Category: Life

Okay, not exactly true, but we did have a church potluck yesterday, and a couple-three weeks ago, I thought I should learn to make deviled eggs because they’re beloved at these things, second perhaps only to the triune God celebrated on Trinity Sunday as it happened to be. I mean, you can usually count on three or four people making deviled eggs, and if you get there two minutes after the pastor says the blessing, you ain’t getting any.

Since I happen to like the one or two deviled eggs available when I get there in time and when I push Gladys and Milt, those codgers, out of the way, I thought (angels singing “aw-aw” and a light shining down from heaven or there abouts, or perhaps just the sun coming out after a week of rain) that maybe I could bring in some deviled eggs. After all, I’m comfortable with baking them to make hard-cooked eggs in quantity. I did just subsist on (it seemed) hard-cooked eggs for the Whole30 diet in January. So that’s not the thing.

So, a couple-three weeks ago, I hard-cooked two dozen eggs (one Sam’s Club pack), and I tried the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (sized for 6 eggs). And I subbed in three kinds of mustard: Yellow, Dijon, and Horseradish. For the final set, I used the alternate Italian-style recipe with Italian creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese. And I labeled them and put them in the refrigerator, only to re-discover that my boys, raised Lutheran, don’t like deviled eggs. So I went through them and decided that I liked the Italian recipe ones best.

BUT: I took ill about then. I thought, “Oh, no, I bollixed the eggs.” I feared not only for my futures at potlucks but for my upcoming vacation. But! My beautiful wife also had a tetch about the same time, and she is the remainder of the household who does not like eggs.

SO: Alright, vacation saved, but this week approached, and I had some older (but good, I hoped) eggs in the refrigerator. So I baked them on Friday, thinking of deviling them to try out recipes. But, day-um, the most tedious part of making deviled eggs is peeling the eggs. I baked them, and then I spent a long time taking (most of) the shells off, and…. Well, I was not in the mood to devil them any longer. So, as in the Whole30 period of my life, I set them aside to eat them for meals and snacks, and….

Well, nobody brought deviled eggs today. I brought a double helping of pasta salad and a chocolate pudding pie, preparation of which was easier given the Sunday choreography of picking up my mother-in-law for service, accommodating my wife who had to speak at a church business meeting after service, picking her up after her speaking, and getting things prepared just so for church, I abandoned the plan of deviled eggs. I did, however, have one of the peeled hard-cooked eggs available for this photo. And then I ate the photo subject. Because I am not wasteful.

Given that nobody brought deviled eggs (or potato salad, jeez Louise, these modern Lutherans and their pizza provided and store-boughten coleslaw), I’m thinking of working to perfect and to get comfortable with my Italian deviled egg recipe.

But not in the near term. I feel like I’m living the slow-motion equivalent of the Cool Hand Luke bet scene (I haven’t seen the film, but perhaps I should look for it) where he has to eat 50 hardboiled eggs at once. Ask me now, and I’m not eager to eat another even though I have six remaining in the refrigerator.

Maybe if I did it in moderation, but: I have a lot of Lutherans to feed. Also, let’s hope for a good potato crop, because apparently I am also in charge of the potato salad now.

In a review of Sue Klebold’s book A Mother’s Reckoning (her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine, Colorado, school shooting), Holly Math Nerd might well indict me:

The Klebolds were running a parenting operating system that is extremely common in non-poor American households — and I suspect it is the dominant mode in middle-class white America — and the system was running as designed.

The problem was not malfunction.

The problem was the system itself, and what it cannot do.

I am going to call this mode role-execution parenting, because performative parenting sounds like an accusation of phoniness and that is not what I mean. Role-execution parenting is sincere. It is loving. It is competent. It is the mode in which parents identify the tasks and milestones and observable indicators of good parenting, execute them well, and treat successful execution as evidence that the parenting itself is succeeding.

Feed the child nutritious meals. Read to the child at bedtime. Drive the child to soccer practice. Attend the parent-teacher conferences. Set bedtimes and curfews. Provide structure. Provide opportunities. Provide consequences when warranted. Provide praise when earned. Do the things the parenting books say to do, with sincerity and attention.

Most American parents who are not poor are running some version of this mode. It mostly works. Most children raised in it grow up reasonably well.

Ah, gentle reader. My youngest just turned 18 and graduated from high school. My oldest has gotten a job which should allow him to move out on his own. And how have I done with them? How can I know?

