Category: Life

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 Ignor 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.

4-island package on US-Canada border hits market fully loaded for $2.3M — boats included

It’s on the northeastern corner of Lake Huron (whose name I already know how to pronounce, thank you), so mighty cold in the winter (probably no ice bridge to Canada or they would have mentioned it). More of a summer home than anything else. But, dang, it looks awfully nice. As long as you don’t run out of bug spray.

I check in on two Daily Dammit, Gannett newspaper Web sites: The Springfield News-Leader and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I don’t read much of them because their articles are mostly behind a very good paywall, but I do check out the local contests.

But I guess the ad pool is shrinking, because not only do we get ads for things that are not local in the “Shopping” section:

I mean, I listen to the radio all the time, so I know a lot of local jingles, but, brother, that ain’t one of them. Maybe it plays before streaming videos, YouTube content, or on obscure channels all the time. But, yeah, no clue what that is.

And we get contests clearly targeted to people in other regions, like this one:

At least, I presume the Michigan one is targeted to Wisconsin and Michigan people, but it’s on the News-Leader web site. I know that I’ve filled out the form before for a contest for a getaway at, what, the Indianapolis 500 or a golf getaway only to get denied (presumably after my contact information was saved somewhere for sale or rent) with a message that indicated they did not accept entries from my location.

Not cricket, and probably indicative of how the ad and marketing budgets are drying up for the big papers.

Oh, and I’ve also started getting calls and texts from one of the companies sponsoring the contests even though I meticulously opt out. So, in desperation, Gannett is courting a class action suit somewhere down the line.

Eh, free Internet content is worth what you pay for it, gentle reader, as you well know but are too polite to say.

WE NEED ANSWERS!

Ah, but to quote the universe, “However, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

Yeah, security sense says no clicky, no stoppy. Also, none of your business my honest opinions. You want them, you come to the blog like everyone else Rob.

Or, since I am reading fantasy novels these days (only one, but it’s relatively recent and top-of-mind), I could alternately title this The Undead Orchard of Nogglestead’s Revenge.

So I hit a stump two weeks ago, which bent the baffle on my mowing deck and one of the blades. It was the second stump I hit in recent weeks.

As it has become drier here in the Ozarks, which happens every August and September and sometimes even July, one of the mowings will turn the grass brown for the season no matter how much rain we get thereafter. So I’ve been delaying the cuttings. Which means a month or so back, I hit the more solid of the peach tree stumps in the front yard.

When a couple of pre-existing young maples lining the driveway were gutted by poor pruning leading to splits, I cut the maples down and replaced them with peach trees many years ago. I said that every year we learn a new way for peach trees to not produce: If the temperature drops to -10 degrees in the winter, they won’t blossom; a warm spell in early spring can cause them to blossom only to be deflowered by a cold snap later; if peaches grow, Japanese beetles come around. The one year when all the conditions were right, we got some very small peaches. Once. Well, I tried to properly prune one of the trees, and it died. The other one beside the driveway died as well, so it probably wasn’t me (and the one in the middle of the yard is half dead). Last year, I cut the two dead ones down for kindling (“You know what I grow in my orchard? Firewood.” is also a common quip).

So, as I said, a month or so ago, the penultimate mowing, I went over the more solid of the stumps in the front yard. The smaller I hit once or twice already and cut it below blade height, but I was still going around the big one. I’d meant to get out there with a pick/mattock to chop it up a bit, but I had not. So the mower grabbed the stump and pulled it out, trapping it under the mower deck. I tried circling the edge of the driveway to pull it out (perhaps damaging the mower deck in the process), but I had to jack the mower up almost a foot to work the new bit of kindling (big enough that maybe it’ll be a main feature although misshapen log) through the blades and then out the discharge.

This ultimate mowing, I had no more trouble with fruit tree stumps out front, but I hit the stump of the apple tree which toppled, but did not die, in a derecho in 2019. It had kinda lie in the back yard for those five years, sprouting some branches growing straight up but no blossoms. So I finally cut it down with a bow saw this winter, after the peach trees out front (it still lies atop the wood pile to be cut down to logs and broken into kindling). I’ve managed to mow around it all summer, but knicked it in the penultimate mowing and grabbed a hold of it this time, pulling much of its stump out. But the deck continued to make noise, so I brought it to the blacktop to check for something stuck under it, and I managed to cut my hand twice on the baffle discovering that the blade was hitting it.

