Category: Life

So as I was going to get my children from school yesterday afternoon, I opened the door in my garage and found a large stuffed frog laying against it.

This stuffed frog does not belong to my children; I am familiar with their stuffed animals, especially the large ones.

It was set against the door where the postal carrier tends to leave packages, so I checked it for shipping labels in case someone had mailed us a frog without a box; there were none.

Which leaves me a little mystery, gentle reader: From whence came this frog?

As I am prone to wild speculation, I can only create increasingly outlandish scenarios in my head:

• It is a warning from the frogs that we should not open our pool in the summer, as too many of their kind jump into the pool and die when they cannot get out.
• It is a MacGuffin in some plot, laden with drugs or microfilm.
• It is a gift from a stalker who has, for some reason, nicknamed me “Froggy.” Perhaps because I once looked like this:

  

  But that would have to be someone who knew me way back when.

• It blew into the back yard of our next door neighbor, and she or her daughter assumed it belonged to my boys and “returned” it.

To be honest, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. We’re not bringing it into the house–as one of the unmentioned possibilities is that it is a Trojan frog filled with frogs hoping to invade my home or, slightly more likely, full of bugs of some sort that we don’t want in. I haven’t talked to my newest neighbors of a couple of months yet, and I haven’t talked to most of my other neighbors for years, if at all. If you think I’m going to use it as an excuse to introduce or re-introduce myself to them, well, think to yourselves how you would react to a strange man knocking on your door to ask if this was your stuffed frog. Yeah, I think that, except probably with more 911 calls and gunfire.

And, to be even more honest, I’m posting about it to keep myself on the amused side of the amused/seriously weirded out line.

• I don’t need you to loan me a 5k; I have enough of my own.
• On the other hand, I have created a new category in my financial software specifically for 5ks, and I’m afraid to see at the end of the year how many hundreds of dollars we will have spent on them. Perhaps I will need to add another mortgage to my house next year to pay for them.
• “Reduce debt with a loan”? That’s not how it works. But, perhaps this sort of reasoning works on people who only learned Republicans are evil in school.

Apparently, a middle school teacher has written an essay on how mobile devices affect children’s social lives, with the need for social media badges like Likes, follower counts, and the immortality of embarrassing incidents.

It’s fictionalized narrative which leaves me little to grab as far as a brief point of the exercise, but basically, it’s that mobile devices affect our children’s development in a bad way. He offers some solutions at the end of the piece, but they’re pretty basic stuff: Have the school technology classes teach kids phone etiquette, stop using social media for official school communications, and try to convince that real life is out there.

Not mentioned: The fact that schools themselves are increasingly giving devices to students.

My children don’t get a lot of device time; they were taken away and locked away many months ago because their behavior was tweenish. But the oldest got a laptop from school last year. Without close, close supervision, he will spend hours on it “doing homework” which turns out to be a little homework and a lot of what he would do on a mobile device.

So, yes, we’re trying to keep them focused on real life, and we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the school’s technology.

As this is the Internet, gentle reader, I will leave it to your feverish brains to wonder why schools would think their often-subsidized-by-technology-companies devices, which capture our children’s data, are better than parent-provided devices which capture our children’s data. I certainly cannot ascribe particularly nefarious motives to my boys’ Lutheran school, but I do wonder why schools feel the need to teach children about computers and devices–things that are common in their worlds outside of school. I mean, they don’t offer Nerf gun classes or riding a bike classes. Kids just learn these things growing up.

Oh, sure, the thought is that they’re teaching the kids technological skills they need to know growing up. But they’re teaching them Google Docs, some video editing software, some quizzing games, and drag-and-drop scripting programming tools. Which most kids would learn on their own if they needed to use the tools. And which will be as relevant as Lotus 1-2-3 when the children grow up. Instead, perhaps the school teaching should focus on working with pencil and paper, since that’s closer to the brain.

I’m not harping on my kids’ school; it’s just following, after a fashion, trends in the modern professional education space.

I don’t think I have a cohesive post for you here, but I’m working from an Internet-connected distraction device here, and this post is a distraction from something I should be doing instead.

Perhaps this post will read a little like a humblebrag, but it’s for something I didn’t accomplish, so I cannot really take credit for it in any way, shape or form.

But when I read the nutrition information on the back of food products, and it says, “Based on a 2000 calorie a day diet….”

I laugh and laugh at the presumption. Yesterday, I got up at 5:00 as is my wont, and according to my FitBit, I had already burned 579 calories.

Friends, this would mean I would burn about 2800 calories a day sleeping (and going to the bathroom once or twice).

