Category: Life

As I might have mentioned, I have assigned each of my boys a book to read, an adult book with few pictures and no comic drawings like you find and they unfortunately find too often in the works of Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey. The oldest got The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the younger got Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. They’re both going to write essays about five lessons they learned from their assigned books; then they will swap books and write an essay on the other book.

As I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned when other bloggers have posted poems that inspired me to include those poems in daily poetry writing. But today I cam across Jack Baruth’s weekly roll-up from last week where he quotes Frederick Douglass because:

The beauty of proper English is that it can be mastered by anyone with the will and capacity to do so. It does not discriminate. It is a tool available to all who might wield it in confidence. Frederick Douglass was one such man. He used the discipline of language to effect major change — in his life, in the life of others. In a Newspeak world, he could never have persuaded as he did, could never have accomplished what he did. In this way, the leveling of English won’t serve to erase oppression or discrimination: it will serve to make it permanent. We will have two official languages: English for the people who make the rules, and Newspeak for those who must follow them. The speakers of the latter will live in the eternal sunshine of a spotless present, never troubled by Shakespeare or Douglass in “the original”, never given the chance to express or consume a contrary opinion. O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Which is why I’ve gotten a little more hands-on in pushing my children. They’ve gotten too accustomed to doing the minimum to get by in elementary school, and it’s about time they started to work with real literature and to become fluent in the language they’ve inherited.

The blog received a visitor from someone in Katy, Texas, the other day:

Which led me to a little reminiscience. The spellchecker assures me reminiscience is not how you spell it, but I feel the narcissistic review of one’s life in “What If?” models is at least as scientifically valid as most social “sciences” taught in the universities and, seemingly, more scientifically valid than a lot of computer models designed to guide public policy and citizen compulsion.

At any rate, back in the early 1980s, my sainted mother was newly separated and soon-to-be newly divorced and was seemingly in retrospect eager to vacate Milwaukee. She had numerous friends there, mostly neighbors or friends of my father’s or ex-wives of my father’s friends that my mother got custody of in the divorce. But her family was mainly in the St. Louis area, where we eventually ended up (eventually being a couple summers after the separation). But my mother briefly, it seemed, considered moving to Katy, Texas, where her youngest sister lived with her then-husband as his work took him there.

As my third grade year ended, I had just finished up my beginning music class learning the saxette (a little whistle later replaced by the new-fangled technology or better marketing program of the recorder which replaced it as the beginning musical instrument). I wanted to sign up for the public-school-offered piano class in fourth grade, but my mother wouldn’t let me sign up for one of the limited spots because she thought we wouldn’t be there for the beginning of the year–we would be in Texas, right down the road from Mickey Gilley’s place (research indicates that “right down the road” means on the other side of Houston in Pasadena but not any more–Gilley moved to Branson at some point, so by my mother’s logic, I live just down the road from it now).

However, that did not actually come to pass. We did another two years at Carleton before moving to St. Charles.

Still, the visit from Katy brought fourth some speculation (a couple minutes’ worth, anyway). How would I be different today had I started the fourth grade outside of Houston, Texas, and graduated from high school down there? Would I have developed an affection for my adopted home state which I really haven’t for Missouri? My aunt shortly decamped for Missouri after a couple of years in Katy; would we also have moved back, or would my mother have gotten a job that compelled her to stay in Houston? Would I have a Texas accent and wear a cowboy hat instead of a fedora? Would I have read Westerns instead of mysteries? Would I actually like bro country in the 21st century?

It’s fun to briefly speculate. Except for the last bit, which is horrifying.

Still, what might have been? This seems appropriate:

Sweet Christmas, that song itself came out, what, ten years after the events I’m talking about, which is to say twenty-five years ago.

I asked my aunt about this to verify whether she was indeed in Katy, or if it was Tyler, Texas–about that time, a Texan girl came to Carleton and said she was the great(x)-granddaughter of John Tyler, so perhaps I was conflating the memories. I say great(x) because in the almost forty years since, I don’t recall how many greats were lined up. Four? Five? At any rate, over almost forty years, I am not sure how many of these memories of mine to trust, and I told my aunt that there aren’t many people left you could set me straight.

