Category: Life

Wait, an eclipse, you say? And then insects that have been under the ground for years emerge? Where have I seen that before?

Oh, yeah.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be getting a shine job.

I am not bragging too much because it starts with admitting some brief uncertainty. But yesterday, I used the word “epigraph” correctly. After thinking about it a minute and double-checking on the Internet.

Epigraph means a quote at the beginning of some written work, such as the poem that leads off the book I was reporting on.

I have to slow down and think a moment because I tend to confuse epigraph with epitaph, which is a brief note on the dead; epigram, which is a brief, pithy bit of wit; or epithet, which is a brief descriptive phrase for someone or something, most often disparaging these days (but what is not?).

I think I learned all these words in my college years, which blends them together even more. I guess they all share the same prefix from the Greek, epi, to mark.

I never confuse them with epiphenomenalism, though I also learned that word in college. But in Philosophy classes, not English classes, which kept it separate and siloed. And other obvious reasons.

Who drew a praying mantis sigil on the sliding doors to the exterior?

More importantly, what eldritch horrors will occur when I wash the windows?

Maybe I should not wash the windows just in case. Which, as you might expect, is the default at Nogglestead. I’ve got Civ IV games to play for hours and then abandon because I haven’t won yet.

KCSM, the Bay Area’s jazz station, played this song this morning:

I was writing a letter to my 96-year-old grandmother when the song came on. In the past, she has mentioned how much she loved my letters, and so I try to write something to her about every month with pictures of my boys in them. But she’s in decline, so I’m not sure if she’ll get each letter or if she even knows it now. She’s about the last person alive aside from my brother who remembers me as an almost continuous entity for my whole life. To the rest of my father’s family, I was a distant relation for most of their lives, someone probably not thought of or spoken of. And my maternal relations, what remains of them, were always elsewhere as well and still are.

In the letter, I told my grandmother that the oldest boy is graduating from high school in about a month, and the culmination of the slow separation will complete. I told her, and now you, that we just had spring break, but as we did not travel, the boys went about their businesses and I…. Well, I did some household projects, but around them. They’re about to launch, and I can only hope that I will have been a more lasting influence than Minecraft and YouTube. But I am not sure.

It has been a very long time since they were little buddies who wanted to be like their father and asked a lot of questions. They have changed so much. But I have not.

Imagine you’re a kid, excited that you’re going to be on the front page of the newspaper, but your mom forgot to sign and return the release form.

And now all the kids at school call you “smiley” or “Walmart-savings-face.”

My beautiful wife speculates that the child might be in a foster home or something. I would extend that to perhaps hiding out from the mob like Jon Cryer in Hiding Out by acting like she is an elementary school student.

You know, I’ve never seen that film, and I don’t remember seeing it on physical media in the wild. I do remember the television commercial briefly. At least Jon Cryer sitting in a school desk (the school kind, so, yes, in the desk and not at the desk), smiling and raising his eyebrows (I forgot the wink, though).

Where was I?

Oh, I don’t know. Riffin’. Riffin’.

I had not realized I could select “Hu” as a pronoun.

I would choose that as my pronouns except I fear it would be denigrated as cultural appropriation rather than cultural appreciation of Mongolian throat-singing metal:

Also, just to be pedantic, but:

Let the employer know what pronouns you use so they can address you correctly.

He/him, et ab., are third-person pronouns. They’re used when people are talking about you. My employer can address me by name or by “you.”

Meanwhile, I sometimes wonder if I’m not being considered for positions because I have twenty-plus years’ backlog on this here blog not taking wrongthink and rightthink seriously.

As this question was marked optional, I did not answer it on the online application, which scored me in some fashion in the omission.

