Category: Life

As you know, gentle reader, every year about this time (or sometimes later), we come across a Christmas decoration that we did not pack away when we put up the Christmas trees (although at Nogglestead, putting up is really putting down as the Christmas storage is under the stairs on the lower level, not in the attic as was the case in Old Trees).

This year, the Christmas Straggler was not the plaid stocking that appeared on the desk.

For some reason, my boys got stockings with their names on them from somewhere. Their church youth group, perhaps? And as I was cleaning some stuff out of the car, I found an additional plaid stocking that made its way into the parlor, but not under the stairs yet.

No, the 2022 Christmas Straggler is a two-time winner, and the original Christmas Straggler from 2012: The little elf bearing presents.

For a couple of years running, he has made it back into the boxes of decorations; however, this year, he was on the mirror in the dining room, and as my beautiful wife gathered the obvious decoration (an obnoxious 12 Days of Christmas thing with a thin dowel tree where you hang tiny ornaments representing the lyrics of the song, a gift from my mother-in-law that has become a fixture in that mirror over the holidays), she (my beautiful wife) overlooked the elf, perhaps used to seeing it on the clock for a year lo that decade ago.

At any rate, although I have identified the Christmas Straggler, I have not packed it away with the Christmas decorations yet. Perhaps I will wrap it in the plaid stocking when the time comes, probably in several weeks when I dust the house again.

(Other years’ winners here. Perhaps I should give the annual post its own category.)

You know, some years ago, on a Saturday morning, we were getting ready to go to a martial arts class. I had not loaded up my pockets with wallet, phone, keys, and whatnot when I stepped into the garage to load our gym bags into the back of the truck, and everyone came out to get into the truck and locked the door to the house. Gentle reader, we lock the door from the house to the garage consistently because we don’t want to just give the house to anyone who gets into the garage–and given that the boys like to come in with the garage door open, that could be easy to sum d00d. As I did not have the keys, we had to call my mother-in-law to come bring us a key.

Since that day, we have taken precautions. We have hidden a key in the garage, not that it takes much hiding with the garage as messy as it is. I am not sure I can find anything in there that is not hidden. And I have made sure when stepping out of the door, before locking it, to check to make sure I have my keys on me.

On Wednesday, I scheduled a mid-day martial arts class, but I worked a little later than I intended–it had been a while since I’d done a mid-day class, so I thought I had an extra ten minutes, but when I realized I leave at noon, not I start to get ready at noon, I flew into action. I got my gi on, tucked my wallet, keys, and phone into the gi, and headed out. Before I locked the door between the house and the garage, I patted to make sure I had the keys. I did.

As my beautiful wife had our primary truck, I was taking the secondary vehicle in the driveway. I gathered my bag and some hydration materials (one water, one Gatorade). And I stepped out the door between the garage doors, locking the door and pulling hard as the latch sticks a bit when it’s locked. Then I reached into my gi for my keys, for the infamous needlepoint fob, and….

I had grabbed the wrong keys.

In the same drawer where I keep my pocketstuffs, I have a keyring with all the strange and auxiliary keys that one accumulates over a lifetime. I culled my keyring a number of years ago, removing everything but my car keys and my house key from it, which lent itself to this collection. In addition to keys for bike locks I’ve never used, keys to trigger and cable locks, and keys to the family lockbox, the ring also has house keys to….what? My mother’s old house? My mother-in-law’s house? I don’t know, but it has several house keys on it. Just not any for our house.

And I was outside the house, not in the garage, so I couldn’t use the hidden key there.

So I called my beautiful wife, who cancelled a meeting and came back from Springfield to let me in.

However, I did get the chance to sit outside in 35 degree weather for thirty minutes to prove how Wisconsin tough I am. However, fortunately, the sun was out, and the gi is black. As I managed to stay out of the wind, it was not too bad.

So I have moved the auxiliary key ring so I don’t make that mistake again.

And for the next couple of weeks or months, you can rest assured I will check the keys harder when I step out of the house.

Like Lileks, I am not a fan of getting up before the dawn:

I never do anything of consequence between 3 and 5. Good for me nothing is required, either, or I might have to go to bed at a normal hour.

