Category: Life

…it would have been about right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   How did I do?

   

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

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

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

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

Not that you ever did. But you might now.

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

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

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

Almost fifteen years pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Choose Your Own Grind Adventure” →

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

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

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

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

How many have I been to? None.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been a couple of weeks (months?) since I’ve heard the coyotes leaving the battlefield in the evenings or returning in the mornings. Have I not heard them because they’re not there, or because I have not been outside nor had the windows and doors open at sunrise and sunset (although I have been in the pool around sunset some nights, but the coyotes come out a little later)?

The appearance of a pair of rabbits might indicate the former.

These little rascals live in the eastern part of our windbreak and spend most of their time in the side yard. One day, though, I surprised them in my garden, and they tried to jump the fence in vain. One darted out the garden entrance, and one squeezed through or under the fence, and the low-tailed it around the pool and to the windbreak. This weekend, as I was mowing the lawn, one of them was near the garden, and he tried to run but was reluctant to cross the driveway pavement. I chased him around a little as I continued my spiraling cutting section, and he eventually overcame his fear of the driveway and bolted around the front of the house and to its burrow.

Without the coyotes around, I guess the next biggest threat to them is hawks and owls and presumably my lawnmower.

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Our last garbage company was having trouble meeting its pickup obligations–private like me, but they also have contracts with a couple of the cities and towns around here that provide that “service” to their citizens. So they dumped a large number of the private citizens who contracted with them. They never picked up their wheeled bin, though; I guess because we got it from the company we first signed up with that the later company acquired, I guess that they did not have it on record that it was their bin. So they left it and did not come to get it when we mentioned it when requesting a refund for the two months’ service that we paid for and that they were not going to refund on their own initiative.

Which has left me with an extra bin, and I don’t mind. Sometimes we have overflow, such as nine pallet-sized burlap sacks that our firewood comes; we top off our weekly trash in the bin with our new company by adding these sacks. Once, our new trash company refused to empty our bin because it was too heavy–I swapped all cat litter boxes at once. So I dumped the cat litter and scooped it into bags and put them in the overflow bin and over the course of weeks (for two more weeks, the new company refused to lift the bin when they could see cat litter in it), I optimally weighted the bin and eventually got all the cat litter out. So it’s come in handy for us a couple of times.

And it provides a nice spot for Jake, our new outdoor snake pet, to rest in afternoons.

Jake looks to be a rough earthsnake. You might remember I made snake flashcards for my boys to study in the probably-soon-to-be-previous unpleasantness. I packed those away at some point, so I had to go to the Internet to look for photos to guess.

I found him when I moved the spare bin to run the line trimmer behind it. I’ve moved it a couple of other times to show Jake to the family and just to say “Hi.”

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A couple years ago, the electric co-op decided they were done trimming the oak at the end of my driveway and cut it down and ground out the stump. Grass has not encroached on the remaining wood chips much. I saw a normal mushroom there, and as I went to get the mail a week ago, I noticed a touch of color.

A quick Internet search indicates this is a mutinus elegans, which sounds like Elegant Mutiny in Latin. Commonly known as Elegant Stinkhorn, the colloquialism I will use is “Devil’s Dipstick.” I’ve mowed them since then, but they will be back.

Wikipedia says they’ve been reported in Texas, Colorado, and Iowa; consider them reported in Missouri, then.

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You might have thought that fauna included new cats at Nogglestead, but no. Cisco does not like cats outside and will go into berserker mode if one sits outside the glass and stares at him. There haven’t been too many of those recently, fortunately. My son and I did have a chunky tabby come and sit on the pool deck and watch us when we were in the pool, but he’s not too friendly–I came out another door to chase him off when he was offending Cisco, and he ran to the edge of my deck and then made aggressive noises at me. So he won’t be sharing an office with me any time soon, and I need to put a broom on the deck to use to chase him off if he really gets aggressive.

