Category: Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pink Fedora

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

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

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

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

The Dogs Playing Poker Chair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False dilemma: It could be both!

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

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

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

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

I received a couple of gift certificates for $25 from my beautiful wife for our anniversary. As I have mentioned, Relics sells gift certificates and not gift cards, they do not give change for the gift certificates so any amount under the face value is lost if you don’t spend it all, and that the gift certificates have very short expiration dates. So I had to spend the certificates in the next month or they’d be lost as one or more others have been in the past. I thought I might be able to pick up a Christmas gift or two for the dwindling number of people for whom I buy gifts, but I came across a copy of White Men Can’t Jump which was on my list of things to look for, and I was off to the races.

I got several movies which will not fit into nor atop my to-watch cabinet:

Titles include:

• Meet Me In St. Louis. Given that I lived in St. Louis (for, what, twenty years off and on?), you might think I would have already seen it. Oh, but no.
• White Men Can’t Jump. My wife was surprised that we did not already have this. I, too, have been surprised that we don’t own films which I’ve seen on home video, but back in the old days, we rented an awful lot of them.
• Rampage, the Rock movie based on a video game. Probably one of many.
• The Wolverine, the origin story film. We saw it in the cinema, but I am coming to build our DVD collection as well. Although I passed over Deadpool because it was $3 at a booth early in my journey. Had I come across it later, when my calculation changed to I have to make sure to spend the full $50, I would have picked it up. But I did not go back for it.
• Death Wish, the remake with Bruce Willis. I tried to watch this on Amazon Prime in 2019 but could not (or did not finish it due to annoyance with the service at the time).
• Grumpy Old Men. Now that I am getting therer, I might appreciate the movie more. Although apparently if I want to see Sophia Loren, I have to get even older until I acquire the sequel.
• RED. We also saw this in the theater. Man, we went to the theater a bunch in the old days. Now that I am a grumpy old man, I don’t think there’s much in cinemas that I want to see.
• Titanic. Not the James Cameron one.
• Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm. These films were huge back in the day, but they didn’t interest me when they were in syndication when I was a kid. Now I live in the Ozarks and perhaps I can appreciate them more.
• Funny Farm. A Chevy Chase movie I’ve not seen. You’d better believe I’d jump on a $1 copy of Modern Problems.
• Date Movie, a modern(ish) spoof of date movies from the people behind Scary Movie and, likely, Not Another Teen Movie.
• District 9.
• Live Free or Die Hard. Quite the Bruce Willis haul today. I think I have the others. Are there four or five now?
• Men in Black 3. I was not aware there was a third with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Apparently so.
• Revenge of the Pink Panther. When I reported on Return of the Pink Panther in June, I said:
  

  I don’t know that I have seen any of the other films or reboots in the wild, but I might pick them up in the future if they’re a buck or so (as this was when I bought it in April).

  This has proven true.

• Married: With Children: The Complete Second Season. This early Fox comedy was considered crass at the time. We will see how crass it is relative to modern things thirty years later. Also, Christina Applegate.

I also picked up some records. I couldn’t even tell you what I bought!

Which is true, because the bundle above with the twine was sold as ten LPs for $2.95, and I will just now untie it to see what I got. I told the young lady ringing me out about how Mainstream Records in Milwaukee used to cell-wrap ten singles pulled from juke boxes and sell them together, and how I loved to buy them a lot because one never knows when one might find something one liked in them, such as a Prince side project. But I predicted that the bundle was one Percy Faith record and nine copies of Bob and Thelma Sing The Lord’s Glory

Well, I know I got:

• When Lights Are Low by the George Shearing Quintet. I paid $5 for it which is a bit outside my normal price range, but I like George Shearing.
• A Jean Pierre Rampal/Robert Veyron Lacroix collection of classical works. It was only $1 at the same booth as the Shearing record, so I was able to tell myself that I only paid $3 per record between the two of them.
• 30 Trumpet Favorites by Jim Collier. It was $4 at that booth, so the amortizing was not going so well. But I was looking to make sure that I spent the $50. Actually, more than $50, as I did not want to get to the checkout and find that one of the booths was 20% off so I only spent $46.87. Something similar has happened once or twice. So some of the records I bought were more expensive than I’d normally spend. Well, now. In a couple of years, they’ll all be expensive.
• Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies by Balint Vazsonyi. I remember mention of them from the lecture On Great Master Liszt: His Life and Music.
• Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session. I will mention this record was only $3.50. Which is odd as anything remotely noteworthy tends to go for $7 to $20 in some booths.
• 52nd Street by Billy Joel. I might have had this another time, another place–in college, when I had a record player and bought some Billy Joel at Recordhead in Milwaukee when they were cheap as people were switching to cassettes for their musical libraries. It might have been one of my records that actually sold at one of my mother’s garage sales. I paid $7.50 here for it. It helped to put me over the top. And, coincidentally, “Zanzibar” from this record played on WSIE while I’ve been typing this post.
• I’ve Gotta Be Me by Sammy Davis, Jr. A lot of relatively inexpensive Rat Pack to be had. Although I had a little difficulty remembering this afternoon all five of the major members of the 60s Rat Pack until now.
• By Moonlight by Wayne King. A saxophonist I’m not sure I’ve heard of.
• Bill Pearce Trombone. A collection of gospel songs on trombone, I reckon. Actually, all I saw was trombone at the antique mall, but it is on A&M’s Word records, and I looked at the back, and it is. So I will play it tomorrow morning.
• Swingin’ by Dean Martin. I think I have it already, but, if so, then now I have two.