Although my brother has now indicated this is an “easy fix” involving changing a bolt on the mower and hitting the baffle with a hammer a couple of times, I’ve already sent to mower to the local (and fairly close) shop to have them check the front wheels (the tires have trouble holding pressure, so I wonder if the wheels themselves are damaged and cannot make a good seal with the tubeless tires) and to adjust the steering bars so they do not overlap (a quick fix I could have made with spacers or by bending the bars, but my uncertainty and lack of historic success with small engines and equipment left me uneager to try).

And: It’s been two? almost three? weeks, and the grass has continued to grow. Scratch that: Some of the grass and other flora has continued to grow seedheads which make everything look untidy (except for the brown front grass, which I cut before I disabled the mower).

Ah, what to do? Last time we had an acquaintance starting out his lawn business do the deed, he charged us $300. Not eager to take on that expense, we demurred.

I have the small push mower that I used in Old Trees in the shed, where it’s sat for almost 20 years. I could try to clean the carb and replace the spark plug, I reckon. I think the fuel line might have been cracked as well. As I’m not sure about the availability of the parts locally and because I’m not very good with small engines, I’ve put this off as well. Perhaps that would be a good project for me to do sometime to, you know, get better with small engines. And maybe get my tiller started again. Ha, ha!

I also have a reel mower which was dull and had dry-rotting tires when I got it. Not likely given the state of the meadow.

So: I have taken the line trimmer to part of the interior back yard. I got about 20% of it with a round of battery charges. I think I will continue this course of action until I’m done with it or until the main mower comes back. The result is uneven but better than its overgrown state, and by pre-cutting, when I get the mower back, it will mulch this part of the yard better and not choke out. The rest of the yard? I might have to overlap the cut portion a bunch so that the uncut portion does not choke out the mower.

And, ah, have I used that extra space in the garage for other projects in the interim? Oh, but no. The last couple of weeks I have fallen back into the bad habit of sitting at my desk too much to too little end. And even writing long-winded blog posts count as an end.

Oh, the humanity. At least the cuts on my fingertip and palm have stopped bleeding and stopped hurting.

One of the things I unboxed from my closet last week, along with some DVDs, videocassettes, and books, was a videocassette cleaner.

For you damned kids, it’s basically a videocassette, except instead of a ribbon, it’s got a bit of a cloth attached to the reels, and you put a little rubbing alcohol on it and run it through your videocassette player (let’s be honest, they’re all VCPs these days; not a lot of R’ing being done). In theory, it will wipe any gunk off of the heads that read the information from the tape. I’m not sure if they really did anything, but in the 1980s, youngling, we were studious caretakers of our cassette players, both video and audio.

You know, I see these from time to time at estate sales, but it’s not something I would buy. Now I own one, I guess. Several years ago, I thought it worth sticking it in a box addressed to myself.

But, do I dare? And do I dare? The videocassette player does not seem to have much trouble with videocassettes. Well, some are degraded, but some are not.

So I will probably keep this in my back pocket until I experience difficulty that I think might be explained by dirty heads. Until then, where should I keep it? In the unwatched videos cabinet? In the cabinet with the tech stack? Ah! The closed cabinet with the extra video game systems in it. Perfect!

Every day last week, different “companies” have posted basically the same job every day slightly different:

The job descriptions are the same, basically:

Continue reading “It’s Not Hard To Spot The Grift” →

I did not go to the book signing at ABC Books yesterday; instead, the family went to the Crane Broiler Fest in Crane, Missouri, which has become somewhat of a family tradition.

But on Friday, I went looking for an audio course to listen to after An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. I have two boxes of audio courses and audio books on the floor in the closet (and some stacked atop them), and I had two boxes of books and things winnowed from my mother-in-law’s library and collection when she moved out of her house, what, four years ago? We culled the books for things we might want when we boxed them at her house, and then we went through them again after bringing those boxes home, and I ended up with two. Which have been in my closet for several years.

As I was digging around, I realized that the top box was half books and half videos. My book saling has been very measured this year; we have not made it to any one of the four Christian County library book sales, and it looks as though we will not make the autumn Springfield-Greene County Library book sale either. So I’ve made a little room on the bookshelves, and I’d trimmed the overflow on the video cabinets, so I unboxed one of the two boxes.

