Category: Life

It was fifteen years ago today that I initially built the outdoor toybox which eventually became our pool toybox.

It was true; I overengineered it a lot because I fully expected toddlers to climb on it.

It was a year ago that I rebuilt it since it was rotting in a lot of places from years of water dripping on its bottom.

And…. It’s ultimately too small for proper sized floats. We’ve only had two this year: A large innertube shaped one that the oldest bought and a leaky mattress type that my beautiful wife bought for $2 on clearance at Walmart.

I’ve still gone out most days, or at least a couple of times per week. The wife likes to go out to the pool in the afternoons when she can. The boys have only been into the pool a couple of times, and one has had a couple of friends to swim once.

Our pool is an underutilized space for sure–and, as major systems have come overdue for replacement at Nogglestead coincidentally when our income is running on a lean mixture–we realized that the pool has been the only thing we’ve spent money maintaining in our time here at Nogglestead.

And the toybox? I shall probably deconstruct it sometime soon and turn it into additional record shelving or leave it in its component parts in my garage and/or shed for years.

But, briefly, it held plastic sports equipment, a giant bounce-on hopalong toy that I used more than my young children did, a plastic lawnmower, and whatnot. And then for longer it held a rotating collection of floats, including water wings and other toddler-sized floats, balls, and dive toys for longer. But nothing now.

To be honest, when I saw the Facebook memories, I thought I’d share the story of rebuilding it, but then I found I already had. Pardon the indulgence about musing about the same thing again one year later.

Wilder today posts about H1-B abuse and says:

But in some tiny newspaper in the middle of BFE, the company puts out a want ad. This ad isn’t meant to be seen by anyone nationwide, rather, its sole purpose is to be “proof” that the company looked for an American. The idea is that only their preferred Indian candidate will know about the opening and the very specific procedures and job code to apply. Then, bang, the company has proof that no qualified American exists and they can hire Poojeeta Ramdash whose uncle runs the division.

Jeez, does that explain the job posting for an SDET I saw in the Stone County Republican?

The Jack Henry world headquarters is not in Stone County; it’s in Monett, which straddles the Barry and Lawrence County line. I emailed the recruiter and never heard back. Perhaps part of the plan.

Interior decorator reveals five ‘ugly’ things you should never put in your home — and you probably have all of them

Let’s treat this as a quiz, ainna?

Bolded are the things I have:

• Televisions. We only have two: One in the upstairs living room which has not been used since 2020, when we played Karaoke Revolution on the PlayStation 2 as the kids’ music class during lockdown. We will probably remove it from the living room in the near future when I finally refinish the end tables and coffee table that I’ve been saving for a rainy day.
• A Microwave. How do you say, “I’m urban, and I go out to eat/order delivery and then discard the remnants.” in TikTokian?
• Laundry hanging to dry. We have wet towels, occasionally swimwear, and things that cannot go into the dryer hanging from convenient fixtures most of the time. Limited, I guess, by when our laundry equipment is down for one reason or another, which seemed all the time until we recently bought expensive “professional” quality things, which means “all the time” is postponed for a year or two.
• Overhead lighting. Although we don’t tend to use it all the time, we have canned lights downstairs and fans upstairs. So we’re guilty of this. I’ve only recently discovered turning on lamps to diminish the darkness in the corners of the house.
• Unused candles. We’ve got a dog candle that I bought for my sainted mother when I was eight at the Wisconsin State Fair and a scented candle my beautiful wife got as a gift somewhere in the little mirror shelf in our dining room, a pair of taper candles in holders that I inherited from my favorite aunt in the living room, and a heart candle-without-a-wick that I made for my beautiful wife as a gift when I was making candles (she does not like fire) in the bedroom. I think we have one or two others in our other knick-knack collection in the clock downstairs which I received as gift–maybe for being the best man at my brother’s first wedding? Regardless, they mean something and are personal relics. One presumes that a 35-year-old professional decorator, influencer, and TikToker is blessed to live in the eternal evanescent now. Although, to be honest, I don’t know him, but I’m not impressed with the depth of people who live on the Internet.

So a perfect five of five.

