Category: Life

Wirecutter showcased this animated GIF:

A couple months ago, I went into the Republic Walmart as it was in the middle of its reconfiguration, and they were jacking up whole aisles and moving them around. I was having trouble finding things that had moved, and I could not help but wonder if they had moved things I was looking for to places I’d already looked. It was like shopping in the Cube with slightly less deadly traps.

I’ve seen this slow reconfiguration of Walmarts in my area over months, so I’ve been largely non-plussed by the Empty Shelves At Walmart stories–I figure that they’ve been running the shelves down to have less to move. My Pricecutter grocery store has been pretty topped up, so I haven’t worried too acutely (although I have laid some stuff up). We’ll see as the moving aisles calm down whether I was right about the Walmarts.

“Did you find everything?” a checker at my home Walmart asked. “No,” I said. A couple of weeks later, the cats are happy to learn that I finally found where my home Walmart has put the cat food.

I noticed that my home Walmart has expanded the self-checkouts, but still has a number of manned checkout stands. But they’ve staggered them like Target has been doing for years, and they’ve reduced the height of the point-of-sale shelves, probably to improve the visibility and discourage shoplifters. However, I wonder how many small businesses that make the impulse purchase tchotchkes that you used to find on these shelves are faring with the reduced shelf space. Or if it’s just slightly diminishing profits from some Chinese conglomerate.

Last year, my beautiful wife ordered me a cord of wood for Christmas so we could burn wood fires. In the past, I’d had Duraflame logs or small bundles of wood I bought at the grocery, so it was even more pleasant to have a wood fire going every evening at Nogglestead. And it helped with the propane costs as the wood fires heated up the bricks and slowly released the heat overnight, limiting the amount our furnace ran.

Being this is 2021, man, and the last two years have kicked my hoarding and stocking up instinct several notches (to 11), this year I ordered 3 cords of wood before the winter from the local arborist (whose radio ads I’d heard decades ago in St. Louis–apparently, it’s at the least a regional chain). We might only burn a little over a cord and a half, but I’d rather have wood on the pile that I don’t use this year than need wood I don’t have in January if propane is not available. Yeah, I might be going a little crazy, but at best (or perhaps worst) my estate sale will look like a fully stocked grocery and home supply store.

The arborist sold the wood in “bags” of about a third of a cord each on pallets, and it took three trips to two different locations of the arborist to bring me three cords. The arborist had a dump trailer, which meant nine pallets of wood were dumped at the end of my driveway.

The wood came on Thursday, which gave me a chance to pick up some additional cinderblocks on Friday. And then, on Saturday….

Well, on Saturday, I warmed up with a martial arts class, had a bite to eat, and then the boys and I got to stacking.

We spent four hours on Saturday, almost until sunset, before I called a halt. Although I had thought we could condense nine “bags” of wood to seven pallets, apparently my stacking is not as tight as it could be. It took us longer than it should have because the oldest found lots of work that was not moving or stacking the wood, including hamming it up for his beautiful mother who took thirty-some minutes of his running monologue of what he was doing. Also, the boys liked to throw wood; in clearing the pallets, they threw some of the wood in the direction of the opposite of where we were stacking it. And instead of using a wheelbarrow to move it, they preferred to throw the logs into a pile three feet from where it lay and have me come to that pile, which was ten or twenty feet from the wood pile, to get the logs to stack. Well, we all got our exercise.

On Sunday, we picked up a couple more cinderblocks to make room for two more pallets to stack the wood on. Using the wheelbarrow, we finished the last half cord or so in about an hour.

It looks nice.

Strangely enough, although my fitness tracker says I walked ten miles between pile A and pile B, I only got a couple minutes’ worth of exercise.

As I said, although it’s not my primary heating source, I am happy to have the wood in case I need it.

My beautiful wife did not ask me how I knew how to stack wood; if she had, I would let her believe it’s because I am a man, and not because I read homesteading blogs.