I did not take a photo of it to enumerate what she gave me, but the videos are a preponderance of historical dramas and romances/romantic comedies. So when I get around to rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (or Kenneth Branagh’s anything, but not Much Ado About Nothing which I read in 2024), know that it’s from this haul. Also, because this has pushed the overflow onto a second cabinet, you’ll probably see movie reports about them first (but not necessarily soon). The books are some contemporary (which means late 20th century and beyond) fiction, textbookish English and literature treatments (she was an English teacher, after all), and some poetry.

What’s more striking, though, is what was in the box and that I have bought in the interim. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham, which I bought in 2025 after watching the movie version, Christmas with the Kranks in 2023, and the DVD of Leathernecks which I bought and watched in 2023. Well, I guess I really did want them after all.

So that means I only have the three boxes remaining on the floor. “Clean office closet” has been on my Goal-Task-Chore (available on the Apple App Store and Microsoft Store) for months. I kinda started around the end of the last school year when I discovered I had a box of two-pocket folders, so I vowed to cull old school supplies to offer to the Lutheran school (which also explains the partial box of school supplies that has remained on my office floor since May).

Ah, the office closet. I don’t really go into it that often. It’s an archive of old Role-Playing Games, technology and certification books from the turn of the century (when I was at the community college studying tech, I came across a listing on Ebay for thirty networking books for $100, someone cleaning out what his employer had bought him, perhaps, and I got it–and then ended up not working in networking or hardware support), older computer magazines, bric-a-brac electronics, a couple of guitar and laptop cases, some batting from my crafting days (where I only used a little batting), several camera tripods, and various envelopes.

And the blocker: My old notepads and notebooks. I have given some thought to discarding those; it’s clear that no university will want the archival papers of the successful poet. I’ve often carried a pocket notebook or the leather binder with its pads and jotted down drafts of poems in them. I have been shredding drafts of my poems recently after I have completed them, but shredding the old stuff seems a little…. Permanent. Maybe I should wait until we get our fireplace repaired so that I can throw them into the fire like a proper literateur. Maybe I’ll also throw in the marked-up copies of John Donnelly’s Gold which I had tech people I know review twenty years ago right after I finished it, or the copy of Marquette Minus One, my first completed attempt at a novel (1 of 2 completed attempts, by the way), marked up as a trade by my college crush as exchange for a theatre ticket for one of The Norman Conquests (not a date! she insisted). They were in the closet until I moved them to the store room. Ah, there are boxes and file cabinets worth of material in there I could discard before leaving it to my heirs.

But I haven’t made that decision yet, and so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on cleaning the closet. Gentle reader, visit Polymarket or Kalshi to predict whether I finish cleaning my garage or my office closet.

Regardless, I have three things for the Free Book cart this morning: Leatherheads, Skipping Christmas, and a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not sure why I preserved this; I have a simlar paperback copy of my own and the leatherbound More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the turn of the century. Since I do not think my boys will be interested, I’ll put it out for anyone who might be, or for the church official who removes non-theological books from the cart.

For some reason, Facebook thinks I’m a big vintage toy fan and feeds me a steady diet of people’s purchases mentioned in groups to which I do not subscribe:

Flash was my first G.I. Joe figure; my father’s then-girlfriend, later-wife bought it for me. When they were dating and first married, she got us several toys to, I guess, endear us to her or whatever. Once her son was born, though, we became the other who needed to be put down in favor of her issue. Probably didn’t help that this time coincided with our moving to Missouri and only coming to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks in the summer, and we were pretty off the hook when we did.

I might even still have it, albeit in pieces (and he’s probably missing his thumb). I don’t see it on the post from eight years ago when I finally let my boys play with the G.I. Joes.

He was a soldier. With a laser rifle. C’mon, man, that was cool. And it predates the cartoon, where they all had lasers somehow.

MfBJN, 2012: A Brief Dissertation On Where To Shoot An Evil Reanimated Skeleton

Forget zombie kitsch; that’s been covered ad nauseum on the Internet. What weapons to use on them, what specialty kitsch rounds to buy for your gun to shoot them, zombie targets for the shooting range, et cetera and et cetera. Have you reached nauseum yet? I have.

