Category: Life

The Licking News, small a paper as it is, has numerous columns worth reading along with a comic page with puzzles.

On of the comics is R.F.D. by Mike Marland.

Last week, the cartoon dealt with local sourcing of foods:

We at Nogglestead are not that country. Although there are many beef operations in the area, including one run by the realtor who helped us find Nogglestead, we do not frequent farmer’s markets to get to know small producers nor do we really home in on local producers whose names we might recognize from Ozarks Farm and Neighbor. Mostly, we grab what is least expensive at the grocery or the warehouse club store.

I am, however, reminded of the time I went back to Kansas with a girlfriend to visit her grandparents, and on Sunday morning, the grandmother or aunt served bacon from Uncle Rick’s pig–and she said she did not like store boughten bacon at all. Although she probably did not say “boughten,” given how much of a throwback to the old ways both families of farmers were in the 1990s, she probably meant it.

We have an older cat with bad teeth whom we’ve started to serve moist cat food twice a day. He likes to nibble at it and lick the gravy, only sometimes going with gusto, and after he finishes, we have protocol for which cats can eat the remainder and in what order. First, Radar Love goes, and then the black cat can nibble (although the last day or so, she has insisted on going first). Then, in the mornings, throw open the office door, which means Chimera bursts through and has generally finished the can of food. In the evenings, I will meter Foot into the office so he can eat some meat before Chimera finishes it.

Which has meant going through a couple of cans of moist cat food every day for the last six months or so.

I’ve generally bought giant boxes of it at the warehouse store, Fancy Feast or Friskies, but the last couple of months, the store has not stocked any. So I’ve started looking for it at the grocery or department store, and there the sections are getting kind of thin.

I mean, correlation does not equal causation. But saying “correlation does not equal causation” does not disprove causation.

All I’m saying is that when cheap Chinese brands of Moist Cat Food start appearing to replace it, I fear the actual contents of the tins.

So my boy’s, formerly my boys’, school announced that they would have the traditional parents/kids basketball game this year. Which is odd; this is the sixth year at least one of our boys has played basketball, well, off and on for quarantines and small class sizes, and this is the first year we’ve heard of the game. But I was kind of excited to participate with my son, who is off to high school next year, so it seems like our participation in school things kind of feels like a workplace after you’ve given notice—a bit distant, with the knowledge that everything will go on without you, and people might not miss you that much. Continue reading “On the Big Game” →

As I mentioned, my mother-in-law is downsizing. As a result, Nogglestead will receive an infusion of quality furniture. I’ve often said, perhaps only aloud and not on this blog, that the only good furniture we get, we receive as a gift, or lately, an inheritance. Which is mostly true, although we did buy an expensive laminate bedroom set a couple years after we moved in, replacing the bureaus we’d had as children, inheritances from my aunt Dale, and a headboard I’d bought at an estate sale for $20.

Continue reading “On the Forthcoming New Old Furniture at Nogglestead” →

On Thursday, I asserted:

Funny thing; although the university sends me glossy magazines on occasion, they don’t try to hit me up for money any more.

On Saturday, this arrived:

Maybe they actually hit me up all the time for money, but I pay so little attention I don’t notice.

The volunteers have stopped calling, though. I think. Maybe they just don’t have my number at Nogglestead.

Yesterday, I posted about not confusing Misa with Maysa.

Today, KCSM, the Bay Area’s Jazz Station, spins a tune by Misia.

All I know is that when I again get a music budget, it will be gone in a very loose Soundex search.

My mother-in-law recently decided to downsize from her home of 35 years and move into a senior apartment not far from Nogglestead. This led me to reminisce and perhaps wallow a bit on grandmother’s house as a concept, or at least enough to produce an essayish blog post about it.
Continue reading “On Grandmother’s House” →

Jack Baruth links to a piece entitled Managerial failings: complification.

The piece goes on about how managers and the managerial class have made things more complicated mainly to give themselves something to do.

Baruth quotes this bit:

Yale for example: more administrators than undergraduates. This is ridiculous; Yale students would be better off if they hired each undergraduate a PhD educated personal tutor and a maid/servant, and it would be cheaper. There is a Yale administrator event horizon at which the mass of administrators at Yale within the confines of the Yale campus will form a black hole from which light cannot escape. If current trends continue, this will happen by the year 3622.

