Category: Life

In addition to the fireplace replacement saga (current status: waiting for an estimate on chimney work tomorrow, and it’s supposed to rain all next week, so our best case might be twice the estimate and done by Christmas), a couple of other things have recently gone sideways at Nogglestead this month.

• The heating element on the oven might have failed, again.
  I mean, I hope it’s the element. I tried to cook a frozen pizza a week ago because during the demolition and vain attempts at fireplace replacement followed by more demolition, my beautiful wife has decamped a couple of times so she could work without power tools in the background. Which means my diet has been sandwiches and tortillas with melted cheese in them. I tried the frozen pizza for a bit of variety, but it didn’t cook. The lower element is not getting hot, so hopefully it’s just the element, again. I replaced it just this January, and although I ordered a spare at that time, it arrived bent. As so many of them do–the Amazon sellers pack them in thin cardboard boxes, and they bend in transit. I guess we will see this weekend if I get an unbent spare. But the failure rate on these seems to be increasing to less than a year now. We’d need to remodel the whole kitchen to replace the existing oven, and all of our budget for anything is going into the chimney replacement–except for a hope that the $45 heating element from Amazon arrives unbent.
   
• My computer is having troubles.
  I bought a relatively high-powered computer last April when I was still working two part-time contracts and expected to be a developer who needed high-end processing power. It’s got 64GB of RAM and a nice video card that’s not at all taxed playing 20-year-old Civilization IV (unlike the computers at the time). However, now that it’s out of warranty and now that the components have gotten ludicrously expensive, it has started rebooting and shutting down unexpectedly. It’s not a software exception doing it, so it’s hardware. I’ve done some research on it, and the Internet recommends I reseat the RAM and video card to see if it fixes it. So eventually did crack it open. The video card is one of those new-fangled two-slotters screwed in at the case/slot and on a rail in the middle of the machine. The RAM is seated such that the video card blocks the release tabs on one side. So I kinda pressed down on the cards and sticks, put it back under the desk, and…. It started restarting at a greater cadence. So I set it on its side on my desk, messed with it again, and left it there for a couple of days. It did not restart, so I thought…. Huh, what if I put it on its side so gravity was holding things in better? It’s a redneck solution, but it just might work.
  

  It did not work. It’s not rebooting several times a day now, but it is still rebooting. This would be more of a problem if I were doing anything worth anything at the computer, but I’m mostly not right now. It wouldn’t be a problem at all, really, as when I built it, I reset my previous troubled computer which made great wheezing sounds at times and which took forty minutes or an hour to reboot. And the reset seems to have fixed the problems. So I could reduplicate my needs on it, but: The Microsoft authentication system (Entra?) is, pardon my French, merde. I am not sure what account my things are tied to, and I am not sure if I can even log into them since I deleted Microsoft Authenticator from my phone because I didn’t know what I used it for. To log into my Microsoft account, which I do, what, every couple of years? Not any more. Eh, one of these days, I’ll have to do something, because someday I might have a video interview or a job or something where that becomes important.
   

• The damned soap dispenser thing.
  The soap dispenser in the master bath–we only had one with dual sinks–was starting to fail. The pump was getting clogged with dried soap. So I thought about replacing them but the things offered at Walmart have gotten cheaper and more ticky-tack in the decade since I bought this glass one. When it intermittently failed last week, I thought I would go to the new Target up US 160 to see what they had. Monday was a day the contractors were not scheduled to come (when they come on days they’re not scheduled to come and come, I often have to rush home to let them in, contrasted with days when they’re scheduled to come but do not), so I went up. And I splurged on two soap dispensers and two toothbrush holders, a his and hers. Which matched. Clear glass, nothing too fancy but $13 a pop anyway. And when I got home, one of the pumps did not work. Bloody hell. I had filled the soap bottle already, and I’m not returning it full.

  So I went back to Target today to pick up another one. I figured I’d swap the pumps and return the new dispenser with the faulty pump. But, of course, they did not have any more clear ones. So I bought a green glass one, but: The pump is a different color.

  

  I think we will roll with it because the damned thing works. Now, do I return the other one? It’s $14.05 with tax, an hour round trip up US 160 out of our general routes to our general destinations. In the olden days, I would have said no, but $14 is more than I make in an hour right now, so….
   

• I got sick.
  We were supposed to see the masonry crew chief on Tuesday about an estimate, and the fireplace guy was supposed to come clean up after punching the hole in the chimney. But they didn’t show. So, on Wednesday, I decided I was going to have a normal day, dammit. I was going to do the networking group thing in the morning and a martial arts class of some stripe in the afternoon or evening. Throughout the whole chimney affair, I have had a helluva time getting to a martial arts class or to the gym, and I am basically melting into a middle-aged man over here. So, pumped up an uplifting book I am reading, I was going to have a normal day on Wednesday. But, dammit, I got sick.

  I don’t often get sick, gentle reader (knock on pressboard). Once every couple of years I’ll feel punky enough to put on a stocking cap during the day, and this was it. Overnight on Tuesday I developed a sore throat and some difficult in swallowing and a cartoonish voice. Although, with the throat clearing, I talked a little gravelly voice. Which lead me to announcing to my cats several times, “I have been, and always shall be… your friend.” as well as extolling Utilitarianism. Which is how the cats knew I was sick. Ah, you know, nobody here would get the reference. The local cinema had a deal to celebrate Star Trek’s anniversary to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home back to back for $20, and I didn’t go. But I didn’t have to to remember the quotes.

