Category: Life

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.

Ah, gentle reader. My impending layoff is yet an impending layoff, which puts one in an unsettled and grim mood as do current events taking place across the country and around the world. So what should one do? One does what one can. One leaves the desk and leaves the computer and leaves the house once in a while. And one makes silly shows of economizing in relatively low impact areas. Not eat beef at every possible meal? Nonsense. I will learn to mend my clothing. Which costs less than a package of Sam’s Club beef when I buy it new at Walmart, and the thread in mending doubles the value of the clothing. Regardless, I will press on.

Overweening first paragraph aside, I have taken a couple minutes to hand-sew a couple of items, but not before putting them on my desk and then moving them around over the course of days or weeks before getting to it. I started with a pair of underwear, an expensive pair of Armachillos that I wear for workouts and which I bought, what, five years ago? The seam at the floor split, probably from friction with the floor of my blue jeans. They are in great shape otherwise, so I had them on my desk for a while until I asked my wife for a spool of thread from her sewing kit. I did adequate work, I’d like to think, but after a couple of washings, I noted the seam was splitting again. Was my work faulty? No! The original seam continued to give way beyond the edge of where my repair stopped.

The second item up was my old Milwaukee Admirals sweatshirt. It’s almost twenty years old–it’s the old logo with the human admiral, not the current skeleton logo that I mocked in 2006. The cuffs and the collar are fraying, but I’m not up to fixing that. I did fix the hole under the one arm–I guess the friction of the cloth rubbing at the armpit causes these holes that are not along the seams? At any rate, it’s good enough to wear out of the house and to pick things off of the top shelf at the grocery. Not for myself; I’m a make-believe miser right now (not even using K-Cups currently, nor Duraflame logs, both dollar-a-day bad habits in 2020 and much more expensive now), and as a make-believe miser, I don’t buy things from the top shelf. But some little old lady might ask me to get something down for her (and suddenly, I find little old ladies flirting with me–what does that say about me?). The sweatshirt lay in many places on my desk and served as such a cat bed for so long that I am pretty sure that I sewed white cat hair into the mending. In part because I’d returned the sewing equipment to my beautiful wife, and the sewing bin disappeared into her office somewhere for a time. But when I found it in a common area, I snagged the dark blue thread and a needle for my office.

The third item had the shortest layover on my desk: A pair of blue jeans. I order cheap Dickies or Wrangler carpenter jeans off of Amazon at $20 (well, more now) each. I used to pick them up at Walmart, but the carpenter jeans are not a popular cut, apparently, and I sometimes couldn’t find any. And as I probably have mentioned, I need carpenter jeans because I have fat thighs (leading to the friction at the bottom). So when another pair of jeans split here (the other common fault is the belt loop at the left rear breaks at the bottom–perhaps because I buy a waist size too large and then cinch the jeans at the waist, perhaps leading to extra stress on the belt loops)–when another pair of jeans split there, I decided to take the one color fits all dark blue spool of thread and fix it. And, gentle reader, I leveled up my mending game by turning the jeans inside out so that the frayed edges would be inside and not outside. Time will tell how long this mending lasts, as I cut the thread so that it was shorter than I liked–I could not go back, tie it off, and then forth and tie it off. Instead, I got back and halfway forth.

Still, unlike the work I do for a living and the blogging I do for “fun,” it was concretely productive. Maybe I will go further and try out the sewing machine I got for Christmas over a decade ago when I saw still stewing in viewing Creative Juice on HGTV. After all, I have lots of wearable LEDs after recent events and projects.

And maybe, just maybe, I am coming out of a screen-and-desk hibernation or coma back into the real world a little bit.

And I would be remiss not to include a video of the lovely Ashley Pezzotti singing “Darn That Dream”:

She has a GoFundMe to crowdsource a new album if you’re so inclined.

I just a week ago told the story of how I repaired my uncle’s Christmas tie and how it took me several rounds of Internet research and orders to get the right pieces I needed to replace the power switch/battery holder and then the LED in it so that it will once again light up red when I wear it on Christmas Eve.