But the original piece goes from that to talk about shared libraries in software development, and Baruth says:

Being Locklin, of course, he goes on to do the math and show his work on it. The remainder of the blogpost consists of a terrifying journey through the shared library crisis, in which I once again find myself accidentally aligned with a brilliant man; for most of my life in tech I busted my hump to make sure I compiled stuff with static binaries, even if it cost more time and resources. I didn’t have a genuine philosophy behind it, as Scott does. Rather, I was just trying to make more money. Shared libraries always resulted in me doing more work after the fact, and since I generally charged flat fees for programming gigs, I didn’t have any interest in doing more work.

You know, I from time to time try to build an application, but I do it in fits and starts. I get something working, and then I come to a frustration point and put it aside for a bit (or a year), and then I come back to it or do something else with Node.js or whatever framework, and something needs updating, and suddenly nothing works at all, and libraries are out of date, or what have you. Which becomes another frustration point….

You know, in test automation frameworks that I’ve built, I’ve written the code mostly myself, relying on other libraries as infrequently as possible. But it’s not really possible any more, no with the current frameworks. Which is why I have not built myself a billion dollar company on an idea and some code written overnight while amped up on coffee. The frustration of modern frameworks, and the fact that I’m lazy.

As you might know, gentle reader, especially if you read John Kass as you should, the moutza is a rude Greek gesture of dismissiveness. Although I’ve often wanted to throw it at someone who offended me, I did not actually make that gesture as a response to anything until last night.

My beautiful wife is spending a lot of time volunteering with various boards and entrepreneur organizations. She sits on the park board, helps to organize presentations for an entrepreneur organization, and whatnot.

A new local tech organization is trying to become a thing, and it is looking for members to sit on its board. So she thought she would apply. Only after filling out most of the elaborate form did she discover it comes with a $5000 financial commitment.

She sought some clarification, and apparently, it’s $5000 each year of the 3-year term. You don’t have to pay it yourself; you can raise those funds or your employer can pay it for access to other expensive executives at the large tech companies in the area.

Yeah, so we had a whole family moment of education in Greek culture and the meaning of Feesah etho.

You know, if you’re on a corporate board, they pay you a bunch of money to basically show up quarterly and gab. Local public and citizens’ advisory boards are volunteer positions. School boards are elected positions. But, apparently, sometimes boards are just a fundraising tool and/or a super-set of more expensive networking opportunities. Which is not for me. I’m not the best networker when it’s free. I’ll be durned if I’m going to pay used car money (at least, used car in years past money) every year to put board member on my resume.

I mentioned in passing that an acquaintance floated our names for participating in the local YMCA board; my beautiful wife, apparently, had a more detailed conversation about it with our acquaintance and learned that it, too, might require a financial commitment. But you know what? I am already a member of the YMCA and a supporter of the annual capital campaign. I know what the YMCA has stood for historically and the programs it offers to people who might need some help. So I am not ruling that out.

I am ruling out a similar structure in place for what’s essentially a business organization, though.

Which isn’t to say that I will eschew the organization. Although I haven’t yet spent the hundred or two bucks annual fee to join (it’s less expensive to mingle with the climbers, apparently), I might, and I’ll probably attend some of its events. But five thousand dollars a year to nominally work for them? Nah!

Also, I should point out that now that I have started giving the moutza, I shall probably do it a bunch. And I will take pride should I catch my children making the gesture. Unless it’s at me.

So my children have taken to shouting, “Hog rider!” with a particular inflection. Apparently, this is the call of one of the units in the game Clash of Clans.

Which has led me to text them or to say, “Hog writer!” The youngest corrected me, believing I was getting it wrong, but eventually, he caught on that I was shining him on.

When I had a spare moment, I created an image to share with them at appropriate moments. Like whenever they bother me with text messages asking for a ride.

Oh, the things I do to torment my offspring.

I’ve removed the whiteboard that I put on my office wall when we moved in. It’s out of arm’s reach from my sitting position, and it’s outside the rolling radius on the carpet protector beneath my chair, so I really didn’t use it for much. I made columns for home projects, things to write, and other things to do, and I might have written a thing or two under the column headings in years past, but I didn’t actually strike much off of them. I used my whiteboard a lot when I worked in an office and I could roll a couple of feet to it and add a task or strike one off.

So I took the whiteboard down. I shall likely clean it and cut it to fit into monitor bezels for smaller whiteboards.

Instead, in the space, I have put my mother’s spoon collection (or I will, when I polish them all) and two paintings by my great grandmother.

I bought a spoon cabinet whilst Christmas shopping last year, as although I had inherited my sainted mother’s spoons, I apparently did not get her rack.

The spoons hung on the wall near these paintings in our apartment in the housing projects forty years ago. We had the paintings on the wall in our dining room at Nogglestead, but the dining room is the only place where our walls have changed much over time. We replaced the paintings with a chicken key hanger that I wood burned several years ago, and they’ve been floating on my office desk or beside it since.