At any rate, something different this year at Nogglestead. Maybe I’ll show you soon the new flora at Nogglestead, including lettuce in the garden. Which apparently attracts rabbits.

The church picnic had a couple of crossstitched pillows in the silent auction, and although I did not actually bid on them in the auction, I picked them up later amongst the remnants, paying more than I would have bid on the items.

The woman who had made them had taken them home but brought them to church on Sunday, so I am not sure if the money I gave her went to the church or to her at that point. Probably the church as she’s active in it and a good congregant. If not, well; the amount I gave her was probably enough for the kits (if she bought them retail) plus materials leaving some pre-labor reform wages for her effort. I know how that goes; when thinking about how much my handiwork in woodburning or whatnot could retail for, the cost was generally less than the cost of the materials if I bought them retail and even if I used scrap, the wages for my effort would be below minimum wage.

I told her when I asked about them that my mother had been very creative and sewed/embroidered/creweled a bunch when I was young. She was even a hostess for the Creative Circle organization which had the late 20th century housewife sales parties but for kits for sewing and not home décor or kitchenwares. So maybe she seemed like she was doing a lot because she was making her sample kits. But I remember latch-hooked pillows and samplers on the wall. But at some point, she just stopped. Maybe it was in the move to Missouri, or maybe it was because she got a full-time job with a two hour daily commute that sapped that energy to do things at home or the later second shifts which tampered with her diurnal cycle. Maybe she spent that time on home maintenance/home improvement when she got houses of her own. Or maybe she continued her whole life but I stopped noticing. Probably not the latter, as I went through her effects after she died and did not see much of that.

As I mentioned, I used to do a lot of handicrafts. Beaded jewelry, woodburning, glass etching, making clocks out of old trays and platters. I guess I was most active with it when I was not full-time or between contracts and when I was hopped up on watching Creative Juice and That’s Clever! and The Joy of Painting with my young children. As I made things, I boxed them up, and honestly thought maybe I would box them up until a silent auction at church rolled around. I thought about a spot in the antique or craft malls, but my work was pretty rudimentary, and I don’t think I would be able to charge enough to cover materials and retail space, much less any effort. And as I got full time work and contracts, I just kind of wandered away from making things for the most part.

And the church didn’t really have many silent auctions over the years. The one at the picnic is only one of a few in the last couple of years, and the auction itself revealed why: Nobody bid on most of the the hand crafts. I picked up a stained glass angel for a Christmas present, but we’re only buying presents for a couple of people these days and don’t need many such articles. So it’s not like I’ve had a place to dump my excess crafting cheaply and for a good cause.

I didn’t share anything anyway. When I unpacked some of the things when the church called for donations, I discovered that the stained glass painting I’d done in 2012 were ruined. I’d wrapped them in old shirts to protect them, and over the years, the paint adhered better to the shirts than the glass. Unwrapping them peeled the paint off of them. So I guess the best way to cast it is that I now have a couple of glass pieces to etch or to paint with the stained glass paint again, but I guess it’s a decade old now. Not that I would have anywhere to go with the completed product.

Ah, this started out as a post about how my mother did cross-stitch until she didn’t. It turned into a how I did crafts until I didn’t. I wonder if reasons were similar, and if my mother ever thought about it.

As I mentioned, I cleaned my store room last weekend, and as part of the cleaning process, I actually disposed of some items in the store room which I will probably never use.

One bin contained phone and Ethernet cabling supplies. I bought some Ethernet cable ends, crimping tool, and wall plates twenty-five years ago when I took hardware classes at the community college and thought I might pick up some free lance work running cables. I (badly) pulled cables from my office to that of my beautiful wife in our home in Casinoport (which included running some conduit pipes the length of the house in a ceiling cavity). I ran Ethernet cables between our offices in Old Trees as well following the phone lines outside the house. And although I got a bid for professionals to do it here at Nogglestead, I ended up running 30′ of cable between our offices and drilling holes in the wall instead of using wall plates (the professional bid was $1000 in 2009 dollars, which is something like eleventy billion in Bidenbucks). I’d originally ordered a kilometer of Cat5 cable, but I sold that at a garage sale at some point in the early part of the century. Somehow, though, I ended up with smaller spools of Cat5 and phone cable, but to be honest, it was not likely 1 Gigabit cable, and as everything is wireless these days (and Nogglestead might well be my last house), so I thought I’d get rid of the cables. I somehow also had a small box of coax cable, so I bundled them together.