One wonders if books would come in sixth or seventh in the list, not to mention shelves of videocassettes, DVDs, record albums, or CDs on display. Or fitness equipment. Or, icky! sports team memorabilia (remember, gentle reader: You can see a Packers logo from just about any point in Nogglestead).

But I live in a house that I live in. Not one I’ve designed for Internet clout/clicks or even real-life approval by people who assess based on that sort of thing. If they don’t go to the bookshelves and see what kinds of books we have to make their determination, we don’t have them over. Which is why, I suppose, we don’t have people over. Or perhaps the ones who do come and would normally judge people by the books they have are overwhelmed at Nogglestead. I dunno. What was I saying?

As I mentioned, my boys and I trekked out to my brother’s place a week ago. My boys wanted to do some fishing, and they not only did some fishing, but also did some catching. Me, I hung out with my brother and his wife. And we walked the edges of his property, 25 acres of lightly rolling hills with some woods at the edges, an old barn, and, as mentioned, a fishing pond.

As we walked, we talked about:

• The cross-fencing he removed because a previous owner had run cattle, but they were in the way of hay cutting; I mentioned Nogglestead had been cross-fenced at one time, and that I found the lines where the bottom strand of barbed wires were still buried back in my metal-detecting days (which, to be honest, were like two: I looked for and found a tiller pin I lost, which is why I bought a cheap metal detector, and two, the day I ran it over Nogglestead’s margin nearest the Old Wire Road and found only the barbed wire, which I initially thought might be buried power lines (double parentheses, but I now know to look at the electric lines from the road to the security lights to the actual drop which are overhead, but then I was ignaint)).
   
• The fact that we had enough cherries for a pie and might eventually get enough blackberries for a pie if we could be arsed to go pick them.
   
• That the boys and I were sorta doing the Rural Missouri Missouri Snapshots contest this year, and that we’d gone to the Nathan and Olive Boone Homestead State Historical Site for photos, but the closest actual State Parks to us are Roaring River State Park and Table Rock State Park (state forests and other Missouri Department of Conservation areas do not count as locations where you can take pictures for the contest.

We left on Saturday morning after that walk, and after I got home, my Facebook feed was all like:

C’mon, man. Along with with the Travis Kelce post I mentioned earlier, that is four posts that Facebook showed me within a day of talking within earshot of a phone with the Facebook app installed (and perhaps even running).

As the Philosopher said, “Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

On Friday, the coverage for the regularly scheduled Saturday “grassroots” protest was not only hyped in its own article but had a slot in the “things to do this weekend” feature.

And, no follow-up about how it went.

Which probably means smaller than the previous one, which was pretty small to begin with. A search of the local television news brings up a couple of pieces about the regularly scheduled “grassroots” protests in a couple of distant cities.

Not a mass movement.

Ah, gentle reader, it has been fifteen years since I posted about a gallery of the Noggle library, and this post is not going to revisit the state of the library. However, I do want to note that the brown, unfinished shelf that housed the woodworking books and magazines has come in doors.

In 2010, it looked like this:

In the decade and a half since, I am not sure I’ve acquired many repair guides, and if I did, they went to the unread stacks. But I did load it up with junk for craft projects that I never got to I haven’t gotten to yet.

But I’m now into year two of cleaning my garage, and I had picked up a plastic shelving unit for use in my office where it didn’t fit (my PCs didn’t fit on it in a fashion where I could have moved my printers under the desk), so I moved it to the garage in the middle of the garage. That made it look junky, so I decided to bring the bookshelves into the house–into my office–and use the wall space in the garage for the shelving.

Well, first, I had to paint it, of course.

The bookshelf has an interesting family-by-marriage history. My maternal grandmother remarried a fellow named Herb when she was in her fifties (old, I would have thought then–given she had only a few years to live, I guess it was truer than I knew). Herb was a woodworker by–hobby? Vocation? He had a professional wood shop that he gave up when they married, and he tricked out the lower level of the house they shared on the flood plain until it flooded, and then he tricked out the basement of their next rented house not on a flooded plain (and the house where my grandmother died–and the last time I saw her, I was so into my new library books that I read in her living room instead of spending time with her while she was bed-ridden–I never knew how sick she was). But Herb did not build this bookshelf.