One of the things about living in one place for a while–coming up on fifteen years at Nogglestead this year–is that you get perspective in seeing the changes and variations in the same place over time. We have seen fifteen winters and are about to have seen fifteen springs, so we get a sense of how wide the seasons can individually vary. Warm winter? Cold winter? We’ve seen both. So the exclamation-point-driven media definitely has a harder sell to convince us that IT’S NEVER BEEN AS HOT (or COLD) AS THIS ON THIS DATE! Well, except for the record set in 1930. Or a couple times that show up in my Facebook memories where I cracked wise about having my window open on this date or pictures of my driveway shoveled on this same date in history.

So I remember the evolution of the Pricecutter where we shop. Well, the big Pricecutter. It’s a relatively new store (but it was there when we got here). A little further west on Republic Road, a smaller, older Pricecutter held on for a couple of years, but it closed, sending Ron, a bagger some decade and change in his second career, to the new(er) Pricecutter. Which has been our go-to grocery after we turned our driving habits Springfield-wise. Even after the Walmart Neighborhood Market opened closer.

About ten years ago, they remodeled the store, freshening its look and, more importantly, expanding its produce section to include more variety. They added a salad bar and increased deli options as well, including a lot of ready-to-eat meals. They have this little isolated cul-de-sac they stuffed with health foods and organic options. They built a classroom for cooking classes. In short, they tarted up the place and filled it with more profitable offerings, but those offerings were parishable.

Althought they did cut the pharmacy a couple years later, the store has been relatively unchanged for that time. But within the last month, they started another remodel. But this time, they’re cutting the perishables.

I first noticed a missing bunker right when you walk into the doors. Between the produce section and the deli, they used to offer a variety of…. well, I think it was dressings, cut fruit trays, and some ready-to-eat things. But that bunker is gone. Bunkers by the cheese and lunchmeat and in the meat section have been replaced with smaller bunkers, and a large section of the meat case has been replaced with closed-door cases that hold longer-shelf-stable items. The meat racks have also been downsized so that they don’t have as many types of cuts prepackaged and fewer of each cut available. They’ve cut down the organic section and replaced it with sodas. In other words, they’re stocking less of the higher profit but perishable items, instead focusing on lower profit items.

The store has gone into a defensive crouch, expecting consumers to spend less on fresh meat, fresh vegetables, and convenience foods from the deli. Because we are.

Also, I cannot help but notice eggs are $5 a dozen again. But I haven’t seen this on the news Web sites I frequent.

When I was working for my first startup right around the turn of the century (he said, hanging an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time), I was also doing the garage sale and estate sale thing on the weekends and posting the gleanings on Ebay on weeknights, and I guess that’s how I came up with this glass candy jar which I brought into the office and put a TIPS sign on.

I brought it with me to, what, two office jobs after that? Maybe only the one, as the second started as work from home, and it’s possible I did not bring it into the office downtown. But that itself was 20 years ago, and I can only remember certain elements of the cubicle there, where the major design elements were old Purina swag that my sainted aunt had accrued from her time with the company before I worked for a digital agency serving the Nestle Purina PetCare company twenty years later.

Since then, it has been in one of the cubbies of my desk in my home office. It looks as though I must have spilled some coffee on it at one time as the TIPS paper is stained.

For a long time, I would empty change from my pocket into the jar. This probably happened more in the Old Trees days, where I would walk around with a baby in a stroller and maybe buy a coffee or a pastry with a bit of cash. Then, when we moved to Nogglestead, the walking around ceased, and the dropping carrying money pretty much ended. For the last decade or so, any change I’ve accrued over the day has gone into the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League mite box in the kitchen, between the garage door and emptying my pockets, and not to the basement.

So this last weekend, I emptied the jar of its remaining change, keeping the single fifty cent piece and the single president dollar coin for myself. I spent some of the coins as “votes” in a chili cook-off on Sunday and put the rest in the church’s big mite box on Sunday.

And now… Well, I guess I will take off the paper and put the candy jar in the garage with the other glass and whatnot that I fully mean to etch or paint with stained glass paint one of these days, where it will likely languish for a decade until my estate sale or until I actually grind a little evergreen tree onto it and fill it with candle wax before putting it into a craft sale where someone knowledgeable about glass will discover it and recognize that it was an expensive piece of glassware that I marred.