One important bit of useful information remains unexplored, however. I have not seen anyone cover on the Internet how to shoot a reanimated evil skeleton, and believe me, I have researched uncountable hours for the answer (uncountable, in this case, because the number is zero, and anyone who tells you you can count to zero is either a higher mathematician or someone about to pitch you zombie and/or bacon-related products. In a word: insane).

So I’ve done some musing, as one would expect I do given the name of this blog, and I’ve decided the following.

Now with people and, presumably with zombies, (I don’t care for zombie kitsch, so I have done only slightly more research on zombies than on reanimated skeletons, which means I watched Night of the Living Dead twenty-five years ago and Evil Dead this last Valentine’s Day), one shoots for center mass. Well, no, scratch that; in zombie films, I guess the head is the key based on some commercials for zombie movies I’ve seen.

However, with a skeleton, there is no center mass to aim for. The trunk of the body is just a bunch of ribs and a tiny little spine running up the middle. When Zhrotor the Destroyer summons his dragonscale-seeded armies to ravage the land, are you going to trust you’re going to hit that little sliver of bones? Let’s face it, if you hit a rib, you’re probably not even going to annoy the skeleton.

Of course, you can shoot for the head as movie-based zombie hunters do, but you have to be really close, really still, and/or really dependent upon special effects to hit that target.

You could shoot for the clavicle or sternum, I suppose, but a clavicle shot is just going to partially incapacitate the clackety-clacking doom marching on you. I suppose it’s better to deal with a skeleton whose sword and sword arm are lying on the ground than a skeleton still bearing arms, but you can do better.

Friends of mine among the living, I urge you to do what I do: Aim for the pelvis.

Shooting News Weekly, 2026: Shot Placement: Is the Pelvic Girdle Really the Best Self-Defense Solution?

One could wonder if the Internet got the idea from my post, which was passed around in geek quarters back when people linked to MfBJN. Maybe not;

(Link via Instapundit who linked here a couple of times back when blogs were a thing.)

The Polaris detached from the pool wall last week. The Polaris is a pool cleaning “robot” which is not really a robot, but a changing water pressure system that stirs up detritus from the bottom of the pool and sometimes catches larger things in an attached mesh bag. Some years, I spend a lot of time on reattaching the Polaris–sometimes, the water pressure causes one of the nuts holding the line (hose) to the housing or its various joints. This time, though, it was not a matter of simple detachment at the quick-release attachment which had been a bit of a recurring problem until I re-trimmed the hose and tightened its nut with a pliers instead of finger-tight. A nut had actually cracked and was no longer usable.

Well, that’s a trip to the pool store unless I have one in the pool parts bin in the garage. I’ve collected a number of bits out there because I cannot throw anything away. I have a bit of hose that’s petrified now. The old skimmer basket which is cracked, kept because I can envision a time when we’re skint and the cracked, replaced skimmer basket is our only option. And, to my delight, an extra hose nut in official Polaris packaging which probably means it cost $20 on a trip to the pool store in a past summer. Good thinking, me. Just in case I would need one, and I did.

Though, to be honest, that’s not much of a gamble. I might have mentioned that Nogglestead is overdue on a number of major maintenance due to its owner’s poor fiscal decisions (mostly, overphilanthropy when flush). But, strangely, we’ve taken care of the pool. A couple of new liners at a couple thousand per. A couple new pump motors and secondary Polaris pump motors. We even got a solar cover to keep the pool water warmer earlier and later which we used only the year we bought it because it’s a lot of work to deploy it, and in the first couple of years (and a decade), we didn’t use the pool that much (and, now, we open it early and keep it open later and I get into it for a cold water dunk / cryotherapy). We’ve been told that the newer models of the Polaris are not as good as the old ones, so we’re likely to keep cobbling this one together as long as we can. So buying a couple commodity spare parts for it makes sense.

But other times, I’ve gotten burned buying spares for appliances we have replaced.