My aunt set me straight: she was surprised to hear that my mother considered moving to Texas to be near her. She thought we were already in the St. Louis area when she moved to Texas. In my mind, though, it was more serious than that, but perhaps it was from a child’s perspective, as I at the time wondered how desert-like that part of Texas was, and I worried about facing Gila monsters in the yard. So whatever my mother might have said, even in passing, I took it seriously in my even-then neurotic way, enumerating an unlikely bundle of worries. And a likely one: saying goodbye to friends.

Well, maybe we were in St. Louis before my aunt moved to Texas; perhaps my sainted mother talked about it when living in my other aunt’s basement and when she was separating onion rings on an assembly line aside immigrants and was considering anything an improvement. Maybe I’m mixing the timeline up because we moved several times in those years, from Milwaukee to the basement a modest house in a well-to-do suburb to the trailer park to the gravel road. Perhaps my mother only dreamed of this in Wisconsin, perhaps she talked about it with her mother or my aunts in St. Louis, all of whom have passed away. Who knows? I’ve reached out to my brother to see if he remembers any of it or if I am just making up fancies in my mind about my youth.

Next up: I shall speculate what would have become of my had I learned to play piano in the fourth grade. Certainly, it would have prevented me from the current mental and neurotic roadblocks I have to learning a musical instrument in my forties (the guitar experiment ended shortly after this rather sanguine update a year and a half ago). Would I have been in band? My beautiful wife ensures me that is an unalloyed good in high school and hopes our oldest does it should he go to public school next year, even though he’s not that enthusiastic about it. My youngest, though, started piano lessons in third grade and really swings on the trumpet already. Would I have been like that?

I look forward to the full resumption of normal activities so I can fill my days with normal busyness and not this nonsense.

I don’t normally buy the smaller bottles of HE Tide at the Sam’s Club, but our normal larger bottles of Tide were out of stock, and in the current unpleasantness, one must hoard what is available, not what one wants.

But wait a minute: This Tide leaves clothes smelling like Clean Linen:

By implication and inference, then, should we assume that all other Tides leave clothes smelling dirty?

Well, no. As you might know, gentle reader, Clean Linen with capital letters is a patented scent and is like Grape Soda. It’s not exactly what clean linen dried on a clothesline smells like, but it’s an attempt to artificially replicate it, and it’s consistent across all olfactory delivery platforms (like plug-in scented oils, which I guess are really Glade® PlugIns® Scented Oils from my experience testing S.C. Johnson online programs) and various sprays.

We will keep this between us, gentle reader, as my beautiful wife does not like this Patented Scent (as we’ve learned from other platforms), and I didn’t see it when I bought the soap. Hopefully she won’t notice that she cannot stand the smell of her clothes. Although if this causes her to take her clothes off, well, I’ll count that as a win.

Michael Jordan showed no mercy playing sons in basketball: ‘Earn everything’

When we’re playing one on one or me on two here, I don’t hold back–which unfortunately means I sometimes run over the younger of my boys yet.

But I know that one day soon they will eclipse me in athletic prowess permanently, so I have to pad my winning percentage whilst I can.

I mean, that very same youngest whom I sometimes run over in basketball runs away from me in 5Ks. He ran a 26 minute 5K when he was ten, for crying out loud, only four or five years after I last carried him over the finish line in one. They’ve already completed a modified virtual triathlon of a sprint distance (subbing in five minutes of cardio for a swim, followed by a 10 mile bike ride and then a 5K) last weekend.

So, yeah, no mercy. And hopefully they’ll show the same lack competitiveness with their old man once they’re beating me regularly, assuming that I don’t give up playing with them once they do.

Which I might soon. Because one does not make it into the Dad Hall of Fame with a losing record.

What if the world government overreaction to the current unpleasantness is designed not so much to flatten the current ICU-utilization curve but is instead designed to acclimate people to living in confined spaces and communicating on video screens because They know an asteroid is going to strike Earth in 2024, and They want people prepared to live life on the generation-ship Teslarks that will carry most of humanity to the stars before the asteroid strike?

You read too much science fiction, Brian J. you might say.

But I really don’t read all that much science fiction at all! But when I do, it’s from before the modern era, where the themes are more about current goodthink shibboleths rather than the fate of Humanity, which contains a lot of badthinkers.