I know it’s the birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

But it’s also the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Of course, that reminds me that it is my father’s birthday. After my parents divorced and we moved to Missouri, I would hear this song on the radio (or once on my mother’s newly acquired Reader’s Digest Blowin’ in the Wind boxed set of LPs–which I still own of course), and I would remember to call my father (collect) to wish him a happy birthday. I probably tell you this story every November, gentle reader; thank you for indulging me.

He died at 47. I cannot imagine him or my sainted mother as elderly.

On Thursday, we picked up our packets for this weekend’s Ruck n Run, a 5.56k in support of local veteran’s organizations. It had two options: To run, or to ruck, which involved carrying a backpack with 45 pounds in it and stopping at five stations on the route to do 25 push-ups, 25 jumping jacks, 25 mountain climbers, 25 squats, and then 25 burpees.

When signing up for the event, I guess I was feeling frisky, because although I signed the youngest and my beautiful wife up for the run, I signed myself up to be a rucker.

Ruck roh.

I had to run to Walmart on Friday to buy a backpack, and the event organizer wanted to collect canned goods, so I bought 48 15oz cans of chili to fill the backpack. I did the math: 15 oz by 48 is 45 pounds, and it was heavy. I started to question my sanity and whether I could actually do it. But then I realized that 15 ounces measured the contents of the cans, but the steel was something else. So I weight the backpack and took out ten pounds of chili.

And I spent Friday worrying how I would do, and if I would even finish the event. The ruck was definitely an unknown, and my training regimen has been spotty for a couple months at least. Okay, since the summer some time. I have done a couple of events–a stair climb, a martial arts testing–that gave me trepidation because I did not train for any of them.

And in all the cases, I did okay.

I started walking instead of running on Saturday morning, and I was pleased to see some other ruckers walking.

I did have a glitch: At the second station, I dropped my backpack behind me and did 25 fast jumping jacks. I grabbed my gloves and the backpack behind me and started putting it on as I was going. I got a couple hundred yards down the road, and someone grabbed me by the backpack. “You’ve got my ruck,” some humorless fellow said, and indeed, he had put his backpack next to mine, and as I was not familiar with my new backpack, I grabbed his instead of mine. So I gave the humorless fellow his backpack and ran back to get mine. On all the other stations, I put the backpack in front of me.

The course was an out-and-back course; as I came to the crossroads where my oldest was posted (a volunteer in his JROTC uniform), I ran up to him and reached out for a low-five. When he returned it, I told him we were a tag team, and he was in–as I made like I was going to unbuckle my pack. I hit the fourth station, squats, and had no problems. So I started run/walking. The fifth station was burpees, which I did in four sets: 15, 5, 3, and 2. And I ran most of the rest of the way, passing some other ruckers. I was going to sprint the final leg, especially as a trio of ruckers I’d just passed picked it up near the finish line, I dipped my shoulder on one stride, which put 45 pounds of chili on that side of my back all of a sudden. So no sprint, and I let those kids go ahead.

Official time says 1:01, but my watch said 54 minutes.

Regardless, the answer to “But did you die?” is no. It wasn’t even as bad as I feared.

But I really do need to get back into the good habit of getting some workouts in.

Oh, my goodness, thank goodness it is November; I can come in out of the rain and the cold.

October was given over to marching band competitions and football games and cross country meets. So, basically, I was living six day weeks, since Saturdays were given over to travel and one or the other. To begin the month, we drove down to Joplin for a cross country meet, drove back in driving rain (which washed out our chance to go to the Pumpkin Daze festival in Republic on our way back). The end of the month featured a whole lot of cold and rain, summarized a bit below.

Continue reading “The Body Counts of Marching Band Competitions; And Thank God It’s November” →

Spent the morning at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Missouri, for a cross country meet in the rain and the mud. Got soaking wet, and wondered if the event would be canceled because the weather predicted rain and thunderstorms for the entire day. On the way in, I saw that the venue was hosting a monster truck rally in the evening; I wondered if they would postpone the event long enough that we would get free entrance to the monster truck rally.