I mean, the thing has spent half of antiquehood with old pennies and dimes with it on my various desks already. But its time has passed. Or, perhaps, this will be in a Five Things On My Desk, Shamefully post in 2026. Life is full of possibilities in different stagnations.

So when I popped in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Saturday night to complete my viewing of the trilogy, I said to my beautiful wife, “I’m going to watch Indiana Jones and Troilus and Criseyde.”

I had to repeat it a couple of times, and she said after I explained a bit, “Oh, Troilus and Cressida.”

Ah, gentle reader. My mother-in-law taught Shakespeare, so my wife knows the story as Troilus and Cressida. But I have read the Chaucer poem Troilus and Criseyde where she has not, and I was using the Chaucer title as a pun. Criseyde rhymes with Crusade, you see, whereas Cressida clearly does not.

Normal people do not have this problem, and I suspect few modern professors do, either.

I picked this up at the library a couple of months (years?) ago, meaning to riff a bit on it. But it was one of the five things on my parlor desk for a long time until I finally brought it to the office to scan.

It’s a tract about combatting disinformation.

Yeah, so it’s a political tract disguised as a non-partisan informational pick-up. It says you shouldn’t trust things you read on the Internet, but things that you get from government-funded nonprofits are fine. Note that it wants what it calls disinfo removed from the Internet! But not library tables.

It looks like it’s a product of the St. Louis Violence Prevention Commission, whose raison d’être is preventing gun violence or something. So a little out of its lane with this bit of info that I’ve dissed.

Ah, gentle reader, it has been over a year since I’ve done such a post (the last being December 2022). But I have taken a couple of steps of cleaning my desk, thwarted a little by digging around in my closet/kind of cleaning out my closet by putting things on my desk when looking for a laptop charger. So now, in addition to several things mentioned in December 2022, I have enough other things to make a whole bit of content this morning.

So, what do I have on my desk for now and what will seem like always?

A Swiss bayonet.

I received this from my mother-in-law when she downsized almost two years ago. For a long time, it resided in a box in the garage. We still have several boxes of things we received from her on the floor in the garage, records in boxes under the desk in the parlor, and boxes of books in my closet to move onto my to-read shelves when I make space. But at some point when I took small steps to clean the garage, I brought this bayonet into my office intending to put it on my office wall with the other bladed weapons. But I merely stacked it with the practice martial arts weapons on the books atop the bookshelves until I got around to hanging it.

Well, gentle reader, the kittens (who are young cats now) have knocked the bayonet down a couple of times, including once when I was squatting by the bookshelves looking for something to read (the kitten missed me, but not by much). After the last time they knocked it down, I put it on my desk until I get around to hanging it. Which has been a week already.

A digital photo frame.

This has been hanging around in my closet for some time, and I got it out when I was looking for the laptop power cord. I got this around 2006, so its little micro SD card still has photos of my first son as an infant. I had it on my desk the last time that I had a desk in an office downtown. After that job, I’ve worked from home, so for many years, I’ve had him around in real life, so I have not needed a photo frame.

I am not sure what I will do with it. I don’t have a handy outlet to put it on my current work desk–they’re all full of device power cords and whatnot. Maybe I will look for the dongle for updating the SD card and load it up with family photos for my beautiful wife who does have an office these days.

A stack of handwritten or clipped recipes.

This stack also comes from my mother-in-law’s downsizing–we received all of her recipes collected over decades, primarily in the 1960s through the 1980s. When my wife culled what she might try from the pile, I gathered some that I thought I’d use for découpage. They ended up in a stack on my desk, and then in a stack under another stack atop the computers under the desk, and then back atop the desk after I sorted some things on my desk. At least I think they’re paper for projects. I will have my wife review them again to see if I mistakenly grabbed some she wanted before I glue them to anything.

A tape measure.

