Category: Life

Gentle reader, my journey with eyeglasses began early. When I was five years old, I had eye surgery to correct a lazy eye (my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital!). I was issued eyeglasses shortly thereafter, and my parents (I had two in those days, gentle reader, a halycon era I can scarcely recall except that my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital, and a boy in the next bed had action figures that you could take apart and reassemble differently, and he let me play with them a bit) had me wear an athletic strap to keep them on my head. And after a while, the strap was painfully tight, so I took off the glasses for good.

Well, not so good. When I got to sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Pickering (who had no cause to visit me in a hospital, but I remember her name just the same) brought up during parent-teacher conferences that I was a smart boy, but I was bombing all my vocabulary quizzes. Turns out that she wrote the vocabulary words on the board for us to fill in the blanks on the quizzes, and so I could not see them. So I got a pair of glasses again, big 80s glasses, and we soon moved to the trailer park where I would be a nerd at the bottom of the social ladder. I didn’t have a regular eye doctor, much like I didn’t have a regular any sort of doctor or dentist at the time. The young optometrist I saw my freshman year determined that I needed bifocals. As I started high school. Extra nerd on that scrawny little me of 1980-something. Thick, thick glasses to correct raging astigmatism.

My sainted mother sprung for gas permeable contact lenses for me sometime in my sophomore year, so I wore them through the rest of high school and through college and into the start of my working life and then into my career. But sometime around the turn of the century, I got tired of them and went back to glasses.

In 200…6? I got LASIK surgery because, if civilization collapsed (it’s been on my mind a while), I didn’t want to be one set of eyeglasses from crawling around like Velma or looking at the Nogglestead library like Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”:

I was a bit disappointed with the result. LASIK only corrected my vision to where my glasses did. Which is normal vision. I had wanted to have eyes like a hawk, but I just had eyes like me without eight to ten ounces of plastic on my nose.

Fast forward a couple of decades years, and I started to wonder about my vision. In church, the face of the pastor is not quite clear to me, but I do sit in the back row, chief of sinners that I be. And I sometimes cannot pick out small text on signs as I’m driving by. So I went to the local LASIK outfit to see about a touch-up which I understand one needs after a couple of years.

The LASIK guy said that with a, erm, distinguished gentleman like me, the eyes are not as adaptable or good candidates for additional work, so he wrote me a prescription for eyeglasses to help with my distance vision. I took it to a shop across from the mall and paid too much to order a set of glasses that I thought looked good on me but are not the prevailing style. Only later did I realize that the eyeglass frames matched the style that my brother has worn for years–so when it came to picking something out, I picked out something that looked familiar.

I waited a couple of days for my sets of glasses to arrive–I got a pair of sunglasses, too. When they did, I popped them on, looked at the sign across the street, and….

That’s it?

The larger signs were just a touch sharper, but I couldn’t see anything with the glasses that I could without.

That was a year or so back, and every once and again, I think I should try them again. This weekend, we went to see Charlie Berens at a local theatre, and we sat in the back (cheapest of the sinners that I be). The comedian did not look as sharp as he does on YouTube, fourteen inches away. So I got them out again on Sunday and brought them to church. I did some A/B testing, or “1 or 2″ testing, by putting on the glasses and then taking them off to see how much earlier I could read street signs or to see how much clearer the pastor was when I had them on, and….

Not much. A little, but not worth the hassle of the logistics of putting the glasses on for driving or shows or church and making sure I have a glasses case (with glasses) and…. To be honest, not worth the hit to the vanity of going back from being a distinguished-looking fellow to the 5″ 6” eighty pound nerd. Which, of course, I am not, but I don’t wonder if I would not feel that way again. Also, I don’t want to become dependent on glasses. I don’t know if the science backs this up, but in my previous experience, one’s eyes behind glasses do not tend to hold steady. I always needed new, stronger glasses every eye appointment.

So I’ll put the glasses back in the drawer for another time.

