my other martial arts school as well. I am hoping for five or six classes a week between them, weighted more toward the tae kwon do for as long as I can. I may not learn to play guitar with my more-open current schedule, but I can spend the time better than refreshing job boards anyway.

As the Philosopher says, “I’ll never be this young again.”

ACKSHUALLY, Shinedown in their new song talk about being young and not knowing it.

Both Shinedown and Three Days Grace have released songs about getting older (see also Don’t Wanna Go Home Tonight). C’mon, guys. I don’t listen to you because I want to feel reflective on my accruing years. I want to listen to you loudly whilst I fight against it.

Well, maybe not mastered, but I did just read a book on it.

Now, courtesy Instapundit, we learn Nordic walking significantly reduces depression symptoms in as little as five weeks, trial finds.

Nordic walking: You know, walking with poles, like you’re cross-country skiing, not like you’re a wizard leading a party on a quest. Which would probably also help with depression unless your scrying indicated your quest was doomed to failure, but you have to try anyway.

Remember NordicTracks? They were a staple of television advertising at one point. They’re still around, part of a fitness conglomerate which has rejected my applications several times. But NordicTracking in your hovel is probably not the part that fights depression. One wonders if being part of a supervised study, thinking that you’re part of something greater than yourself even for a brief time, is enough to lift a bit of depression. But I’m not a researcher, just a blogger.

From time to time, a quote swirls around the Internet that goes like this:

These trees which he plants, and under whose shade he shall never sit, he loves them for themselves, and for the sake of his children and his children’s children, who are to sit beneath the shadow of their spreading boughs.

From a French sermon? Greek proverb? Regardless, one sign that I am ever an optimist and benefactor to the world is that I have often (annually) I plant a garden and don’t expect to get anything from it.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. This is: Last week, I bought a box of 500 #10 envelopes.

Ah, gentle reader. My favorite aunt died in, what, 2004? 2005? Not only did her death spur me to have a conversation with my beautiful wife about starting a family, but from her we inherited a set of #10 envelopes which lasted us for fifteen or eighteen years. When we ran out a couple years ago, my beautiful wife picked up a box of 40, and, several years later, we have again run low. So when shopping, I looked at the various options, and I selected the large box because it had the lowest per unit cost.

But the number of things we mail in #10 envelopes is diminishing.

I mean, I use 12 a year for credit card receipts. I mail out remittances for one or two bills every quarter that do not provide their own envelopes. My letters to my grandmother are generally too long to fit in anything but 6″ by 9″ envelopes.

So, likely, my heirs will inherit some, if not most, of these envelopes.

When I’ve gone to estate sales, the most depressing sight is always the partial cans of WD-40, the spice jars, the half-used cleaning products. No one ever wants to think that one might not use up and discard this retail commodity. But it will happen.

Hilarious Bookbinder writes on male competence and enumerates examples:

Competence is when you can do things like this, without much effort or fanfare:

• Change a car tire
• Change your car’s oil
• Perform minor bicycle repairs, including fixing a flat in the middle of a ride
• Install a new flapper valve in the toilet
• Replace a sink that is not built-in
• Rewire a lamp
• Install new lawnmower blades and replace the serpentine belt on a riding mower
• Assemble flat-pack furniture
• Drive a stick shift
• Cook a restaurant-quality meal beyond merely grilling burgers (although that too)
• Navigate by reading a map

Metacompetence is when you can do those things never having done them before. When you think, “this lamp needs rewiring. How hard can it be? I’ll figure it out.” Then you do, and it is no big deal. When you arrive at an unfamiliar foreign city with only a tourist map in your pocket and get around just fine. When you follow a recipe to make beef Wellington for the first time and it comes out like the picture. Life’s not a video game, and this isn’t about gaining skills to “level up.”

I nailed most of them. I’m not sure what “a sink that is not built in” means–I replaced the kitchen sink at Nogglestead not long after we moved in. Although everyone knows I cannot rewire a lamp without Nico’s help. I haven’t done the blades on my lawnmower, but I did replace the deck belt this year (again). And as far as restaurant quality meals, I don’t order steak out because I generally grill it better. And! I once made manicotti from scratch to impress a girl, including the pasta–which, to be honest, confused me–what is this eggs and flour and oil bit? Oh!

Although, again, to be honest, when assembling flat-packed furniture, I often install one thing upside down and have to redo it the right way. And on trips to New York and San Francisco, I’ve also gone in exactly the opposite direction of my intention. So maybe “metacompetence” is not my core competence after all.

The only thing I don’t actually know I can do is to fix a flat on a bike. I haven’t had a flat on a ride yet, but that’s probably because I haven’t ridden as much as I could have.

Still, I’m better by his reckoning than Robert Heinlein’s:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Ah, spring. The time of the year when the weather alert radio goes off, or not, when severe weather threatens.

