Category: Life

So the swag in our 5K bags has changed in the last year or so.

Instead of little tchotchkes like bottle openers, calculators, and whatnot delivered in a plastic bag that I could reuse as a small garbage bag, we’re getting ticky-tack water bottles.

The bottles, of course, are so you can refill them with tap water instead of drinking from a plastic bottle and tossing it. However, the swag bottles are only nominally thicker than the disposable water bottles. They’re not quality water bottles with insulation, and let’s be honest: everyone already has one. We do. Since everyone is giving out these little water bottles, we’ve got a bunch of them. Maybe I’m just a little peeved about their profusion because my boys like to fill one up with some fluid and instead of drinking it and reusing it, they leave them littered around the house like stray bowling pins as they then use another. Every couple of weeks, I collect them, wash them, and put them in a donation box for a church garage sale, where they can sit on a table for a couple of days marked a quarter before someone else throws them out, from whence they go to a landfill and take double the 100,000 years or whatever it takes for a disposable water bottle to decompose.

Many of the athletic events have switched from plastic bags to tissue-thin recycled plastic fiber “reusable” shopping bags as well. They’re thin and don’t look to be very durable except, probably, in landfills. I don’t use reusable grocery bags as I like to collect the plastic bags to use for cat litter cleaning and for the multitude of small waste cans at Nogglestead. At times, when I have not been shopping as often, I’ve resorted to buying a box of these plastic bags. I’d feel a little odd using the reusable bags for trash duty, so they go into the donations box pretty much the time I get home from the athletic event.

So in lieu of disposable items, the swagmakers and swag-swaggers of the world offer us these cheap reusable items that are not much better than the disposables they replace and allow the people whose logos appear on them to feel like they’re doing something for the environment, but, come on, they’re not.

This January 1952 issue of Pageant magazine is its Best of Everything 1951 issue. A time capsule into the immediate post-war world in a digest magazine that apparently sought to take on Reader’s Digest. It’s a general interest magazine, with not so much the high writing of the slicks nor the woman-focus of home magazines.

What’s inside?

• “2001 A.D.–Year’s Best Forecast”, a vision of what life would be like in 50 years. It’s off quite a bit, but it’s all-in for wind and solar power and down on nuclear, which is the state almost 70 years later.
• “She Gets Most Joy From Cooking”, wherein the author of The Joy of Cooking Irma Rombauer is named Woman of the year. Almost 70 years later, the cookbook is still known.
• “The Case of the Curious Cop”, a true crime story that’s interesting even now.
• “The Miracle of the Giants”, a baseball story.
• “The Men Around Truman”, profiles of some of the president’s advisors, many of whom are forgotten today.
• “The Birth of an Island”, a science story by Rachel Carson. Yes, that Rachel Carson.

Along with these articles, we’ve got fashion guides on how to buy items that you can wear or pair for different occasions; the best toys to by for each age group; beauty queens of different festivals; and varied humorous joke/quip collections like you would find in Reader’s Digest.

Along with a full photo of the cover girl on the back:

Cute, but not racy.

No left-wing bias to speak of–the magazine talks about the “pinkos” in government–but a couple of environmental pieces that foreshadow things to come. The “best science story” by Rachel Carson, for example, tells of how volcanic islands are formed and how different plant and animal species might come to it, and how great it is until MAN SHOWS UP.

You know, I miss general interest magazines like this. I subscribe to Reader’s Digest off and on, and I used to subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post and Grit, but those last two changed too much to retain my interest. But I must be the only one; otherwise, we would have more of them around today.

I wonder where I got this; the front cover has an antique mall sort of pricing on it, but I can’t imagine picking this up for a dollar at an antique mall. More likely, it was in a dollar bundle of digest magazines and chapbooks that I bought at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene Library book sale. These bundles, grab-bags really, provide me with quite a few curiousities that I sometimes count as books read. But not in this case, as it is clearly but a magazine.