You know, I’ve done something similar with my beautiful wife’s reading glasses. Sometimes, when I’m reading alone and nobody can see me, I will slip on a pair of her reading glasses to see what effect they have on my close vision and…. Not much.

Well, they do magnify the text, but if I hold my book at regular reading distance (regular because that’s where the focal point is the best–I do read best at a particular distance–is that normal?), the text is just slightly less sharp, maybe.

But a slight improvement, maybe, is not yet worth the cost.

One day, too soon, I will turn that corner. And I will suddenly need bifocals again. But it doesn’t seem to be today.

Gentle reader, I have successfully triumphed over a small broken appliance with a successful hack.

A couple of years ago, we bought a little cordless handheld vacuum commonly known as a Dust Buster no matter who makes them, although ours does happen to be a dustbuster® by Black + Decker. I used it to vacuum up the little bits of wood that shook off of firewood on the bricks before my fireplace every day. It’s the kind where you have to hold the power button to make it work. And it worked for about a year when it suddenly stopped. Pushing the button would not engage the motor and the suction even after charging the device for a long time.

So it languished on a side desk in my office for over a year, as things do (as you know, gentle reader!) until I recently cleared off that desk–well, I didn’t clear it, but I did remove the dustbuster® and a flashlight that’s not working–and took the things to my workbench. Which has had a blocker project on it for a couple of months. The blocker project is not the lamp–I’ve moved that, yet incomplete five years later, to a different desk in the garage. It’s a bed tray that I was hoping to do some découpage with, but I ran into a little snag painting it and just… left it there for later, which is even later from now.

With a little time to kill available to me on a Sunday afternoon, so I set aside the blocker project (perhaps for five years or more) and opened the device up to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

When I opened the shell, I could see it was a simple device. A battery, a charging plug, a pressure switch, and a simple motor turning a plastic rotor.

Given that it was a power switch required pressure to keep it on, I thought perhaps the external switch was not contacting the internal switch, so I pressed it tighter, and the motor ran.

I did, however, see a little spark at the top of the battery from time to time, and my original theory proved incorrect. Essentially, the little bit of metal attached to the top of the battery had come loose. When the dustbuster® lie on its back and when I pressed on it, I guess the battery was close enough that it touched or the electricity could jump the gap, but it was definitely broken apart. The battery was not in a housing where you could swap them out. It was hard-wired into the system. Or it should have been.

Now I suppose, gentle reader, I could have soldered the lead back onto the battery. One of the pyrography tools I have, the nicer one, has a soldering tip and came with some solder–and I might have another kit somewhere–but I have never soldered anything in my life, successfully or no, and I didn’t want to try and to fail on a Sunday afternoon with what would be the defining moment or capstone of my weekend.

So, instead, I got a couple of rubber bands, and….

Well, I make that sound so easy: I grabbed a couple of rubber bands, as though Nogglestead has a drawer full of them. Now, you might think this is the case, and it might well be–I have not opened some drawers in years, and I am not sure I would have noticed rubber bands on instances where I have opened some of the more esoteric drawers looking for a luggage tag or the driver’s side mirror of a 1986 Geo Storm. I mean, it’s not like the collection of 3.5″ discs from my first 286 circa 1991. I know which drawer holds those.

So I went looking for rubber bands. We don’t get nor use rubber bands a lot here at Nogglestead. It’s not like we’ve had need to buy a bag of them. Mostly, they come to us on rare occasions when the postal service sees fit to put a rubber band around a stack of our mail. Or our accountant will sometimes band our files or filings together. But we’re getting only a single hands’ counting of rubber bands annually. I put them in the little box of paper clips, which I also glean from filings our accountants sends us, but I recently discarded several as my beautiful wife was concerned the kittens might take them from the box and choke on them. But I found a rubber band under the paper clips, and I started back out to the garage with it, when the rubber band of unknown provenance and age broke. I went back to my office and found two more which appeared more supple. I know I am running on, but I want to give you a sense of how much actual moving back and forth from the actual opposite ends of my home I had to do to to acomplish this simple repair.