This month, we’ve had several rounds of severe weather in southwest Missouri, which is normal. Last year, severe storms knocked down a hella lotta trees up north in one storm and then down south here in another, leaving broad swaths of the region without power for days or weeks (our turn came at the end of June). This year, we had a round of heavy hail which devastated the north part of the city, and recently we had a round of storms that included an EF0 tornado that touched down briefly on the eastern end of Battlefield, the town that begins across the farm road from me.

On that occasion, my weather radio did not alert, but my beautiful wife was upstairs and heard the sirens instead. Nothing but heavy rain here, enough to keep the swimming pool kinda full (the fact that we need heavy rain to keep the pool full is a worry for another day).

Then, on Saturday night, the weather radio went off just before midnight. In the dark, I button-mashed the top of the radio, hoping to get the voice messages, but I didn’t hit the right combo in the darkness and opted for rousing my family and getting them downstairs where I could check the Internet, maybe.

But the Internet indicated the tornado warning was for Barry County, south of here. I went back upstairs to check the radio, and I had button-mashed the text of the alert away so all I could see was the red light and the incorrect date and time. A red light could be anything–flood warning, severe thunderstorm warning, nuclear attack–I’ve squelched the klaxon for all of these, leaving only the tornado warning to alarum and awaken us. We remained downstairs for a while–everyone else ended up sleeping down there. When I came upstairs, the amber light was on, indicating a watch of some sort.

As I was getting to sleep, my phone blared:

Jiminy crickets! I de-bleared my eyes to read it, and it’s an IMMINENT THREAT ALERT that the James River was flooding and fast.

Ah, but gentle reader. I am not close to the James River, and this was not an immediate threat to me trying to sleep in my dry bed at 2:00 in the morning.

So the warnings for Nogglestead have been off-kilter this year. I’ll check the radio to see if it’s somehow gotten set so that we’re in Barry County or something. My wife wondered if it was because our Starlink internet jumps around IPs so that location detection picks us up elsewhere, but this is a radio, the old-timey device. So it’s either a bad setting in the radio or the trainees at the weather service are hitting the wrong buttons.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching the skies. Except at night, when most of our tornado warnings happen.

And note this is the only time I really miss “cutting the cord.” When we had tornado warnings in the past, we could go downstairs and flip on the television and watch the KY3 wall-to-wall coverage with immediate updates. I’ve got the weather app and the news apps on my phone, but they’re pretty useless in these instances–and they rely on the Internet, which gets hinky in storms because it’s trying to beam to the satellites through the clouds. Still, I don’t miss it a couple thousand dollars a year’s worth.

Ah, Rick and Friar, I don’t mean to demean your patronage here, but my primary “readers” (that is, data ingesters) continue to be clankers of one variety or another. Chinese LLMs consuming the blog hundreds of pages at a time or Facebook trying to “engage” me more.

Another data point for the hypothesis: yesterday, I post about a local Carnegie library. Today, Facebook shares a post about Carnegie branches all around the state:

Instead of showing me posts from, you know, people I’m connected to on Facebook. Because the machine is not making money showing me their posts.

When we first moved to southwest Missouri, the branch library in the next town over was in a storefront just over from the Walmart. They were building a new branch, and it opened not long after we settled. I took my young boys to several story time activities there, and it was our home branch for a couple of years before their schooling and other activities took us into Springfield every day. Fifteen years on, the library system decided the town needed a new branch, so they built a new one to replace the still newish (fifteen years old for a library? C’mon, man, like a church building, that’s a pup that has not yet developed character–not that either is built with character any more). Whilst it was being built, I applied for a part-time job as a shelver at that branch, thinking maybe librarian might make a good second career choice for me–probably not, given what modern librarianing is. I was actually called in for an interview, but I demurred–a friend’s daughter also applied for the position, and I didn’t want to take it from her.

So after the grand opening of the new building, my beautiful wife had an (overdue) book to return, so we stopped by the new building which features an auditorium, a computer lab, meeting rooms, and…. One room with books, a small set of shelves which looked like it had fewer books than the previous small branch had.

Last week, as part of the Summer Reading Program, one of the activities was to go to a different branch of the library. I don’t know whether to count the small town (but growing rapidly town, he added to keep the Chamber of Commerce people happy) or the Springfield-Greene County mothership branch as my home branch–I generally choose the mothership as my “home branch” when I fill out the Winter Reading Challenge forms, but over the last couple of years, I’ve only gone into the library to either pick up or return a reading challenge form.