All right, now for the unveiling of the bundle. It included:

• Malaguena: Music of Cuba by Percy Faith and his Orchestra. It was inevitable that I would someday begin to collect his work as well. This one came with bonus discs.
• Solisti di Zagreb, a collection of classical string material conducted by Antonio Janigro.
• Mozarto Concertos 21 and 23 conducted by Alfred Wallenstein.
• Elman Jubilee Record by Mischa Elman, violinist.
• Buxtehude Organ Music by Walkter Kraft. A collection of preludes and fugues for organ.
• Dream Along with the Singing Strings, a collection of string songs with “Dream” in the title.
• Dream-Time Waltzes by Reg Owen conducting the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.
• Stadivari Strings Sampler, a sampler disc of some line’s string records.
• Pop Concert Favorites by the Morton Gould Orchestra.
• Sweet Voices of Inspiration, a Longines Symphonette Recording Society platter of choir songs.

Holy cats, did I luck out. I thought it would be a collection of the family gospel group records that sellers cannot give away. Instead, it’s not far off of things that I would maybe buy at the Friends of the Library book sales on half price day. Except fewer Pretty Women on Covers (PWoC). I laughed out loud in relief and joy.

So, at any rate, although every booth seemed to have a sale going running up to the holidays, I managed to go over the gift certificates by about $15. Still, a respectable haul for that amount.

Of the films, I am most likely to watch White Men Can’t Jump first (it is the one I was keeping an eye out for). As to which record I will listen to first, c’mon, man, it’s the Shearing record, ainna? I shall go listen to this presently as I start baking pies for tomorrow.

Facebook hit me with a bunch of suggested nostalgia posts yesterday about the film Night of the Comet (a Christmas movie by the way) because it was released this week in 1984.

Meanwhile, KY3 alerts me Look up! Leonid meteor shower peaks this weekend.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be barricaded in the local shopping mall. We still have one here in the Springfield area for emergencies just like the one I’m expecting.

Also, Friar, note: Geoffrey Lewis. Who was also in Spenser: Promised Land as I recall.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am a software tester by trade, so part of my job includes creating a large number of first name + last name combinations.

As a reader of British tabs, I’m exposed to an awful lot of porn star and OnlyFans names, so I have this fear that I will sometime unwittingly combine a first name and a last name to match a porn star.

Actually, given the size of the industry and the number of names I’ve run through the various systems, this might already have occurred.

Probably, it would result in slightly less opprobrium than if I accidentally combined a first name and a last name to match a Confederate general.

Last night, I attended a la-di-da technology group banquet in a suit and everything. I was not nominated for any awards, but my beautiful wife is on the board of the organization. So off to the event I went. It included a lovely dinner and everything. I spent most of the mingling time sitting at our dinner table with my trusty binder, trying to hash out a poem that probably won’t work anyway.

The group’s tech events tends to have a number of sales people and solution providers from companies that will manage your networks or manage your phones provide tech support or development work, or offer education or coaching in any number of disciplines. One rarely finds actual developers and never finds any QA professionals.

But some of the local software developers group appeared. I recognized several of them as I’ve attended a number of the group’s meetings this autumn. Turns out that several of them were up for the young buck awards. So I meandered over and struck up a conversation with a couple of them. The topic of self-assessment of expertise came up, and I said I couldn’t rate myself as a seven of ten in any programming language even though I’ve used several. “And I’m certainly not Seven of Nine,” I said.

You know, Seven of Nine.

“You know, Seven of Nine. The Borg from Star Trek,” I explained to my wife, leaving off how the actress’s divorce led to President Barack Obama. Then I looked at the two developers we were talking to, and one said, “Star Trek? I might have seen it once.”

And I was all like:

It suddenly occurred to me that I was almost twice the age of these developers, and although my heart lies more with them and their work than with tech executives, I was an old man to them.

Culturally, I am older than an old man. My tastes tend to run to books, movies, television, and even music from decades past, often before I was born. Whereas the geek culture of today tends to focus on the present. When I mentioned to the developers I work with that I have a kitten named Meow’Dib (well, formally Maud’Dib), they knew what who that was. Not from the book. Not from the 1984 David Lynch film.