Their presence on the walls means that we nominally have four generations of Noggle art on the walls. Well, had. These paintings, a sketch by my youngest aunt on the Noggle side, and two pot holders that came from art that our children made at school. Sadly, the potholders replace multimedia art that my grandmother did, which is in my office closet awaiting a good place, I guess.

I was going to polish all the spoons at once and hang them, but it’s turning out to be a harder chore than I’d expected. Individual spoons are taking fifteen minutes to polish. I remember sitting down with my mother and brother maybe annually and doing this at the table in the apartment and maybe the trailer, and it never took us that long, but they’ve been in storage for at least the twelve years we’ve lived at Nogglestead.

As I’m working on them, I have noticed that they’re mostly not collectible spoons or even silver. Instead, most of them are just stainless steel patterns that you would get in a grocery store. My aunt who worked for the government traveled for work sometimes and brought my mother a spoon from Washington D.C. and pre-revolutionary Iran, but my mother did not travel far in those days. The corridor between St. Louis and Milwaukee, mostly, with an occasional trip Up North and one vacation in Rockaway Beach, Missouri, which is about forty minutes from where I live now. It was only after my brother joined the service that she travelled, visiting him at his graduation in California and at his postings in Hawaii and Quantico, Virginia. She would then take cruises with her sister and went to Las Vegas for her sister’s wedding, but she was past spoon collecting then. So most of the spoons that I am polishing are stamped Oneida on the back.

At any rate, I got the spoon cabinet in early or mid-December, and I started the polishing project in January. Las Vegas puts the over/under on my completion of this project in April 2023. Perhaps I should enlist one or more children to make family memories. But they, as I was, are not keen on those kinds of family memories, although it was gratifying to see the silver emerge from beneath the tarnish.

I’ve seen, once or twice, on the Internet the photograph of a principal or teacher standing in a gym where the school and mascot name, the Sparta Trojans, are on the wall behind the principal, and the text is something like, “The history classes at this school are suspect.” I didn’t snag it because it didn’t really speak to me. I went looking for it this weekend, but I couldn’t find it via an image search nor on recent meme round-up posts at Knuckledraggin, Powerline, or Bayou Renaissance Man. So just take my word for it.

On Saturday, I went to an archery tournament in Sparta. Home of the Trojans.

This isn’t the first time I’ve known the exact location of a meme; the overpass with the Buffalo Springfield sign is over on Kearney. And who can forget the CAPTCHA that was just a few blocks from my home in Old Trees.

I wonder how many people have experienced first hand the subject of memes. Probably a lot, especially amongst the kids that are on the TikTok and sharing things from their lives with their friends.

But, still. I’m talking nationwide.

It’s kind of like I always see individual street lights that go out when I’m near. It might be because my aura disrupts them, or it’s more likely because I am looking for the pattern and see it.

Oh, by the way, the Answer Man once researched the history of the mascot, and his results were inconclusive.

Bad news for the Bayou Renaissance Man:

Miss D. and I headed down to Big Texas Metroplex a couple of hours from us yesterday, to take her car (an old-model Subaru) to the dealer there for a major service. We get routine services done up here at a local shop, but for the big stuff (every 50,000 miles or so) we prefer to use the dealer.

We left the car at the dealer, asking for a detailed quote before they went ahead with the work. It’s a good thing we did. We were sure we’d be facing a bill of a couple of thousand dollars, but when the quote came back late yesterday, it was for over $11,000!!! Turns out all sorts of little things had accumulated that our local shade tree mechanic hadn’t picked up on, so their cumulative effect has reached very expensive proportions. Some of what the dealership wanted to do was cosmetic, rather than really necessary, but even so, the laundry-list of repairs was a shocker.

Gentle reader, we are getting to that age with our cars, too, and in a different age, the internal algorithm would be different.

Our newer car is a 2008 Lexus SUV with 150,000 miles on it. We’re still carrying a note on it (not much more, thankfully). But it developed a habit of suddenly deciding to gallop instead of ride smoothly. It has an adjustable rear suspension–you can set it to smooth luxury ride, or you can set it to offroading. Well, sometimes–often after a trip to Sam’s Club, where I picked up a couple hundred pounds of water and cat litter, it would get very, and by very, I mean painfully bouncy.

This storm had been gathering for a while–the shop where I take my vehicles had previously experienced the condition and had give a bid of $2000 or thereabouts–but when they looked it over again, they determined they’d need to replace all the shocks, air springs, and whatnot. So the total bill would be $5000 or thereabouts. They were very apologetic about the estimate.