One of his five or six children built it as a china cabinet in high school shop class. It was not a bad piece of schoolwork from fifty years ago; it’s made of solid wood, which puts it above most of our bookshelves which are particle board and laminate. My mother inherited it when my grandmother died, and I remember it on the exterior wall of her dining room–but when I went to show my beautiful wife a picture of it as a china cabinet in a photo of our family having dinner at my mother’s, it’s not there. Maybe it was on the interior wall of that dining room.

Sometime, I got possession of it; I don’t actually remember when I got it, and that bothers me a bit. I don’t think it was when my mother passed away– I did not take much of her furniture, leaving it along with the house for my brother to deal with. It might have been after my first aunt passed away, at which point my mother probably inherited a nicer china cabinet from her sister.

I say this because when I got it, I took the doors off and removed the center pieces of it to turn it into bookshelves. And I sanded some of the paint off of it. This would indicate I got it pre-children, back when I thought I would get into refinishing furniture (which I really didn’t–which is why the hardware for one of the desks in my office is packaged in the garage–I planned to refinish it 26 years ago, but I have not gotten to it yet, and it’s been in use for probably 24 of those years). When we moved to Nogglestead, it was put into the garage, and there it’s sat for the sixteen years we’ve been here.

Well, I did not stain it, but I painted it with leftover fence paint, and it’s in my office now.

It also has the distinction of combining reference material (the woodworking, home repair, and electronic repair books), books I’ve read (the paperbacks at the top), and books I have not read (things I had stacked horizontally atop the other bookshelves in my office). I’d thought I’d need it for the overflow mass market paperbacks I’d read, but the overflow did not take up much space on it. So I have commingled read with unread. But not my books with my beautiful wife’s books (I say that as though it’s a taboo, but some of the books from my childhood are mixed with her books in the family room).

I stacked the former read paperback shelves atop each other, and the three shelves together eliminated some of the only wall space available in my office for decorations. So the few of my mother’s spoon collection which I actually polished at one time and displayed in a hanging spoon collection display thing-a-ma-bob–well, they’re on my desk again, suitable for a five things on my desk post again. I’ve kind of leaned the other things from that wall–the Jordan Binnington print, a couple of woodburnings I’d given to my aunt and uncle which I got back when my aunt died, and a couple of small paintings that my great grandmother did and which I remember on the wall in the dining room in the house projects–atop the bookshelves.

But there’s no room here for the spoon collection. We’re actually getting to the point at Nogglestead that we don’t have vertical wall space for the things we’ve accrued, so some are in the garage, and some will be in the storeroom.

At any rate, that’s the story of this particular bookshelf. Which is the only heirloom-quality bookshelf we have, actually.

“I hope you like the color,” I said to my wife. Because we have five or so gallons of brown paint left.

And onto the next project: Which is cleaning and organizing the garage, and maybe finally refinishing/staining the coffee table and end tables which my brother gave me in 1999 or 2000 and which I took apart to stain evenly and which we have moved, disassembled, several times. Who knows: When the garage is finally cleaned up enough that I can get to things and that the floor is not covered with boxes, bike carriers and trainers, and donation piles, maybe I’ll get back to actually doing things in it.

Or maybe I’ll wait for 2040 to get around to it. Time will tell.

Did you ever hear of a “heat dome” before this year or last? Me either.

What Is A Heat Dome? Explaining The Deadly Weather Pattern Behind America’s Most Dangerous Summer Days

Kind of like “bomb cyclone” hit public consciousness five years ago and gets thrown around all the time now. Well, all the time, in winter. We have one or more bomb cyclones every winter, which is unprecedented (in that we used that term for winter weather).

Forget millennial discovers. This is millennial names. And it’s all because it never happened before the younger generation existed (according to the younger generation). And now, it’s millenial names, and LLMs repeat ad infinitum to each other and us.

It’s all my fault, probably.

I let my beautiful wife go to Sam’s Club by herself today. Actually, she asked if I wanted to go before she planned her trip, but I thought to do some yard work this afternoon, so I encouraged her to go on her own. Honestly, she’d heard me complaining about the new “Scan ‘n’ Go only” policy which I’d kvetched about in April. They kind of relented, apparently, with rumor that they would keep a couple registers, but when I went last week, they had whittled manned checkout stands down to one and a couple of self-checkouts which lead to a line in the 8am hour allotted only “Plus” members who paid extra for the privilege. She came back after almost two hours incensed. So I guess it won’t be hard to convince her to abandon it entirely if they continue to try to improve profitability by a partial percent at our expense.