A church group has called for donations for its fundraising rummage sale, so I thought about including it with the several boxes of bric-a-brac that has been cluttering my garage for years (somehow, we miss the annual fundraiser some years). But instead of dumping it on them, I called the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a retail store where Habitat sells donated building materials. The guy who answered the phone had to go ask if they would take the cables, but when he came back, he said he would.

So I ventured up there on a Saturday morning, and I’m sorry I did.

The place was a zoo. A jacked up pickup truck had broken down or something and was blocking part of the entrance not only with the truck but with people clambering around it and under it. The parking lot was too small for the number of vehicles there. People were just parking willy-nilly and wandering through the parking lot without looking. I found an actual parking spot and had my youngest grab the box of cables, and….

The guy receiving the donations was completely dismissive of our donation. He reluctantly took it off of our hands and said they could probably recycle it, but he might have thrown it in the dumpster when we turned away and tried to navigate our vehicle out with minimal property damage and loss of life.

You know, excessive gratitude for little donations like this embarrasses me. However, disdain or annoyance at my small bit to try to help, that boils my blood every time.

The food pantry that my church supports is on the north side of Springfield, which means it’s a bit of a drive for us, and I used to take our old canned goods up there. But the volunteers there ranged from indifferent to annoyed, so I started dropping stuff at the food pantry in Republic where they’re generally pleasant.

It’s almost enough to make me less kind.

And at least the crap is out of my store room.

of free time on the Memorial Day weekend.

Oh, gentle reader.

I have recently added little air filters to a couple of rooms in the house, particularly where cat litter boxes are present (during the recent reign of litter box averse cats from the previous generation, we added cat litter boxes in the living room up stairs and in a corner of the den downstairs to give the old cats options, and we’ve left the one in my office where the kittens were sequestered during their first days in the house). And I have been pleased to note how much the little $50 devices knock down the dust in those areas, so I thought, “Why not put one in the store room?” as this room holds three litter boxes (and, indeed, for a long time were the only litter box location in the house).

To put one in the store room, I would have to find an electrical outlet, presumably one behind the boxes of miscellania on the shelves. Hey, I was planning to swap out the cat litter boxes for fresh litter and to mop the room anyway. Why not dust everything at the same time? It’ll only be a couple of hours, ainna?

Oh, but no. Gentle reader, it took me over 10 hours to remove, dust, vacuum, mop, dust again, and replace everything. Steps included:

1. Removing old cat litter
2. Dusting and moving out all boxed old computers, comic books, old files, those bins of cables I cannot yet part with, and personal memorabilia as well as unsorted loose items meant to be put in the appropriate place “someday.”
3. Removing shelving units
4. Sweeping the floor
5. Mopping the floor
6. Hosing off shelving units
7. Setting up fresh cat litter boxes
8. Sort the, er, unsorted items and put them into the proper bins or boxes
9. Dust (again) boxes before returning to the store room
10. Dispose of certain items earmarked for donation or other, er, disposal

Not included: Dusting my office where I put the boxes and whatnot while I swept and mopped.

My goodness, almost fifteen years’ of cat litter leaves quite a patina on everything. Not everything had been undusted in that time–I’d dust or wipe things as I got into them or whatnot–but the fine, fine dust on everything stuck to my hands such that I had to wash them like Lady Macbeth to keep from leaving dust on things I was dusting. And a couple of the shelves had an inch or more of cat litter under them where the cats had scratched and where the thrown litter had fallen through the holes in the shelving.

