Category: Life

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.

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.