  Fortunately, it looks to have been a 24-hour virus; I’m already feeling better. Not sure that I want to go to martial arts classes just yet, but maybe Saturday. Unfortunately, my dying Spock impression is no longer so good, but my dying tauntaun impression remains spot on.

Sometimes, it just feels like the whole saddle blanket is burrs. But what a metaphor that is; it’s mostly unpleasant for the horse, not the rider.

Eh, I have meat, I have a roof over my head (someday, maybe, to be a new roof if we have any money left), I have books to read, and I have to believe someday I’ll be able to kindle a fire to enjoy.

I updated my app Goal-Task-Chore:

New features include:

• Defer to-do list items for a number of days if you know you won’t get to them today.
• Pause chores you won’t need to do for a while but don’t want to delete and lose–things like seasonal chores (clean pool, mow lawn) or normal chores you won’t do on vacation.
• History view to help you answer the question, “What did I do all day?”
• Improvements to editing and deleting chores–specify whether to do so for the current instance on the to-do list or all future instances.

Of all the apps I have written, this is the one I use the most.

Ah, gentle reader, you might have seen some asides in other posts about how we’re having a fireplace replaced, and that it’s not going well. I was going to write a wrap up post after it was done, documenting the stages, but…. it definitely feels like it will never get done.

You remember the fireplace from happier times.

Also, perhaps luckier times. Continue reading “Fireplace Replacement: The Saga So Far” →

I’ve added a couple of things to the donation boxes:

I got the Braun shaver twenty-some years ago when I went into the office every morning downtown. I figured if I got an electric shaver, then I could shave while reading blogs before work. However, I switched back to disposable razors probably twenty-some-minus-three-or-so years ago, and it’s been gathering dust in my closet ever since. Looking at my Amazon history, I bought twelve cleaner refill packs in 2009 and I used two of them. So I guess I was using the electric shaver at Nogglestead, but not for long. I remember from my Ebay days that a lot of estate sales had electric shavers available. Well, not mine.

I took a glance at Ebay to see what Braun shavers are going for, and…. I dunno, whole kits go for a hundred or two hundred dollars, I suppose, depending. Should I get back into the lifestyle or rent a booth at Relics? Sometimes, things like this make me wonder.

Next to it, also from the closet, is a little clear plastic container and a six pound box of colored sand for sand art projects. I might have bought the equipment after reading Sand Art in 2012. Perhaps I even thought it would be a good project to do with my boys. Ah, how many art supplies I bought and thought I’d do projects with them, but I only did it a couple of times. I remember cutting out pieces of construction paper and making mosaics with them, and another year we made little Sculpey Christmas ornaments that were so thin that I glued them to a painted plaque instead. That plaque is still part of our holiday decor, although bits of the thin ornaments are breaking off now. Ah, what did I fill my days with then? Reading blogs and posting on 24thState.com (now defunct, a long time gone), probably. And then they were in school. But maybe they remember some of it, but not sand art.

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about the books and records (and swords) I acquire; I guess I’ll spend a little time musing on the things I let go from time to time.

Ghost jobs. Scams. Rolling job posts for places that are not really hiring but would be happy to have your information if they do. H1B posts, where they just want to prove to the government that American citizens cannot do the job. Job platforms whose goal is for you to respond to their “job posting” to enter your information in their system, and they’ll apply to a job with someone else and then count you as one of their users for financial touts and then spam you three times a day with links to jobs you’ve already seen and/or applied for (but the links are to their platform, and if you apply through them, it’s success for them whether or not your application gets kicked out for being submitted by a third party–and your individual application gets kicked out, too).

Oh, and copy-and-paste errors from companies who might actually be hiring.

You see this in URLs, where job postings are appended with -clone, and the job posting title and responsibilities are nothing like those that would have been cloned. You get repeated questions, especially the demographic ethnicity/sex(erm, gender)/disability/veteran status questions, sometimes in two different forms (dropdown-lists and checkboxes). And, once in a while, a knockout question that should not apply to the job you’re applying for.

Like a QA job whose requirements are:

Essential Functions

• Design and execute comprehensive test plans and test cases for new features and system enhancements.
• Lead regression testing efforts to ensure stability across releases.
• Collaborate with developers, product managers, and business analysts to clarify requirements and resolve design issues.
• Document and manage detailed defect reports, including reproduction steps and severity assessments.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and contribute to sprint planning and retrospectives.
• Maintain and enhance automated UI and API test suites.
• Analyze test results and provide actionable feedback to development teams.
• Contribute to the development and documentation of QA processes and standards.
• Mentor junior QA testers and support their professional development.

Education and Experience

• Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree in an IT-related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software QA testing, preferably in healthcare or financial services.
• Experience working within Agile frameworks and collaborating with cross-functional teams.
• Hands-on experience with front-end test automation tools and frameworks; Playwright preferred.
• Hands-on experience with back-end (API and database) testing, including load testing tools; JMeter preferred.
• Hands-on experience testing mobile applications using tools such as LambdaTest.