Our travels took us through the middle part of the city (as we went to ABC Books and a street mural, another activity for the summer reading challenge), and we stopped by the Midtown Carnegie Branch. Ah, Carnegie. So you know what you’re in for: An older branch with character. We visited this branch in the summer of 2017, when the boys and I visited all the library branches as part of our own summer challenge (including far-flung branches in the northern part of the county in Ash Grove and Fair Grove, which is in a room at the fire station). This branch has also had an expansion, a modern graft onto the brick and mortar front of the building. When we entered from the rear, we had options to go up or to go down, and I said to the employee/volunteer (?) at the desk inside the door that I wanted to go up to the books, and I went up to find…. Again, fewer books than previously. I went to the philosophy section which was a single shelf, about 20 inches of books–in my previous visit, I picked up Daniel Klein’s Every Time I Find The Meaning Of Life, They Change It (which I just listened to as an audio book in December, so you might have recognized the title). The section was mostly pop-philosophy (not that the Klein was any different), but the total stacks, again, were, what, 12 or 20 sets of shelves? Not a hella lot for a middle-of-the-city branch, and not a lot of primary sources in the mix (I think I’ve written a screed on this before, but I couldn’t find it quickly).

Ah, general reader. I am not a library scientist, but my understanding of history is that, back in the olden days of centuries past, when books became more available, people put together private groups that would trade books amongst them, or private lending libraries made them available, or you could subscribe to lending libraries for cash, and public libraries were designed to democratize access to books for the public.

Ah, but nobody reads now–not many people–and libraries seem to have cast around for new missions to keep, you know, their employees employed. Which is now budget-intensive things like computer labs, maker spaces, and larger and larger meeting rooms and auditoriums (as well as training programs and, let’s be honest, a capex hit on providing me with mugs I rarely use). I should note here that the mothership branch has a decent set of stacks, but it, too, recently underwent an expansion. Not for more room for books, of course, but rather a larger auditorium for programs and, I suppose, to let.

Which is why I draw the comparison to convention centers, at least in terms of the need to refresh (technology, at least) every couple of years. To keep up with modern needs. Which, I reiterate, does not seem to be books.

Is the public library really, really necessary in the 21st century if it is not there to have stately buildings, safe spaces, and books?

You know, I am a fan of privately run community libraries who, run by volunteers and stocked by donations, made books available to the public. However, the ones that I have supported over the years have become public libraries–eager for the certainty of funding and access to, well, funding. I haven’t been to them lately, but I wonder if they have fewer books now that they’re public libraries? To be honest, I think that the Community Library in High Ridge, which I frequented when I was in high school, might have had stacks on par with the branches I visited this month.

So perhaps librarian is not the new career I am looking for. Maybe Library Board would be a better fit, where I could say, Are you serious? and No a lot. Which I’ve already trained for in a long career in software quality assurance.

Ah, gentle reader. Last September, in a haul of buck bundles of chapbooks and literary magazines, I got two copies of the Wingéd Lion, the literary magazine (at the time) from Missouri Southern State College (now MSSU) in Joplin.

The issues are dated Spring 1975 and Spring 1978. I would have expected the freshman and sophomores to be present in both, but we really only have a contribution from Sharon Rogers, a junior in 1975 and a senior in 1978 (a part-time student or a long-time student).

Oh, man, did they remind me of my high school literary magazine, Pen and Palette.

Both are landscape (11″ x 8½”) and are on heavy bond paper with heavy covers. The art styles match almost match–the 1970s ones are more in line with its times and the Pen and Palette art represented a lot of good art class projects. But I wondered if the style was shared with a lot of small college literary magazines–Mama Joy, the sponsor of the Northwest Writers club, would have been just about the age to have graduated college in the middle 1970s. After all, 1987, or first issue, was less than a decade after 1978. But, no. I checked the masthead to see if I knew any of the people in it, but also no, although one name, the woman who was both the junior and the senior, seemed familiar, but I couldn’t make a connection.

Ah, those literary journal days. I thought I could make it as a poet and a short story writer, maybe also a novelist, coming out of high school and going into college to write. Here are my contributions to Pen and Palette:

1987:
“A Model Murder”, a detective fiction short story.

1988:

• “Fall”, a poem
• “A Shocking Case of Murder”, another detective fiction short story. I had a bunch using the same characters with gimmick twists.

1989:

• “Shepherd: For Hire: The Sharp Kidnapping”, a satiric short story about a high school student who thinks he’s a detective. Not a true story, but in middle school, I wanted to start an in-school detective agency. I was serious.
• “Sonnet of Spring” which might have been my first sonnet, actually.
• “Tyrone Jackson: The Search for Maynerd”, a short story that a group of us wrote in Creative Writing class. It was a story in the round sort of thing, where each group wrote a bit and passed it to the next group. We inserted Tyrone Jackson into all of the stories. I wrote our original story as it should be told, and eventually I wrote a whole collection about this character. I have, of course, told this story before. In 2004. Which is closer to then than it is to now. Man, I wish I still had that binder.

1990:

• “Adventures and Exotic Places”, a short story with a real Walter Mitty vibe.
• “Stopping of a Poem by a Thought”, a satiric poem making light of a Robert Frost poem.
• “The Vigilante”, an unrelated crime short story.

I didn’t have anything in the 1991 or 1992 editions because I’d graduated by then–no three year gaps between my high school junior and senior years–but my brother was still in the writing group, and my sainted mother sponsored for two additional years.