Where was I? Probably going up and down the stairs.

So I looped the rubber bands around the battery to ensure that the lead remains in contact with the battery. As I mounted it into its the plastic body, I had to re-weave the rubber bands a bit, but it held. And when I got the screws in and pressed the power switch, it worked.

So I have a working dustbuster® again. At least until the rubber bands snap or until I jostle it so that the lead is no longer in contact with the battery. But I feel clever for an afternoon.

Also, I am now thinking about how easy it would be to unscrew the housing and reverse the rotor on the motor so that the dustbuster® blows instead of sucks. But I don’t have many friends in real life to whom I could try this. Just a coincidence, I suppose.

Also, sorry I don’t have pictures like a proper Internet how-to, but I was eager to try it out (it worked! as I mentioned) but then I am too afraid that if I open it up again to see the magnificent harp of Icantsolder will lose its magic.

Somebody that we used to know posted this on Facebook:

Ya know, that’s never been the problem here. When we have gone through phases of banana-eating here and then the phase ends, leaving us with bananas that go to baking-ripe, I’ve often made banana bread. Chocolate banana bread, no less.

The problem is that few of us will eat it.

I don’t know if it’s because we’re all lazy, and cutting off a piece is too difficult for us. Speaking for myself, I don’t tend to like sweet breads in the middle of the day. I’m okay with a doughnut in the morning, but sometime after that, I’m onto non-sweet breads. Bagels, and sweet non-breads, but not sweet breads.

In the olden days, we could take baked goods in for the teachers at their Lutheran school, but now they’re at the big impersonal public high school, that would be weird.

So we don’t throw the bananas away. We add some ingredients and invest some time in baking, and then we throw the result away.

See also Brian J.’s experiments with bread pudding circa 2008-2009.

Winterize Your Grill Now to Keep It From Rusting:

At the end of the season, it’s understandable that you just want to cover everything up and forget about it for winter.

Not me, brother. There is no off-season for the Nogglestead grill.

(Link via the Ace of Spades HQ overnight open thread.)

We have a kitten named Maud’Dib. It’s all about Dune at Nogglestead these days.

And one day, perhaps my beautiful wife will read it. After all, she read The Lord of the Rings before I did based on the movies coming out.

Maybe I should trick her into watching the film with me.

The 1984 one, of course.

YouTube suggested a Peter Zeihan video (Don’t Be Surprised by China’s Collapse) when I was just looking for a Johnny “Guitar” Walker song (“Ain’t That A Bitch“) because I haven’t cleared my cookies often enough in my main browser.

And I look at his backdrop:

And my conspiracy lobe started throbbing.

Given that the continents of “Earth” are all in a semi-circle on this map, what, exactly, is on the southern hemisphere of this planet?

Understand, gentle reader, that the conspiracy lobe of my brain is equal parts my creativity for fiction, the things that gave me the willies when I was younger, and my rational concerns based on lived experience (well, with projection from some individuals to the behavior of groups).

Or is it?

It has been a while since I’ve had to clean pasta sauce off of the light fixture, but….

Last night was Homecoming and my boys were going. The oldest got the idea to get some Welch’s sparkling grape juice to take to the dance. I discouraged such behavior, because even if it were grape juice, it would upset the School Resource Officers. So, instead, they went to dinner before the dance and stopped at the grocery but returned home to drink the sparkling grape juice before the dance.

The oldest, 17, decided he would open the bottle with a winged wine opener. So he started trying to screw into the cap, but these bottles have twist-off metal caps under the foil. So he shook up, the contents under pressure, and then he managed to punch a small hole in the metal cap. And the contents under pressure….

Well, some are on the ceiling, some was on the floor, some was upon him in his homecoming finery.

But, like Pandora’s box, after the troubles blew out the top, the boy was left with about an inch of fluid in the bottom of the bottle for his trouble.

And we have a reminder that will likely last until we move out of Nogglestead and the painter who covers it all will wonder what it is.