I replaced the push button with a sliding switch, though, and sort of half-arsed it by splicing wires instead of soldering. But after years (decades?) of not working–it did not work when I inherited it over a decade ago–it worked, and it was off of my desk where it had been intermittently for months at a time for the last couple of years when I decided to look into fixing it and then determining, often, Not today.

And I was premature in fixing it earlier this month.

For on Saturday, we went down to Sp4rkcon, the Walmart Global Tech team’s annual free cybersecurity conference, and the free lanyards had all the parts I would have needed to repair the tie.

Each featured a power board with replaceable battery and a four position push power button–the four modes being on solid, on blink, on blink quickly, and off–as well as a string of green wearable LEDs.

It is a far better kit than what I put into the tie. As a matter of fact, I’m considering replacing the guts of the tie with the power switch from one of the lanyards. But considering means I thought of it; we all know I will leave well enough alone for at least a decade.

But I have another couple of bits/parts if I want to make use of them in future projects. When I think of them. If I think of them.

A couple of times recently, I have walked through the little hallway to my office, and I have seen that the decorative flintlock pistol shadowbox thing is crooked.

This means Nico was here.

I have posted pictures of that precocious kitten before. Although I guess now he’s technically not a kitten, but he retains his inquisitive ways.

And the shadow box on the wall is a couple of inches thick, so Nico thinks he can get on it. As the frame is only canted and not on the ground with broken glass everywhere, I can only presume that he thinks better of it when he touches it and it moves. Or he can get up there no problem.

Also, gentle reader, and by “gentle reader,” I mean random Internet stranger looking at that photo and fingering one’s lockpicks, note that these are not actually authentic or replica flintlock pistols which sell for thousands of dollars but are instead Turner Wall Accessory home décor which sell on the Internet for $45. I bought them in an antique mall in Billings over a decade ago thinking they might be replica pistols or such, but, no. However, as I probably paid $20 for them, they would seem to have appreciated nicely. Kind of like collectibles like used cars and food have appreciated in value lately.

I have mentioned before that I have an Easter tie, but I seem to have held back notice that I also have a Christmas tie. So let me go on at length about it, gentle reader.

I inherited it from my uncle, the “rich uncle” with whom I lived briefly. He passed away in, what, 2011? 2012? I’ve had the tie a long time, and I’ve worn it for the last several years running on Christmas Eve. The tie has a little red LED in it that presumably turned on at one time, but not since I’ve had it. You could find the button that operated it, but pressing it did nothing. So I wore it that way for a couple of years, and then I wondered if I could fix it.

So I cut a stitch in the back of the tie to open it up, and I found the simple board with a push power button, a hard-wired battery, and an LED. I took the battery off the board and looked at the tiny wires it held, and thought I could fix it, but it would be a problem for another day. And as so often happens, it became a problem for another year.

Sometime after Christmas Eve 2023, I put the tie back on my desk, and it lay there (well, here and there as I moved things around on my desk) for some months when I was cleaning or pawing through miscellania in the hutch when I came across some sewable LEDs I’d bought, what, a decade ago? I’d thought about putting them into a collar for Roark after we saw The Cat from Outer Space which features a cat whose collar gems flash when he uses his alien powers. Geez, that was probably twelve or thirteen years ago. I ordered some wearable LEDs and a board that makes them flash and a cat collar and…. I put them into a container in my hutch for someday.

Well, finding them again made me think I could look around SparkFun, the Web site where I’d ordered the original wearable electronic bits. I’d hoped to find a battery compartment where I could replace batteries when they wear out and connect it to the board. But I’d cut the leads to the battery, and, brother, those wires were tiny. So I ordered a ten pack of battery packs–you can order single units from SparkFun for under a buck, but if you order from Amazon, all the little electronic bits come in ten packs.

I bought a spool of two-strand sewable steel to use with the project, but I found it too fine to work with. I hoped to simply run the little threads from the connectors on the battery pack to the “legs” of the LED (research has just now indicated that these are the anode and cathode, words which appear in John Donnelly’s Gold but which I did not know applied to LED lights as well). But the thread, as I said, was too fine for my easy use.