As I started the room reassembly, I groused about it or demonstrated frustration with the fact that it would eat up my Memorial Day, and she asked me if it was worth it. And: I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s going to see it, and nobody at Nogglestead will notice (as I’m generally the one who goes into the store room. But, c’mon, man, it needed to be done. Which I wonder if it isn’t thematic of my whole existence: Doing what needs to be done, but nobody sees it.

At any rate, look upon my works, ye mighty, and join my despair:

I hope the new filter can keep up with the cat litter dust. And that I can keep up keeping the new filter clean.

And hopefully after a few more days, I will stop smelling that dust.

Or maybe I need to read the manuals or online help or related articles. But whenever I try to take night photographs with my iPhone, I am very disappointed.

For example, on Sunday night, we’d had storms, and fog began to rise from the moist ground. Across Nogglestead, the 4th family to live in the first part of Whitaker’s Folly since we moved into Nogglestead keeps their front porch light on. From my vantage point on the glider on the deck, I see the light diffused through the fog behind the a lone tree standing in our field, and it’s an interesting shot.

But with my iPhone, it’s:

I took several shots with several different settings, and that’s the best of the lot. It has a sort of Impressionist feel to it, but if only I could have captured it more clearly, I think it would have been a better shot.

I’ve thought from time to time about taking up photography as a hobby–enough that I have acquired more than one tripod–and I have one or more books on photography in the stacks. And I once tested a photography class sharing Web application when my best client took a photography class and founded a startup to support it as one does. But I’ve never gotten serious about it. Or serious enough to actually discover what those little icons on my phone’s camera app mean.

I guess that’s a story of my life: I thought about something, but did not pursue it with vigor.

I might have mentioned that life is a bit transitional here at Nogglestead these days. The boys are getting older (one has graduated), so they don’t need their dad as much–as a matter of fact, I see them too little these days as they go about their endeavors. And my job situation is uncertain, and it’s taking its time to resolve and might for some time yet.

So, in my uncertainty, I have seized upon something I can control to make myself feel more in control, and that’s taking care of Nogglestead.

In the olden days, when I was watching the boys most of the time or immediately after they were both in school full time, I cleaned the house metronomically. I swept every day; I cleaned the bathrooms completely on the weekends and the bathroom counters on Wednesdays as well. I painted several rooms. I mopped and vacuumed weekly at least.

But with the contracts and the employment, the housecleaning slowed. Dusting happened every couple of weeks. Dusting or vacuuming the lower level fell to once a month. Yard and garden work, at least my part of it, fell to half-hearted plantings in the spring. Sometimes, especially toward the end of the previous vinyl liner, pool cleaning and maintenance occurred intermittently. In my defense, some of this was delegated to teenaged boys who would prefer to do other things over the summer than work, and we were to busy and, frankly, inattentive or lazy to insist.

But now? Again with the metronome. Pool on Fridays. Dusting upstairs and bathrooms on Saturdays. Cleaning the hall floors on the weekends. Dusting and vacuuming the lower level every other week. I’ve started mowing the lawn every week or ten days (which will slow in the drier summer), and I have started completely weed trimming and edging Nogglestead. Mowing is three to three and a half hours each time, and the trimming/edging is two to four hours spread over a couple of days/charges of the battery packs we have for the trimmer.

And you know what? Everything looks nice. And I’m a little eager for time to pass so I can start these chores over again. But I will enjoy the tidiness of Nogglestead while it lasts.

Hopefully, things will even out again, and Nogglestead can fall back into untidiness.

Ah, gentle reader. As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he’s holding the line on aging. Well, not in my popular culture knowledge. I’m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger. I guess I’ve always had an old soul when it comes to that sort of thing. I’ve always read old books, whether capital-L Literature or old suspense and science fiction. But, still, I’ve done martial arts classes with people much younger than me, and I’ve had my children in school with children whose parents were ten years younger than I am. So I might have been fooling myself, but I thought as long as I had kids in school, I was young.