Skills

• Proficiency in SQL and working with relational databases.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong critical thinking skills, including the ability to analyze data, interpret requirements, draw logical conclusions, and develop effective solutions to complex problems.

And a question on the application, probably a knockout question, is:

Do you have at least 3 years of experience in Microsoft cloud engineering, endpoint management, systems administration, or a related role?

Well, I have an A+ certification which is so old that the A+ people don’t recognize it any more (more like Alpha+, amirite?), I’ve had networking and sysadmin classes (albeit in the 1900s, essentially, so onboard computers for horse-driven traps–and the fact that he uses “traps” instead of “carts” or “buggies” underscores how old he is!), and I have managed home networks and devices on those networks in a variety of Windows versions as well as Linux and Mac. And I have recently done a “computer repair” which I might recount which would have Rob beating me with a helmet like General Patton (perhaps to be recounted soon).

I could not say “yes” to this question because my experience was not professional, and so the resume might not go from the ATS to the ATS AI much less anyone who could interpret what’s on my resume.

I’ve written about knockout questions before. I’ve also started thinking that my resume might look fake in 2026 because it’s filled with companies that don’t exist any more.

Oh, the things I’ve seen, and, oh, the things I see.

As I mentioned, I cleaned my office closet and discarded shredded some old papers (but not the box of old, printed out letters that I sent to various family members over the decades and the emails that my beautiful wife sent me when she initially reached out to me in 1997).

Well, I discarded some things I’ve had for decades as well. Continue reading “Discards, Decades Later” →

I have cleaned my office closet, which has been an archeological dig, sort of.

One of the blockers to cleaning my closet was taking care of a bin of old notepads. For almost 40 years, I’ve carried pocket notepads and my leather binder (the one on the cover of Coffee House Memories, which I still carry to coffee shops and other events where I might want to take notes). And I’ve always saved the notepads in case scholars wanted to dig through my archives to study how my poems evolved. Because, in my 20s, I considered the possibility that I might be a major figure in American letters, and even though I was already then raging against political correctness, I cognitatively dissidented the two possibilities might be true. Not that political correctness has kept me from ascending the heights of literature; being lazy and a jackwagon did most of that.

But: I kept them anyway in case I wanted to go over them myself someday. But the time came to clean the closet–after all, it’s been on my to-do list app for months, and I’ve had a box of school supplies from the closet for the whole summer, it seems. I hope to donate to the Lutheran school here, but I’m afraid they will say no, and I will have to discard a pile of construction paper, unused two-pocket folders, cardstock, and etc. Or worse yet, I’ll put it back in my closet to languish until my heirs have to deal with it.

And…. Continue reading “Well, I’ve Done It” →

Looks like officials are reading my review of Mary Baker Eddy’s poetry:

On the plus side, if we get into a rumble, I can go to the emergency room, and they cannot.

Also, who even gets counted by Statcounter these days? LLMs learning and Christian Scientists.

Jordan Valley Health is a community health provider in the Springfield area. We’ve only been to one once, when we absolutely had to have an incoming high school senior get a Meningococcal vaccine the week before he was scheduled to start.

In the old days, which was up to a couple of weeks ago, the logo had some loosely botanical thing going on the the V in Valley:

But they’ve (expensively) redone all their signs and logos to feature…. A mama bear and cub or something?

Every time I pass one, I think it’s a veterinary office. Even the one in Republic where my son got his shot.

Since I have joined a Springfield, Missouri, Facebook group run by an acquaintance and have slowed scrolling to read Ozarks Alive captions, Facebook thinks I should see all the regional groups and whatnot. Even when they’re not real. Like a colorful autumn photo purportedly in Joplin, with oranges, yellows, and reds. C’mon, man, they had the same extremely dry September that we had, and their trees this year are going to go from dull green to brown if they have not already (although in the northern part of the state, I presume it will be better since they had copious amounts of rain throughout the summer).

But what in the fresh hell is this?

I guess some of those names are right, but the James River is not that big and does not run through Springfield, and….

Yeah, no, that is not Springfield, and I’m not sure what the point is of mocking something like that up. Trying to sell some sort of travel slop to people who aren’t from here? Who knows.

It was quiet last week here as I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a conference: Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Midwest Conference, known to me as CMMC, uh, MC. What is CMMC? Well, in a nutshell, it is a process for Department of War contractors to prove that their technologies, processes, and practices adhere to certain different standards of security. It’s adjacent to what used to be my mainline, software quality assurance, but my wife is big into it and has a string of letters on her LinkedIn profile and many fine remunerative contract opportunities so long as the Federal government keeps pushing for it. Which it sometimes is, sometimes isn’t. But I had a chance to learn something, and I had a chance to get away for a couple of days with a beautiful woman, so I took it.

The conference was in downtown Tulsa, so we stayed at the Hyatt Regency on Second Street. The textures from our window:

That’s looking northeast from our room which was on the southern edge of the building. The Hyatt Regency has a walkout basement thing going on; Third Street is a floor higher than Second Street, so the little parkway below just north of the building is a parking garage that serves the hotel and the performing arts center. I presume Tulsa or someone offered some green roof tax credits or something, because I saw a lot of them downtown.