My college, sorry, university, had a magazine which put out a literary “edition” which was a small separate digest in 1991 and 1992, but was rolled into the regular magazine as a supplement in the spring.

I had a poem in the 1991 edition (“a brash young man, ideas set…”) and a poem in the 1993 edition (“Listening to the Night”), but, boy, howdy, look at the table of contents in 1994:

Two of the three short stories (“An Aluminum Dream” and “Shepherd: At College” featuring the same character from the high school literary magazine). Six of the fifteen poems, including:

• “Chance Encounter”
• “Homecoming: A Collage”
• “View from a Railcar”
• “Upon the snowy pillow next to me…”
• “Falling Snow”
• “Third Floor Eyes”

Four sonnets, a long free verse narrative, and on general poem.

I did not win either of the cash prizes awarded–one for fiction and one for poetry–so maybe the lesson I should have taken from my experience is that it was easy to get published, but not so easy to get paid. Although I’m not finding it easy to get published these days in existing outlets that don’t have “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” or “Musings from Brian J. Noggle” in the title.

Aside from that, though, the main thing (which will be far briefer in account than the lesser thing of Look at me! I coulda been somebody! is how we students were swinging for the fences. Trying different themes, trying different genres (well, everyone except me who stuck to detective fiction mostly), different rhyme schemes and forms for poems…. Reading college literary magazines these days don’t seem as freewheeling.

Or maybe I’ll change my assessment as I get into additional magazines in the stack upstairs–but most of them are college literary magazines where the contributions come from outside the student body (ahem–from people like me). So they might prove to be fairly homogenous and, well, common.

Maybe I should take up a new hobby of prowling for college literary magazine that might contain writers who went on to bigger things. Almost as interesting as collecting gentlemen’s magazines with Stephen King stories, but with a little less nudity. Which is its own reward even if the investment in obscurity does not pay out.

As you know, gentle reader, I have been doing the Springfield-Greene County Library’s Winter Reading Challenge for, what, six years now? Yes–2021 was the first year. Each summer, too, the library has a Summer Reading Challenge, but I’ve shied away from them because they weren’t a reading challenge–instead of reading five books in fifteen categories in two months (or in all fifteen categories, as I am a stretch goaler), you read five books in three months but do five activities as well. Kid-kinda activities, even in the adult program.

So I’ve avoided it. Except for this year.

My beautiful wife mentioned it in passing, and so I looked at the flyer for it.

Activities included going to a different branch of the library than you normally do, going to the First Friday Art Walk…. downtown, I think?, downloading the library app, attending a book discussion, going to the Missouri Institute of Natural Science, or doing you own activity (up to three out of five can be your write-ins).

I would have dismissed it again, but….

Well, a couple of things. First of all, my youngest is also at a loose end. He graduated from high school, separated from his high school job, has been slow to hunt for another job, and is prone to spending all day playing Minecraft unless someone shanghais him into leaving the house. I had just done the thing last week, and we went to the co-op to pay our electricity bill, when (second of all) we passed right by the Missouri Institute of Natural Science.

It’s a small museum of paleontology and geology; when a road crew blasted its way into a cave (in the 21st century), they found fossils and whatnot and decided to preserve them. When I say it’s a small museum, I mean two rooms, essentially. When the boys were young, one summer I had free reign (I mean reign)–I was between contracts, and they were out of school for the summer in a time before I was not between contracts, and they spent their summers in daycare “summer camps” at various churches and whatnot. So that summer (after they spent a month in their own school’s “summer camp”), I took them to a lot of local attractions, museums, hiking trails, and bowling–lots and lots of bowling. When we visited then, MINS was only a single room. Ah, but where has the time gone?

I dragged the boy man to MINS, briefly–our visit was but thirty minutes, maybe, and part of that was me swapping old man stories with the old man volunteer who lives nearby. I have, what, three pictures from the trip? Different from the first one, but our digital photography strategy has changed. When the boys were young, we copied all the photos from the digital camera and later from the iPhone. But now, we take a couple of photos when we remember to, and we save only the best to conserve space on gigabytes and terabytes of hard drives. Mostly to save space on the backup devices, which are likely a decade or so behind current storage, although with the trends in current prices, soon they’ll be parate again.

So I started my Microsoft Publisher document for tracking books and activities (Publisher will live long enough for me to finish this reading challenge, as Microsoft is sunsetting it and making it impossible for me to access 30 years of .pub documents–ask me how I feel–but you can probably guess). And then…

The next week, we took a trip to ABC Books (not that one, but the one we mentioned in it. Since we were going to that corner of the city, we could hit another branch of the library–we chose the Midtown Carnegie Branch (can you tell where it came from?). I checked out a book, to be reported on when I finish it. After that, we went to the baseball stadium in town, formerly known as Hammons Field but now called Route 66 Stadium (or is it?) to get a photo by the public mural on it. Bang! We were already three activities in!

