Category: Life

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.

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.