Role-execution parenting tends not to develop the skills of interior attunement — the slow, patient, often uncomfortable practice of being present to a child’s internal weather independent of the child’s external performance.

To be honest, I am not sure what this means. Of course, I think that you cannot really know someone aside from their actions–I believe the oldest actually asked me about something like this based on something he’s recently read or has seen in an Internet video.

And I’ll never know how I’ve done as a parent because I’ll hopefully never know how their entire lives have gone.

The lottery machine was down at the grocery store this afternoon, so I could not buy a Powerball ticket. Ah, gentle reader, this is where I am in my career now: No full time job, but playing the lottery.

Ah, but the scratch-off vending machines were operational. My youngest doesn’t understand why I didn’t pick one of them. He’s just 18, and he bought a scratch-off himself once, but that’s all he’s interested in.

I’ve never been a fan of scratch-offs. Why? Because I’m not a Calvinist.

When you buy a scratch-off ticket, it is or it is not (probably not) a winner. But when you buy a numbers drawing ticket, you are not a loser until the numbers are drawn in the future. So you’re spending that (ever-increasing) dollar total on possibility, not actuality.

Perhaps the explanation was not the best.

As I mentioned, I read almost a year’s worth of Readers Digest magazine last week (that year being 2024-2025), and I have been thinking about the experience this week.

I found myself on several occasions telling my beautiful wife about something I read in the magazine. That doesn’t happen with what I read on the Internet; mostly, I read political blogs and Substacks, and the news media I read tends to lean toward crime and celebrity. Instapundit has some science links and sometimes music links to innumerable Matt Margolis PJ Media pieces, but, man, I miss general interest magazines.

Readers Digest has “Drama in Real Life”, the various humor sections (now overtaken by reprinted and perhaps uncompensated tweets–remember the old days when they paid hundreds of dollars per anecdote?), some health bits, generally a bit about food (November is good for reminding us where cranberries come from, which is generally Wisconsin), “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” (which I just scan looking for words I don’t know–generally, I know 14 or 15 of the 15 unless they have a strange theme), and so on. Every month it runs a piece on “The National Interest” which is a touch to the left of the spectrum, but not crazy. Things like “Teachers don’t make enough money and are leaving the field” (touching mostly on the money, not the institutional flaws which also might account for it). And a lot of articles still mention climate change, although that will probably diminish over time. Even though it was 2024, nothing hammered on Trump or lauded Biden–Elizabeth Warren got a shout out from someone who got scammed out of $30,000 as she (Warren) agitated and/or legislated some customer protections, but probably not the kind that says “Don’t Venmo thousands of dollars based on a text message from an unknown number.”

You know, newsstands used to be full of magazines with this sort of content. Lighthearted, light weight often, varied, and generally interesting. Even at the high end, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker proffered longer but varied bit which I often read cover to cover.

But those have all gone leftwing nutso after the turn of the century (when George W. Bush was the worst thing in the world). I gave up my subscription to The Saturday Evening Post about a decade ago when its contents got to be a little one-sided (see this for example). National Review used to have decent book reviews and pop culture stuff, but I let that lapse when it went all anti-Trump and started shifting its editorial viewpoint to match the full page Google ads–First Things kind of fills this void now, one of the two magazines I subscribe to now (New Oxford Review being the other, although I get the NRA, Ducks Unlimited, AAA, and electric co-op magazines for free).

I don’t have a current Readers Digest subscription–I let it lapse because they sent me constant reminders to renew my subscription before my subscription was lapsing–and sometimes, I ended up paying ahead for a couple years because I was not attentive. But maybe I’ll resubscribe if I get another card sometime soon.

Or, maybe, I should not and instead focus on clearing out the drawer full of decade (or more)-old magazines which piled up. History magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, even Beer magazine…. I probably have First Things and National Review magazines from the Obama administration in there somewhere. Maybe, with enough vacations, I can catch up on them.

But I probably won’t mention tidbits from them in conversation.

How’s the job hunt going, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I got two No buttons whilst on vacation and one right after I got home.

I did, however, get a HOT HOT HOT lead while on vacation. How hot?

I had some recruiter I’d never heard of reach out to me last Tuesday with four emails (with different subject lines), two phone calls, and a text message in a short period of time.

Seems legit.