NORMAL ACCORDING TO WHO, the night owl screeches. The high achievers? Hah: they get up too early. Wife regularly has meetings with doctors that start at 7. People in finance and high-powered law firms are on the treadmill at 5:30. Normal for them, I suppose. When I had to get up early and get to work to do the news broadcasts I was compelled to take to bed early and wake in the bleak dark, and I hated it. The day seemed impossibly long, like a frozen baguette you had to gnaw from one end of the other.

If I could control my sleep with willful precision, I’d rise at 7:00, then sleep from 2 to 6, then stay up until 2. I’ve always hated afternoon. The very word sounds like a yawn.

You know, I’ve had to get up early for work most of my life. When I was at college, I had to get up early many days to get to campus, and I had to get up to open the grocery store produce department other days. After school, I had a bunch of jobs where I had to be at work at 7 or 8, often an hour away from work, so it was up at five (often after being up until after midnight the night before, but I was young).

But I had a brief idyllic period during my first remote working experience, before we had kids. I could sleep until 7am, hit my desk at 7:02am, take a nap at lunch, work until 4pm, doze until my beautiful wife came home from work, and then stay up until 1am or 2am. I wrote most of John Donnelly’s Gold during that, what, year and a half? But then the boss rented some office space downtown, and I had to be up at 5 again to be at the desk at 7am, and then we had kids, and I was up at 5 with our early rising baby and then up a 4am or 5am to get a couple hours of work in before having to take the kids to school and taking off early in the afternoons to retrieve them.

I have given some thought as to what life will be like when the boys leave us in only a few years. The evenings will be quieter; I will not feel like I need to be available for guidance all evening long, so perhaps I will undertake projects in my office or garage or maybe leave the house. Weird thought, that.

But I have certainly thought that if I’m still working from home, my schedule will involve waking after sunrise.

I feel this most acutely this, the first week of January. Over their Christmas break, I’ve slept in as I’ve not had to run into town in the 7 o’clock hour. And we’ve put the Christmas down, so Nogglestead is suddenly darker without the lit Christmas lights (we leave the trees on all night and all day). And the sunrise is so far away. It’s, what, almost 7am, and it’s going to be dark for another hour or so. The oldest tends to put on a bunch of lights on the upper level of the house as he gets ready to get himself on the high school bus. Normally, I go along after he’s left and turn those lights off. On days like these, though, I leave those lights on until after dawn.

C’mon, dawn, I’m waiting.

Over at Outkick, Joe Kinsey’s daily post reminds me of an old pastime:

Winters seemed snowy back then in southwestern Ohio. Very cold. Dark. But there were always those Summerall and Madden afternoon Redskins or 49ers games to get us through. I’d be filling up NFL sticker books with my Christmas stocking hauls and listening to those games religiously. I can still go back in my mind to 1987-1989 specifically and remember the setup in our house and how we’d spend Sundays with the NFL.

I’d not only like to point out that the 80s were snowier than the current decade–we had a lot of snow in Jefferson County, meaning a lot of time off of school–but…

Collectible sticker albums. I’d not thought of those since probably the 1980s, but I, too, would buy an album and then buy packs of stickers, sight unseen, to stick into them. I did baseball albums, though, not football albums. I never completely filled one, but I am sure I had a couple of them going in the middle to late 1980s.

I don’t have them now, even though I have all my baseball cards from the era. I wonder how collectible the sticker albums eventually proved to be. Not enough to check the prices on eBay. Just enough to say, huh, I remember those.

Gentle reader, I had one of the best Christmases in recent memory even though the days have had high temperatures in the 1970s, as un-Wisconsinlike as you can imagine; the only snow we had was in Christmas songs. However, this is not far outside the wide range we’ve seen here at Nogglestead in our time here–we have had a sum total of one white Christmas, I believe, when an unexpected snowfall lightly dusted southwest Missouri in 2010.

So what made this Christmas special?

My brother and nephew came over from Poplar Bluff on Christmas Eve to spend the night, open presents and to have Christmas dinner before returning to Poplar Bluff. Which explains why I know what this means:

Compared to a standard Kawasaki Mule, the Roxor is a little bigger, a little heavier, a LOT more powerful, and a bit simpler in most respects. Most critically, because it’s not CVT-equipped, it can tow quite a bit more, to the point where I’d feel comfortable using it to maneuver a loaded car trailer around our property.