Downtown Tulsa wasn’t full of older buildings like you get in some places. It’s not like downtown Springfield which has a bunch of brick buildings clustered together in a fairly small footprint. We didn’t ramble too far–from just north of the BOK Center to, what, Detroit or Cincinnati Street and Second Street to Cameron (once) but mostly Archer. An early review of the history made me think the older part of town was elsewhere, but the train tracks and the train depot are within this grid, so I guess it was a relatively small town until the oil boom in the 20th century, so most of the buildings are relatively new.

We got in on Wednesday afternoon, walked a bit to find the place where the conference was held, had a nice dinner at Ti Amo, which is right near the BOK Center arena, home of the minor league hockey team and host for nationwide touring act concerts. We met up with some CMMC professionals at Cabin Boys up on Main and Cameron, our furthest venture from our hotel, a walk in a warm rain. On Thursday, the conference had a full day. I, however, did not attend the whole day, opting to play hooky for a couple of sessions to walk up to Magic City Books, a new book store (that is, it sells new books–I guess the store itself is a decade old). I was looking for a regional or local history book, but it didn’t really have “a history of Tulsa” books. Wicked/Highway 66 books, some academicish books, and Prairie City by Angie Debo, which offers a “composite” of similar towns, I guess? What the book store did have was a shelf-sized display of books (dozens) on the Tulsa Race Massacre, a 1921 event which left many black (and white) residents of the Greenwood section of the town dead. Poor Springfield only had a single lynching in 1904 to try to carry collective or city-based racial guilt into the 21st century. Tulsa had a whole pogrom.

On Thursday evening, we had some Cajun food at Bourbon Street Cafe, and on Friday morning, we attended the half day of the conference–well, my wife did; I attended a single session and handled luggage and checkout duties. Then we drove home, tried to stop in Claremore for lunch but managed to get to the Chik-Fil-A at the same time as two high school cross country teams.

Another nice little break and quick trip like our stay downtown and an upcoming overnight in St. Louis. And maybe a lead on some work for me, which would be nice.

It’s funny; Tulsa is as close as either St. Louis or Kansas City to us, but we have to now not really thought of popping down for a quick visit. Staying downtown is nice, as although there are many people working in the towers and going in and out of the parking garages, the city is really quiet in the evenings. Foot traffic is less than even downtown St. Louis (we stayed downtown in April, and I didn’t see a bunch homeless people on the streets–I was only hit up once, sitting in the hotel coffee shop no less. The restaurants were empty, although I’m sure that’s different on concert nights and when something is going on at the performing arts center, but probably not as much as a major league sporting event.

So we will probably be back. Next year for the same conference if nothing else.

Okay, so we call a decoration we find after we’ve packed up the Christmas the Christmas Straggler, and I’ve documented many of them over the years here on the blog.

Now I’ve started a new tradition: Sometime before Christmas, I pick up a little decoration and put it on the mantel upstairs to see if anyone notices. It started in in 2023 and continued in 2024 and 2025 with little village figurines from Walmart. Since I was at Hobby Lobby on Monday for the project I mentioned yesterday, I picked up a little tchotchke (Christmas 50% off) and placed it in the customary spot:

It’s a little light-up Christmas tree which I don’t expect to light up.

Every year, after, the family indicates they have seen the early decoration pretty soon after I put it up. I dunno. I expect my oldest will spot it since he is fairly observant and spends a lot of the day pacing a loop through the living room/parlor/kitchen/dining room, so he has plenty of time in that room.

But I need a term for this tradition. The Christmas Intruder? The Christmas Sooner? The Christmas Tailgator? Pre-Straggler? I am open to suggestions.

And it occurs to me that this tradition might well be remembered more by grandchildren in a couple years than my actual children. After all, I started it when they were or were near adulthood.

One of these days, and by “days,” I mean “years” (but not too soon), we will cull our Christmas decorations. We have so many that we do not put out, ones that we received/inherited but hold no memories of our childhoods. And some from our childhoods are breaking down. So another culling, but perhaps not this year–although when we take the decorations down, it will be next year. We will see, I guess.

Well, sometimes you gauge your days by the number of lives you’ve improved or brightened, and if you’re like me, it’s a pretty low number. But Sunday I scored at least 1.

As I have mentioned, I like to step into our pool for five minutes in the mornings and the evenings. After all, we pay a pile to keep it going. Someone should use it. Now that we’re getting into the end of the pool year, it’s more rewarding because the water is colder. A dip in the morning, and I’m shivering and the fat is burning all day. A dip in the evenings, and I’m ready to get under the blankets and go to sleep.

But, sometimes, in the middle of the day, I step in to recharge. I’ve stopped, mostly, drinking coffee in the afternoons. So to perk myself up (now that the pool is a Wisconsin temperature), I’ll step in in the middle of the day. Sorry, I said that last sentence. Perhaps I need a dip.

So, on Sunday, I stepped into the pool mid-day. I say “step in” because we have a shallow end which shallow ends in steps, and one can walk into the pool there. The deep end has a diving board and a ladder. When I was younger, I would jump into the water, even when/especially when it was cold to acclimate quickly. Now, I step in measuredly, but not gingerly.