One of my tape measures. What did I measure, and when? I don’t remember. Normally, I’m not measuring anything large down here. I have a pen holder that contains some tools, screwdrivers and pliers, because I sometimes work on little things or electronics at the desk. And I have a small wooden ruler, undoubtedly purchased as part of back-to-school supplies lists, for small measurements. Maybe I brought the tape measure when the ruler was lost behind or below other things. Only time will tell when I take it out to the garage where it belongs.

A stack of handwritten or clipped recipes.

A couple of old inspirational quotes. Twenty-five years ago, I was prone to taping these things to CRTs above my 286 or my sainted mother’s 486 (in those days, young reader, commodity computers were desktops, and you put the CRT monitor atop the sturdy metal computer case). One is a handwritten Mark Twain quote from The Prince and the Pauper, which I read (and probably quoted) in college. The second is a Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man in the arena which has become somewhat common on the Internet.

I can’t imagine the last time they were taped to a monitor or the desk hutch. I expect that I had them in a folder or on one of the file organizers on my desk but they came out when rearranging/sorting the desk.

They’re simple bits of paper, but I’m not sure why I cannot discard them. Perhaps because they’re personal relics now.

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So what about the items from 2022? Are they still on my desk?

• The dreamGEAR MyArcade DGUN-2561 hand-held electronic game? Nope; sometime in the year that has passed, I got it put onto the wall with the other electronic games.
• The Toys for Tots stickers? Nope; I have discarded them as well as the others that I have received in the interim. Although I think I have a couple of more durable Toys for Tots tchotchkes addressed to my mother up in the hutch.
• The pocket Declaration of Independence and Constitution? Yeah, but it’s getting closer to the end of the desk. I am not sure what to do with it; I don’t expect to put it onto the to-read shelves and read it (I actually have other volumes of the founding documents). Now that I think of it, I’ll put it aside and drop it on the church free book cart or the Little Free Library in Battlefield since I’m doing that now.
• Signed CD and note from Jane Monheit? I put the CD onto the stacks of CDs in the hutch probably shortly after the post, but I just recently as part of cleaning the desk put the note into a little binder of autographed memorabilia that I’ve received from artists when ordering from their Web sites directly. So nope, but just barely.
• The photos of me as a ring-bearer (and the photo of Gimlet’s daughter)? Actually, I am pretty sure I just recently put these into the unsorted box of memorabilia in the closet. And by just, I mean when cleaning my desk in January or when I tore apart the closet for the laptop cord.

So that’s only 20% I am getting better.

And as to previous editions, it looks like only the laptop hard drive from October 2022 remain on my desk, although to be honest, it was only with the January cleaning that I put the remaining stray spoons (noted in October 2022) into the bag of my mother’s spoon collection (noted on my desk in February 2014) which has been relegated to the store room again as polishing the spoons was proving very time consuming indeed. I bought a spoon display case whilst Christmas shopping in, what, 2021? wherein I polished a couple of the spoons and put them into the case, but it was too small to display them nicely (the vertical alignment was too short for the spoons) and it would not have held them all anyway. I have bought another one while Christmas shopping last year which holds the eight spoons I polished (and need to polish again probably). Perhaps I’ll get that bag of spoons to work on them again. Or at least to post about them again in 2027.

Also on my desk: A bag of the Christmas cards we received in 2019. Presumably, they were in the closet, and I got them out to put them in the store room with the others. I’ve been thinking about trimming the fronts off of the stock cards as one of our church’s ministries is creating cards to send for sympathy and to shut-ins. Every once in a while, they put a call in the bulletin asking for cards, but I never hop on it when I see that in the bulletin.

NOT on my desk: The 2023 Christmas cards, which I bagged up after taking them down this year. When packaging them, though, I found the 2022 cards under a pile of “I don’t know where to file this” filing on the other desk in my office. So the bag is labeled 2022/2023 Christmas cards as I’m not sure which year the individual cards arrived. That bag, though, made it to the store room. I think.