Yes, it is true, not currently a carefree contractor for-hire, but I’m in an engagement where I have a manager. Actually, I am pretty sure I have thirteen or fourteen managers, or that everyone is a manager except me, but that’s pretty much been the story of my full time jobs anywhere.

So I talked to my manager on Friday, a day ahead of the long weekend, and she asked me if I knew any veterans.

Which seems like an odd question to me.

I mean, my parents met in the Marine Corps. My grandfather also served in the Marines. My father in law was Air Force. Let’s be honest: My children’s school canceled the annual Veteran’s Day slide show because it turned pretty much into my boys’ family tree after I asked my grandmother for a picture of my grandfather in uniform, and she sent me pictures of family members going back over a hundred years in uniform.

My brother signed up for the Marines after high school. Jimmy from the trailer park, the other N in the Triple N Enterprises lawn cutting service, signed up for the Army and went Airborne. Dave, who lived two doors down from my father in Milwaukee and with whom I was very good friends my first year at school, signed up for the Army after high school and went Airborne. My friend Brian, the Elvis impersonator, was in the National Guard for a long time. Todd, the thespian I went to school with, was in the Navy and afterwards played Mike in a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt.

Those are the people from my close circle who served. I have numerous acquaintances from church who served, and I’m Facebook friends with BlackFive and Baldilocks.

So, yeah, I know some veterans.

Is that odd? Is it because I’m the product of neighborhoods, trailer parks, and cohorts where college was not the default option after high school that I know so many veterans? Is it because I’m the product of a more expressively patriotic age?

Perhaps it was just my manager’s way of getting to my plans for Veterans’ Day.

Which only incidentally had an outward demonstration that might tie into the holiday. As I was in the St. Louis area, I visited Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery and put flowers on my mother’s grave.

And I don’t just thank veterans on one day of the year. But I do thank them. And you, gentle reader, if it applies.

I’ve never been a real photography buff. I mean, I had a couple of cameras when I was a kid, and I’m glad that I had them to document my early life (like this). But I haven’t really gotten into it as a hobby, although I have bought at garage sales a number of tripods for some reason.

However, there is one photograph I’ve wanted to take for a number of years

A couple hills over, a white barn sits partway up the slope. As you drive down the farm road, you can see it in a small window in the trees. Trees climb a hill behind the barn, and trees lie long the intervening hillsides so that the barn is surrounded by the leaves. You can only see it from a spot on the corner before it is again obscured by the trees. It’s especially beautiful in the autumn, with the vivid colors.

So in past autumns, I’ve tried to take the picture with my phone, and it didn’t work. I tried a couple of times with a digital camera, including putting it on a tripod, but it lacked a zoom. Other years, we have only had a single fall color, brown, after dry summers. Some autumns, we’ve had windstorms that denuded the trees right after they turned and I didn’t get a chance.

This year, someone built a large house on a corner lot on the farm road. I gamed out an encounter with a suspicious homeowner as I tried the photo this year, but as I slowed down when driving by, I found the foreground trees had grown so that they overlaid the barn, and the opportunity for my perfect shot had passed.

Ah, well. I took it for granted that one autumn day I would get the shot I wanted even as the years passed and the landscape changed. The house on the corner lot has planted a boundary for trees. In another ten years, I won’t be able to see the new house–or the barn on the hill beyond.

So I guess I will enjoy the vista while I can and only occasionally mourn the photo that never was.

When I was in late middle school and high school, which is to say the time when I lived in the trailer park and down the gravel road in the valley, a lot of family members died. I lost my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin, a number of great aunts, my great-grandmother by marriage, and then my step-grandfather. Some were far off, but I attended between one and three funerals a year in that span. The older generation, those great aunts, were in their eighties, my grandparents died young, and my cousin was shot at 21.

Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of how those things are aligning again.

The autumn started with notices of death around us. Shortly thereafter, I learned that my aunt has cancer pretty badly, which has spurred a couple of trips to the St. Louis area.