That might be a little high for the sleeping burn, but if I exercise at all, I get close to 4000 calories a day on the FitBit. Extra active days, like a couple of weeks ago when I ran a 5k and then shoveled mulch for my children’s school, I burned nearly 5000.

Of course, these are FitBit calories, and the numbers on the FitBit are precise but not necessarily accurate. It does kind of match up with what I have experienced all my life. How long it took me to put on any weight at all even when I lifted weights regularly. The fact that my sainted mother lived on nothing but junk food and weighed about 100 pounds her entire life.

So excuse me if I don’t watch what I eat. There’s so much of it; I can’t see it all.

Now, I am off to make a full breakfast.

Here at Nogglestead, we will clearly hang anything on our walls.

As I mentioned, our Trunk or Treat motif this year was Rock Concert, with the aforedepicted heavy metal costumes. Additionally, I made a little concert for the cargo area of our Highlander:

Yes, that is Bazooka on the lead vocals, Quick Kick on the bass, and Roadblock on the lead guitar.

It was a late-breaking thing; although I had mentioned the idea early in October, the family was not enthusiastic about it until I received my wig, ordered from Amazon. Then the boys were all on it. So I assembled a stage out of scrap pine from martial arts-broken boards, printed out some small guitars and taped them to toothpicks for structure and so the GI Joe figures could grip them.

And the stadium faces backdrop. That was the hardest part. I took some thin posterboard we had for school projects and painted five panels black, with several coats of black each. Then, I mixed up a flesh-colored-ish shade of acryllic paint and dabbed on some faces. After that dried, I mixed a slightly different color and added other faces. I repeated that a couple of times, when they were complete, taped the panels to cardboard to ensure they would stand up. And we were set.

I spent the two hours of Trunk or Treat thrashing to the Leo playing through the wireless speakers beside the stage. People asked me the next day how my neck was with all that thrashing. Nobody asked me how my back was after hours of painting those backdrops that no one noticed.

But the effort was not wasted.

I put three of them in poster frames and hung them on a bare wall in our exercise corner. Strangely enough, they brightened that corner considerably with the reflected light on the frame plastic. Even more strangely, my beautiful wife likes it.

I still have two panels left. Perhaps I’ll frame them up and put them in a silent auction sometime just to see what might be bid on them.

Look, ma! I am an artist!

Well, I have a new exclamation of surprise or frustration: Monte crist!

The night before last, my beatiful wife awakened me. I had retired before she did, and before I went to bed, I started the dishwasher. As she was sitting downstairs, she heard the sink in our bar gurgle, and water was coming up the drain. So I raced upstairs to turn off the dishwasher which drained the dishwasher instead of helpfully pausing it, but we managed to get a bucket and bail the sink before too much of the water ended up on our floor.

And it brought to mind a little ditty by Paula Abdul.

The solution for a clogged drain like this is to panic to run a cable augur, also known as a snake, into the pipes to bore through the obstruction.

The kitchen and bar sink are on the north side of the house, and the wastewater exit is on the south side of the house. The showers, bathrooms, and laundry equipment were draining fine, so I knew it was in the line running from the north side of the house to the south side of the house.

Now, I have a small augur that fits on my drill and has a couple feet of cable in it, but it’s a long way to go to the south side of the house, so we called for a plumber to come out and run a real auger into the plumbing.

I have thought about getting a real auger, at least a real consumer auger, but they run hundreds of dollars. When I was in college, the legendary Swedish mechanic (who shamed me into reading literature for fun) owned one, so my father could borrow it when he had a clog. But it’s hundreds of dollars in expense that might not pay out if I don’t get enough clogged drains (or have enough friends to borrow it from my while it clutters up a part of my garage).

You know, it’s the first clog beyond the p-trap that we’ve had here at Nogglestead. Contrast that with our experience in Old Trees, where we lived for three years: We had the drain guy out so often, we were on a first name basis with Rick and knew a lot about him (his favorite hobby and prized possession was his monster truck which he took to events and children’s hospitals).

Back then, it might have made sense to buy a full-sized auger, but if we’re only going to need to use it once a decade, it would take fifty years or more to pay out versus calling a plumber.

So no cool new power tool for me.

Just an increased watchfulness on the drains to see if they’re draining slowly because now I know that a back-up is an actual possibility from direct experience, as well as a sense of relief that we caught the back-up before the dishwasher went through its whole cycle and made a real mess. And an excuse to run a Paula Abdul video.

So what has made me more agile, years of martial arts training or years of putting away laundry in my children’s dirty room strewn with clothing, bedding, sleeping bags, toys stacked upon toys, Nerf guns (which the boys take too seriously to lump them in with the toys), a shrieking alarm set purchased from the “book” order at school, and quite likely a cat hiding under the debris that will shriek, bolt, and/or attack if you step on it.