UPDATE: Friar spreads a conspiracy theory.

The other day, I was flipping through a paperback collection of poems called Immortal Poems of the English Language, a gift from my high school National Honor Society Secret Pal (a year-long Secret Santa type deal) at the end of the 1989 school year, when I came across “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
     That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
     To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
     The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
     A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
     As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
     Lov’d I not Honour more.

I had forgotten I remember that poem.

I memorized it and performed it once or twice in my coffee house open mic days (whose memories I have shared). But I’d forgotten I’d memorized it. I mean, it’s not like the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet that I liked to open with at a new venue, and it’s not as noteworthy as memorizing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” en toto. So I’d forgotten I know it.

But after we wrote the poem and after my youngest boy read it, I showed them how I could recite it from memory (mostly), and pointed out that when you really liked a poem, you could memorize it and recite it and thus make the poem yours. They did not seem excited at the prospect, although they acknowledged that they’ve memorized song lyrics. So they know what it means. Whether they will ever choose to memorize a poem of their own accord remains to be seen. But I’m hopeful.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan?:

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Thanks to the myriad studies, models, and tests conducted during this current unpleasantness (the COVID-19 pandemic, he says to himself reading this in 2030 when it might not be immediately in mind and assuming he survives the current unpleasantness), and how each is breathlessly reported by a 23-year-old journalist whose only brush with “science” was a freshman class in climate change, we can each have our own facts to clout people who wear masks/people who don’t wear masks/people with whom we disagree politically.

One of my pastors posted this on Facebook:

As governors are trying to figure out how to ease back in to a new normal, please remember:

🛑 Some people don’t agree with the state opening…. that’s okay. Be kind.

🏡 Some people are still planning to stay home…. that’s okay. Be kind.

🦠 Some are still scared of getting the virus and a second wave happening….that’s okay. Be kind.

💰 Some are sighing with relief to go back to work knowing they may not lose their business or their homes….that’s okay. Be kind.

👩🏾‍⚕️Some are thankful they can finally have a surgery they have put off….that’s okay. Be kind.

📝 Some will be able to attend interviews after weeks without a job….that’s okay. Be kind.

😷 Some will wear masks for weeks….that’s okay. Be kind.

💅🏻 Some people will rush out to get the hair or nails done…. that’s okay. Be kind.

❤️ The point is, everyone has different viewpoints/feelings and that’s okay. Be kind.

We each have a different story. If you need to stay home, stay home. But be kind .

If you need to go out, just respect others when in public and be kind!

Don’t judge fellow humans because you’re not in their story. We all are in different mental states than we were months ago. So remember, be kind.

COPY AND PASTED….
Please SHARE this reminder for kindness. ❤

I suspect that ship has already sailed and sunk just off the coast.

Regardless, I’m still going to smile and say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” to people even if they’re dressed and are treating me like they’re Wuhanfa.

Seen on Facebook:

Of course, I ordered one.

You might remember how impressed I was when I read Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon. And Hannibal, clearly.

Unfortunately, I’ve bought a handful of t-shirts from Facebook ads, so Facebook shows me more t-shirt ads than posts from my friends.

And designer face mask ads. Heaven help us, but there might well be a glut of those in a year or so. I hope you can make quilts from them.

The other night, I dreamed of the trailer park.

It was weird; I was going for a run from our trailer towards the outside of the park. It was nice outside, but I saw some people as I turned onto the main street in the middle of it, but I went wide of them for social distancing purposes. I got to Delores Drive, the thoroughfare that led up to the highway, and I stopped to look at the Stop’n’Go which was a small convenience store, but it might have had a couple of gas pumps. Instead of the Stop’n’Go, a little plaza stood there with a Domino’s Pizza. Suddenly, it was snowy, and I was crawling on the shoulder of Delores Drive headed toward the school bus stop or perhaps up the hill–it was a big hill and not fun to drive on in the snow and ice. So I heard; I was too young to pay attention to real life at thirteen years old.

So I decided to take a spin around the old homestead in Google maps.

This is the entrance to the trailer park. Back when I lived there, the sign was a big wood-carved sign that misspelled it as Siesta Manor Mobil Home Park, although someone tried to squeeze an E in there, but it was far smaller than the other letters. The lot behind the sign was green space with some playground equipment and a swimming pool. It looks as though they’ve filled that area with other pads.