But that’s neither here nor there. The purpose of this post is to dwell upon the copy on the side of one of the empty cases that she grabbed to carry things.

10 Seconds is all it takes to kill 99.9% of Bacteria¹⁵

The books I’ve been reading lately with notes favor end notes, and it’s more common it seems to use stars and daggers for footnotes when they’re on the bottom of the page, but the rest of the box has no notes whatsoever, not fourteen preceding the fifteenth and nothing marked ¹⁵.

I mean, how did it get there? Did some junior graphic designer just swipe and paste it from the packaging which might have footnotes? Or from a document with the claims which had footnotes?

The minor things that vex me in a minor way.

I have gotten onto some odd email lists somehow (presumably by applying for jobs that are really just data collection tools for spammers and fraudsters).

This one, though, goes to my Hotmail address (28 years old and still humming although Microsoft might be making it harder if not impossible to use) all of a sudden: Realtime crime reports in, what, Utica, New York?

I’m almost afraid to learn why something thinks I live in Utica, New York. I probably have multiple properties which I’ve optimistically valued for bank loans or something and am subject to the full sanction of New York law.

UFC legend Randy Couture airlifted to burn center after frightening NHRA practice crash

I just saw him in two Expendables movies (The Expendables 2 and The Expendables 3). And I didn’t know who he was.

Maybe the MfBJN curse, wherein authors and actors whom I have recently seen or read die, is mutating to only injury. One can hope!

Some countries celebrate this holiday on different days.

Some recent arrivals to Britain celebrate it everyday in Britain.

Also known as “Adventures in Camping in Your Own Home.”

We had a storm come through on Sunday afternoon with straight ahead winds of up to 80 miles an hour. Wider than the derecho that took down our electric drop and toppled an apple tree which I have not yet had the heart to cut down because it’s still alive, although not thriving. We watched the winds bend the trees, and my wife said the house was shaking, although I did not feel that. She and my youngest continued to watch it, and I went back to my desk, and out went the lights.

We’re kind of used to short outages, and we had one for a couple of hours a couple years back, but this one was different.

City Utilities working to restore power to Springfield after damaging storm

(We’re not on City Utilities; we have an electric co-op.)

Earlier this year, a strong set of storms knocked out power to places in the northern reaches of the area for a week, and so I thought this time might be different. And it was. It turns out to have been 42 hours, two nights and a day and a half, without power. Of course, we did not know that then.

So our little camping-at-home adventure began.

How did we do?

Well, we had plenty of drinking water laid in (as we’re on a well, when we do not have electricity, we do not have running water, either). We had to ration flushes, which left the house smelling a bit like a gas station.

We had plenty of food, and we went out to eat a couple or three times.

We had a great opportunity to change the water filters–which is generally not a pain, but it had been a while–as we drained all water in the lines to flush toilets.

We had a great opportunity to defrost our freezer. We’ve not gotten it low enough on contents that we could put it in our other freezers for a couple of hours on a summer day. Instead, we got the chance to give the contents of our warming refrigerator to a friend with a large family who could always use extra comestibles–which includes a full gallon of milk and 24-pack of eggs fresh from Sam’s Club. And we took meat and whatnot from our warming freezer to the food bank this morning where they passed it out immediately to customers. And now we have a fresh and clean freezer. Just think that if we had defrosted it sometime in the responsible past, it might not have held until the day the food bank was open.

I read a little in the evenings by lantern light. We didn’t use candles–we have plenty of little LED lanterns that provide plenty of light for reading or writing. I carried a flashlight in my pocket because Nogglestead is dark at night; interior rooms where we live and the corridor mostly lack windows, and the nights were moonless. I remember spending the night we bought the home here, and I remember it as having been very dark indeed. We must have had the electricity turned on the next day–even on dark nights, ambient light from our security lights outside make it pretty easy to move about, but the last two days I’ve had a flashlight in my pocket.