So we had that done. Because I hope/expect to get another 100,000 miles and a couple of years out of that vehicle. I mean, replacing it would cost a pile–check out this ad with used truck prices in the vicinity:

I mean, trucks with similar mileage are $30,000. So we had the shop redo the rear suspension. I mean, they could get the parts and everything. If we’d held off, who knows if the parts would be available in summer or autumn, or how expensive they would be then.

The other vehicle is a 2004 Toyota Highlander with almost 250,000 miles on it. To demonstrate how the calculus has changed: The check engine light is on and has been for over a year–it’s got a catalytic converter electronically reporting problems, but it has not actually failed. When the guys at the shop checked it, they said it would be, I dunno, $600 bucks to replace it. And back then, I thought, “Should I spend $600 on this old truck?” I am thinking about getting it replaced after all since I’m also hoping to have this car for a couple more years–it’s the secondary vehicle in the household, so it doesn’t get as many miles as the primary truck, although it is penciled in as the vehicle for the boy who will get his driver’s license this year.

However: The beginning of last month, someone backed into our Highlander. We’re just now to the point where an insurance adjuster is going to look at it, but I took it to the body shop to get an estimate because the damage was minimal–the bumper got knocked an inch out of alignment:

The estimate from the body shop was $2400 which include 16 hours of labor to repaint it–two whole days for someone. The blue book value of the vehicle is somewhere around that. So for this cosmetic damage, the vehicle might be a total loss. The replacement cost of this vehicle, as we have seen, is probably several thousand dollars more than that, so we will probably end up driving it unrepaired. Although I’m not sure what that will mean for our insurance insurability going forward. Probably that it’s long past time to drop collision coverage on it.

I would not even have filed a claim on it, but I married into the middle class, where driving cars with dents in them is inconceivable.

I guess this illustrates a mindset of someone–me–who wonders if automobiles will be scarce and/or more expensive in the future and who is mentally just a couple of steps of planning bubble-gum-and-baling-wire repairs in the future.

Lileks on the decline of written checks:

“So,” I said, “That’s done. Now the second part. Ready?” I slid a piece of paper across the desk. “I need some more checks.”

She reared back in mock surprise: whoa, we are going way back in time. We had a conversation about the decline of checks, the annoyance of checks, our annoyance with people who write checks, and how the grocery store cliche of the old lady who has to dig to the bottom of her purse for the checkbook, then takes forever writing it out, then enters the amount in the register – where did they go? What will be the equivalent in 30 years, I wonder. Someone who has to get out his phone, swipe up, find the app, tap it on the terminal, I guess. Behind him in line, people who’ll pay by blinking a personal code in front of the retinal scanner.

I went to the grocery yesterday morning, as I’m one of those old people who still go into the grocery store instead of having them bring it out to your car or to your home. Want to know what will be gone in 30 years? That’s what will be gone in thirty years: Shelves where you can pick your own amongst wide variety. How it ends remains to be seen.

At any rate, an older lady ahead of me wrote out a check for the amount of the purchase only. But she didn’t take to long for it; I think we waited longer for the lone cashier to appear from her overstuffed obligations to actually check us out.

But, I sadly note, not much older than me. Who still writes checks for select bills, such as magazine and newspaper subscriptions, so they don’t just jack the price up on me to the max I won’t notice every year.

‘My neighbour keeps putting a chair in the road so I can’t park outside my own house’

I haven’t been hitting the Chicago newspapers since John Kass left, but, certainly, at least one columnist has done a column on dibs (linked story is a year old, but you could probably find a more recent example).

Apparently, there’s a new genre of Internet video where a woman berates a man who was looking at her while she exercises at a gym.

I haven’t seen the videos themselves, but the British tabloids have run a number of stories of them over the last couple of weeks, but perhaps the tide is turning. Woman who filmed man behind her while she was working out at the gym divides opinion after revealing she was pleased her ‘booty wasn’t his focus’ – with some saying she shouldn’t have had her camera on him at all

Yeah, I’m hopeful this plays out soon.

Being a creepy looking guy, I’m always self conscious about whether I’m making eye contact too long with women at the gym already. This little bit just worsened my self-consciousness and probably made me even creepier. Perhaps I should not flick my tongue over my dry lips quite so much. And try a disarming smile that comes out a smirk.

Instead, I should stare at the floor harder.

I am exaggerating for comic effect a little, but not entirely. What I am indicating clearly, though, is how British tabloid headlines directly effect my perception of the world I live in and my behavior. Which is as embarrassing.

Chili brats?

Yes, please.

It’s the chili with beans that really makes it pop.

Oh, the things I eat to disgust my boys.