Looks like the pool is still there. Strangely enough, I think I only went to that pool once or twice in the three years I lived there. I might have gone to Noyes Park’s pool in Milwaukee the same number of times in that span.

Even though the number says 108, I’m pretty sure this pad is the one our trailer sat on. Third from the main road. In the first lived a woman and then her son; the son sold my brother Playboy magazines and later gave us a dog we called Buddy, but the dog had been abused and kept us in terror–and took the eye of our Pekingeseish dog in a fight–before my mother had enough and divested the family of the dog whilst I was in college. The second trailer housed an old man who somehow got permission from my mother to let us go with him to Portage Des Souix (about an hour and a half away) to help clean out another trailer of his. Old Frank was a messy, dirty man, but I guess my brother befriended him. On the other side of us was the Hittler trailer, of course. Across the street where Jimmy’s dad lived, next to Cathy, the woman with the double-wide who became a realtor and sold my mother the house down the gravel road. On the other side of Cathy was a guy who worked for the government whom the FBI interviewed when my mother was going for security clearance; he came over right away to let her know the FBI was canvassing the neighborhood.

I’d say it hasn’t changed since the last time I took a look at it, but the image is dated 2013, so of course the 2013 image hasn’t changed. I notice, though, that they built all those pads at the front of the trailer park but had a lot of empty pads in the interior.

Clearly, the little business plaza which featured the Stop’n’Go has not fared so well. In addition to the little convenience store at the left, the building at the right held business offices for a liquid propane dealer and, briefly, something called “Hot Tub Haven” that was open until 2am and, in a stunning turn of events, involved prostitution.

Across the street, we used to stand and wait for the bus in front of a beauty college that stood at the entrance to Brookside Estates, another mobile home park. What’s really weird is that you can see the old building in one spot in Google Maps as you’re moving south on Delores Drive:

That image is dated 2017; in other images dated 2019 which you see for most other spots on Delores Drive, the building is gone:

Google Maps is kind of like my own memory; I think this is true, and sometimes, something can corroborate it, but most of the time, in the 21st century, it’s unbelievable and unproveable, and those who could attest to it don’t remember or are dead.

Atop the hill, the old U Gas is now a Circle K.

On Sunday mornings, my sainted mother would often stop at the U Gas to pick up a dozen gas station doughnuts for us. I remember not being able to afford canvases or art supplies, so I’d cut the corrugated cardboard doughnut boxes to be the canvases for my extra credit poor water color paintings. The U Gas also had a couple video games in rotation, and although I didn’t get into Out Run, all three of us in Triple N Lawns blew all of the money we’d earned and our banked gas money on Rampage one afternoon.

Across from the U Gas was the flea market for a long time until they tried to develop it. They built a Bonanza restaurant deep into the lot and had a sign that said Now Leasing Plaza 30 which must have been up for a decade. Eventually, they put in a mobile home lot. In the last thirty years, though, it has been developed.

I sure missed the flea market, though. A kid with a couple of bucks in his pocket could climb that hill on a Saturday morning and find any number of wonders.

At any rate, man, that was almost 35 years ago. This is the point where I’m supposed to say, “It doesn’t seem like it!” My beautiful wife says something along those lines when we drive through the Missouri State campus where she went to school. And maybe it wasn’t for her, as she has not aged. But for me, yeah, that was a long time ago.

Tyson Foods chairman warns ‘the food supply chain is breaking’:

The chairman of Tyson Foods is warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from the national food supply chain as the coronavirus outbreak forces food processing plants to shutter.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” John Tyson wrote in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

An advertisement in the papers? Why run an advertisement in the papers, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post?

Unless it’s a call for… government action in the form of money or a special guest worker program or something.

You know, I used to be young and cynical, but that’s back in the days when I was a foolish optimist.

(Link via Instapundit. See also Powerline.)

UPDATE: Well, they got something: Trump to Order Meat Plants to Stay Open in Move Slammed by Union. Maybe not what they wanted. (Link via Instapundit.)

After last week’s incident with the deadly (if you choked on it) prairie ring-necked snake in the gardens of Nogglestead, I decided it would be a worthwhile goal to teach the boys to recognize various snakes of Missouri.