But, oh, gentle reader, the oldest has graduated from high school. And even before that event, I’ve been letting the old man out by expressing the way we did things in the 20th century. To whit:

• On a recent visit to the dentist, I was confronted by a new hygenist who was young and pretty. And although I am happily married, it is the way of the Man to puff out one’s chest a little in this situation. However, at the end of the visit, she scheduled me for my next four-month-cleaning, and I said it was the easy one since it was in the same year. The hard ones were the ones that occurred in the next year, because I would not have the calendar yet upon which to write the appointment.

  Silly old man! In the 21st century, people put appointments in their phones nowadays. Although I do put appointments in a Google calendar for work, it’s still not my default for doctor’s appointments. I still write them on the wall calendar in the dining room. I’m the only one who does, though, so I never know what’s going on with my beautiful wife or my children.
   

• One of the organizations for which my wife volunteers had a game night to bring together IT students from various universities with the members of the IT organization. She had trusted me to buy soda and water for the event, and I bought something like four cases of soda and a couple cases of water for the projected 30-60 attendees. I didn’t think it was too much, thinking college kids could easily drink three or four sodas over the course of a three-hour event.

  The treasurer of the organization brought along the big ledger checkbook for the organization to write an expense check for another member. “And a big bag of quarters in case we run out of soda so we can pop down to the vending machines,” I said, ever the jester.

  But the gentleman, older than I am and a manager/executive for many different firms in his career, pointed out that the kids used their cards at the vending machines. Of course they did. But I come from an age where Cokes were not quite a dime, but Vess soda could be had for a quarter from a vending machine.
   

• I mentioned my brother got married. He and his wife also closed recently on a nice slice of land which has a nice pre-fab house on a foundation along with twenty-five acres of land which means he has accidentally on purpose, perhaps, but it’s nice.

  Also, it is a new address, so I wrote it in my address book.

  

  The address book was a gift I received when I graduated high school a couple of years ago. I wrote in it the addresses of high school friends and family members with whom I would correspond throughout high school and beyond (I still double-check my grandmother’s address in the book even though she has lived in the same place for a couple of years now.

  The address book itself now contains more scratch-outs than confirmed addresses, and an Excel spreadsheet maintains the shrinking Christmas card list, so it’s a more accurate and useful representation of street addresses of people with whom I regularly (annually) correspond.

  But I still put this address in my address book.

  Which makes me think I might need to update the centerpiece of the Family Bible as well with wife and children’s names. Which seems fitting as they’re about to head out on their own.

As if these examples enough were not enough to indicate I might be approaching middle age, the wedding videos and photos themselves did.

And I guess I might as well embrace it. After all, it’s not like I’m getting any younger or getting any more sincerely interested in the concerns of the younger amongst us.

On Saturday, as I mentioned, I went to a small town in southeast Missouri to attend my brother’s wedding.

As it was the first time that I’d seen him in quite a while, we exchanged Christmas presents for 2023, and he had a couple of milk crates with records in them. He said they were from our mother, but I thought that I had gotten all of her records already. When I started dusting them off and going through them, it became clear that most of the records came from someone else.

I mean, certainly some of them bear the sale tags with a G on them that indicated she’d placed them in the garage sales of the early century, but, again, most of them did not have it, and they were a mixed lot of old/small label gospel (the kind I thought I’d never own), 80s pop, and folk. I wonder if they were just other records that other people had put into the yard sale that were still in my mother’s garage when she passed away or perhaps they were records my aunt picked up before she passed away–given that they included some photos and art with a note written in our family friend Gloria’s hand, it could be any of the above.