Mid-day, the sun is up and it alters which side of the pool I go to. In the dark, at sunrise or at sunset, it doesn’t matter. But when the sun is high, I want it at my back, or at least the top of my head where I’m facing away from its strongest rays. So, on Sunday, after noon, I went to the west wall of the pool, and saw something on the top rung of the ladder.

Now, here in the country, you get odd boles, bumps, mounds, and whatnot out of seemingly nowhere. Why, just yesterday, I was driving down Primrose and saw they’d gotten well onto building a large structure which signs indicated will be a Children’s Hospital. Which was in town, on a road I don’t travel that often, but it’s sometimes moreso that way out in the country (rapidly suburbanizing).

I squinted. Not because of the sunshine so much but mostly because I’m getting older, and I’m outside the age where LASIK touch-ups are effective (so soon?), and I’m to vain to get glasses, but I wouldn’t have worn them to the pool and would have to squint anyway. Is it a dead bird? A pile of leaves? Something more sinister?. I resolved to not let it bother me, but after only a minute and thirteen seconds in the pool (the temperature in the upper seventies yet, so I was not wussing out), I got out and had a look.

Dead bird? Baby possum? No, it was a fat field mouse, holding on for dear life and also terrified into petrification lest I eat it.

Sometimes, I dump tiny field mice from the skimmer baskets, but not mhonkers like this. Perhaps it had gotten disoriented in the overnight storms. But it probably did not know to hop from the ladder to the deck, and I’m not sure it could have executed the maneuver if it knew to try.

So I got the little manual skimmer, which is not so much a net as a paddle, and I knocked it into the pool. It started to scramble, indicating vita, and I scooped it up to the deck. Whereupon it found its footing akin to the cartoons we old-timers have seen in our childhood, and it scrambled across the deck and through the fence towards my house, most likely toward my beautiful wife’s flower garden and perhaps a nice little spot under our decaying deck.

So: I saved a life that day. Not a human one. So no song for it, but I feel just a little better about myself. As long as it stays outside. Because if it comes inside, the (cat) boys will dispatch it our I will. Because, you know, we all have our arbitrary rules for preservation of life.

Voyage St. Louis has an interview with the graphic artist who designed the cover for John Donnelly’s Gold and whose copy of a Dave Barry book I might have gotten food on my senior year of high school.

I was having lunch with a friend last week, and he commented on the prices at the local chain restaurant. Everything you could order came out to about $13 or $15 for a breakfast plate or a sandwich and side. I know, of course, because I remember when taking the family out for a meal came to $40 instead of $80, and that was just a couple of years ago. He has a larger family and has to be more frugal, so he probably doesn’t eat out that often. Neither do we these days, it seems; when reconciling accounts recently, I only came across two restaurant receipts. Time was that we accrued a stack of them in the month, with a couple of trips to fast food places and a couple of sit-down restaurant trips. But even McDonalds is $15 a person these days, so, nah.

But: I ordered a sandwich and a salad, and the salad came with a sliced hard-boiled egg. For free. It was only a couple of years ago when eggs were $5 a dozen, and this very restaurant had an egg surcharge. But here I got one, for free. And I remember a time, a long time ago, when you could have dinner at this restaurant–after the installation service for a pastor friend, we had dinner here, and I remember being upset that my then-young son put my suit at risk of a stain. Perhaps even the son who later purloined that very suit. But after the restaurant reopened in 2020, it only had breakfast and lunch hours, and the menu is reduced accordingly. But I remember.

Since we have an election coming up, news outlets are thumping the gas prices thing. They are up, but some of us remember other times when they were high. Apparently, I posted on Facebook about a near $50 fill-up, and my ha’brother posted a photo of the gas pump of a recent filling in Wisconsin:

That’s $3.96 gas fourteen years ago, pre-inflation, pre-$15 minimum wage. A commenter at Founding Questions yesterday, reminiscing about the 1990s, pegs gas prices in 1995 at $1.20 a gallon when the minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. I haven’t delved into official statistics, but that seems to track with what I remember, and note that the price of gas then was around 1/4 minimum wage. Kind of like today.

But memory, and perspective, won’t get people wee-weed up. I used that expression the other day with my beautiful wife, and she said she had never heard it.

As I mentioned, my beautiful wife and I went downtown and had a date night which ended at the Hotel Vandivort where we spent the night, paying double what we might have if we had checked hotel prices first and bought tickets to match. I suggested the excursion because 1) I just read 1001 Ways To Be Romantic and realized that I’m responsible for suggesting/setting up date nights which are not professional events and 2) one of the members of my BJJ school whom I have never met posted on the school’s Facebook group that he and his young daughter were in Les Misérables, but since his daughter is in elementary school, she was pairing in her role with another kid, so we had to pick a night when both were performing (for some reason; I don’t actually know the fellow, but I guess both of them study at the school?). A convenient Friday night performance coincided with the night before a big MSU football game, though, and after buying tickets, I discovered that the hotels downtown were almost booked up. Except for the Vandivort, which had rooms, but, as I said, double what they were most nights. Surge/algorithmic pricing for the loss!

