Category: Life

Second Strike Christmas Cards:
n. Christmas cards sent to you by people only after they receive your Christmas card in the mail.

Remember when ordering your holiday cards to order in excess of the people who are on your own Christmas list so you can have second strike capability.

Client: “Hey, I’ve got a name that’s like the name of one of the Great Old Ones. Can we increase that motif by adding something like an Elder Sign to the logo?”
Graphics Design Professional: “You got it!”

Suggested tagline: The engineering firm whose name is not spoken aloud.

(Not to be confused with Toht or Not?)

I have two Christmas stockings:

My mother-in-law made the one of the left for me somewhere around the turn of the century; my sainted mother made the one on the right in the middle 1980s, when we were living in the trailer park and she came across some iron-on letters somewhere.

The one on the right hung with similar stockings with my mother and brother on the wall by the bedrooms in the house down the gravel road we lived on during our high school years; the one on the left hangs by the chimney at Nogglestead with similar stockings for my wife and children.

But I point out to my children that the difference in their appearance does not reflect a difference in the love with which they were made. Their grandmothers had differing skill levels at crafts and different gifts. So while my mother-in-law (for whom I really need a standing adjective–perhaps I will try “wonderful”) can make beautiful crafts with felt, glue, and spangles, she probably has not singlehandedly finished a basement or remodeled a bathroom.

It would be nice if the children could learn the lesson from this, that people have different talents and skill levels, and that’s okay. It’s a lesson many storybooks from their earlier years tried to convey, but my children are boys, so each must be the best at everything, or at least better than his brother. Which will only succeed ultimately in making one of them sadder than the other in each assumed competition.

A link to this Mental Floss article: 11 Twisted Facts About ‘The Far Side’

Since it is officially December, the One For You, One For Me protocol is now active when ordering gifts on Amazon. I’ll count this as one for her and will order myself a heavy metal or jazz songbird CD to reward myself for my giving nature.

No, I didn’t misspell reign. Sometimes, I’m startled by a rain of CDs.

Yes, there is a cat involved.

Two of my cats like to loll about on the top of my desk hutch, warmed by a couple of lamps that I have up there. One, the smart one, jumps onto the window sill to the left of the hutch and then atop the hutch. The other one, the younger of the two, prefers to jump atop the arcade game to the right of the desk, to knock off a couple of hats resting atop the Arkanoid, and then to army-crawl under the lowered ceiling and duct work above the hutch to get to the warm spot by the lamps.

Along that part of the hutch, I have stacks of CDs, and as the cat crawls behind them, he nudges them ever so slightly towards the edge of the hutch. Eventually, they reach a tipping point where another nudge as he crawls by or stretch as he’s already resting knocks a cascade of CDs onto my desk and, sometimes, me.

It’s not as fun if you’re watching me.

As a result, I have to remember to straighten and push back the CDs as often as I can.

Which I’m doing right now as I think about it.

I recently made a trip to the Kansas City area, and my brother who is in Leavenworth gave me some effects from my sainted mother, including a number of publications in which I appeared in the 1990s and early part of the century. Although there weren’t many clips, they’re relatively impressive compared to my recent output (which has been frequently paid for, thank you, but only appears on Web sites which is still less impressive than in print).

One of the things I got was a stack of old newspaper columns. I’d had two newspaper columns in the past: A column you might remember, gentle reader, called “Opinion Shapers” which was a quarterly in the college paper, the Suburban Journals (you might have seen references to them in the past here, as they ran in 2008-2009).

The first, though, was for the college paper, the Marquette Tribune. It was a monthly column that rotated with four other students, two from the left and two from the right. Given that two of the other columns were called “The Traditional Conservative” and “The Right Perspective”, I think they put me on the left because I had long hair. But I was not to right from the left; my first real column lambasted a proposed required multicultural literacy class (and my second lampooned those who successfully agitated against the required class).

Back then, they did not have comments section on the Internet. Instead, they had to make due with an unsigned editorial column.

No such luck, anonymous scribbler.

Visit my post I Am Buck Rogers.