Their geek culture comes from recent streaming series and video games. Not even movies so much any more. Maybe it’s good to have endless reboots even if they’re photocopies of photocopies. It’s the only thing keeping any threads of shared culture together.

The M.C. of the awards portion of the program also made a Star Trek reference because he is older than I am and also didn’t know the audience as well as he thought. At one point, he mentioned “the intrepid Captain Picard,” and I leaned toward my wife and said, “Picard did not captain the Intrepid” as I recognized it was the name of a Star Trek ship. I thought maybe it was the ship that Chekov was on in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but when I researched immediately after the program ended, I found that the U.S.S. Intrepid was in the original series’ “The Immunity Syndrome” and was crewed entirely by Vulcans. As I last read the Blish rendition of this episode in 2005 and last year when I walked through some of my duplicates in the series, I am surprised I remembered it (and then I remembered the ship Chekov was on was the U.S.S. Reliant).

So I thought I would ambush the M.C. to give him the true flavor of a tech meeting: Someone handing him an ackshually over esoterica in expired pop culture.

I mentioned this to my wife and one of her acquaintances (and my LinkedIn connections, which is lower than acquaintance) about how amusing my plan was, but that I would not carry it out. And all of a sudden I was all like:

I am awkward and off putting even at tech events.

One of the members, an Air Force veteran, stepped up to the podium to recognize veterans, and he asked the veterans in the crowd to stand up.

Five people of 249 did. My wife was a little shocked that the group included so few. Tomorrow, at church, half of the men in the congregation will stand when called upon.

I twirled my finger to indicate the crowd and said, “They went to college.” And did so in the years after mandatory service and after the peace dividend of the end of history which has left us probably ill-prepared for what might come.

So, yeah, these are not my people natively, but I can eventually make small talk with them. Or maybe just the older people among them.

Facebook has taken to showing me suggested posts from 1970s science fiction television programs,including stills from Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and they sent me back with this one:

Let the first amongst you who has not said, “Broot-doot-doot. SPECTRA!” in the manner of Keyop cast the first stone.

I loved this show as a kid when it was in heavy syndication. I can’t remember if it came on before or after school–probably both at different times. But it was my favorite of the Japanese imports that preceded the toy-based cartoons (the Transformers, the Go-bots, G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) that would come along in a couple of years.

And, like with Airwolf doing the loop, the climax was generally not over until they reluctantly decided to use the Fiery Phoenix (where some sort of plasma fire covered their regular space ship and they were about invulnerable). Although unlike Airwolf’s loop, the Fiery Phoenix did come with a cost as demonstrated by the agonized character stills that accompanied it every time they used it.

Ah, well. Facebook seems to have turned, if not only for me, into a wellspring of nostalgia. In addition to the aforementioned shows, I get vintage cheesecake served up (some overlap) along with nostalgia-themed pages about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Maybe it’s just tailored that way for me since I primarily log into Facebook these days to see what I posted on Facebook in years past. Kind of like what I use this blog for primarily.

On Thursday night and Friday, I fought vainly that old ennui. You know, the telos versus deontos: Is what I am doing good for something? Or is it good in itself? If so, why am I not going anywhere and not feeling good about being present in the moment much like I have been present in similar moments for the last fifteen years? Pragmatism versus stoicism/Buddhist mindfulness, if you would. And thinking whichever one I was supposed to be doing, I was doing it wrong anyway.

So on Saturday, I headed over to the Hobby Lobby looking for some wire and some camouflage scrapbook paper. I mentioned last year that I wanted to put my father-in-laws waterfowl calls into a shadow box, and in between then and this summer I did. I used camouflage scrapbook paper instead of fabric, and I used fishing line to tie the calls to the shadow box back. Why? Because the shadow box my mother-in-law had built for us used fishing line, which is unobtrusive, in it. But the fishing line knots, inexpertly applied by yours truly, came loose, and the calls partially fell inside the box.

So I thought I’d do with with wire this time. So I headed to Hobby Lobby for more paper and some wire. And Christmas decorations were in full bloom in the Hobby Lobby. So, on a whim, I bought a little resin Santa Claus for $3.50 and stuck him on the mantel in the living room to see if/when anyone notices.

I told my youngest we would be putting up the Christmas tree in a couple of weeks, and he protested, saying we normally don’t decorate until Thanksgiving. I pointed out that is in two weeks, regardless of whether the daily high temperatures are 75 degrees right now. And I mentioned to my beautiful wife that the local radio station that goes to Christmas music has done so for the last two months of the year.