I participated in a sprint triathlon in August at the YMCA, and the swag bag contained a pair of YMCA sunglasses with the neon arms.

My goodness, when I was eighteen, I didn’t wear anything other than sunglasses with neon arms, cheap ones. And we called them shades.

I misplaced my regular sunglasses, so I’ve worn this pair for about a week, and it made me feel eighteen.

And, according to my boys, I looked like an anachronism. Well, they did not say anachronism as I am not sure it’s in their vocabulary. But if they knew the word, they would apply it to me.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to party like it’s… a couple years ago.

Well, gentle reader, as with the last few sales, I was not sure whether I would schlep all the way to the other side of town to buy records and books that would, maybe, barely fit onto my existing shelves. I asked my beautiful wife Friday night if she would like to go, and she made sounds like maybe she would go just to go with me but one of us should be around to pick up the student athlete from school in the early afternoon on Saturday. So I asked my oldest son if he would like to go, and he answered with relative enthusiasm that he would. So he and I went and met with the crowd of the first hour of half price day.

We only went to the dollar section, which is half the sale but included not only books (which I didn’t really browse) as well as records, audio books, and DVDs which were fifty cents each. Those, I browsed.

And bout a few.

I only got a few books, browsing the poetry and philosophy sections on the way out. I did get a bundle of chapbooks/pamphlets for a dollar; since I just read one such short work on fraktur, I was eager to see what was available. But there was only one such bundle, which I bought.

I got:

• Bullshit and Philosophy edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch. Is reflections on On Bullshit? Time will tell.
• The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell, an Arthurian legend in verse. Originally published in 1848, this book is not quite that old, but could be 100 years old or so. It pains me how recently a book published a hundred years ago would have been published.
• Milton: Minor Poems edited by William Allan Neilson. Do not confuse this Lake English Classics edition with Milton’s Minor Poems edited by Philo Melvyn Buck in the Eclectic English Classics edition which I read in 2020. I am hoovering up the little pocket editions from this era which are still in pretty good shape, although this book is an ex-library edition with the attendant marks. The book sale had two copies of this particular volume; I picked up this one because it had a better cover.
• What I’ve Learned About Life in the Ozarks… Our Kids’ Perspective. a 2004 fundraiser by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) ot the Ozarks, a collection of short quotes by kids and photos. The kind of thing that I would pick up, but my son threw this into the box. But he’s not here to claim it now, so into the unread stacks it goes.
• How It Was: Remembered and Fabricated by Orvey C. Buck, a self-published collection of poems from…. well, one of the included chapbooks is dated 1989, and the font is monospace, so it might have been laid out on a typewriter. Even so, the collection is probably contemporaneous with my first chapbooks.
• One World, One Heart by Susan Polis Schultz. But didn’t I already read it? Yes. But it was the chapbook facing out on the one bundle I bought. So I got another copy. It reminds me of buying poly packets of used jukebox 45s back in the day. You could see the first and last one, and you were generally gambling on what was in between.
• Nutshell People and Other Biota by Mykia Taylor (1989).
• Timberlines by Mable A. Lybyer (?).
• The Little Wilderness Poems by Mary Holman Grimes.

I also picked up five bundles of The Missouri Conservationist magazine to look for photos I can use in découpage. The magazines were essentially a nickel each, which is below even yard sale prices.

Before I hit the books, though I went through the albums. The sale did not have many, but not many people were looking through them. Still I picked up a couple.