Over the weekend, we went to the Pickwick Street Fair. Well, briefly. I finally got to see Kristi Merideth, whose CD I got in in 2016 and whom I mentioned in 2018 had a child in school with mine. I say briefly because the crowds agitated the oldest, and neither of them was impressed that their elementary and middle school colleague was on the stage. Also, they had no seating within the event boundaries to enjoy the music–although we could have gone to the coffee shop next door and sat on the patio, but they were ready to go.

That’s four already, and it’s only the second week of June. Strangely, I am further behind on the books than the activities. And we will finish the activities for the summer reading program this week, probably. Which means I will turn in my “game board” next week and get the unnamed prize.

I have encouraged my youngest to participate as well since I’m dragging him along to the events. And, you know what? I’ll probably find activities for the both of us to tear us away from the computer on the days until he gets a job, I get a job, or he starts his in-person college classes. It will be good for both of us. Mostly me, as it also allows me to return to a summer with two knockabout boys that we spent doing things together.

Now, what should we do today? Plant a summer flower (or flowers) together to complete the reading challenge? Go bowling and to the nature center, just like the old days but just the two of us? The summer reading challenge has suddenly prompted us to the possibilities.

I am not the Imelda Marcos of hats, gentle reader, but I have accumulated some in my time, and, at Nogglestead, they (and those owned by the other members of the family) tend to gather in two places.

One, the top of the video game in my office, is where my hats end up.

This is where I put hats which I do not wear often. A lot of times, these include hats I’ve bought on vacations to cover my balding head.

The collection includes:

• A cheesehead.
• The boonie hat I just bought in Florida last month.
• The paper hat I bought in Arkansas in 2023.
• Three (3) grey fedoras that I have bought at garage sales over the years before re-learning that grey is not really my color. One of these might actually be the first fedora I got while in college, which I wore when writing my first novel.
• Two (2) black fedoras that were my daily wear fedoras before they wore out–one has a hole at the top of the crown at the front, where you grab a hat to take it off. The other does not seem to hold its shape.
• Another straw hat with the Island Beach brand name on it, which probably indicates I also bought it in Florida.
• A little Tyrolean (Alpine) hat which I bought at Friestatt’s Ernte Fest a couple years ago (maybe 4 now?).
• Three (3) NRA caps which I got for renewing my memberships over the years.
• A John Deere cap which probably came with my lawnmower–I cannot imagine actually buying one. Oh, I see the back says Owner’s Edition, so, yeah, I got that sixteen years ago when I bought the
• A Canada cap which my mother-in-law bought for me as a souvenir on one of her driving trips probably fifteen years ago. Or twenty. They’re about the same when you reach a certain age.
• A youth-sized Green Bay Packers cap.
• A white Springfield Cardinals cap which I bought as part of a bundle at a silent auction or at the ballpark.
• A Springfield Cardinals 2012 champs cap (ibid.).
• A Milwaukee Brewers cap which I bought on one of the trips to the Dells–probably 2017. It was the go-to cap for a while, but it has gotten stained, so it’s in the… collection, I guess?
• A St. Louis Blues hat which I bought back when we were DINKs who went to a lot of Blues games.
• A Missouri State ball cap which I bought to wear to…. The one football game we went to a decade or so back? Or one of the two Ice Bears games we went to over the years (and widely spaced, which is unfortunate since the tickets are inexpensive).
• A SparkCon hat I got as swag at the Walmart Cybersecurity Conference the first time I went. Pretty sure it was not this year.
• The Confederate hat I got after my father died.

Jeez, Louise, that’s 24 hats. More than I expected when I started writing this post. They were not only atop the game but behind it, as the top of the video game was a frequent destination for the kittens (and the cats still hop up there from time to time). The hats need blocking, and they’re all covered with dust and cat hair. To be honest, if I’d written this post last week, many of them would have ended up in the Lutherans for Life rummage sale. Like the probably youth-sized bucket hat I’d hoped to take to Florida (but it was youth-sized, probably not shrunken via washing as I said earlier).

Atop the refrigerator, hats also accumulate.

This is where I put the hats I wear regularly, including:

• My current black fedora.
• The current paper hat, if any–currently, it’s the ladies resort hat I bought last month in Florida.
• The Big Cedar Lodge cap I bought at our aborted vacation last year where it kept the rain off more than the sun.

The rest of the family keeps their caps up there as well. These include:

• A Missouri State Pride Band cap that my beautiful wife got at one of their reunions.
• A Dennis Hanks Chevrolet hat. That was my mother-in-law’s car dealer. Not sure if it came with the Chevy when she downsized or if she gave it to one of the boys at some time or another.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from conferences.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from my oldest son’s current employer, brought back from his time behind the booth in Florida last month.
• A SparkCon cap with less cat fur on it than mine.
• A tech company swag cap which is for my wife’s company. Not sure how many of those she got or if it was a free sample when she ordered other swag.

Ah, gentle reader. As with book accumulation points, sometimes hat accumulation points get decommissioned. Not depicted in this post: The pile of hats which had been in the garage.