Also not on or under my desk: A couple of pillows whose stuffing had gotten balled up with repeated washings. I replaced the batting in them, but I ran into some difficulty sewing them up and asked my beautiful wife if she could. That was probably a year ago. They remained under the desk until I sewed them up yesterday with another bit of unprofessional mending. Because somehow, a needle appeared on my desk. So they’re out of the way. The Marine Corps pillow I mentioned in August 2022? To be honest, I don’t know where that is now. It is quite likely that it is somewhere near the desk even now. And given how I am now a sewer, maybe I will stuff that and give it to my brother.

Wow, that’s a lot of words on trivia. And, to be honest, at the end here, I don’t think how long these things remain on my desk is something to brag about.

But you all are welcome to start a pool as to what will be the first thing removed from my desk (I’d go with tape measure as I could feasibly take it to the garage when getting things to hang the bayonet on the wall) and which will remain the longest (I’d go with the quote cards).

Well, okay, not anywhere close. But if you watched game shows in the 1980s, you might be familiar with two of the games’ villains. The Whammy from Press Your Luck and the Dragon from Tic Tac Dough.

   

So the question I have for you is: Which is the bigger villain?

I’ll go first (and probably only). I say the Dragon because I came to watch Tic Tac Dough earlier than I watched Press Your Luck, and because the Dragon was the height of Apple II graphics at the time (according to the Wikipedia entry).

However, one could make the argument that the Whammy was worse because it was part of regular game play, and the Dragon was only part of the bonus game at the end of the program.

Still, I have to go with what I know.

I can still hear its roar when the game player exposed its square. To be honest, I think I can hear the Whammy, but I might be thinking of the Domino’s Pizza Noid from that era.

Generally, this is a prelude explaining the dearth of posting, gentle reader, but this story is unrelated to the dearth of posting. That particular ennui stems from not being particularly interested in posting political hot takes because I’m not convincing anyone and venting my spleen is not actually letting any fresh air into my spleen and because I’m looking for work and a front page of political wrongthink can hinder that. Although most employers and hiring managers don’t bother to look at my LinkedIn profile, much less do a Web search for me (Googling a person is so 2002), I did get a blog post attached to my job application once and might have led demerits. True story: On one of those barrage interview situations, none of the senior people looked for me on the Internet, but a junior developer participating in the interviews, did, and he mentioned my reading a Star Trek book. Afterwards, I got a hit to the blog from Greenhouse on the previous post which indicated that Chinese cat food products might have suspect ingredients. As I interviewed with two Chinese-Americans, I presume this labeled me as a xenophobe (although you, gentle reader, know that if I am not truly a Sinophile, at least I have read some history and watched some native films). I’ve not been posting a lot of humorous anecdotes about life because, well, how is life going? That’s another story, maybe, but I am looking for work. Enough said for now.

So when I say My laptop failed to boot, I meant my nearly thirty-year-old Thinkpad.

Continue reading “Last Week, My Laptop Failed To Boot” →

Ah, gentle reader. Every morning, I make our bed at Nogglestead because, at some point in my life probably coinciding with moving into my own apartment but more likely coinciding with getting a serious girlfriend or getting married, I moved beyond just leaving my linens in disarray on my bed and actually making the bed in the mornings. I mean, there’s even a book about it now (not a new book now, I guess, since it was published in 2017).

In the winter, the bed features a set with a heavy comforter and decorative pillows, here modeled by Foot and Roark, PBUT:

I usually make it right after I shower early in the 6 o’clock hour in the AM (both my beautiful wife and I are early risers; she because she just does, me because I want to ensure that the boys get off to school on time).

So it looks nice until sometime in the 11 o’clock or 12 o’clock hour, when I come up for a daily nap. I move a couple of the decorative pillows over and crawl under the comforter.

I snooze for about an hour, and if a cat has curled up against me, when I slip out of bed, I don’t remake the bed if it will disturb the cat.