So I thought about where I could get a bit of small gauge insulated wire. I feared needing to buy 100 yards of it at the hardware store for an inch or two that I’d use. And then I thought, Oh, no.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am a bit of a pack rat (NOT a hoarder). So it was with great internal fanfare when I recently cleaned out my garage–well, okay, that’s overstating it. When my mother-in-law downsized almost two years ago, she gave us boxes of things to go through, and one such box was extra parts from when she had someone build a custom computer for her. Inside the motherboard box, we had the case slots taken out to put cards into the PCI slots; an IDE cable or two, and power connectors for chaining hard drives to a single power supply connector or something along with a driver CD or two and installation guides for various components. And I threw them away. The very wires I could use. Oh, how I rue the day I discarded anything!

Just kidding. I did throw them out, but I had not emptied the garbage can in the garage, so I recovered the power cables anyway.

And lest you worry, gentle reader, I only disposed of the computer ephemera from my mother-in-law’s most recent desktop. I have bins and bins of my own accumulation over the last 30 years in my store room. But let’s not waste them on this project and save them for something important, okay?

So: I had the battery pack, and I had the wire, and I had the existing LED soldered onto the board that was working. So of course I tried to wire the battery pack to the LED soldered onto the board. But, as you might expect if you’re not some aging English major trying to rediscover electricity, this led to a very shaky set of connections prone to short-circuiting. So I snipped the LED from the board and tried to affix the little wired leads from the battery pack, trimmed from a hard drive power cable, to the anode and cathode (as I now know). But I could not get a good solid link by looping the wires and securing them with electrical tape. I know, I know, but I was trying to do this quickly and simply and without needing to solder.

So I ordered a set of 10 (of course) LEDs with longer legs. Actually, I ordered two sets of 10: 10 of the 5mm bulbs and 10 of the 10mm bulbs as I was not sure which the existing aperture in the tie supported. How do you measure the LED? Height? Circumference? I still don’t know, but I do know that this was a 5mm bulb as I was able to replace it with another 5mm bulb.

And alright, alright, alright. I linked the power supply to the new LED by turning the anode and the cathode like jump rings and looping the wire through them, securing it all with a spot of electrical tape. And it worked. So I fed the LED through the tie and put on the little rubber ring (grommet? Not exactly–what do I call that to get results on Amazon? 5mm rubber rings?).

And my uncle’s Christmas tie lights up for the first time in probably decades.

I have been goofing on the experience on Facebook:

I ordered the parts to repair my uncle’s Christmas tie.
This is the 21st century, you know.

All right. The original LED circa 1995 is still good in my uncle’s Christmas tie.
I just have to bypass the board with the power switch and hard-wired battery with a replacement and we should be good to go.
And if it doesn’t work and catches fire, I will be the brightest candle at candlelight service on Christmas Eve.

By the time I’m finished repairing my uncle’s light-up Christmas tie, it will have cost me $1200 or more at the rate I’m going.
But it will have more processing power than it did in 1985, and it will be able to connect to the wi-fi.

Finished repairing my uncle’s Christmas tie.
Upgraded the LED, too. FAA regulations prohibit me from shining the tie at passing aircraft.

So, yeah, from an electronics perspective, it’s a pretty simple circuit. I showed it to my sophomore, the guy going to be an engineer, and he was a bit, well, dismissive. But I’ve done it, and he’s done some school work and a hella lotta Minecraft.

Still, I’m not sure how proud to be of my work, which is really my fatal flaw. I guess we will find out on Christmas Eve when I try to light it up. But, if nothing else, the tie is hanging in the closet with the other ties and is off my desk. Now, about the sweatshirt that I just want to pull a couple stitches through. Or several years’ worth of Five Things On My Desk posts. As well as a host of other projects of minimal difficulty if you know what you’re doing, but I do not, and I don’t want to bollix it up.

---

Hey, think you’ve seen this before? I accidentally posted the first paragraphs of it, incomplete, on April 9. Hit Publish instead of Save Draft.

I am on the Internet, so you would expect me to speculate in a most irresponsible manner when I notice something, but I’ve got nothing but the noticing and the question.

They call Ozarks Technical Community College OTC.

The city of Ozark calls the Ozark Community Center the OC (probably because one or more of them heard Orange County, California, called The O.C. and thought it was cool).

But the question I have is:

What is happening to the extra Cs?

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.