At any rate, the Vandivort is a new boutique hotel (right next to the historic Landers Theater where the show performed? What verb does a show do?). It’s really nice, though, with spacious rooms and actual robes in the closet (when putting the luggage away, I thought, “Why did we bring coats?” because it was almost 100 degrees outside).

But: It is a converted industrial building, so the room had a loft feel to it. The room was larger than you get at some boutique hotels, especially the ones like Tru which are smaller rooms with no furniture in them. Also, the Vandivort is not tall; it’s four stories, and we were on the third floor. So it’s not sold for the view.

My beautiful wife went to the window and noted the green she could see: A little square below us with a planter with elephant ears and what looked like banana leaves in a planter; a patch of grass next to a small parking lot by the Vandivort’s second building; and a tree on South Street.

Ah, but gentle reader, maybe I am just a city boy, but I find this view entertaining and fascinating as well.

There’s a ramp to…. What, an old loading dock? We’re looking out on the back of what used to be the Outland Ballroom which closed down. We’ve got some textures in the different brick buildings, including one that has what looks to be a shed atop it, but that’s really where the old elevator equipment was housed (thanks, Answer Man!). If you go all the way to the window, you can see the lit alley below. Springfield is a relatively safe little city (this shooting was blocks away!), so people will walk down this alley without fear.

You know, gentle reader, that when I go on vacation, I like a balcony or deck that looks out on trees and/or water where I can sit and read. Most hotels do not offer this amenity, but I still like to sit and look out the window at whatever the city or location has to offer. A parking lot, distant buildings, and a highway? I’ll watch the cars go by. The backside of office buildings and electrical transformers? I will watch the birds as they settle on the facades.

I dunno if that makes me an outlier of some sort who can appreciate even different walls to look at. Although I guess the exception is really old hotels where your room looks out on an air shaft or a U-shaped hotel where you’re deep in the U and can only see a sliver of the street.

Perhaps, too, I travel seldom enough that all of this is always novel.

As I mentioned, we went to the book sale this weekend. And although I do not generally target the book sections widely, I did come away with some purchases.

My beautiful wife also got a stack of books and the oldest got a history of Wales (perhaps because Noggle has Welsh origins).

As far as books go, I got:

• Misselhorn’s Pencil Sketches of St. Louis.
• Electricity for All: The Story of Ozark Electic Cooperative, 1937-2012. This is my electric coop from the time it began to after I moved into Nogglestead. Incredible to think that someone had corporate historian work into the 21st century. I myself have thought a history of one of my martial arts schools, which has been around for over thirty years, would be a cool book with stories about some of the students (the other school has been around for six or seven years, so its history much more brief).
• The Artwork of Emily McGee which is not only a monograph but shows how different works develop–that is, step-by-step (not quite) illustrations/images of the works’ progress.
• Pleasures of the Porch: Ideas for Gracious Outdoor Living by Daria Price Bowman and Maureen Lamarca. I actually got this at BookMarx, the downtown bookstore, on Friday afternoon. The theatre and the place where we stayed was a block from BookMarx and across the street from Stick It In Your Ear record store. We went to BookMarx so my wife could pet the cat. I was not eager to browse/buy on Friday night when books were going to be fifty cents on Saturday, but the prices at BookMarx were reasonable, and I got this on the dollar cart.
• Sheer Poetry: Words & Photographs by Rosalie Toler and Gerry Toler.
• The Spoken Word Revolution edited by Mark Eleveld. A collection of open mic / poetry slam type poetry that originally came with a CD, but that is absent. Still, I can read them myself.
• Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell. As I mentioned, Abelard came up not only in the collection The Rape of the Lock but also the audio course I’m currently listening to, so of course I had to pick up his biography.
• Selected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of course, I have probably already read them. My first thought was that I could give the book to someone as a gift, and I even asked my wife to whom I might be able to give it. But she cautioned me that it might be taken a certain way. After all, I gave her a copy back in the day. So I’ll just put this in my stacks as an excuse to read these poems again. After all, I pick up old Harper editions of her books when I find them just for that reason. And in this case, I spare it from becoming cat litter.
• Two literary magazine issues, Frost Meadow Review Volume 9 from 2022 and River Styx, the St. Louis literary magazine, from 2021. I prefer to find physical magazines to submit to rather than just scrolling Submittable.
• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce by Robert Penn Warren. A single poem former textbook probably.
• The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2013 which is why it has cycled out of the library’s collection–that’s fourteen years ago!
• Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light, poems by Loren Broaddus.
• Circle of Ecstasy: A Haiku Neophyte at 76 by Antonio S. Dimalanta, MD.
• Gentle Harvest: Poetic Moods and Memories of a Woman’s Life by Florence Burrill Jacobs. Strangely, the title page has been removed, but the dust jacket has her name. No idea the year, though.
• How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen. A short book suitable for college students, but maybe not any more.
• Rocky Comfort by Wayne Holmes, an autobiography or memoir. Is the difference how important you are or the completeness? At any rate, likely one of the regional reminiscences that I love.
• The Story of Old Ste. Genevieve by Gregory M. Franzwa. It might come in handy if I read it before I go to the town so I can tell anyone I’m with bits about it. Usually, I find these books when I’m visiting the town and can only tell about it later.
• Parenting Advice to Ignore in Art and Life by Nicole Tersigni. A modern looking collection of memeish quips.