The running was postponed (but only for about thirty minutes thanks to the heroic efforts of the powers that be), so I guess not, but I was texting my beautiful wife, who stayed behind due to illness, and the phone’s suggestions were way off.

It did not suggest any work by Joyce Kilmer. Nor what I was really talking about.

Now I’ll have to watch to see how many times the iPhone suggests “monster truck rally” in the future.

Because I am sure I am further on Apple’s that kind of people list now.

My beautiful wife doesn’t know about this, but if she did, she’d want to go: 274-day cruise will take Royal Caribbean passengers around the world.

To be honest, $120,000 per person doesn’t sound too bad for a nine month trip.

My oldest son is in his high school marching band at the encouragement of my beautiful wife who was a band geek babe throughout high school and college, and he kind of likes it.

His freshman year, his late entry into the high school kept him from marching, and the 2020ness meant his band only played at the football games and sent videos to workshops and competitions, so this is the first year I get to really experience a band season.

Which explains why I have been living six day weeks in October: Saturdays are given over to band competitions, start with taking him to school at 9am and end with picking him up from school at 11pm or so. Which includes sitting in bleachers for ten hours, watching bands of various sizes perform their shows.

The bands perform in something called “prelims” which is nominally an elimination round, but sometimes the round only sends a quarter of the bands home. Then, the bands get some feedback and hang out all day, and then those not eliminated do the same shows. Then, the top eight bands get huge trophies.

To me, the shows are like synchronized swimming with an overlaid symphony. My wife has experienced the marching band life, so she has an understanding of it that I lack. They’re making shapes, although I am not sure what the shapes are supposed to represent especially vis-à-vis the music they’re playing. Some music is arrangements of popular music for marching bands, but some of it is not. So they’re walking in circles here like spinners and propellers in the old biology computer game. What does that mean in relationship to the music? To the theme?

I suspect there’s really not a narrative or thematic element to many of the things they do, that the whole exercise is self-conscious bit of art, where you need to appreciate the things the marching band is doing as things a marching band is doing. To appreciate the synchronization, the artistry, and the musicality of a marching band marching. Which is kind of like a lot of modern art: It’s self-conscious, look at me, not look through me to a deeper meaning.

So, no, I told her. I think one has to have been in a marching band to really get into it. Otherwise, we’re just going there to support our kids.

Although I have to say that it led me to a “meme” that with probably the highest odds for me to see it in the wild, shared elsewhere from me as the root of it:

Those are actually “marching tubas” (different from the Sousaphone, which is the tuba-like instrument used by marchers that looks like a traditional tuba).

But muzooka captures it better, I think.

Not a metaphor referring to the television show Lost–I mean, who remembers Lost now?

I mean, a metaphor that we really cannot use in the 21st century.

Static.

I was driving along this morning, taking the oldest to school in the darkness for his marching band practice, and I thought about writing a poem about moving through the tunnel of the night, and I thought perhaps I could work in a line about static, but no.

I mean, who under the age of, what, forty has experienced broadcast static?

Most kids these days have not experienced over-the-air television nor have seen a playing of the national anthem and then television stations signing off in the middle of the night nor dozens of UHF stations on the second dial that show nothing but white noise.

On the radio, the Seek buttons and digital tuning eliminates that sound between the stations, and although one can still experience some weaker signals when driving out of range, who listens to the radio in the car any more except we old men, and by we, old man, I mean I.

So I got to wondering whether the removal of the concept of static from the mental makeup of modern man has had any impact. In the digital media world rife with social media misgivings, have we lost the ability to discern signal from noise, the ability to not accept everything presented to us as equally true or just surface impressions?

Eh, maybe I’ll use the metaphor anyway since I don’t expect young people to read my poetry anyway. Or old people for that matter. I’ll just write what I want.

This is a huge book, part of the Abrams Poster-Sized Book line, and it lists and depicts, well, Fabergé eggs and other charms made by the great jeweler whether the ones given by the czars of Russia to wives and mothers or other nobles of the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries.