• Gap Mangione! When I looked at the cover, I thought, “Man, I didn’t recognize him without a hat.” But this is Cap Mangione, Chuck Mangione’s brother. It would appear that their relationship was/is better than the Gallagher brothers.
• Living Together by Burt Bacharach.
• In Orbit by The Three Suns.
• This Is Perry Como.
• Greatest Hits by B.J. Thomas so I can play his biggest hit for my boys to hear without the ooka chocka locka.
• Sami Jo by Sami Jo. Pretty Woman on Cover (PWoC). With most of these, you can guess mid 70s folk country, and so it is here: her second album from 1976, and her last.
• Party Boots by Boots Randolph. A two record set. Might already have it, but I spent fifty cents to make sure.
• Montenegro in Italy by Hugh Montenegro. The composer/band leader behind the iconic spaghetti western themes.
• Traces of Love by Jane Morgan. I have at least one of her records around here somewhere (research on this blog and certainly not any sort of organization of the Nogglestead music library indicates The Sounds of Silence and In My Style).
• Mediterranean Cruise by Frank Carle and his orchestra.
• Songs You Love To Remember by The Mills Brothers.
• Melissa Manchester by Melissa Manchester. “You like Melissa Manchester, don’t you?” I asked my wife, hoping to make this whole orgy of profligacy about her.
• Aces High by Ace Cannon.
• Unfailing Love by Evie. Since I got her Christmas album, maybe I’m an Evie fan. Or maybe it was just fifty cents so why not.
• Soft Lights and Sweet Music by Percy Faith and his orchestra. Apparently, this is a 1977 reissue of a 1950s original. But PWoC. Holy cats, that young lady is adorable. And if that young lady is still alive, she’s nearing eighty.
• When Your Lover Has Gone by Teresa Brewer. A jazz singer; I’d never heard of her before.
• Colours of Love by Hugh Montenegro. I might already have this, but it was fifty cents, so it’s best to make sure. And it would double my chances of finding it in the music library if I ever wanted to.
• Return of the Wayfaring Stranger by Burl Ives.
• Burl Ives and the Folk Singers Three.
• It’s Not Just My Funny Way of Laughing by Burl Ives.
• Singin’ Easy by Burl Ives.
• The Versatile Burl Ives. I mean, if I really get into Burl Ives, I’d hate to spend more than $3 for a set of his records.

It’s funny how the sale has its gluts of different things. This sale had a lot of Rose Maddox, for example, where other sales have had a lot of Spanish or Brazilian music. Unfortunately, or fortunately according to my pocket book, this sale didn’t have a lot of tempting records. We might be running out of that window where I’ll find a lot of 40s-60s jazz and easy listening available. Those grandparents are probably all about downsized by now.

After the records, I hit the DVDs and pretty much collected anything that I might want to ever see.

The takings include:

• Get Carter, a Stallone actioner of a bygone age.
• A Quite Place, that movie about aliens that locate humans by sound.
• Dallas Buyers Club.
• Don Juan DeMarco, a Johhny Depp film from a bygone age.
• How To Be A Latin Lover, which looks to be a comedy with Selma Hayek, Rob Lowe, and Kristen Bell.
• Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Pitt and Jolie action comedy(?).
• A Little Unprofessional, a comedy special by Ron White. Although I apparently did not pick up the one by Larry the Cable Guy.
• The Bookshop; I read the book in 2021.
• Corky Romano with Chris Kattan. Heaven forgive me, but I took my wife to see this in the theaters.
• Toy Soldiers which is not Little Green Men but instead a Louis Gossett, Jr., movie with Sam Gamgee in it.
• Iron Mask which surely must be a retelling of the Dumas story starring Arnold Schwarzenneggar and with Jackie Chan.
• Rocketman, the Elton John biopic which my son slipped into the stack.
• Legionnaire, a Jean-Claude Van Damme film.
• La La Land.
• Bringing Down The House with Steve Martin and Queen Latifah which is not the story of the MIT card counters. I don’t think.
• Knives Out which is a relatively new film. I’m not sure I want to see it, but maybe someday the mood will strike me.
• Medea on the Run, one of two Medea movies I picked up. My son was stunned.
• 15:17 to Paris; I might already have it, but I spent 50 cents just in case not.
• Underworld which I saw a long time ago when it was new, but I have not followed the franchise.
• Cry Macho, a recentish Clint Eastwood movie.
• Brimstone which is not the turn-of-the-century Sci-Fi series but a western. Hopefully, not to much of a modern Western.
• A Madea Family Funeral, #2 of 2.
• The Predator, a recent entry in the franchise likely to disappoint me.
• Fantastic 4 which I might already have.
• Ambulance, a Michael Bay film the boy wanted.
• Ad Astra, a Brad Pitt film I am not sure I heard of, but the boy wanted.
• The Poseidon, a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. No Ernest Borgnine, no Shirley Winters, no Leslie Nielson as a straight man. I expect to be disappointed.
• Better Off Dead with John Cusack. I’ve been kinda looking for this one, so I’m excited.
• Argo.
• Tomb Raider, the new one with Alicia Vikander.
• Crazy Rich Asians.
• The Legend of Bruce Lee, a documentary.
• Clash of the Titans, the remake.
• Wildthings with Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, and Denise Richards.
• Casino Royale, the first of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. I saw it in the theaters, and it’s the only ones of the Craig set I’ve seen.
• Baywatch, the comedy remake.
• The Master Gunfighter starring Tom Laughlin. You know, Billy Jack. Well, I would not have known either (although I am pretty sure I have seen at least parts of The Legend of Billy Jack because my sainted mother liked the movie or maybe Tom Laughlin).
• First Blood, the first Rambo movie.
• Patch Adams and What Dreams May Come, a Robin Williams double feature.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first in the series which I also might have seen in the theater.
• Olympus Has Fallen, one of the Obama-era “terrorists/bitter clingers have attacked the White House!” movies. Probably enough time has passed I can view the movie on its own merits and not part of the contemporaneous coastal zeitgeist.
• I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a later (well, not Netflix-later) Sandler comedy.
• The Producers with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.
• The Deer Hunter, the Vietnam movie which captured my son’s attention.
• Zoolander No. 2–well, it was only fifty cents.
• Kick-Ass 2.
• Beowulf which has a computer-assisted Angelina Jolie in it, ainna?
• The Death of Stalin, an ensemble comedy from a bygone era more bygone than other bygone eras I’ve mentioned so far.
• Trading Places, the Dan Ackroyd/Eddie Murphy comedy from the early 1980s.

Holy cats, that’s fifty films. I haven’t watched the last fifty I bought yet.

Looking at the list, I’m somewhat surprised just how heavily weighted it is to franchises, remakes, or reboots. But I suppose I should not be. Also, I have determined the place to get later films on DVD will be library book sales, as some of the later titles here were ex-library holdings–and libraries might be the only DVD release some titles get.

I also picked up two courses, Starting Out In Chinese and Shakespeare: The Great Comedies. So I just need to start commuting again or something to listen to these and the others I’ve acquired.

At any rate, the check made out to FOL totaled $40. If I had stopped in the Better Books Section, I would have spent more, perhaps on art monographs or old books, but I would also have had to eventually shelve them. Which is a sore subject right now as work at Nogglestead required us to move six bookshelves and their contents. It only took a little over an hour, but still.

I would proffer a pool, gentle reader, as to which film you would expect me to watch first. I cannot participate, gentle reader, as I have already watched it. But you can speculate in the comments if you would like.

Ah, but you know me, gentle reader. I look at that vast list of unsolicited, unentered contest wins worth several thousand dollars, and I think “I’ve got to pay taxes on all that.”

I think I shall decline.

I am not claiming to be a polymath, gentle reader, as I would have to be a far better autodidact than I am. But I sure am reading and listening widely these days, which means I have a lot of new vocabulary words getting thrown into my brain, briefly, while I’m reading/listening/studying. Soon to be fall out when I start memorizing additional heavy metal lyrics on my gym playlist.