You know what has a continuously variable transmission? A Jeep Compass such as my brother drives. Which led to a series of adventures.

My brother felt the transmission struggle a bit as he hit my farm road after driving on the highway for three hours. He checked the transmission fluid and found it a bit low, so we went out at six-thirty on Christmas Eve looking for CVT Transmission Fluid, which is different from regular transmission fluid. All the Walmarts were closed, so we ended up hitting a couple of gas stations and an extensive truck stop, but no luck. Plenty of regular transmission fluid, but none of the special stuff. So my brother and nephew would also stay Christmas night, and we’d hit Walmart in the morning so he could top it off.

Christmas itself went well. We opened presents, of course. My beautiful wife got the Iron Maiden cooler she never knew she wanted:

My best moment was when my youngest, acting as Santa and passing the gifts out, slid a wrapped box toward me. I picked it up and said, “This feels like the Summa Theologiae.” And my beautiful wife said a not beautiful word, because it was.

I have mentioned often, whenever I listen to audio books or courses on Aquinas, that I wanted to own a copy of Summa Theologica. Well, now I do, and I’m going to have to consider reading it.

We spoiled the boys, of course. The nuclear family got the standard pajamas, warm pajamas suitable for many Decembers, albeit not this onw. I have my brother-and-nephew tactical pens–if it has tactical in the name, it’s a good gift for them–along with books and gun targets. We then ate a great meal, watched a Packers victory, and watched my new DVD of The Blues Brothers–I read the novelization in March and haven’t seen the film in estate sales, thrift stores, or antique malls since, so my beautiful wife found it for me at a music/video resale shop (and paid $6 for it).

Then, on Boxing Day morning, I took my brother to Walmart when it opened at 6:00 for some special transmission fluid; he topped it off, but when he threw it into reverse to head home, the transmission made a crashing sound, and he had no gears. So I spent Boxing Day driving he and my nephew back to Poplar Bluff. He’s in a bit of a spot–it was his only running vehicle, and he is yet unsure where to have it repaired, how long it will take, or how much it will cost. So his adventure is a little more problematic than my drive, but I enjoyed the extra time with him.

And the whole weekend provided a little break from my routine. Towards the end of this year, I’ve been spending too much time at my desk getting too little done. I was going to write a cri-de-coeur post–I even had a great pun title, L’Eh State, C’est Moi, but never mind. I’m going to find space on my bookshelves for Summa Theologica, write my thank you notes, and get away from my desk.

On most online forms, the drop-down list for Title, where they appear, tends to be very bland. You get Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms., sometimes Dr. But the titles list on the donation form for WSIE is more comprehensive:

I am not entirely sure what some of them are. Which means that some of them might apply to me.

So I am almost done with the 2021 Christmas cards.

I have mentioned in the past that I still send out Christmas cards (Reflections On Christmas Card Sending 2018, Literally, The Christmas Card Scandals of Nogglestead).

I’ve mentioned before that I like to send the old school communications. We don’t do the custom photo card much, as that requires too much planning and getting a good picture of all of us together. Instead, I write a Christmas letter with a couple of paragraphs and pictures of the boys and buy several boxes of cheap cards to tuck them into.

Then I spend a couple of nights addressing envelopes and signing cards. I have mentioned how the whole process gives me the opportunity to reflect on the people I’ve known and only keep in contact with through unrequited Christmas cards, including distant family with whom I’ve spent Christmases past but whom I have not seen in decades.

As I said last year:

The real scandal of the Christmas cards, I suppose, is that it gives me the one chance a year to think of and to communicate in a one-way fashion with people I’ve known and I think fondly of, but not fondly enough to keep in greater touch throughout the years. Some of them are on Facebook, or were for a while, but I’m not on Facebook much any more, and I hardly saw things from them when I was, either because they stopped participating or because Facebook has curated them out of my feed for its own ends.

So, for me at least, Christmas cards are about the warm feelings they give me and are a completely selfish pursuit. But I really do wish the recipients a Merry Christmas and a blessed 2021.

The Christmas card list is dwindling, though, and the number of people for whom I write little notes is fading. So it’s a more somber holiday onanism than normal.