So I went to the Missouri Department of Conservation Web site and got a list of the snakes of Missouri. Then, in my own personal arts and crafts time, I laid them out, printed them out in color, and made a set of flash cards:

Unfortunately or fortunately, I was not zealous in selecting only snakes whose habitats include southwestern Missouri, so we have a number of snakes who have been seen in Platte City once. Maybe.

To study them, I am going to shuffle them and make each child write them out in alphabetical order and then in order of length.

And then once they’re good at identifying the snakes by the pictures on the flash cards, I’ll have made a set of cards with other pictures of the snakes so that they learn to go by the pattern and not the particular picture.

Once, when we went on a hike at the Nathan Greene homestead in Ash Grove, we came across a snake lying across the cut grass that served as a path across a wide meadow when we found a five foot snake lying across it. I didn’t have a stick to move it along, but I convinced the boys to walk around its but end slowly. After we were past, I got closer to snap a picture, and it snapped into defensive posture and moved along. It freaked the boys out so much that, although I said we’ll just keep walking and watch more closely for snakes, my youngest took off at a run, at which point he stepped on another snake which also snapped to defensive posture whilst my boy jumped straight into the air. We made it back to the trailhead very quickly, and the boys have not been eager to go hiking since.

At any rate, a useful exercise to keep them busy in between their actual school assignments.

My boys have a science project where they’re supposed to create a Rube Goldberg machine.

Here’s what they made:

I’m not saying that it was the best Rube Goldberg machine ever, but it looks like it was so advanced that the Israelis took it out.

The boys have continued with their teleschooling as schools in Missouri have been closed for the rest of the year. They’ve been a little, erm, lax about turning in their work on time, but that’s not really been much of a change since the teleschooling began.

One of the young men was charged with creating a model of the ear for his science class, and he of course did not begin it until the week after it was due. He built a small model out of Sculpey and pipe cleaners, but the first try was rejected, and he built it again. Which was accepted.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can use it in our art history unit on Van Gogh.

You know, that gag worked better on Facebook. Just the picture and the punchline. BOOM!

Meanwhile, tonight’s poem tying into history courtesy Blogodidact. Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
    And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
    We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
    To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
   The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Now, if I can only put my thumb on them long enough to get them to finish their papers on lessons learned from the autobiographies of Ben Franklin and Frederick Douglass.

Scientists Explore Underwater Quantum Links for Submarines.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have lots of experience with Quantum Link.

As some of you older folks might know, Quantum Link was an online service for Commodore 64s which later became a little thing called America Online.

But I was on it in the old days, before it was cool. I’m a Q-Link hipster.

Well, all right, not a lot of experience. Let me explain.

When we lived in the trailer, we got our first computer, a Commodore 128, with my mother’s inheritance from her aunt. We also got a modem with it (not one you plug your handset into a la Wargames, but a flaky Volks 6480 1200 baud modem into which you plugged your telephone line directly. We got wind of or, quite likely, a free installation disk somewhere, perhaps with a magazine or sent via a magazine’s mailing list.

So we installed it.

To get into Q-Link, you had to dial up to one of the big data centers that leased their lines to businesses during the day, but were available for consumer traffic at night. The client software ran and communicated with the company servers back east, and you could get into chat rooms both public and private (yeah, Baby Boomers invented online sex, too, you damn kids). The news groups and forums were free, but chatting and playing games was not; you had to pay an extra six cents a minute to do so, six cents a minute that was added to your phone bill (come on, not everyone had credit cards in 1987).

You would think the limits to off-business hours would have minimize the damage a couple bored teens could do, but you’d be wrong.

My mother worked first shift in those days, so she’d leave the trailer a little before seven in the morning, and we’d roll out of bed and hop online for a couple of hours of Plus time before the data center would cut over to businesses. And nights, we’d weedle my mother until she relented to let us have an hour of Plus time, maybe even each.

I imagine they had an account page somewhere that could show you how much Plus time you used; I’m also sure that if I saw it, I would have dismissed it with “What does another $3.60 matter?” (call it Dollars-a-Day Bad Habits: The Early Years).

When the phone bill came, somehow we’d racked up over $300 in charges. Which took diligence, gentle reader, and probably sneaking onto the service at night as well.