I have since learned that my stepmother with whom I had a rocky relationship also has cancer pretty badly. I learned this from my grandmother, who let me know that fifteen people in the family have health issues of some sort or another.

So my aunts and uncles are getting into their sixties and seventies now. My mother-in-law is closing in on eighty. My grandmother is in her nineties, but you wouldn’t know it. And, who knows, maybe one of these random pains and little coughs I get might actually be the innocent symptom of Something Worse as I fear.

You know, you can recognize mortality and deal with it in one of two ways: You can appreciate every day what you have now and actively treasure those relationships, or you can dread the loss that you know is coming.

Me, I’m making more effort to see my family that lives outside Springfield (which is to say, all of them but my immediate family). I’m trying to live life with better experiences than the simple day-to-day maintenances (although now that St. Louis Blues Hockey games are $80 a ticket, they will be memorable because they’re scarce). I’m going to send more frequent notes and letters to my grandmother who has told me she loves them and reads them multiple times.

Still, even as I do these things, I am pretty sure I’ll dread the future losses. I said you can deal with it in one of two ways. I will do both and let my impulses battle it out in my psyche.

More than 100 vegetable products recalled over listeria concerns

Also not affected, fortunately: Coffee, wine.

So basically my diet remains unaffected.

We were just talking about mixtapes, and I earlier today searched this blog for “Didde” to see if I could find the picture of me with my printer from the middle 1990s.

Instead, I found an old blog post about a mixtape I made for my then-girlfriend, now-wife called the Lil Didde Mix.

So apparently I did do that in the 1990s.

It’s amazing the details one forgets.

Which is why it’s nice to have the blog and the personal relics to jog my memory.

So as I was laying up the Halloween costumes in the closet, I noticed I had some old grey socks in a bin with some overflow underwear I culled from a crowded drawer at some point or another.

How old are those socks, you might ask (but probably not). Over thirty years old, gentle reader. Over thirty.

From 1996 to 1998, before I began my career in computers, I operated a Didde-Glaser 175 two color offset printing press in O’Fallon, Missouri.

One of the second shift printer operators nicknamed me “Inky,” as I might have been a little messy. I learned to wear black jeans and black sneakers as reflex blue ink does not stand out on them, and I bought grey athletic socks to tone down the flash of white between the jeans and the shoe. I’m pretty sure that’s the only time I’ve bought socks like that, so these would indeed be getting into their third decade.

I recently bought a couple pairs of athletic pants to replace some old ones that I’d worn out with frequent trips to the gym. However, the current style seems to be a little form fitting. To the point that I feel like I’m going to stand out of them whilst doing squats. So I was going to turn this into an object lesson for my oldest child who is really into name brands as, I suppose, youth often are.

“These are Michael Strahan’s,” I said, pointing to the athletic pants. I had prepared my lecture about how the fact that they were a premium brand meant little since they wouldn’t actually serve my athletic needs, that I should have just gone to Walmart.

But he sidetracked my planned life lesson when he didn’t know who Michael Strahan is. I explained a couple of things: New York Giants defensive end. Today Show co-host. Apparently, a clothing magnate.

I did say that as a “premium” brand, it was probably of better quality than what I would buy at Walmart and wear out in a couple of years.

I got to my final point, and the knowledge that brings this whole post together:

“When my grandchildren come to a sleepover with Grandma and Grandpa, I’ll wear these pants to bed.”

Ms. K. has a blog post about Durable Characters in commercials, and she cites Flo from Progressive Insurance and Mayhem from State Farm who have been in ads for a decade (although Mayhem had a hiatus if I recall, and I should, as I consider Mayhem to be one of my professional heroes).

I see her Flo and raise her the Sonic Guys who have been doing commercials for Sonic since 2002 almost continuously and Jack in the Box, who has been in Jack in the Box commercials since the middle 1990s through, what, 2017 (according to the Jack in the Box Fandom wiki)?