Nothing seems legit in the whole process these days, ainna? You scream try to explain your value to an indifferent void, you get a couple of screener interviews and wonder if they’re just doing it so that they can say, “Nah, we need an H1B,” and then you do it again tomorrow.

So, onto tomorrow. Which is today.

As the philosopher said.

Ah, gentle reader: You have caught me out. The lack of posting last week was because I was on vacation in Florida. I scheduled a couple of posts, and I brought a laptop mainly to have off-site backup but also in case I wanted to write (I didn’t) and maybe post (clearly, I didn’t). I have an iPad for testing best-selling apps reading blogs and “Substacks” while away (in Safari–gramercy, how many ads you people must suffer through on a daily basis). I will recap it a bit below the fold.

Continue reading “Caught Out” →

Archivists see surge in Wisconsin residents seeking Canadian citizenship:

One Friday in April, archivists at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay set aside all other work to tackle a growing backlog.

Fifty-two nearly identical research requests had piled up. All asked about French-Canadians who once lived in northeastern Wisconsin.

Well, maybe. But I am 12.5% French Canadian. True fact. Although I am slightly more German, it’s because of combinations of ancestors. One great or great-great dropped the von on arriving to America, but everyone else has been an amalgamation.

Not that I am looking for Canadian citizenship.

I might have mentioned that I am slowly, over the course of the last few years but more actively in the last couple of weeks, cleaning my garage. Which includes culling the various things that I collected to make into clocks/woodburn/etch/make into candles–hell, I don’t even know why I collected so much of it. I guess it was intentions to make crafts, which lasted up until Creative Juice and That’s Clever went off the cable and air.

One of the other things was collecting, from scattered locations, various pairs of shoes in the garage.

Many of them were “outside shoes,” from when we would get a new pair of shoes for the boys (now men), and we’d tell them to use the old ones to work in the garden. Not that they did; not much gardening has been done at Nogglestead that I have not done (although my beautiful wife has, in recent years, worked very hard on the flower garden that’s outside her office window). And, to be honest, although I bought a pair of work boots the first year I lived here and I’ve worn them in the past (they don’t have many miles on them, though, as I’ve also abandoned gardens in the middle of the year in years past), I have taken to doing my yard work in sneakers as well.

Over the years, they’d been kicked into distant corners of the garage, under piles of donations, under stacks of miscellania, behind unused wood, and tripped over at times. Six or seven pairs of worn, undonateable shoes that they’ve mostly or completely outgrown. I’ve asked them to go through the box, and we’ll discard most if not all of them.

So: Progress on the garage, but:

My wife has reclaimed a pair of sandals. And put them back in the garage. Which means she now has two pairs of outdoor shoes to kick around out there.

One step forward, and two shoes back.

UPDATE: According to Facebook Memories, I actually bought those boots on this very date in 2010:

I actually had no idea when I scheduled the post yesterday afternoon.

Tam K. links to a Wall Street Journal feature piece entitled Our Longing for Inconvenience and she, Ms. K., quotes:

I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman.

Yeah, sorry, don’t understand.

Number of video games that take quarters in my office right now: 2 (Trivia Whiz IV and Arkanoid). Nogglestead features many audiocassette players in the main stereo in the parlor, the unit I just put in my office, the radio in the storm room, the radio in the garage, and in the main vehicle of Nogglestead (my beautiful wife plays her favorite mixed tapes in it; I play old audiocourses, as you know). The Walkman? I think it’s in the office closet or a bin in the storeroom. VCR? I have one hooked up (although the last videocassette I watched was in March), and I have some backups in storage for when this one fails (spare DVD players, too, because their time is going.

I mean, I guess the original author was someone who never had these things. I am someone who has them and has never given them up.

So, I have mentioned that my friend Dave sold me a nice stereo somewhere early in my college years, and I listened to it through college. But when I returned to my sainted mother’s house in House Springs after I graduated it, I didn’t need it because I wasn’t home that much to listen to music, and we had a console stereo inherited from my grandmother in the house. So I put the stereo in my mother’s annual garage sale, and it sold–to our family friend Pixie. Who reached out to me because I left the record Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd on the turntable while it sold. Did I want it back? Nah, I told her I should get the CD anyway, and I gave her the sleeve when I next saw her.

It took me probably twenty-five years to actually get the CD, but whatever. Fast forward to 2026.