You know what that is like?

No, Catherine Zeta Jones, you are not ready unless you’ve trained for things placed haphazardly on dressers raining upon you when you open or close a drawer, including things like a complicated Lego set with 600 pieces that will shatter upon impact upon your skull, scattering additional shrapnel to avoid on the way out of the room.

Although Entrapment came out before she became a mother. Perhaps she learned.

In my garage, I have a trash can half full of crushed aluminum cans awaiting a trip to the recycling center.

I bought the trash can when we moved to Nogglestead just over nine years ago. So I expect that it will be full sometime around 2030. Maybe.

When I was younger, taking aluminum cans to the recycling center was a windfall. My parents, when I was young, would collect their empties in giant garbage bags and would take them in periodically, receiving cash in those days when it was hard to come by. Both figuratively and literally–ATMs were not yet a thing, so if you needed money on a Saturday, you needed to know a shop owner that would cash a check for you, but the scrap yard was open on Saturday mornings.

Immediately after college, when I was living with my sainted mother and working two low-paying, an-English-major-can-get-them jobs to keep up with my suddenly due student loans, she would let me take in the aluminum cans for a bit of walking around money, and a couple of bags of cans could net me somewhere around $40, which was quite a windfall in those days.

Out of habit, I still hold onto the aluminum cans I come across to sell to a recycler, but I don’t drink much beer or soda from cans these days. Most of the cans I get are from food trucks that include a can of soda with a meal deal, empty beer cans tossed out of pickups coming down the farm road, or crushed cans that I find in parking lots and toss into the back of my truck. The latter methodology embarrasses my beautiful wife a whole bunch, but you can take the boy out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the boy.

But I suppose I’d better get on it before the contents of the can have to go through probate.

After getting dressed and breaking their fasts, the boys like to go outside for a couple of minutes before leaving for school in the morning to firet all of their Nerf guns at once and to explode into the open space around us.

Which means the last bit of the morning ritual is generally like that of this morning:

Father, 7:27am: “Boys, get ready to load up.”
Father, 7:32am: “Boys, load up.”
Boy, 7:33am: Brings his bike into the garage along with a single Nerf gun.
Father, 7:34am: “Number 2, where are you?” Looks in tree.
Father, 7:36am: “Number 1, go get his bike.” Which father sees in the ditch beside the road.
Father, 7:37am: “Number 2, LOAD UP!”
Boy, 7:37am: Climbs twenty feet down from a different tree. Goes with his brother to retrieve not just a bike, but also a cot, a chair, and half a dozen other Nerf guns from the ditch.
All, 7:41am: Actually leave for school.

As I have mentioned, over and over, in an effort to humblebrag my way to your respect, gentle reader, I run a number of 5Ks in the autumn and winter.

This is because my boys are in their middle school cross country program, but since they go to a small school, their cross country events are not actually meets with other schools. Rather, they run 5Ks in their school uniforms, and once they started doing so, I started running as well because physical self-abuse of distance running is easier than making small talk with the other parents or just lingering around the event venue awkwardly without making small talk (my preferred option of the two).

As I’ve entered my third year this season, I’ve come to appreciate the finer points of distance running. To whit:

1. It feels so good when I stop.
2. I don’t have to make small talk with the other parents and embarrass myself.
3. I get to make quips as I’m running.
4. There are free bananas at the end.

Perhaps the last thing is the best thing. Like, on Saturday, when I crossed the finish line…

…I said, “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”

Come on, that’s from Forrest Gump:

I had to explain that to my wife. Come on, the film in only twenty-four years old now, old man. Surely you remember it?

I’ve also used the line noted as number 1 above, which is from an old joke: A doctor asks a man why he keeps hitting himself with a hammer, and the man says it feels so good when he stops.

At any rate, the highlight of the run for me is the things I quip at other runners and volunteers on the route.

I try to keep my breathing such that I can shout out good morning to the volunteers along the route, pointing us in the correct direction, or to people who come out in their front yards to watch us go by. But I like to crack wise as well.

Some of my favorites include:

• It’s a lovely day for a walk.
• There must be some mistake. I signed up for the 100 meters.
• Are you in my age group? Good, I don’t have to pass you.
• Can you get me an Uber?
• Are we there yet?

Or whatever fool thing comes to mind. Of which there are plenty, because 5Ks give you a lot of time to think, and they give me a lot of time to think fool things.

The quipping keeps me from thinking of myself as a serious athlete or runner, that I focus on the wisecracks instead of Peak Performance. I could probably shave a minute off of my time by taking it more seriously, but that would be less fun than running already is not.