Putting that little Santa on the mantel made me feel a little better, probably more so than the amusement of wondering if/when they will discover it (no one has so far, although everyone walks through the room several times a day) than the Christmas spirit. But it could have been worse: On the way to Hobby Lobby, I passed someone giving away free Australian Shepherd puppies. Now they would have noticed that (and I was tempted, because what eliminate ennui like a puppy?).

At any rate, it’s not like we have put up a small Christmas tree like after our Christmas-themed trunk for Trunk or Treat in 2021 or when I started playing Christmas records in October 2020. So I’m still not that guy. But I am getting closer. Also, I found a Christmas record that was misfiled in the Nogglestead LP library (where the Christmas records are the only ones kept together and sort of organized, apparently only mostly), so it’s on the desk by the record player. So the odds of it finding its way to the turntable in the next couple of days are pretty high.

UPDATE: It was less than ten minutes before I started listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s The Holly and the Ivy, the aforementioned formerly misfiled Christmas record. My beautiful wife, passing through, commented on it. But she has still not seen the Santa.

Last night, the Lutheran Student Center hosted a trivia night fundraiser at one of the rival Lutheran churches in Springfield. One of the hostesses called it the “Second Annual” but that is not exactly true. It is the second year in a row after a hiatus, but the LSC has held trivia nights before at the LSC on the Missouri State University campus before. I know because the North Side Mindflayers won like three in a row.

But it does illustrate a bit of the mindset and myopia of trivia nights hosted by the college students and millenials. The world starts and ends with popular culture from the time when they were born. The questions they compile lean heavily on movies and television of the 21st century as well as slant toward younger topics like children’s books and Disney. Maybe they just stopped reading after that, and if they need questions from literature, it’s recent children’s books or things assigned in high school.

With this in mind, I figured the odds of a Taylor Swift category were very, very high indeed. I mean, c’mon, man, biggest pop star on the planet and “dating” the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, for whom people in this area cheer. So high as to be approaching 100%.

So I spent yesterday afternoon taking notes from her Wikipedia entry and studying the order of her albums, her hits, her few acting appearances, and some of her conflicts and controversies, although the anchor woman of got a list of previous boyfriends and the songs written about them for study.

So we got to the venue and I took one last look at my three pages of notes and crumpled them up and threw them away before the game began.

And the Taylor Swift category was: “Taylor Swift lyric or verse from the Book of Lamentations?”

Aw, hell, I didn’t know I was going to have to listen to the music, too.

So I guess I should have spent the afternoon reading my Bible instead.

As it turns out, we ended up tied for third after the table full of school teachers and the table with the church pastor on it (who I believe went ten for ten on the Book of Lamentations category). Which is out of seven.

It’s weird: I think I’m losing a step in the trivia game as we’ve not done so well with the couple of church trivia nights we’ve been to in the last couple of years, including this “second annual” event. But when I play along with Jeopardy! on rare occasions when I see it or when one of my co-workers asks a trivia question, presumably from a Jeopardy! list, I am pretty quick with the response. I really do think that there’s a real divide between these general trivia games which go back into the 20th century and beyond and the games put together here locally.

That’s what I tell myself in consolation, anyway.

And if anyone accidentally creates a Billy Joel category, I will be set. Although “old” music questions that they ask tend to come from or be about songs in rotation on the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today radio stations. So like the literature questions, they’re pretty basic if you’re, erm, out of college.

When my boys were young, they delighted in new sheets or new pajamas (sometimes just long underwear that they wore for pajamas) with cartoon characters on them, and they liked new novelty shirts. So I would buy them on occasion to give them a little joy and me a little joy in their joy. Brian J., did you spoil your children? In some simple ways, perhaps, but one of my love languages is gift giving, so those around me must fight against being spoiled on their own.

One year, when they were, what, two and four? Three and five? I bought them a matching set of novelty Halloween shirts from Walmart. They loved having the same shirts and dressing themselves alike, and they loved their Halloween shirts. So it became an annual thing for a couple years (they’ll remember it as all the time). The youngest, who chooses his favorite shirts and wears them almost daily even into his high school years, would wear those Halloween shirts all year round and into the next school year.

When I saw the shirts displayed this year at Walmart, well, I:

I bought them in the men’s section now, two larges. One for my high school senior and one for my sophomore. It could be the last time the oldest spends Halloween at Nogglestead.

I have put them in their rooms amidst their laundry without fanfare. We will see if they find them and wear them or if they’re lost in the maelstrom of teen boys’ rooms forever.

I shall probably do something like this with grandchildren some day if the boys extend our line.

Or, you never can tell. I might do this again next year.

1. Get a bid from a contractor for a job.
2. Think, “That’s outrageous! I can do that myself.
3. Go to the hardware store and buy the needed supplies at retail, which amounts to 50%-60% of the original bid.
4. Do the project incorrectly, and have to do it again.

That’s Bidenomics-level savings right there!

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.)