So I dusted them off and here’s what the stack included:

• Workers Together For Him by the Pentecostal Children’s Home. Not found on Discogs)
• Birthday of a King / Christmas with Bob by Bob Harrington. $3.99
• Bizet Carmen Suite by Fortuna Records. $19.99
• To You With Love, Donny by Donny Osmond $.50)
• Where Did Our Love Go? by the Supremes $1.99)
• Honky Tonk Classics Volume 2 by Mike Di Napoli’s Trio $3.99)
• Organ and Chims by Robert Rheims for the Whole Family At Christmas $12.00)
• Poor Rich Man by Bud Chambers. The cover says he’s America’s Number One Song Writing Preacher. Not found on Discogs, but others of his are listed between $15 and $100
• Looking for a City by Jimmy Swaggart. $1.68)
• It Is No Secret by Stuart Hamblen $1.99
• Bobby Rich Sings Your Requests. $4.99
• The Best of Scripture in Song by David and Dale Garratt. $3.99
• What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye (no cover). $0.34
• Happy Holiday With, a Columbia collection (no cover).
• Live at the Lighthouse by Elvin Jones (no cover). $10
• Wheels of Fire in the Studio by Cream (no cover, and only one record from a two-record set).
• Lonely Blue Boy by Jimmy Griggs (no cover). $3.46
• La Familia by Kracker (no cover). $2.15
• The Battle of New Orleans by Jimmie Driftwood (no cover). $12.00
• You’re All I Need by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, a compilation (no cover). $7.32
• Children’s Favorites by the Jingleheimers (no cover). $1.00
• The Wilderness Road and Jimmie Driftwood. $2.85.
• Mighty Clouds Alive by the Mighty Clouds of Joy. $3.50
• Oh, Lovely Galilean by Wayne Baldridge. Not found on Discogs.
• Happiness is Gladness by Gladness Jennings (no cover). $9.99
• Sing Your Song, Jimmy by Jimmy Williams (no cover). Did not find on Discogs.
• Don’t Let The Ship Sail Without Me by the Happy Gospel Four (no cover). Did not find on Discogs.
• Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins. This copy does not have a garage sale sticker on it, so I don’t know if it’s the one from my youth, but I know we had a copy as my father played the record on Christmas. $1.98
• I’ll Keep Holding On To Jesus by the Kenny Parker Trio. Not on Discogs, but other records sell from $3 to $25
• The Lord’s Prayer by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. $.16
• Surfer Girl by the Beach Boys. $1
• Dance, Dance, Dance by the Beach Boys. $2
• Control by Janet Jackson. $.38
• You’ll Never Walk Alone by Elvis. $.25
• Elvis Sings Flaming Star by, well, Elvis. $.32
• Elvis’ Christmas Album. This is the third or fourth copy we have at Nogglestead. $.50
• The Muppet Movie Original Soundtrack Recording. This is the second or third copy we have at Nogglestead. $1.99
• Hi In-fidelity by REO Speedwagon. $.54
• The Nostalgic Voices and Sounds of Old Time Radio Vol. 2. $1.02
• You Can’t Be True Dear… in the Ken Griffin Style by Charles Rand at the organ. $.99
• Blue Hawaiian Waters by Harry Kaapuni and His Royal Polynesians. $1.50
• This Is A Recording by Lily Tomlin. $.89
• Little Things by Bobby Goldsboro. $.39
• Country & Western Stars. $1.49
• Johnny Horton Sings with a back side by Texas Slim & His Cowboys. $1.02
• Save the Last Dance for Me by the DeFranco Family featuring Tony DeFranco. $1.45
• The Brightest Stars of Christmas. $.69
• This One’s For You by Barry Manilow. $.25
• I Love You So Much It Hurts Me by Tennessee Ernie Ford. $.74
• Lawrence Welk’s Ragtime Gal by Jo Ann Castle. $1.08
• Go Honky Tonkin! by Maddox Bros.& Rose. $1.45
• Our Best To You: Today’s Great Hits, Today’s Great Stars, a Columbia collection (no cover).
• Greatest Hits The Fifth Dimension (no cover).
• Unforgettable Oldies Volume II (no cover).
• Greatest Hits Volume One by Roy Acuff (no cover)
• Happy Holidays: The Music of Christmas Volume 2 (no cover)
• Monkee Business by the Monkees, a photo disc from 1982. $9.25
• Jerusalem by John Starnes.
• Sing and Be Happy with Little Marcy. $5.00
• Andy Presents: The Book of Matthew
• The Little Drummer Boy featuring Don Janse and His 60 Voice Children’s Chorus, a Clark gas stations record.
• Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music. This is the third or fourth or fifth copy of this record at Nogglestead.
• 40 Hour Week by Alabama.
• The Osmonds Live
• Colour by Numbers by Culture Club. A very nice cover. In middle school, I got a button of this cover out of a vending machine for a quarter and wore it to school to some teasing. Or as they would call it now, bullying.
• Records by Foreigner, the greatest hits collection. I actually have this on cassette already–I bought it in college.
• Blondes Have More Fun by Rod Stewart.
• Dirty Dancing, the original soundtrack.
• Disney’s Christmas Favorites.
• Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra. Again, the third or fourth copy at Nogglestead, but the cover is very nice.
• Candyman, a Disney record.
• Foot Loose and Fancy Free by Rod Stewart.
• Gideon by Kenny Rogers.