The bed often remains in that half-discombobulated state until I turn down the beds at night. Sometime around dinner time, I take the pillows off and turn the comforter, blanket, and sheet down for easy access in the evening. I started doing this after one of my wife’s business trips probably a decade ago–she traveled, what, coast to coast and was gone a week, and I wanted to present her with one of the little touches of travel at home. No mints or cookies, though.

So if you break it down, the bed is in a Made state for, what, maybe 5 hours in the day? And then it’s Partially Made for 6 or 7, it’s Turned Down for 2 to 5 hours, and then it’s In Use for 7 to 10 hours.

I haven’t read the book on how much benefit one gets for making the bed for such a brief interval, nor how much might be deducted from the Benefits of Making Your Bed for not re-making it when it would disturb a resting cat. But that’s the state of things at Nogglestead most days. And I am sure it says more about me and my personality than any Internet personality test.

So I compelled my youngest to attend a trip to the hardware store–okay, big box hardware retailer–as I was in the process of turning a repair that could probably have been solved by tightening screws and laying down a bead of caulk but was costing $35 and counting. I mentioned we were looking for gaskets that fit between the spout and the wall, and so I was explaining what a gasket is to the boy, who is taking engineering classes in high school and should probably know what a gasket is.

“A gasket is a rubber or plastic piece that fits between two metal pieces to seal the gap,” I said, “It’s generally designed to keep fluids in.”

As we walked along, I thought about other similar devices. “A grommet,” I said, “Is a piece of a third different material put around a hole to protect both the material with the hole in it and the thing passing through the hole. You find metal grommets on tarps, and when I put lights in wine bottles or lamps, I put in a rubber grommet to protect the wire from the rough edges of the cut glass or ceramic.”

As we did not find spouts with gaskets or gaskets that fit between the spout and the wall, I said we’d put some caulk around it. “Caulk is a material that goes between two materials to keep fluids out,” I explained.

So caulk is kind of a gasket, but not exactly, although all three, grommet, gasket, and caulk, serve similar functions. Sort of.

Perhaps I confused the young man and should just leave his engineering knowledge to what he gets in his classes and Minecraft.

I have long been a fan of shopping at antique malls for Christmas presents (as you know, gentle reader, from my posts about buying records whilst Christmas shopping in years past) because I hope to find something to match the perceived personality of the gift recipients, something unexpected, maybe a little quirky, and something not generic like gift cards. Also, maybe something less expensive than if I ordered it off of the Internet.

These days, my shopping list is smaller. My aunt for whom I bought Duck Dynasty things or Dallas books or board games passed away in 2019. I bought or made gifts a number of years for my relations in the Kansas City area, but I’ve dropped them as they never acknowledged the gifts nor stopped to visit me when they were in the area (and they’ve not communicated with me in years at all). So I’m down to immediate family, my brother’s family, and one family with whom we’ve exchanged gifts for a while now.

So I hit Relics, Ozarks Treasures, and Mike’s Unique this holiday season and went through all the aisles in each coming up with a couple or three gifts.

However, I did not give or get some interesting things this year.

The Pink Fedora

Some time in the distant past, when my boys were about 6 and 4, I ordered a couple of child-sized black fedoras for them, and I remember that they wore them at least once with me as I took them to school. They might have worn them a time or two otherwise, perhaps as part of a Halloween costume or dress up like a literary character day (the youngest went as Mike Hammer one year because that’s how we could dress him up with the materials at hand, including a small fedora).

This year, my beautiful wife asked me if I remembered that, and of course I do. One of the monitors in my office spends much of its time with a slideshow of family photos, so I see Mike Hammer at the very least with some regularity. And she decided that adult fedoras would make a wonderful gift. So she planned to order them, but left it to me, so I could balance low-cost with quality, or at least find some that were not shipped flat (and had trouble returning to shape).

I wanted something as inexpensive as possible because I expect my boys, now 17 and 15 and not so enamored with their father, to not wear the fedoras at all. But time will tell. I also expected that they would presume this was my idea.