In case you don’t know, these small bits of metallurgy and lapidary are intricate bits of work, often with surprises inside like little charms or miniature paintings, that the leader of Russia gave as gifts to his wife, the Czarina, or his mother. After the revolution, the Soviets sold many of them off, and Forbes ended up with the most comprehensive collection of them, which is why a Forbes wrote the text.

They’re incredible pieces of work. Fabergé didn’t do the work himself, and the book identifies the masters who did when possible. The form factor of the book makes it a bit awkward to handle, especially when a cat wants to get onto your lap, but it does allow you to view the eggs larger-than-life. And where the eggs are not available for photography, a chronological presentation with line drawings appears at the end of the book.

A fascinating look at art and engineering probably best known as a James Bond prop.

So yesterday, as I was putting away two five packs of toothpaste in our master bedroom walk-in closet, I came to a discovery. Not that I am a hoarder, gentle reader, but in this the year of our Lord 2021, when you use one, you buy two, and the word “Limit” in a store means “Buy this many whether you need them right now or not.”

No; as I put the glued packs onto the high shelf in the closet, above my head but still reachable, I pushed them back, and they encountered resistance. I reached up there and found….

A… What, radio?

It turns out it’s a small wired speaker powered by three AAA batteries that you can plug into your Walkman or Discman to play them without headphones, I guess. I suppose it would work with an old iPod, too, as it has the 1/8″ stereo cord tucked under, so definitely designed for some mobile device.

I asked my beautiful wife if she recognized it, and she did not. It looks like a Bluetooth speaker, so I thought perhaps it might have been one that did not work well and that we abandoned. But as it’s a wired speaker….

It’s entirely possible that it’s been on that shelf ever since we’ve lived here, something that the previous owners did not see when moving out. I mean, I certainly did not see it from the ground level, and if I’ve brought a step into the closet to change the bulb, I didn’t look in that direction or it was behind other things. It damns me for not cleaning or reorganizing the closet in the entire time we’ve been here and for not repainting it, I suppose.

I just wish I’d find a trove of pre-1965 quarters instead of the normal sort of electronica I might buy at a garage sale with a modern quarter. Or I would have in days past; I’m not hitting many garage sales these days, and although I’ve gone to a couple estate sales in the recent months, I’m not accumulating the electronic bric-a-brac I used to.

In the review for A Bend In The Road, a book of poetry put together by a nursing home operating company featuring poems by its residents, I said:

Man, I remember nursing homes in the 1980s. Two of my sainted mother’s aunts ended up in a couple of different facilities, and the facilities were as cold and efficient as hospitals but with less care. It depressed me to go visit those old ladies–I was young then, and impatient. Times have changed now, though; one local senior living facility has been running ads showing a tatted up, goateed and mohawked pierced grandpa with big headphones on taking a selfie. One expects the new facilities are more fun, but then again, the ones that advertise in 417 are probably the nicer ones anyway; one would probably find my relations in more traditional centers.

I went through several copies of 417 we had on hand to try to find the ad in question to share it with you, but I could not find the full page ad nor remember the name of the place to look for the ad online.

But I got the new issue of the local slick this weekend, and Turners Rock has reduced it to a quarter page, which trims it a bit, but you can see whom they expect to live in their senior living facilities:

I guess he doesn’t have a mohawk after all. And we can’t see piercings, but they’re definitely implied.

You know, I’m not far off of eligibility for senior living facilities, but I can’t see myself downsizing that much. I have too many books yet to read and too many records to fit into a small apartment, and I am used to playing my music as loud as I want. But fifty-something is not turning out to be adulthood and elderliness that I remember from when I was young. I cannot tell whether that’s because my perception has changed as I have aged or whether being older has changed. Probably both, and both to a large degree. But, truly, truly, I say to you, most of the metalheads I know these days need Advil after a concert, not so much for hangovers but for body aches.