Some years ago, when we were burning through Crosley/Victrola/Chinesium’s Choice all-in-one units with turntables we wore out, we wore out one such unit and let my oldest put it into his bedroom–he could still use the tape player, the CD player, Bluetooth, and radio. And he did for a while. But when he rearranged his room last year, he took the unit out and put it onto the donations stack in the garage.

This weekend, I was sorting the donations and tidying them up–we can actually, you know, donate them to a church fundraiser soon. And I came across this unit and thought, hey, some of the units we “burned out” might have been because I made that determination on Sunday mornings when spinning the Swedish Gospel Singers and thinking the first song sounded slow. Well, when playing it on a new and better turntable, it still sounded slow. So maybe I was getting rid of functional units.

So I repatriated this unit into my office and turned it on.

In a moment, I started hearing something from it, and I checked. The button was set to CD, and I ejected it to discover…. My son had left the CD of Dark Side of the Moon in it. I’m not sure if it’s the replacement I bought or if we had bought him his own copy, but….

Like father, like son.

Note: Not like mother, like son. I gather this crap up and donate it instead of having a garage sale because:

• It’s a bother.
• It would not net much.
• I would not like to see how little other people value the things I divest myself of.
• Donating it to the church yard sales means if we have second thoughts, we can buy back our stuff, cheap. This has happened. More than once.

I’ve successfully ushered Feline Fly Assassin to the Microsoft Store so it’s available to download and play on Windows.

Getting an app on the Microsoft Store is slightly more difficult than the Apple App Store because Microsoft has a Byzantine set of rules around accounts:

1. You have to be a Microsoft Partner, which means you have to have a parent account which Microsoft expects to be a major systems integrator or Azure Cloud player.
2. They expect your Partner account to be a corporation with a DUNS number.
3. Jeracor Group does not have a DUNS number.
4. Also, it cannot find Jeracor Group’s registration in the State of Missouri (it is).
5. If you somehow get through the Partner process (on a second try, I did), you need to use a personal account to upload apps.
6. Of course, my corporate account (Jeracor Group) was burned when I uninstalled the Microsoft Authenticator app from my phone.
7. So I created another one using an old Gmail testing account, but not a new Gmail account because the steps involved to create a Gmail account are crazy. What, I need to scan a QR code on a phone and then let it send a text message from my phone? How to make your security tighter: make it look suspicious.
8. Follow processes not unlike the Apple App Store to add details.
9. ?
10. Success!

Seriously, the crap aligning the accounts took me several days. And I wasn’t sure that it worked until this morning–the app was stuck in the certification step even though it said it could take a few hours to three business days. It was almost three business days.

So, maybe I’ve got another avenue of revenue which might yield more than the almost $10 I’ve sold on the App Store.

You can download it here. Just 99 cents. Wotta deal!

Ah, gentle reader. I have mentioned that when my contracts get thin, I have extra time, and I often squander it (that post was a full-time position ago). I left that aforementioned full-time position sixteen months ago, and I’ve been cruising on a couple of contracts–one that I’ve worked on intermittently since that post in 2020 and one that engages me half time for six or seven week stretches. Well, the first has gone into remission for a bit, and the other went down to ten hours a week max billed for a role that really requires closer to the 20. So I have sent some finalish bills, and in the interim in this year and almost a half…..

I guess I have squandered a lot of time, again.

I guess I have been doing something–developing and releasing a number of apps which have sold in the double digits now (combined). But over the winter, I fell into the doomscrolling again–I would hit the job boards, read some blogs, and then after lunch I would refresh certain selected things and launch a game of Civ in the background.

So it occurred to me in the middle of the night one day last week that I could have learned to play guitar by now. As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought a guitar some years ago and took some lessons, but in those busier times, I didn’t have a lot of time to practice. So it sits in the corner of the office, gathering dust with a bass guitar I bought some years later some years ago now. If I had spent an hour or even a half hour on weekdays plucking at them, I probably could have learned to play something by now.

So as the spring begins, I’m resolved to tackle some things. I’ve started cleaning out the garage a bit. I’ve added some projects to Goal-Task-Chore, the app I developed for just such a purpose. And look at this:

My brother gave me that coffee table and end chairs in 1999 because I was into wood refinishing. Which means about that time I refinished something or other and wanted to do others–including a desk whose hardware I removed but never got to refinishing but instead have used as a desk in my office in all of the homes I’ve lived in since then without the hardware attached (and, as a matter of fact, I found one of the pieces of metal trim on the floor of the garage before my workbench when I was cleaning up over the weekend–no idea where the rest of it is). When I received this living room furniture, which he got tired of moving while he was in the Marine Corps, I broke it into individual pieces so I could stain them individually. And I broke one of the pieces when knocking the pieces with a rubber mallet.