1994:

I have to wonder how those actors and comedians feel to know that their most famous work comes from thirty second spots over the course of decades. Hopefully happy for the steady work.

From a small town paper’s profile of a local elementary school teacher:

“The best part of my job is working with the kids. My career goal is to stop working with the kids.”

So twenty-four years ago last night, I was at work at a produce market in southwest St. Louis County. I was a year out of college, and when my student loans repayments kicked in, I found I needed a night job as my temporary Associate Editor position at an industry magazine wasn’t going to cover them much less gas money to get to the job, so I went back to slinging produce.

In those days, I was driving back and forth to Milwaukee frequently as I clung to my collegiate friendships as best I could. Probably a mix of I didn’t want to leave college yet and I don’t make friends easily. It allowed me to see my father, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer the summer after I graduated, and who completed a course of treatment and went into “remission” that lasted whole months.

My brother, on emergency leave from the Marines, had called the day before and told me that I should probably come home soon, so I made plans for the weekend to come up.

Continue reading “An Anniversary of Sorts” →

Has the whole pink for breast cancer awareness thing run its course? I’m seeing remarkably less pink in the wild this month.

I was going to say something last week, but I thought I might be ahead of myself in making the assertion, but we’ve seen a weekend of NFL football without a pile of pink on the field. My martial arts school has, in the past, pushed pink belts and even, if I recall, pink gis, but this year it’s just decals.

Huh. Perhaps everyone is aware now, and the charities that existed to take in money, pay themselves, and raise awareness are finding themselves with tighter budgets.

You know, I used to be young and cynical back when I was more idealistic.

So I didn’t run a 5K yesterday.

I mean, I signed us up for the Panther Run for what would have been our fourth year in a row. But a late addition to my boys’ cross country schedule of actual cross country meets this year (instead of the Panther Run and other 5Ks) meant we were going to be in Joplin, an hour away, instead of on the Drury University campus.

Still, on Friday night, we went to pick up the packets and shirts anyway.

As we picked them up, several volunteers thanked us for coming to run with them, and I murmured a response that was not untruthful. Then, as I was leaving, my triathlon coach, who also works with the timing company for the event, asked if we all were going to run it, and I admitted to him that I was a fraud. I wasn’t going to run it, but I was going to pick up the shirts.

But I won’t wear mine. Although the Panther Run provides nice long sleeved shirts with moisture-wicking fabric and although my t-shirt wardrobe is about 60% 5Ks and triathlons (and only 20% Green Bay Packers), I won’t wear a 5K shirt if I haven’t actually run the race.

It’s happened before. Last year, we picked up our packets for the Sole Purpose Run on Friday evening, and our youngest took violently ill all Friday night, so none of us were in any shape to be awake much less run a race at 7am. So my shirt went into the donation pile immediately.

Other times, we have signed up for 5Ks but not run them. We signed up for one in Joplin in January the year before last, but race time temperatures were in the single digits. Another time, an ice storm might have made it too slick, so we stayed home, only to discover from the event pictures that the course was pretty clear (and the ice storm kept a lot of runners away, so I might well have medalled with my normal 3.1 mile time).

At any rate, the cross country season is over, and I’m hoping we can sign up for one or two 5Ks yet this year. I’m hoping I can get to the gym a little better early in the mornings and rebuild some running endurance so I can make a good show of it. And to start preparing for next year’s triathlons which could very well begin in February.

As you know, gentle reader, you often have to check your trivia that you learn from trivia books as authors put in fake trivia to catch copyright violators.

So I have to wonder if I can trust anything in a book excerpted in The Mirror: What ‘bumfiddle’ really means and 17 other bizarre word facts

The fact in question is:

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is screeched.

Well, it’s tied with strengths, the longest word with only one vowel, at nine letters, and both have a single syllable.

So never trust your trivia. Especially if you get it from a book, the Internet, or me.