In a related note, they’re building a lot of senior living around Springfield, giant complexes with hundreds of units. Theoretically, many of those seniors will be moving out of their homes and putting them on the market. And builders keep building lots and lots of new single family homes. Who is going to live there? The population has been holding steady. We haven’t been cranking out babies to warrant this much growth (we only did one for me and one for you but not one for the bishop). Are the powers that be planning for a population boom from somewhere else (abroad or aliens?), or are they merely pursuing a build-build-build strategy not unlike China’s which will lead to an eventual bubble bursting?

I dunno, but I’m not taking out any home equity loans based on valuation that says Nogglestead has almost doubled in worth since we’ve been here.

My Facebook feed these days is about 70% ads and promoted posts from old Hollywood, random authors, and retro/nostalgia sites.

One of which recently delivered this up to me:

How many of you had pieces of furniture in your house in the 1970s?

Well, I did not have any of these in my house in the 21st century, but my sainted mother had two differently sized end tables and the coffee table in her home in the 21st century:

My brother inherited the items after she passed. I am not sure if he still has the pieces–I didn’t look too carefully the last time I was out there–but these are heavy and heirloom quality. After all, I am pretty sure that my mother inherited them from her mother in the middle 1980s or perhaps from her sister.

Regardless, I have to wonder how many of these nostalgia clickbait posts are written by young people who don’t realize that, as you get older, the past, especially the artifacts, come along with you. Or perhaps it’s just me, someone who relies on personal relics to connect to the past since so many of the people I knew and could corroborate my stories have passed on or don’t remember.

I was talking to the woman at the cleaners who handles my eldest’s JROTC uniform weekly about how time passes differently for kids versus we elder folk because each year is a larger percentage of their lives than ours. So a kid who’s fifteen, his fifteenth year is 7 percent of his life, and likely 10 or more percent of the life that he remembers well. Someone who’s going through his fiftieth year, the year is only 2 percent, and he might not remember much of it at all.

On Friday, Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, explained:

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas.

I have known this and have explained it to my sons and to everyone who will listen.

I have some photos rotating on my auxiliary monitor beside me; one crops up of the boys with medals for a middle school event. To me, it was very recent; to the boys, this was, what, 2018? A long time ago. By the time that period elapses again, the oldest will be out of the house, and the youngest will be, what, a junior in high school? The whole lives that they have known here will only be an interlude in my life, and the soon-to-be-over beginning of the rest of their lives. I’ve known this, too, for a while–I have been saying that we’re on the downhill slide since the oldest was nine. But it gets realer and realer in my imagination.

I already grieve for this time, even as I spend too much of it on work and other things or being frustrated/exasperated with them when I’m with them. Fortunately, I will only remember the best parts. And not my own, what, dread of our separation?

Lileks pities the technical writers:

Of course there were manuals. In binders. Sitting on the shelf of everyone’s desk. Never used. Tossed out en masse. I feel a bit of sympathy for the people who wrote them, but that’s probably misplaced. A job. They were paid. Wasn’t creative. Kept the lights on.

Yeah, I’ve written manuals for money. Pretty good money, actually.

But one does not finish a manual or set of updates to documentation and feel any sense of creative accomplishment, for sure.

Kind of like writing a backwater blog.

The Springfield Daily Dammit, Gannett! has a video wherein the Answer Man tests the new twenty-six-year-olds on how to pronounce various places and streets in the Ozarks.

Which shows not only that the journalists, who have been at the paper for some time now, have not yet been around enough to pick up some pronunciations, but also that they’re not from around here to begin with.

After twelve years here, I knew how to pronounce everything except the basketball coach’s name. I am not sure how that counts as Ozarks since MSU is only a job, and probably (the coach hopes) a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Now ask them questions derived from old episodes of Schoolhouse Rock so we may laugh at their answers to basic civics as well.

You know, some weekends I come through on Monday morning wondering what I did and where the time went; generally, this follows a weekend of common tasks, chores, and work, where I get up-do a martial arts class-nap-work-chores-sleep-church-nap-chores. In the autumn and winter, Sunday afternoons are given over to football as well, so the time goes by and I seemingly have nothing to show for it.