On Monday, we went and helped a friend who had limbs of her maple tree across a driveway. After a quick bath in the pool, I went to the gym. Then, the youngest and I went to lunch and then to Relics for gift shopping. On each trip out, we hoped to return to lights beside the garage doors, but no such luck.

So, for me, it was a vacation. I work from home, and all of my work stuff is in my office. I could have schlepped to a coffee shop and plugged in a laptop and turned on my phone’s hotspot (which rapidly drains my battery, so I’d have to jack in the phone, too). But I had nothing that pressing, and I wanted to wait to see if the power would come on any minute now.

How did the rest of the family do? Well, they became a bit restive as they did on our trip to Big Cedar this year. They complained about the power being out a lot. The oldest went out several times and kept busy, but the youngest is very electronics oriented, so he would run his phone out of energy and be at a loss. My beautiful wife got restive at spots, mostly at bedtime when the household temperature was 80 degrees or so. She did get a chance to work off-site, which got her into air conditioning and allowed her to bring a bounty of power banks home.

Power came back this morning as we were on our way to the food bank, and when we came home, it took time to put things back together. I’d left the water off so that I could make sure the filter housings weren’t dripping, so I got them going, we got the washing machine and dishwasher spinning, we got the freezer out for an official defrosting (and not just leaking onto the floor behind the wet bar), and I got back to work.

So some lessons learned: We might consider getting some rain barrels. They would help with watering plants in the dry part of summer and offer toilet flushing when the power is out. We’re not considering a generator as our need for it is yet unproven–we’ve lost power for probably fifty or sixty hours total since we’ve lived here, and that’s been almost sixteen years. But if we start to see decline in power reliability, we’ll reconsider.

Also, I recently questioned whether declining quality of public works led to street problems. Do I think that declining electrical infrastructure might be a factor in the recent outages? Perhaps. I mean, there are more lines going more places, and they can’t be arsed to bury them, but: From our drives around the area after both storms, it was clear that a lot of trees completely blew over. That is, when caught in the wind, the trees just toppled, leaving bunched root balls exposed. And in the case of our friend, it was a maple tree that split, and they are notorious for that–but they grow fast, so they’re popular with builders and subdivision developers. So I cannot help but wonder if these problems are caused by non-native trees planted in development which are not suited to break deeply into the clay soil in these parts, and now the trees are reaching an age and height where they are more prone to toppling.

But I can’t be arsed to find out.

So look forward to resumption of regular book and movie reports and other twee asides.

Or even the list price of $7.44 million. Castle-equipped Scottish island lists for the first time in 80 years — and it’s accessible only by boat or helicopter:

An entire private island off Scotland’s rugged west coast — complete with a ruined castle, a working farm and a cluster of off-grid holiday cottages — is hitting the market for the first time in nearly 80 years.

Shuna, a 1,100-acre island in the Inner Hebrides, is being offered for about $7.44 million, marking the end of an era for a family that has stewarded it since World War II.

The Gully family has owned the island since 1945, when Viscountess Selby, reeling from the war’s aftermath, walked into a London estate agency and inquired — somewhat famously — if they had “any islands on the books.”

Of course, it’s over there, so it would cost a lot for everything even before the cost of having it supplied by boat comes into play, and you aren’t allowed legally to have what you need to defend it.

But it looks like it would be an interesting purchase nevertheless, especially with several rental cottages on the island to let.

Ah, but I am reaching the point in my career that I’m starting to doubt whether I will become wealthy from working for a startup especially since I am not chasing the AI bandwagon.

Of course, I thought the Internet would not be big either, so take my counsel for what you paid for it.

At the Ace of Spades weekly book thread, Perfesser Squirrel reports on going to a library book sale.

And buying 12 books.

Last time I went to a library book sale, I got 26 books, an audio book, four or five magazines, a stack of videos, and a stack of records.

Next Saturday, I’m going to the Clever branch of the Christian County Library for its annual book sale. If I only come away with 12 books, it probably means there were only twelve books left. I mean, it will be $3 bag day. Last year, I got 36 books into two bags. My first job as a grocery bagger continues to save me money.

But Perfessor Squirrel, who claims to work at a university, is a rookie. One does not get to the next level of book ownership at 12 a week.