You know, $300 doesn’t sound too horrible now, but my sainted mother was a clerk-typist spending her take home pay paying for the oldest, worstest trailer in the park and cheap ground beef and off-brand Hamburger Helper, so this was a significant amount for us at the time. Maybe an extra paycheck, or thereabouts. She just admonished us in the adult fashion–you know when you do something so bad that you don’t get yelled at, you get admonished, which is worse. And she paid it without docking our allowance–which was, what, maybe a buck a week at that time? I would probably still be paying that off if she hadn’t been so gracious and forgiving.

But that was the end of Q-Link for us, and we were relegated to BBSes when our Volksmodem wasn’t flaking out on us.

So maybe I don’t have as much actual experience with Quantum Links as I put on my resume.

Years later, as I mentioned, it became America Online, and I signed up on my mother’s old 486 (ask yer grandpa). And I posted on a newsgroup through it. And the rest is wonderful history. So not only did I get a beautiful wife on the Internet before it was cool–I got her on QuantumLink.

(Link about the submarines via Instapundit.)

You know, I’ve seen advice that you should buy gift certificates/cards to support businesses that are locked up by order of the governor.

To be honest, that’s a bit of a gamble, ainna? The gift card will only work if the business survives. Which is becoming less of a toss-up the longer this goes on.

This came to mind because I gave my beautiful wife a gift certificate for a local yoga studio for her birthday last year. Actually, I gave her two. I often give her gift certificates for an experience sort of thing–a spa or something–but when it comes to a gift certificate to the gun range or the yoga studio, I hope that she’ll invite me–but she immediately thinks of a friend she’d rather take, and then their schedules don’t align, so the gift cards remain in her desk drawer for years.

The yoga studio’s gift card has an expiration date of one year from the purchase, so basically a week or so before her birthday this year. In January, when her schedule was continuing to not align with her designated yoga friend, I mentioned that I would be happy to go with her, so we sort of made plans that we would block out some time for it.

Then the shutdown happened, and although the studio is offering Zoom classes, I’m not sure this is how we want to begin our classes. So the shutdown could conceivably run past the end date of the certificate, or it could run so late that we wouldn’t have time to use up the certificates (I bought two to emphasize she could bring someone else–I meant me), or the studio could shutter entirely in the next couple of months.

So support your local businesses by buying gift cards, but only gamble as much as you can lose.

Which explains my ulterior motive for ordering at least once a week from ABC Books. It’s not because I like to accumulate books willy-nilly at the thought that I might want to read that particular title someday. It’s because I generally have $100 or $150 in ABC Books gift cards on hand to give for birthday presents and whatnot. I need to prop them up as best I can or else I’ll have to think of some other default gift for my boys’ school mates or teachers.

This morning, I awakened before dawn to the smell of stale smoke.

Initially, I thought it was the wind coming down my chimney and picking up the scent of last week’s wood fires in the firebox, but its prevalence and eventual resolution into something more akin to a grass fire than a wood fire led me outside to see if any horizon or, worse, pasture adjacent to Nogglestead or Nogglestead itself were on fire. I haven’t grilled in a couple of days, and it’s been years since I set my yard on fire whilst grilling (embers from the fire would occasionally alight upon and alight a mulched flower bed across the driveway-a flowerbed that was not renewed after the second such incident).

It also awakened my beautiful wife, and when you’re awakened by an alarm–even if it’s only the scent of a fire–you don’t go back to sleep easily.

I wonder if it was the remnant particles of this, suspended: 200 acres of miscanthus go up in smoke.

That’s a little northwest of here, so probably not. But sometimes we get the scents of grass fires that are dozens or hundreds of miles away.

Just we’d rather not get them while we’re trying to sleep.

Yesterday, we worked in the gardens of Nogglestead, and as I was turning the 16′ by 16′ vegetable bed with a spade, my beautiful wife and oldest son were working on the flower bed in the back yard. And they called me over to handle a snake they found.

We have a definite protocol for handling snakes at Nogglestead:

1. Remove or kill the snake.
2. Research exactly how dangerous step 1 was.
3. Exaggerate how dangerous it was.

Prairie ring-necked snake?

via GIPHY