The cross country coach referred to these events as races which would put a little pressure to, you know, win if I took him seriously.

Instead, I’ll continue to think of them as moving open mic nights.

It was a busy Saturday, as so many of them get to be.

We started out before dawn to run the 2017 Habitat for Humanity Home Run 5K at 7 am. Our boys are on their school’s cross country team, but as it is a small school, they do not participate in meets with other schools. Instead, they run in 5K fundraisers every autumn, and the whole family runs in them. It looks like the Springfield News-Leader‘s photographer was on hand to take pictures.

She did not get any of our crew, though, and the official event photographs are not online yet, so I cannot do my traditional Bill the Cat head swap on my picture in the event.

Which I do with all my 5K pictures because I tend to think I look like Bill the Cat in them anyway, as I did with the one from the 2017 Panther Run above.

So we arrived home about 10:30 in the morning, enough time for a spot of rest and a bit of lunch before I took the boys to the Ozark Mini Maker Faire where they were to man the First Lego League booth for a couple of hours starting at 1pm. They’re not just athletes; they are also scholars and participate in the robotics/programming competitive league. Again, it looks like the Springfield News-Leader‘s photographer was on hand to take pictures, but, again, none of us.

Perhaps we should have carpooled.

We got back from the Mini Maker Faire, which was more mini than it was last year, werd, in time to load our truck with some blankets and desserts to take to our martial arts school’s annual picinic (which is how autoyogibearrect spells it) at 5pm. This time, the News-Leader photographer was not on hand to take pictures–that I know of–but we had some pulled pork, chatted with some friends, while the boys played on inflatables.

We got home about 7:30. There were no news photographers to capture our return, which is good.

But I thought it was interesting that the News-Leader‘s photographer was at two events that we attended, and we’re still not on the society pages yet.

It’s only a matter of time, though, I reckon.

Learning to Drive Stick-Shift on a Dodge Viper

Did I say “problem”? I meant “solution.”

I learned to drive late–I was in my last year of college when I got my driver’s license (which is ahead of my sainted mother’s pace–she was, what, 33?). In high school, I didn’t have anyone to teach me to drive–my mother was too anxious, a family friend who took me out once was too afraid to take me out again, driver’s education in school was during summer vacation, and private driving lessons were expensive. So it had to wait until I was off at college, living in my father’s basement in Milwaukee, for me to get regularish tutelage behind the wheel.

When I came back to Missouri, I needed a car to get out of the long valley on the gravel road and to anything resembling a job. I garnered a decent amount of monetary graduation gifts, enough for an old used car, and I was looking for an automatic transmission since I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift–but I would make an exception if I found a sports car I liked.

Well, I found a red sports car with a manual transmission.

A 1986 Nissan Pulsar (the one depicted is not my Pulsar–my Pulsar’s clear coat was peeling off). So I had to learn to drive a stick. A family “friend,” a burgeoning mechanic, gave me a twenty minute lesson and set me loose on the curvy two-lane country highways and four lane state highways that surrounded the valley. He also helpfully fixed the symptoms of a flaw in the electronics of the car that routinely burned out batteries, alternators, and headlights in the car instead of finding and fixing the problem, which finally led me to getting an older old car with its own faults. And a new mechanic. But I digress; I see I’ve already talked about that Nissan just last year. It must be part of my decades-long mid-life crisis to keep hearkening back to it.

But back to my original story: Pretending I didn’t know how to drive a stick because I didn’t want to drive a Viper.

So, a bit of background about Jim, the Viper’s owner. He was a millionaire next door; he’d been a union poo-bah and invested in real estate and had done very well. He dated my aunt for a while, on and off, and he liked to carry $5,000 in cash on him at all times in case he saw something he wanted to buy. He liked to hit the riverboat casinos and gamble past the limit, getting other people in the casino to get him more tokens when he’d filled his limiting punchcard. He owned a Viper, and he brought it to a family reunion one summer.

My brother was on leave from the Marines at the time, and he’d brought a gearhead friend of his with his souped-up 70s GTO. They marvelled over the Viper, and Jim took his keys out of his pocket. “You know how to drive a stick?” he asked them, because he was going to give the keys to his high performance, expensive sports car to a couple of twenty-and-not-much-more males to roar around the county park and presumably south county.

I most certainly not volunteer, and my brother and his friend didn’t know manual transmissions, which is probably how that Viper got back to the garage that afternoon.

Well, that, and the handgun that Jim illegally carried in the console to brandish whenever unsavory types took too much interest in his Viper when he was stopped at red lights in sketchy parts of town. Which was more than once by his telling of it.

(Link via Instapundit; memory probably from my imagination.)