Also, when I went to get Christmas stamps, all the store had was otters playing in the snow.

Given the recent news (Man attacked by 20 otters, bitten 26 times: ‘I thought I was going to die’), I have to wonder what sort of Christmas message my recipients will think I am sending.

I have made my quips, though. On Facebook, I said:

To make our Christmas letter fit on a single page and inside the margins of the decorative paper, we eliminated any mention of our second son.

Let’s see if anyone notices.

It’s not true, but I inattentively signed one card Brian, Beautiful Wife, and Son #1, and Son #2 because I went with the and too early.

I have also caught myself being a little inattentive while signing them Merry Christmas and a blessed 2022. I am wondering the ratio of people I have wished a blessed 2021 to people I wished a blessed 2202. Probably 3:1, which is probably a good thing.

Reader’s Digest has a trivia quiz every issue. This one had a couple of questions that caught my eye.

First, the bonus question drove me nuts because I’d just read on a blog somewhere about the name of the guy. Wait, see page 22? I read it in this very issue of Reader’s Digest which is kind of like a printed blog.

But, anyway, it’s question 8 that made me raise my eyebrow. Female reindeer have antlers. Actually, it’s the answer that made me raise my eyebrow.

Fact; reindeer are the only deer species in which females have antlers.

[Laughs in Ozarkian]

16-point deer harvested in Missouri turns out to be doe

So perhaps the answer is that all reindeer does have antlers, but reindeer are not the only species where antlers appear on does.

So, to bring you up to date to the calumnies befalling Nogglestead. Remember our misadventures this holiday season so far:

• The falling garbage disposal of Thanksgiving
• The completely Noggle Family Christmas credit card fraud adventure wherein it took almost two weeks to receive a new credit card, but it did arrive in time to prevent me from having to rely on poorly but hastily executed crafts for Christmas gifts
• The passing of another friend now confirmed by his sister who got into his Facebook account to let people know

So what has befallen us lately? Continue reading “To Keep The Spirit Of The Holidays Alive, I Just Need To Write The Check” →

Patrice Lewis asks:

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled across an article entitled “Americans Panic-Buy Firewood And Stoves Amid Energy Crisis”: “The global energy crisis has led to a spike in natural gas, heating oil, propane, and power prices, making the cost of heating a home this fall/winter very expensive. As a result, Americans are panic buying cords of wood and stoves to deflect soaring fossil fuel prices.

…

Have others noticed this? Is anyone transitionng [sic] to wood heat this winter in response to energy prices?

Well, I wouldn’t say panic buying, but I did lay some extra wood up.

Although I haven’t even bothered to light a fireplace candle the last few nights as the daytime temperatures hereabouts have been in the upper 60s or lower 70s for the last week. Which does not warrant a little flickering light in the family room no matter how early it gets dark.

Still, in one of the phrases that my boys will someday say “My father always said,” it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

The headline/title is full of uncertainty, including the word friend, clearly.

Continue reading “I Think Another Friend Has Died” →

I mentioned that the son of one of my wife’s friends is a wide receiver at Ohio State University. So after I saw a couple of posts on Saturday, I thought that Buckeyes jerseys with his name and number on them would be a good Christmas present for the family. So I did a little Internet searching, and although the big retailers didn’t offer his name on a jersey, I found a store that offered custom jerseys and let you choose from members of the current roster. So I selected four different jersey styles and added them to the cart. Although the store had a PayPal logo on it, it didn’t offer it as a payment option during checkout.

So I entered my credit card information with a touch of trepidation, but I’ve been fairly lucky with online stores to this point, so….

The browser’s address bar goes to some Chinese processing company and ends with a screen that says System Exception. And, nothing. No email confirming the transaction, oh boy.

A little while later, my beautiful wife asks me to look at something. The credit card company has sent her a potential fraud alert. A payment to some company name not visible on the Web site in the amount of the transaction. I told her to decline it, which put us on the fraud path, which cancelled my existing credit card. I should get a new one sometime soon.

The best possible result is that this was simply a Chinese manufacturer that hid its name behind an American sounding storefront and was not actually harvesting Buckeyes’ fans credit cards.