Recently, though, I have learned the following words and could briefly say them correctly and/or read them with fairly correct pronunciation:

• Kuduasai. I’ve started playing with Duolingo, refreshing some of my Spanish and starting, again, Japanese from scratch. Kudasai means please in a familiar sense.
• Chavín de Huántar. This is an archeological site in Peru which has information about the Chavín culture which spread through cities in Peru about 1000 BC. I’ve had a couple of car rides/child pickup opportunities recently, so I’ve started listening to lectures again, this set being Lost Worlds of South America. I’ll probably finish this sometime in 2024, by which time I will have forgotten how to pronounce Chavín de Huántar, but I will likely remember the feline deity and whether one can build a vampire story about them.
• As I mentioned, I’m in the process of reading The Life Of Greece by Will (and Ariel) Durant, so I am all steeped in Greek names like Polycrates and Anaximenes and Anaximander and Xenophanes, and I am pretty sure my pronunciation tracks with the Greek. I mean, I do have a cat named Chimera, which is pronounced just like it’s spelled, ainna?
• I’ve been reading some late ninteenth century and early twentieth century short stories, so I’ve been looking up lots of words like demirep and so on. Unfortunately, I did not write down each new word as I looked it up or otherwise note it. Or perhaps it is for the best, as I would want to use them and would become more obscure than I am.

Something is bound to stick, though, gentle reader, and that will make me even more boring to talk to at parties as I suddenly lurch from creepy and silent to enthusiastic about esoterica. Which is also creepy, ainna?

But I would not include photos of a gun cabinet (not even a gun safe, but a gun cabinet) in a real estate listing.

We’re having a little work done around Nogglestead, and every estimator and service professional that’s been by has wanted interior photos of the house, and that enough makes the conspiratal lobe of my brain throb.

Conspiratal lobe of the brain aside, photos of guns on a public real estate listing are right where burglars can see them.

Youngest: I need to make something medieval. He says, referring to a summer project that he has chosen to wait until the night before the project is due.
Father: What do you mean medieval?
Youngest: From the Middle Ages.
Father: What do you mean the Middle Ages? From the fall of Rome to, what, 1400? That’s a thousand years.
Youngest: I want to make a mace.
Father helps son by providing a poster shipping tube and by pointing out you don’t have to make the ball completely out of aluminum foil, but he can instead make a ball of crumpled newspaper and cover it with foil, saving his parents $20 in aluminum foil.
Youngest: I need some string to attach it.
Father comes up with some twine and envisions the boy tying the head of the mace onto the shaft like a thong holding on the stone head of an axe.

But the boy makes clear that it he is going to tape the twine to the end of the shaft and then to the mace head.
Father: Oh, you’re making a morning star.

---

So I told the boy the history of the mace and its application in warfare. Part of the return to school is signing of the syllabi, where the parents and students review the content of each class and what they will cover.

And I thought, hubrisly, I might know more about history than the history teacher and more about literature than the English teacher.

I mean, I only have a bachelor’s degree, but I have continued to read for the, erm, couple of years since then. Which is, in many cases, longer than the teachers have been alive.

Granted, I am quite the outlier. But I would be happy to help my boys with their studies, at least in these subjects. When they come to me three-quarters of the way through the year with advanced algegra problems, though, I guess it puts me back into my place.

Patrice Lewis of Rural Revolution on the issue of worry:

I know someone who is worrying himself into an early grave. He has an incredible number of blessings in his life – a lovely wife, great kids, a beautiful home, good health, modest financial success – and yet he is so caught up in how bad things are getting (both nationally and internationally) that his worries are starting to damage his health.

Like the commuters in the subway station, this friend can’t always lift his head to appreciate the beauty around him or the blessings of his life. Instead, his eyes are focused on the news as he obsesses over the state of the world.

I know I struggle with this, for sure. Perhaps more than most people. As a remote worker for almost two decades, my perspective often has narrowed to this monitor and keyboard. I have to make an effort, and it’s a constant effort, to not feel isolated and atomized, to get out and to do things.

Jeez, I was Gen Z before Gen Z had a name.

Two die in Ironman triathlon as witness says ‘race should never have gone ahead’:

Two men died while taking part in the “brutal” swimming leg of an Ironman triathlon event in Ireland with disruption from Storm Betty that made the water “choppy”.