To be honest, given the various different payments and the other books included for other people, I am not sure how much I spent. $20? I know when I came through the bargain side, the book counter did not bother to count the poetry books because he said they weren’t anything. I disagreed, but I guess I got a bit of a discount.

And, again, I was not jonesing to buy more audio courses, as I’ve gotten them down to a mere two boxes in my closet, but they’re marked less than ten dollars each, down from forty bucks a couple of years ago, so I was getting complete audio courses for $2 or $5. So I got:

• After the New Testament: The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers
• Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed
• Famous Greeks which would have fit in with my reading of The Life of Greece. Given how many years it’s taken me to work through The Life of Greece, I still might listen to this years from now in the middle of the book.
• The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries which I will have on tap for when I get to the equivalent volume of The Story of Civilization if I get there.
• Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire. Ibid about the maybe I’ll listen to it when reading about that part of history. Or maybe sooner.
• The Russian Revolution: From Tsarism to Bolshevism. Likely no mention of Doctor Zhivago. Well…. Never say never.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to reading these books, actually. Unfortunately, after completing the bulleted lists above, I moved them from my desk to my stacks, and I likely won’t see any of them again for a long time. Unless the bookshelves collapse under the weight again or the cats knock them down because I’ve put most of them stacked horizontally atop the bookshelves, and the cats like to prowl behind them when choosing a bladed weapon.

In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline:

Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and Battlefield, and other parts of Greene County):

The Brookline Post Office

It’s a two-room cinderblock building where one of the rooms is a lobby and the other half loads mail for our rural postal carriers. I’ve been in on occasion. Nadine is always friendly, giving my child leftover stickers or stamping his hand SPOILED. What, your post office has more than one clerk? That, my friends, is urban.

At any rate, I was driving into Brookline to vote today. I drive twenty minutes at highway speeds to get to my polling place, checked once by a stop sign and twice by traffic signals. I filled out my scantrons and stepped out of the polling station, a Republic Fire District station (professionals, although part of the near parts of Republic including my domicile are covered by the volunteers).

Here’s what I saw from the doorway. Forgive me for not stitching them together for you:

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

The only thing in sight is a Church of Christ.

If you want to see the photos, you’ll have to click through. And if you’ll pardon me, but I don’t have photos this time, but just a description of what’s changed.

The post office is still there; it never really handled Republic’s mail–there’s a post office down off of Highway 60 that handles it–and the Brookline post office no longer handles our mail–it’s handled by the larger Republic post office. The Brookline post office is just a storefront that sells stamps now and has a wall of post office boxes. Nadine is gone now, as are her replacements including Mark, the only other one whose name comes to mind. I haven’t been to that post office in a long time.

Our polling place is no longer at the fire house. Instead, the whole family now votes across the street at the aforementioned Church of Christ.

The intersection of MM and Sawyer Road there now has a stop light. And a giant Amazon warehouse. And a strip mall servicing trucks coming out of the various new warehouses in the area. And the Iron Grain District which is a “mixed use” development which has at least one restaurant and coffee shop plus other things, including a large gas station. There’s another large gas station across from the post office. And they’re talking about widening MM from 60 to the interstate to better accommodate the big trucks.

When we moved here, we expected the suburbs to expand west on Highway M / Republic Road, but they followed Highway 60 from west Springfield instead. New shopping centers and apartment complexes are working to fill that empty space, but the lot on the corner of FF and M remains mostly empty even after having been for sale and development for most of the time we’ve been at Nogglestead. It didn’t help that the local wireless retailer put its home office in the middle of it, which might keep it from developing as retail.

But over time, I guess everything changes. But I’m still mostly the same. Which probably says something about me, and perhaps not something good.

So for a while, off and on, I’ve been buying frozen treats for the family. Fruit juice bars in the past or ice cream sandwiches. I got away from it for a while when we skint, but our income situation has returned to an income situation, and we’re not hemorrhaging money like last year, so I’ve started picking up the frozen treats again, a ten-spot a week during the peak of summer. And although my youngest has made a habit–and, basically, a complete diet–of the ice cream sandwiches in the recent past, I have been the one eating most of them the last week or so.

Last week, on a lark, I bought a box of Drumsticks as well. If you’re not familiar, Drumsticks are ice cream cones with a chocolate and nut covering, akin to the dip you might get at Dairy Queen or other places. However, they’re pretty hard as they’re all frozen and individually wrapped unlike, say, soft serve dipped to order in molten syrup. And I shouldn’t say it was a lark, really, as I’d seen the boxes in the warehouse club freezers and thought about picking up a box for a couple of weeks before I actually did.

But, ah, gentle reader. How each one takes me back, just a little, to 1996.

I was living with my sainted mother in Lemay, Missouri. I lived with her after the university for two and a half years, and it seemed like such a long time. Those were busier days, then, and my perspective on time was that of a young man, where every year was a larger portion of my life than it is today. But now that my boys are on the cusp of leaving me, probably in less than that time frame, it doesn’t seem that long at all.