But what makes this a particular Noggle Christmas story is that I told my wife what I had ordered, and she told me that her mother had been caught by the same site. My wife, unknown to me, had thought that a #86 Buckeyes jersey would make a good Christmas gift for me, so she asked her mother to find one, buy it, and wrap it for her. And her mother, who is fairly Internet savvy, ordered from the same online store. And her credit card company processed the payment without a potential fraud alert, and she had to not only get a replacement card, but she had to work with her credit card company to get a refund.

We have a history of getting each other the same things for Christmas, so we kept in the spirit of that by getting each other credit card fraud for the holidays.

In other news, my holiday spending and one-for-me, one-for-you protocol has been suspended for the nonce. Ah, well, everyone has enough from me already anyway.

Thanksgiving dinner was served late at Nogglestead; my beautiful wife was a bit under the weather and was napping when she meant to put the turkey in the roaster. As it was only the four of us this year, we were very flexible. So we ate late, 7:30 or so, after dark. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberries, and gravy.

As is my wont, I finish the meal the fastest, and I got started on the dishes. It wasn’t lost on me that in addition to the normal detritus we were going to wash down the garbage disposal, we were including some bit of mashed potato boiling water thick with starch effluvia along with the resultant remnant mashed potato paste and store-boughten brown gravy. I got to thinking that the last backup at Nogglestead, earlier this year, came on an evening where we’d had a nice Sunday dinner but that required a lot of dishwashing.

Apparently, plumbers call the day after Thanksgiving Brown Friday:

“The term Brown Friday, the first time I heard about it was probably a few years ago,” said Chad Farrell with Roto-Rooter Plumbing.

Local plumbers say the day after Thanksgiving is one of their busiest days of the year. That’s because many households experience drain and pipe clogs in their bathrooms and kitchen sinks during the holiday.

So that was in the forefront of my mind as I washed the large turkey platter and the large turkey roaster pan. I thought I might send one of the boys down to the bar sink to watch for backup while I finished the dishes.

Then I turned on the garbage disposal, and when I turned it off, it drained really quickly. That’s the new garbage disposal I installed this summer, a little oversized perhaps, and not the whisper quiet one because I didn’t want to spend $100 to have ten seconds of whisper quiet every couple of days instead of normal volume garbage disposing.

Now, the linked article says stay away from using your garbage disposal, and I do, for the most part stemming from my time in Old Trees, where the wastewater lines there backed up several times a year. I was aghast when I saw my recently passed (two years? already?) aunt putting whole potato peels down the disposal there when helping with dinner.

So I flipped on the disposal just to clear out whatever bits of effluvia were slowing the draining (hopefully, it was that and not a blockage down the line somewhere). Then I rinsed a dish, and the resulting water drained quickly. Notably quickly. I was surprised and pleased.

Until.

Until my beautiful wife, barefoot, brought over some dishes and noticed the floor was wet. I checked to see if it was rolling off of the counter top, but no.

I looked beneath the sink. The garbage disposal was sitting on a can of cleaner and hanging by its PVC discharge tube. Apparently, over the months, it was unbalanced enough or loose enough to vibrate itself off of the mounting ring that holds it to the sink (its whole weight hangs from the sink, which seems risky enough engineering to me as it is). And the contents of the sink were inside the cabinet and on the floor.

Ah, gentle reader, there is a life lesson in this: Do not worry about what might happen, because something entirely different is likely to go wrong.

I remounted the disposal–the bucket and wood that I used to lift it into place were still together in the garage as I am slow to clean the garage and don’t tend to put things where they belong because other things that don’t belong are already there.

So I will go into this holiday season not only thinking about my dwindling extended family, but also my seeming incompetence to do basic home maintenance chores without disastrous results and spoiling the holiday.

If anyone needs me, I shall be outside, wishing for holiday snow that rarely comes to these lands.

I recently discovered that an old article I’d written doesn’t appear on my publication list, and so I searched the Internet for the first line (“‘Most robust applications, whether desktop- or Web-based, allow multiple users to log “) to see if it appeared somewhere that I’d forgotten.

Well.

The third search result, and the sidebar suggestion, are the Wikipedia entry for Human Sexual Activity.

That is the most spicy first line I’ve ever written. Spicier than Robert Davies tried to log onto FuckedCompany.com, and he could not, and he knew he was fucked. even.