For a long time, I had a pile of hats on the little desk in the garage which included:

• The hat I wore to the range in 2008–what was that company’s name? Something-care–I know TimBob, Jack Straw’s friend and who visited this blog in those early days, where “early” means five years into it.
• A Netscape hat whose logo was off-center.
• The cap I got when visiting the bay area and which served as my painting cap for a multi-year turn around the fence.
• A Queen City Roofing Materials cap which I bought when we first moved here. I guess I wanted to be more locally authentic or something.
• Several (?) other straw or brush hats that I’d bought on various vacations and intended for gardening use.
• A Dogwood Canyon cap bought on one of our trips to Big Cedar or Branson where we went further south for an expensive walk.

And probably a couple of others I forget.

As part of the multi-year garage cleaning project, I gathered them and boxed them for a donation–and they remained in a box or two awaiting an opportunity to donate them (which was this Monday, as I mentioned). I did wear some of the straw hats while gardening from time-to-time, but got into the habit of just putting on my most-recently-too-stained-for-going-out cap since the noise-canceling-but-music-blasting headset can fit over a ball cap but not a fully brimmed hat. My current cap is my previous Big Cedar Lodge cap. The garage might also have another cap stashed somewhere for the other lawnmower riders to use, but most of those aforementioned caps are in the Trinity Lutheran gym (or are in a dumpster nearby).

My goodness, that is a lot of hats. And an awful lot of words about the hats. But most of them are personal relics now, pointers to past events to cue my memories.

Welp, in researching this post, I discovered a similar sentiment in 2024 (It Almost Feels Like I’m Giving Up). But I have done it. Well, that’s a pronoun without a proper antecedent.

So: The Lutherans for Life annual yard sale started accepting donations yesterday, and we took 17 boxes (and one piece of furniture) in two trips up to the Trinity Lutheran Church gym. We were not the only ones to deliver on day 1: On both of our trips, we encountered several other trucks with various (smaller) loads, although there was a U-Haul rented for such an occasion that we maneuvered around on our second visit.

17 boxes. Enough for a yard sale of our own, actually, which is atypical; usually, when taking things for the Redeemer Youth Garage sale (discontinued several years ago) or the Lutherans for Life sale, we have a couple of boxes. This stack comes from a couple of sources:

• We missed last year for some reason.
• I culled children’s videos from our library. Ah, when we had young babies, I started collecting kid’s movies on home media, DVDs and videocassettes, to watch with them or to play for them to entertain them. It was a thing, you know. You hear stories about kids watching films and wearing VHS tapes out. But: When we moved to Nogglestead, the video library was downstairs, and we kept the boys upstairs most of the time because the home offices were on the lower level. AND: We had DirecTV with built-in digital video recording capabilities, so we captured Sesame Street, Yo Gabba Gabba, Word Girl, a variety of craft shows, and other PBS works on hard drives, and those were our go-to watching entertainment–or child distractions, anyway. So we did not watch most of the videos at all. So I gathered a box of the things we didn’t watch and probably won’t, even with grandchildren, but preserved others (the entire G.I. Joe cartoon series and selections from The Muppet Show and related movies, for example. But a box or a box and a half of old media.
• The children’s books that I did not reclaim and which we did not keep for grandchildren when culling my youngest son’s library in January. So two or three boxes of books.
• Things from the garage, which I have been cleaning out for…. Three years now?

Ah, gentle reader: That is what feels like giving up (as I mentioned in 2024 and will recount again). I recycled a bunch of glass and bottles back in 2024, and I did not have only one bin to go through in 2024.

About a decade or fifteen years ago, I got the notion to drill holes into plates to insert clock movements into them. I did it with a couple of kid’s plates and trays and one or more ceramic plates.

So I bought a lot of plates and trays at garage sales (and a couple of hubcaps) and made clocks out of a few of them…. But, as with many of the things I was making, I came to a ceiling of sorts: I have a short circle of people to whom I give (gave) gifts, and I really didn’t have the confidence to make an Etsy shop or rent a craft or antique mall booth. So, I shifted to another hobby or craft so to give my Christmas gift recipients some variety. And I boxed a couple of things to spring on church’s silent auctions, although we don’t tend to have those any more, either.

I also mentioned (8 years ago) etching and painting wine bottles. Well, I also accrued many clear vases, wine glasses, and other clear glass to work on. And…. Well, I donated them to the Lutherans for Life yard sale. After a decade or so in the garage, they were covered with dust and cobwebs. And I did not take time to clean them.

I had gathered a lot of frames for various things. I had made pressed flowers from the gardens of Nogglestead with a mirror background (cut down from a mirrored tile or small mirror), so I bought a bunch of frames, expecting I would make many other things like the gift I gave to Gloria after she came to visit–and which she sent back shortly before she died. But I didn’t, and those microwave-pressed flowers have faded on the parlor wall since. But I had boxes of frames and shadowboxes and small mirrors.