Ah, gentle reader, I have mentioned many times how often I had to fix my dryer(s). We had commodity Maytag/Whirlpool washers, mostly under the hood the same units, and I was forever replacing wheels whose ball bearings seized up, slipping belts, or bad fuses/thermometers on them. They were not even electronic dryers, dammit, but the lubricant on the wheels or the bearings were trash. I ended up having a kit on hand so I wouldn’t have to wait for an order to be able to keep the multi-load daily laundry running. And when we got the postless Samsung washing machine, which sat on shocks and if one of the shocks went bad, the washing machine was useless. After replacing them once, I ordered an extra set on hand for the next time since the Internet informed me it happened pretty often. But as it happened, a seal at the bottom failed and the repairman sent to me by a lead generation service proposed a fix that cost more than a new washing machine. As a result, we have a matched set (bought at two different times when each unit failed me for the last time), and we have parts for machines we will never own again.

I’ve also mentioned that I have had to replace the heating element on the forty-year-old wall-mounted oven a couple of times (jeez, just this January?) and have had trouble with them arriving bent or broken. I want to say earlier this year I also ordered a spare, and it arrived bent, so I sent it back and did not order another spare. I mean, we can’t replace the oven without renovating the whole kitchen because it’s a small oven built into the wall, and they don’t make ovens that size any more). So we’ll have to ride it until we absolutely cannot any more. But, eesh, I’ve not been happy with the heating elements I have ordered from Amazon.

So buying spares really does seem like a bad idea in these cases. Parts I don’t have on hand fail, and I end up replacing the unit.

The one exception I have is for our family room television. It’s a rear projector kind which uses a giant, expensive lamp. The lamp on our twenty-one-year-old television has failed twice, and the last time it did, I ordered a second lamp because I figured that in a decade from then when it failed again, the part might not be available. So it’s gathering dust in a cabinet in the storeroom. Hopefully, if I need it, someday, it will work. But history has proven that’s not often the case–something else will fail, and we’ll end up with a modern telescreen of some sort.

Meanwhile, my garage collects these spare parts, and I’m not sure what to do with them. They’re new, so I hate to pitch them. They have fallen out of the return window by many years. Perhaps if I get into listing things on Ebay again, I’ll give them a try there. Or, more likely, leave them for my estate sale.

So I had a job interview yesterday, the first in…. Well, I would say “months,” but I did have a “record yourself talking to an ‘AI'” thing last week which was almost like a job interview, but not really. One of the things on the job posting was “Comfortable pushing back, including with senior engineers, when a process or PR isn’t ready to ship.”

The best story I have for this comes from my days at the digital marketing agency almost 20 years ago. The client’s product, secondnature™ brand dog litter, was going to be featured on Good Morning America, so the agency hired a consultant to optimize the Flash presentation/video. The consultant was auto-didacting Flash as she went, or she was trying to, but it came down to an all-nighter the night before the product appeared on a network television news show. My role was basically waiting all night for something to test, and her role was to say, “I’ve almost got it now, it’ll be ready soon.” So I undoubtedly watched a couple episodes of the early The Simpsons seasons on the eMac and stretched out on the floor for a nap with the volume turned up on the PC speakers so I would hopefully hear the instant messanger ding. Around daybreak, before air time, she delivered…. Something. Something not better than we already had. So I vetoed it. And the agency, presumably, ate the cost of that failed effort (the agency, as it happened, ate a lot of costs of failed efforts both while I was there and after).

It’s a good story, but: I would have probably had to explain what Flash was.

I mean, HTML 5 did not come around until 2008. Before that, it was Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, a browser plugin that handled video and rich applications. Because neither Microsoft Silverlight (a johnny-come-lately) nor Java applets (write once, run anywhere, riiiiiight) did it quite as well. It eventually became a rich attack vector, though, and HTML 5 with its new tags killed it.

Ah, gentle reader. I said yesterday:

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

I’ve been around long enough that I know the problems that newer technologies and processes are trying to solve. Git and distributed version control systems? Developers were tired of finding files locked in Visual Source Safe–so, have pull requests and merge conflicts actually made things better? Dunno–that’s just how we do it now and come up with ever more creative and time-consuming ways to fix the new problems. (Aside: You know, some job postings still mention that the applicant should be familiar with source control systems and include Subversion aka SVN which was a 20-year-old proto Git. I cannot imagine anyone is still using Subversion, but I guess one never knows.) People tired of frames and table-based layouts created Cascading Style Sheets and now the widget-based responsive design front-ends which rely on hard-to-nest blocks of code whose methods change seemingly every release of the framework, and…. Okay, frontend stuff is not my passion.

But that perspective is not valued, old man. What companies want is for employees to do it the current way the bestest.