And, gentle reader, I then moved those pieces from Sycamore Hills to Casinoport to Old Trees to Nogglestead, and they were on the bottom shelf of one of the plastic shelving units in the garage for fifteen years until last year when I started cleaning the garage and determined I would refinish them finally. Ah! But they remained unassembled and unrefinished because I could not find two of the cross-braces.

However, I found them as part of this weekend’s cleaning, and I glued the broken piece since I’m suddenly gluing a lot of furniture (and have many furniture/bar clamps all of a sudden). Today, I put them together for the first time in thirty years, and this weekend I shall begin stripping and sanding them, and….

Well, I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I’m done. I’d thought about actually putting them in the living room, but now that I see them again, the end tables might be a little short. But, we will see.

And when they’re done or drying, maybe I’ll pick up the guitar.

Ah, gentle reader. I might have mentioned that I have been dabbling in poetry again for, what, the last six years? (I completed a poem six years ago which had taken me years to write it, they were the best years of my life; it was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05-wait, no, that wasn’t me, except that I finished that poem after having parts of it on a legal pad for years, unfinished.)

Anyway, so: I’ve been working on a poem about estate sales. Basically, it tells about how I used to haunt estate sales at old, dated houses (back around the turn of the century, I would spend Saturday mornings at estate sales and the other weeknights listing books, games, et cetera, that I bought on Ebay. But, now, after 16 years at Nogglestead with little change, I can understand why someone might have found their 1960s or 1970s home comfortable.

So I thought it would be two stanzas. But then I thought maybe a hinge stanza about my aunt who died in 2019, parceling out furniture while she was still alive. And I thought about it for a long time without really putting pen to paper, but considering it a bit, you know.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I got the opportunity to go to the coffee shop for a little bit and put pen to paper. And, after another coffee shop visit a couple of days later, I had the hinge stanza. And when I got to the computer to add it to the official Word document, I discovered that I’d finished(ish) the first stanza last October. Jeez Louise, given this pacing, I’ll be lucky to finish the poem this year.

Ay, me. I am not breaking any land-speed records with these poems, and I’m certainly not a professional. But that’s okay; I’ve been reading a lot of The Complete Works of books, and even the best poets have a lot of chaff with their wheat (apologies to Leah Lathrom Wallace for stealing her chapbooks’ metaphor). Maybe I’ll just focus on the wheat. Which might well be just chaff.

I will be glad to exorcise this particular poem, however. Between a comment my wife made sometime ago (along the lines of her hoping to die before me so she doesn’t have to deal with all my stuff), the slow-motion end of Lileks’ marriage, including a downsizing sale (this weekend, in fact), and suddenly, I have been walking trhough my house like I was walking through my own estate sale. I mean, I have a lot of books, and my boys no longer like to read. The personal relics which were things my family members owned will mean little to them–they did not know much of my family. I have no urge to go to the book sales this year. I’m starting to get rid of the reified potential in my garage–I will donate some of the things to the new Lutheran High School thrift store if it gets off the ground. I brought in some wine glasses I’d bought to–I guess paint with stained glass paint, since three of them had masking tape around the lip line.

Hopefully, a combination of finishing this particular poem and maybe cleaning my garage a bit so I can do some project work in it will help fight the old ennui.

When I tried to release the third PhrazeMaze (Shakespeare) puzzle game, the app store balked and said it was spam. Instead of releasing individual apps which had a set of similar puzzles, they wanted me to release a game with in-app purchases for the game packs. So I have.

Behold, the unified PhrazeMaze!

It’s free with three samples from five different puzzle packs:

• Proverbs
• Psalms
• Literary First Lines
• Nursery Rhymes
• Literary First Lines

Complete puzzle packs are 99 cents.

And I can add more if I happen to sell any.

Which I have not. Ever.

Which puts them on par with most things I make and sell on the Internet.

11 auto features that we miss (titled “The Good Old Ways: Many once-common features removed from today’s cars are now sorely missed in the AAA Explorer magazine from which I tore the article one evening).