Ah, gentle reader, as I rummaged through the boxes, pre-rummaging for the rummage salers to come, I wanted to keep all of it.

But I didn’t. I packed several boxes of frames and of glassware for the garage sale. A box or two of oddball plates I’d accumulated, some with thrift store prices written on them or garage sale stickers.

I did keep the wood, the plaques, and the various articles I bought for woodburning. I saved the mirrors because I might want to put them in technological devices in the future. And I saved some frames because I might use them (and because I would have had to move the electric smoker to get to bottom shelf, and I didn’t have time for that yesterday).

Who knows? Perhaps the room in the garage will give me time to work on projects. I think my beautiful wife would like to park a second vehicle in our three car (three cars in the middle 1980s, so three small cars) garage.

But, yet. So much reified potential lost. Of course, the decade and a half where these things went unused was also lost. And continue to be lost.

Until I go back later this month and buy it all back.

Okay, not exactly true, but we did have a church potluck yesterday, and a couple-three weeks ago, I thought I should learn to make deviled eggs because they’re beloved at these things, second perhaps only to the triune God celebrated on Trinity Sunday as it happened to be. I mean, you can usually count on three or four people making deviled eggs, and if you get there two minutes after the pastor says the blessing, you ain’t getting any.

Since I happen to like the one or two deviled eggs available when I get there in time and when I push Gladys and Milt, those codgers, out of the way, I thought (angels singing “aw-aw” and a light shining down from heaven or there abouts, or perhaps just the sun coming out after a week of rain) that maybe I could bring in some deviled eggs. After all, I’m comfortable with baking them to make hard-cooked eggs in quantity. I did just subsist on (it seemed) hard-cooked eggs for the Whole30 diet in January. So that’s not the thing.

So, a couple-three weeks ago, I hard-cooked two dozen eggs (one Sam’s Club pack), and I tried the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (sized for 6 eggs). And I subbed in three kinds of mustard: Yellow, Dijon, and Horseradish. For the final set, I used the alternate Italian-style recipe with Italian creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese. And I labeled them and put them in the refrigerator, only to re-discover that my boys, raised Lutheran, don’t like deviled eggs. So I went through them and decided that I liked the Italian recipe ones best.

BUT: I took ill about then. I thought, “Oh, no, I bollixed the eggs.” I feared not only for my futures at potlucks but for my upcoming vacation. But! My beautiful wife also had a tetch about the same time, and she is the remainder of the household who does not like eggs.

SO: Alright, vacation saved, but this week approached, and I had some older (but good, I hoped) eggs in the refrigerator. So I baked them on Friday, thinking of deviling them to try out recipes. But, day-um, the most tedious part of making deviled eggs is peeling the eggs. I baked them, and then I spent a long time taking (most of) the shells off, and…. Well, I was not in the mood to devil them any longer. So, as in the Whole30 period of my life, I set them aside to eat them for meals and snacks, and….

Well, nobody brought deviled eggs today. I brought a double helping of pasta salad and a chocolate pudding pie, preparation of which was easier given the Sunday choreography of picking up my mother-in-law for service, accommodating my wife who had to speak at a church business meeting after service, picking her up after her speaking, and getting things prepared just so for church, I abandoned the plan of deviled eggs. I did, however, have one of the peeled hard-cooked eggs available for this photo. And then I ate the photo subject. Because I am not wasteful.

Given that nobody brought deviled eggs (or potato salad, jeez Louise, these modern Lutherans and their pizza provided and store-boughten coleslaw), I’m thinking of working to perfect and to get comfortable with my Italian deviled egg recipe.

But not in the near term. I feel like I’m living the slow-motion equivalent of the Cool Hand Luke bet scene (I haven’t seen the film, but perhaps I should look for it) where he has to eat 50 hardboiled eggs at once. Ask me now, and I’m not eager to eat another even though I have six remaining in the refrigerator.

Maybe if I did it in moderation, but: I have a lot of Lutherans to feed. Also, let’s hope for a good potato crop, because apparently I am also in charge of the potato salad now.

In a review of Sue Klebold’s book A Mother’s Reckoning (her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine, Colorado, school shooting), Holly Math Nerd might well indict me:

The Klebolds were running a parenting operating system that is extremely common in non-poor American households — and I suspect it is the dominant mode in middle-class white America — and the system was running as designed.

The problem was not malfunction.

The problem was the system itself, and what it cannot do.

I am going to call this mode role-execution parenting, because performative parenting sounds like an accusation of phoniness and that is not what I mean. Role-execution parenting is sincere. It is loving. It is competent. It is the mode in which parents identify the tasks and milestones and observable indicators of good parenting, execute them well, and treat successful execution as evidence that the parenting itself is succeeding.

Feed the child nutritious meals. Read to the child at bedtime. Drive the child to soccer practice. Attend the parent-teacher conferences. Set bedtimes and curfews. Provide structure. Provide opportunities. Provide consequences when warranted. Provide praise when earned. Do the things the parenting books say to do, with sincerity and attention.