The storm had been battering County Cork, where the event was taking place, and conditions were “brutal” as competitors took to the water, a witness said.

I am not a fan of the open water swim. I am also not a fan of competitive swimming in the ocean. Come to think of it, I am not really a swim fan.

This Saturday, though, I did compete in my first sprint-length triathlon, and I did better than I hoped. Longer swims expose my lack of swimming ability and make me far less competitive, so I finished about 6th from the bottom.

Forensically, I look back and think I could have trimmed some of my swim time if I had not positioned myself second-to-the-end of the indoor pool snake-swim where you line up according to speed–I was faster than the woman I was behind, but I did not pass her as I was doing the triathlon on “cruise” speed, aiming just to finish. The first transition included a run from the YMCA pool to a transition area that was a city block away–run around the YMCA building in a parking lot barefoot, cross some grass, cross an apartment complex’s parking lot, cross some grass, and then part-way across a church parking lot to the transition area where the shoes are.

I made a wrong turn on the bike, too, which added a mile or so until I recognized no police or volunteers were blocking traffic and no bikers finishing the out and back route were passing me any longer. So that added five minutes or more to my time.

Also, I walked probably half of the 5k run at the end. I certainly hadn’t trained for it. I had a time of 35 minutes with the walking–my normal 5k time is right about 30 minutes, so it only added 5 minutes to it.

But I suppose I could have trimmed, what, ten minutes from my overall time? That would have moved me up nine spots, probably still in the bottom third. So, yeah, longer triathlons are not my sport.

When I racked my bike, my old triathlon coach asked me if I was going to stay on it that day. I guess the fact that I laid my bike down on the Tiger Tri three weeks ago and finished it bloody has become common knowledge. He was working the mike at the finish line, and he announced me by calling me a staple of the shorter triathlons. Which I guess I have been this year–I’ve done two indoor triathlons and the two outdoor triathlons this year, which is pretty good for how poor my training regimen has been.

I did get a cool picture from it, though.

Now, after a couple months, I can get back to my real fitness passion: Weightlifting, as I can do so much of it sitting or lying down.

Well, until I decide to train at the last minute for the indoor triathlon at Chesterfield Family Center in late winter.

From Powerline’s The Week In Pictures:

C’mon, man, I gave something similar away for Christmas 2016:

I read Powerline’s The Week in Pictures to see if I’m in it (see also this and this).

On Wednesday, we went to 1984, the local vintage arcade, as part of my beautiful wife’s birthday celebration.

As in years past (2017, 2018, and 2019), we visited right after the arcade reset its annual high scores, and everyone in the family was able to get a high score on something. My wife got the high score on Joust again, of course.

One of the machines I got a high score on was Sinistar, but I did not register it immediately, as I was going to make just one trip to the counter as I was only going to get one free voucher and pin no matter how many high scores I set. When my oldest said he’d beaten the arcade’s high score, I went to look to see if it was higher than mine, and it was. So that triggered the boys’ sibling rivalry, and they swapped high scores on it for a while until the youngest blew us all out of the water. But by making a quick trip to the desk, the oldest secured a voucher for having a high score that did not last long at all. So we all ended up with vouchers.

How did I do?

I got high scores on the following:

• Arkanoid
• Asteroids Deluxe
• Circus Charlie
• Commando
• Elevator Action
• Spy Hunter
• Xevious

They might not stand for long. Hopefully not. We were there early on a Wednesday evening for roughly two hours, and the very light crowd turned over a couple of times. The number of games that were offline was a bit concerning, and many of these machines are 40 years old, so I imagine spare parts are getting thin. A lot different than when I dabbled in video game collecting 20 years ago.

At any rate, the intersection with the recycler tour comes from something I posted on Facebook and on this blog on July 27 and 28, 2011:

I sent the image to both of the boys.

Here in 2023, I don’t have to explain the forty-year-old game from 1983 that they’ve recently played.

I will have to explain Farmville on Facebook and the teaser of the wandering sheep. Or no, perhaps it’s better if I not try.