This weekend, though, I can account for my time pretty easily–and still have little to show for it.

On Saturday, I slept in until about eight thirty. When I was younger, my waking hours tended toward the night, so I would stay up until midnight, one, or two in the morning, and I would sleep until ten o’clock. But having children has put me on a morning-based schedule, so when I get to sleep until eight, I take it. I slept until eight, and then I had some breakfast, and I puttered a bit with morning chores, and then I took my younger son down to Nixa so he could spend the day with a friend. On the way home, we (my beautiful wife and I) stopped at an estate sale over in Battlefield. You know, I used to hit estate sales every week in my Ebaying days, so I was a little inured to how somber it was to go through someone’s life’s leftovers, but now that I hit them only once every couple of months, and because I’m getting closer to that end for myself, I’m a little sad. But I picked up several videocassettes, including Secondhand Lions for which I was kinda looking, and some magazines for découpage projects.

After a nap, I replaced the belt and tension wheel on our dryer, which had taken to screaming like a banshee when drying laundry–which had made me reluctant to do laundry at all. The kit I bought had replacement drum support wheels as well, but I didn’t want to take the drum out completely. I was on a bit of a clock with afternoon plans, but I wanted to fix the dryer because we were going to need to run it later in the evening and perhaps after bedtime. When I started it up, it was quieter, but then the squeak returned. I didn’t have time to re-open the dryer and do it all over again, so that failed repair would have to linger until Sunday.

In the afternoon, I drove to Cole Camp to pick up the oldest son, who had gone out of town with a friend to visit the friend’s grandparents and fall festival in Cole Camp. It’s two hours to Cole Camp, and we picked up the youngest after we returned to the Springfield area, so all told I spent about six and a half hours in the car on Saturday ferrying children. On the plus side, I got Secondhand Lions, and the trip to a new town enabled me to get two new papers to subscribe to, the Buffalo Reflex and the Benton County Enterprise. Which means I’m going to have to get a bigger mailbox so Cora, our mail carrier, can fit all these papers in on Thursdays and Fridays.

On Sunday morning, we did the Springfield 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb.

110 flights of stairs; it took us a little over an hour. I did it two years ago, and this year, I did it with the boys. I was a little concerned as I am two years older and have not been as active as I have in the past, but it was not too bad. The crowd was smaller than my previous experience, but it was still full of firefighters doing the climb with their full gear. It humbled me, and I pointed out to the boys that most of the people there would risk their lives to save yours without a thought to the danger. I felt a little like I was stealing some valor participating as a civilian. I’m not one to thank everyone for their service–frankly, I think that’s a middle class affectation more for the thanker than the thankee–but I do appreciate what those firefighters do.

After the climb, my youngest and I pulled apart the dryer, including removing the drum. We wrestled off the existing drum support wheels and tried to fit the new ones on. Either the wheels I received in the kit were the wrong parts, or a production defect made them a millimeter too thin, but the new wheels did not fit. So I cleaned some fabric–hair or lint wound tightly around the shafts–and added a little WD40 and hoped for the best. The boy, who likes to help with these sorts of thing when they go well grew frustrated, as the new little plastic clips were also tight to get onto the shafts. However, when we put it all together, it worked, quietly, and so far the dryer has not caught fire.

It was a good thing I did it before the nap; I told the boys that the climb was more of a workout than a 5K and more akin to a triathlon. After pizza and a nap, I was not good for much of anything. Fortunately, football season opened everywhere but the NFC North, so I got to read poetry whilst the Packers took a pasting.

So that’s what I did. Something close to nothing, but different from the weekend before.

Apparently, there’s a local company, Pine Box Entertainment, that has produced a collectible card game called Doomtown: Reloaded that is based on the Deadlands role-playing game.

Which is the last new-to-me role-playing game that I bought in Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 2017 (but have not played).

I have since bought the new version of Dungeons and Dragons’ Player Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide, but haven’t played them, either.

I just saw the headline in a local business journal’s afternoon email and thought I might have recognized it, unlike many of the publication’s regular readers.