Most American parents who are not poor are running some version of this mode. It mostly works. Most children raised in it grow up reasonably well.

Ah, gentle reader. My youngest just turned 18 and graduated from high school. My oldest has gotten a job which should allow him to move out on his own. And how have I done with them? How can I know?

Role-execution parenting tends not to develop the skills of interior attunement — the slow, patient, often uncomfortable practice of being present to a child’s internal weather independent of the child’s external performance.

To be honest, I am not sure what this means. Of course, I think that you cannot really know someone aside from their actions–I believe the oldest actually asked me about something like this based on something he’s recently read or has seen in an Internet video.

And I’ll never know how I’ve done as a parent because I’ll hopefully never know how their entire lives have gone.

The lottery machine was down at the grocery store this afternoon, so I could not buy a Powerball ticket. Ah, gentle reader, this is where I am in my career now: No full time job, but playing the lottery.

Ah, but the scratch-off vending machines were operational. My youngest doesn’t understand why I didn’t pick one of them. He’s just 18, and he bought a scratch-off himself once, but that’s all he’s interested in.

I’ve never been a fan of scratch-offs. Why? Because I’m not a Calvinist.

When you buy a scratch-off ticket, it is or it is not (probably not) a winner. But when you buy a numbers drawing ticket, you are not a loser until the numbers are drawn in the future. So you’re spending that (ever-increasing) dollar total on possibility, not actuality.

Perhaps the explanation was not the best.

As I mentioned, I read almost a year’s worth of Readers Digest magazine last week (that year being 2024-2025), and I have been thinking about the experience this week.

I found myself on several occasions telling my beautiful wife about something I read in the magazine. That doesn’t happen with what I read on the Internet; mostly, I read political blogs and Substacks, and the news media I read tends to lean toward crime and celebrity. Instapundit has some science links and sometimes music links to innumerable Matt Margolis PJ Media pieces, but, man, I miss general interest magazines.

Readers Digest has “Drama in Real Life”, the various humor sections (now overtaken by reprinted and perhaps uncompensated tweets–remember the old days when they paid hundreds of dollars per anecdote?), some health bits, generally a bit about food (November is good for reminding us where cranberries come from, which is generally Wisconsin), “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” (which I just scan looking for words I don’t know–generally, I know 14 or 15 of the 15 unless they have a strange theme), and so on. Every month it runs a piece on “The National Interest” which is a touch to the left of the spectrum, but not crazy. Things like “Teachers don’t make enough money and are leaving the field” (touching mostly on the money, not the institutional flaws which also might account for it). And a lot of articles still mention climate change, although that will probably diminish over time. Even though it was 2024, nothing hammered on Trump or lauded Biden–Elizabeth Warren got a shout out from someone who got scammed out of $30,000 as she (Warren) agitated and/or legislated some customer protections, but probably not the kind that says “Don’t Venmo thousands of dollars based on a text message from an unknown number.”

You know, newsstands used to be full of magazines with this sort of content. Lighthearted, light weight often, varied, and generally interesting. Even at the high end, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker proffered longer but varied bit which I often read cover to cover.

But those have all gone leftwing nutso after the turn of the century (when George W. Bush was the worst thing in the world). I gave up my subscription to The Saturday Evening Post about a decade ago when its contents got to be a little one-sided (see this for example). National Review used to have decent book reviews and pop culture stuff, but I let that lapse when it went all anti-Trump and started shifting its editorial viewpoint to match the full page Google ads–First Things kind of fills this void now, one of the two magazines I subscribe to now (New Oxford Review being the other, although I get the NRA, Ducks Unlimited, AAA, and electric co-op magazines for free).

I don’t have a current Readers Digest subscription–I let it lapse because they sent me constant reminders to renew my subscription before my subscription was lapsing–and sometimes, I ended up paying ahead for a couple years because I was not attentive. But maybe I’ll resubscribe if I get another card sometime soon.

Or, maybe, I should not and instead focus on clearing out the drawer full of decade (or more)-old magazines which piled up. History magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, even Beer magazine…. I probably have First Things and National Review magazines from the Obama administration in there somewhere. Maybe, with enough vacations, I can catch up on them.

But I probably won’t mention tidbits from them in conversation.

How’s the job hunt going, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I got two No buttons whilst on vacation and one right after I got home.

I did, however, get a HOT HOT HOT lead while on vacation. How hot?

I had some recruiter I’d never heard of reach out to me last Tuesday with four emails (with different subject lines), two phone calls, and a text message in a short period of time.

Seems legit.

Nothing seems legit in the whole process these days, ainna? You scream try to explain your value to an indifferent void, you get a couple of screener interviews and wonder if they’re just doing it so that they can say, “Nah, we need an H1B,” and then you do it again tomorrow.

So, onto tomorrow. Which is today.

As the philosopher said.