My mother handled all the shopping, such as it was. Not a lot of fresh produce–some apples and snack fruit, probably–and not a lot of things for home cooking–in addition to not being much of a cook (neither she nor, by her tutelage, me). Also, she worked second shift. The freezer was stocked with frozen things–and she would call the house line every night on her way home from work (she had a cellular phone, gentle reader, in the middle 1990s, in a bag) to ask me if she wanted me to pick up a Taco Bell Big Beef Burrito Supreme on her way home. She ate Taco Bell nightly, and would share the bounty with me if I were home and awake.

My goodness, she and I could eat nothing but junk in those days. I lived on frozen pizzas and Taco Bell and other fast food, and I tried to gain weight and lifted weights, but to no avail. I was eating several thousand calories a day, including weight gain shakes, and nothing. We both were skin bags over bones.

The freezer also has another treat: Drumsticks. The warehouse club was way up in Earth City in those days, an hour away by car, so she was not buying them in bulk, but the freezer almost always had Drumsticks in them. Oh, boy, and did I eat them. What was I doing at the time? Laying out the St. Louis Artesian? Hanging out in the gap between jobs? Playing Gemstone Warrior 3 on America Online? I had two jobs, spent a lot of time at coffee shops and open mike nights, and still somehow had a lot of time to sit in my mother’s (well, my aunt’s) house and eat Drumsticks.

I shall probably look back at this time of my life and say, “Wow, I had a lot of time.” And I spent it eating Drumsticks and feeling, briefly, twenty-four again.

On Sunday mornings, we take the backup vehicle, an 18-year-old Chevy Trailblazer, to church because we pick up my mother-in-law, and at 83 years old, she gets better into it (her old truck when she was still independently mobile) than into our primary vehicle, an 18-year-old Lexus SUV that just turned 220,000 on the odometer (the Chevy still relatively spry with 100,000 fewer miles on it and still mostly hers as her independently mobile driving took her to New England, Canada/Michigan (almost the same, especially on multi-million dollar houses on islands in northern Lake Huron), the Grand Canyon, and Florida many times when she was taking care of her brother and later his estate. The Trailblazer now serves mostly as the younger boy’s go-to-work and go-to-school (now that he’s in college, but also when he was in high school) vehicle. So: It’s a mess, and the windshield, well…. A gentle lens for an aging actress, let’s say, with what I presume is soda spray on the inside and dust and pollen that can only be poorly cleaned using the windshield washer since the wiper blade is in pretty bad shape.

So we’re going along on the farm road where it dips between hills and trees by the pipeline pumping station, and my beautiful wife says, “Deer.” I start slowing down, and sure enough, a young deer comes running from the left side of the road. I braked, but not to a complete stop, and it thumped against the vehicle. I didn’t go over it, and I didn’t see it in the rearview mirror, hopefully because it ran off feeling abashed. It was only several miles down the road, on the way down to church, that I stopped because I was suddenly afraid that I had been dragging the poor thing. But the car showed no signs of damage.

We did have a bit of a contretemps in the car though. My wife assured me that I did not hit the deer, and my youngest and I were pretty sure we did. She had seen a deer on the right side of the road, which we did not hit, and had not seen the one on the left, which proceeded to hit us (he said defensively, more defensively than he drives, obvs).

BUT: The impact site was between the wheel well and the door, an invisible dent but that had bent that part of the fender/quarter panel juuuust enough so that the door rubbed against it loudly. Of course, taking it to a body shop for repair might have totaled the car as they recommended new fender and door panels and maybe hinges. So I (when I remembered to, when the temperature got closer to 100 degrees outside) went out with a rubber mallet, some plastic body pry bars, a screwdriver, and some pliers and…. Well, I wish I could tell you that I did an exemplary job fixing it right, but I bent it enough to minimize the rubbing so that it’s not really loud when you open the door.

I was in a similar situation just last week: I took a different route home from town than I normally do, a farm road that I only travel down once every couple of years. It’s curvier than ours, and I slowed way down on it, which meant that the frolicking young deer were able to cross safely in front of me then. I also remember that about ten years ago, someone was driving down that road hit a woman on a horse and drove on, thinking that she had hit a deer. I know how it can happen. I imagine myself doing it. But this was a deer, I assure you.

It’s the first collision with a deer that I’ve had even after 17 years in the country, so I guess I should count myself lucky more than a good driver. I might have hit a squirrel many years ago. I did hit a dog once on a pre-dawn commute through a transitioning neighborhood. Same thing; he came running from left to right, and although I braked hard, I went over him and felt him bump something under the car, but not under the wheels. I came to a stop and saw him standing in the road and decided I was not going to chase him to take him to the vets.

So, yeah, I am unschooled on the protocols of what to do when you hit an animal. Stop to make sure it’s dead? Put it out of its misery? Take it to the vet? I guess I should ask my brother; before he retired, he was hitting deer every couple of months on his morning, two-hour-on-country-highways, pre-dawn and post-sunset winter commutes. I am pretty sure that my father hit his share of things–he often had a few beers before driving up north the go hunting and a few beers on the way, but, of course, I cannot ask him, either, as he has been dead for almost thirty years now. Regardless of if I do the right thing or merely do an acceptable thing, I will mull it over for a long time and feel vaguely guilty about it all.