Jeez, man, that’s over 70 new records. Some didn’t have sleeves; others were only in sleeves and not covers, so I will have to order another set of 12″ cardboard sleeves, too.

Additionally, I got two empty sleeves: Everything is Beautiful by Evie (sad to learn it was empty), This Is Another Day by Andraé Crouch And The Disciples, and No Trespassing and Other Stories for Children featuring Uncle Charlie and the Children’s Bible Hour Staff. I have not looked through all the records I have to ensure that the covers match the contents, but I might just have these sleeves. I have saved one or two others in the past when I was not scrupulous about checking the contents of the sleeves and either got a mismatched or empty sleeve. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. Perhaps recycle them as “cleaning the garage” (where the whole of the cleaning is recycling these sleeves.

At any rate, I am looking forward to listening to some of them. But I really, really need to build additional shelving now.

So my brother got married (again) this weekend. We drove three hours to a small town in southeast Missouri where the bride has lived all her life and will live all the remainder of her life (likely) as they just bought a nice homestead with 25(!) acres of land.

I was not the best man this time around, just a groom’s man. Although I did not give a highlarious toast (probably more Steve Buscemi than Adam Sandler, if you know what I mean), I did use my power of quipping (probably inappropriately) to keep things light on what might have been a tense day. Jeez, I remember my wedding day a couple years ago, where I got lightheaded when I took my position at the front of the church, taking off my jacket and helping to put out the food at the reception because nobody else was doing it, and calling the same brother dickhead when he, a groom’s man, wanted to sit at the head table which had only room for the bride and groom and the best man +1, and man of honor +1.

So I hope I helped to alleviate some of that.

It was not a church wedding; the ceremony and reception were held in a small hall rented from an old church (or maybe just an old church turned into a rental hall).

The best bits:

• Fifteen minutes or so before the ceremony was scheduled to start, I told the best man, my nephew, that in three minutes, I was going to come up to him and loudly say, “I don’t have the rings!”
• About fifteen minutes later, I came up to him and said, “I don’t have the rings!”
• After the ceremony, I came up to him and said, “You don’t have the rings?”
• The bride’s party arrived just at the time scheduled for pictures; prior to that, my brother ran home for something, so it was just the groom’s men at the facility, leading to speculation that one or the other of them made a break for it. We even speculated what it would be like if both of them decided to bolt only to meet at the airport. What a rom-com that would make.
• The itinerant preacher was late, leading to speculation that maybe he made a run to the airport.
• After the recessional at the end, we all ended up crowded on the front stoop of the hall. “The rehearsal went well,” I said. “When do we do it for real?”
• Et cetera.

Jeez, I hope I didn’t make it worse with my japery. But, somehow, I fear I might have.

And, unfortunately, in the same circumstances, I will jape again.