They are:

1. Uncovered engines; after about 20 years, the list plastic pegs disappear, so they gradually become less covered over time.
2. Oil dipsticks; the newest car amongst us still has one, as the oldest kept seeing a warning light and tried to use the dipstick but ended up overfilling his oil.
3. Analog instruments; two of the three vehicles have spinning pointers, but they’re probably electronically determined.
4. Buttons, knobs, and levers; two of our three still have buttons for heating and radio and whatnot. To be honest, I don’t know about the newest vehicle because I don’t drive it. One of our three even has no screen.
5. Unconnected infotainment systems; one of them has a screen, but it does not play videos–although it will play DVDs’ audio, as I have learned, so I can listen to DVD lectures.
6. Full-size spare tires; one of the three does. Which means it has one more Tire Pressure Monitoring System sensors to report low pressure at odd moments.
7. Glorious color; Well, one of the three is not black or white.
8. CD players; at least two of the three do have it–and one has an audiocassette player. If we get a newer car, I will want a CD player installed as I have lots of audiocourses to get through yet.
9. Unpainted bumpers; yeah, no, all plastic and will total the cars if bumped.
10. Printed owner’s manual; at least two of the tree have them, and I’ve looked in one of those two in the last week (story forthcoming, maybe).
11. Drivers; we don’t have any of the new lane assist or blindspot warnings even. I work in tech. I’m not sure I’m going to ever have a self-driving car.

Yeah, I am not looking forward to getting a vehicle which is later than 2010, ever.

So, gentle reader, I am the sort of person who puts dryer sheets in with his laundry, especially during the winter months. And I have vacillated between the warehouse club’s house brand and Bounce name-brand dryer sheets for years. Depending upon how miserly I was feeling, mostly. But the last time I was in the market, I decided to go with Bounce because even though we run the laundry all day here, by the time we got to the bottom of a box of sheets, particularly the two-pack bundles we got, the sheets had lost most of their scent. So I went with the Bounce, and….

Wait a minute.

Instead of a two-pack of sheets, I got a single box here instead of two, and you’ve cut the size of the sheet about 20% but have put two of them together, perforated, so I have to tear them apart myself. And for the same low price?

Well, I guess if you’re going to do shrinkflation, it pays to add as many variables to the calculation as possible to try to obscure it as best you can.

Best of all, you’re doing this for my convenience.

Jeez, guys, am I getting more curmudgeonly, or merely posting the same amount of curmudgeonishness and cynicism more often? More value for you! If you value that sort of thing, I guess.

As I mentioned, in January, I reclaimed some comic books from my youngest’s bedroom as we culled the children’s books from his shelves (and moved the bookshelves downstairs as depicted in the The Noggle Library, 2026 Edition).

I stacked up the salvageable ones, which includes not only some heavily worn comics from my youth but also things that the boys got at The Comic Cave back in the day or things they bought at ABC Books, whether with gift cards they received or as a bribe for coming with me to the book shop (not that they had much choice ten and twelve years ago).

And…. some of these Bongo Simpsons Comics Explosion books. They’re flat-spined collections of comic strips(?).

I have a bit of a conundrum: Do I count them as books or comic books?

As you know, gentle reader, I have in the past counted collections of cartoons as books in my annual tally and generally subject you to my twee musings on what I’ve read. Not so with comic books. But, as I mentioned, these have flat spines. Like graphic novels. Which I have counted in the past.

So, if I count them as books, I can use them for blog fodder. And I can just put them on my bookshelves. If I count them as comics, I have to acquire some magazine-sized poly bags and figure out where to put them–my short boxes are comic sized. Maybe I need to get a magazine-sized box as well.

Oh, the dilemma!

Probably, though, I will bag them and store them with the comics. Not that it will make much different at estate sale time, but it will leave the room on the bookshelves for actual, you know, books.

Ms. K. yesterday:

This was the second time I drove myself there. The first time I did was back in 2022 when I took the Zed Drei, and on that occasion I stopped in Springfield, Missouri on the way home and fell in love with the twee little Holiday Inn right off I-44. It’s like a 5/8ths scale big city hotel, with an atrium and birdcage elevators and the works and if Springfield has an annual sci-fi con then this is where it happens and I’ll bet it’s adorable.

Missouri Comic Con is coming up in a week, and check out the guests. Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Jewel Staite, Alan Tudyk, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Vicki Lawrence (?)….

It’s at the fairgrounds, not the Holiday Inn.

Am I going? Nah.