I found this pink fedora at Relics, and I thought about giving it to my wife from the boys, but it’s twenty dollars. Not bad for a fedora, but I am trying to exercise a little fiscal discipline in spots, and I know my wife would not wear it. So it’s still available, perhaps for the times when I am less frugal.

The Dogs Playing Poker Chair

I spotted this in the back room at Mike’s Unique. I did not look at the price of it–I am not a fan of secondhand upholstered items in general–but I sent a picture of it to my beautiful wife.

Back when we lived in Casinoport, I must have mentioned the seemingly ubiquituous dogs playing poker paintings. Did we see one at an estate sale? Perhaps. My goodness, they seemed common in those days, but one does not see them any more. They must have been a mid-century or earlier fad whose examples were getting cleaned out in the turn-of-the-century estate sales. My wife fittingly made noise about never, ever at Honormoor (our Casinoport home), but I ended up buying a framed print at some garage sale and hanging it in my garage. I also found a Dogs Playing Poker computer game on a cheap CD at Best Buy (let that be your guide as to how long ago it was, gentle reader: A game on a CD. At Best Buy.). It had you playing poker with a variety of dogs of different breeds with different personalities and styles. I played it a couple of times for laughs, but not much. It was probably about the time Civilization IV came out, and we know how I’ve not played many games besides it in the last twenty years.

I think the frame on the dogs playing poker print got broken one move or another and it got sent out with the donations to one garage sale or another. The game, too, probably went out with the cullings of old CDs, but it’s possible that it’s in the binders with old operating system CDs in the closet. I have not researched it in putting this post together but might take a look through those binders for old time’s sake sometime.

What did I get at the antique malls after spending three or four days of it?

Well, I got some locally produced jams and jellies for the brother and his families. I got a couple of decorative signs and wallhangings for his fiance. And I got a Bob Gibson St. Louis Cardinals jersey for my oldest son. Who didn’t know who Bob Gibson was. I explained he might have been the best pitcher ever, including Nolan Ryan (and he might have been the only pitcher able to best Ryan in a fight). Of course, I might be biased because I just read his first autobiography earlier this year and for some reason–perhaps reading two bible autobiographies this year–Facebook insists on showing me Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan posts. Unlike the fedora, though, I have seen my oldest wearing the jersey a couple of times at home. Perhaps it will broaden his appreciation of the storied franchise.

I will head back to Relics in a couple of minutes to look for a gift for our friend family since I couldn’t be arsed to make one for them when I was inspired to (and then was not inspired in the two or three weeks since). I might also have a gift or two to give myself, but probably not a lot of records or DVDs. LP prices are way up, and DVD prices are climbing as well–and I have plenty of films to watch now that holiday movie re-watching is over.

Not hide and seek with decorations which leads to the annual festival of The Christmas Straggler in January. This one is for the whole holiday season:

What Is That On My Freshly Vacuumed Floor? A Kitten-Mauled Decoration Or A Candy Wrapper?

False dilemma: It could be both!

They went through a phase where they would just let their candy wrappers, snack bags, or soft drink containers–and sometimes glasses–fall from their hands when they were done with them, leaving the detritus on the sofa or floors of the family room.

Which is odd: When I was a kid in the projects, I thought nothing of just dropping trash on the ground even though Milwaukee had public trash cans on just about every block (the green Keep Milwaukee Clean bins which are probably gone now). But I would not do that in the house. But my boys are the opposite: They get almost belligerent when someone throws a cigarette butt out of a car window, but they just drop garbage in the house (and take their shoes off when they come in the house, presumably to keep the dirt out but more likely because that’s what their friends from years ago did at their house).

Maybe they’re not yet out of that phase; maybe it’s that they’ve got devices/televisions in their rooms these days and don’t spend as much time in the common areas. So perhaps (probably) they’re still doing the same thing in their bedrooms now but it’s less noticeable as I don’t go into their rooms that frequently.

At any rate, the floor in the family room was briefly more festive than the rest of the house. Which is on a light decoration protocol this year to regular Kitten-Orchestrated Crashes (KOCs) as I mentioned.