From 2004.

In hindsight, I said:

It would be the equivalent of dressing like Capt. Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds from television’s Firefly—in 2007.

Clearly, I underestimated the multiplier of the Internet on geekery. I could dress up as Mal Reynolds in 2016, and people would know who I was.

Heck, I’d have to explain it less than my actual Hallowe’en costume from 2016:

I was Pokemon Go.

You 21st century kids with your digital Internet-connected, automated, MP3-playing umbrellas! Why, I’m no Luddite, but I prefer a manual umbrella.

Fortunately, I know just where to get them.

I kid, I kid. Of course I don’t use an umbrella. I wear a hat, for Pete’s sake.

So I’m ready to register the North Side Mindflayers Trivia Team for a trivia night to support the local Lutheran Student Center, and the registration form asks you how many children you’ll need to register for child care.

Example: 23.

Now, it’s a table of 6 people. But for Lutherans, that might be a valid example number.

For the record, the progeny of our six is 11, but it’s three couples. If it were six mommies, it could easily be 23 or more.

Also: Note that children who are 3.5 years old must wander the LSC floor begging for snacks from the various tables since children between 3 and 4 will not have child care provided.

So a couple of years ago, we got a bedroom set with a configurable four poster/canopy/sleigh bed and dressers that actually match. As you might guess, this was not my idea.

But for a number of years, we didn’t have any curtains on the bed. When I looked for sets, I found them to be too expensive. When I bought curtains off the shelf, I found the pockets were too small for the canopy rails. I considered custom sewing, but that, too, would prove expensive. So we didn’t have any canopy or whatnot for a long time.

And then I thought: Magnets.

I bought some craft magnets. I folded the tops of some of the sheers I’d bought but whose pockets were too small for the rails over those rails and used the magnets to stick them. And, voilà! We had the adult equivalent of a fort to sleep in every night.

Until Roark discovered he could leap into the sheer and bat at it until it fell.

I’m really glad we didn’t go with the expensive custom-sewn solution before he discovered this.

So have some cats as D&D characters.

2015 marked the twentieth anniversary of my brief foray into editing and publishing my own magazine. Let me take you a bit down memory lane and tell you the story of the St. Louis Artesian briefly.

Continue reading “When Brian J. Was A Publishing Mogul” →

Here at Nogglestead, we could simply say mow the grass. Not mow the lawn which implies a square footage of uniform grass, and Nogglestead has myriad types of grasses, ground cover, and weeds in lieu of a lawn. However, mowing five acres minus the buildings that make Nogglestead truly a compound leaves one with plenty of time to think of expressions to more poetically capture the experience. So here, gentle reader, are some of the best ones.

Running the Nogglestead 500.
Because the discharge is on the right side of the mower, you’re always turning left, just like NASCAR.

Driving to St. Louis In My Backyard
Early on, I realized that the three to four hours I spend on the lawnmower when cutting the grass is about the time it takes to drive from Springfield to Saint Louis.

Listening to a Long Country Marathon
As I have recently mentioned, my radio headphones can only pick up one station relatively clearly on every spot of the grass, and that’s a newly bro country station. So I get four hours of girl-get-up-in-my-truck punctuated with some heartbreak. Mowing the lawn does not often put me in a good mood.

Closing the Flower Shop
The youngest son still likes to pick flowers for his mother, and when I’m about a week late in mowing, it has a wide selection of flowering weeds and wild daisies for him to choose from. Until such time as I chop them all down.

Feeding the Birds
Once in a while, when I’m out mowing the back field, one or two birds will start swooping and diving around me. It weirded me out the first couple of times. I thought perhaps I was nearing their nests, and they were trying to drive me away, but it’s a relatively flat field and not good nesting for anything. Later, I realized I was kicking up some insects, and the birds were eating them.

Chasing the Wildlife
In addition to the birds and the bugs, from time to time, something will take off running or hopping ahead of the mower. I’ll slow to let a frog get out of my path, but yesterday I chased a rodent a ways to make him reconsider Nogglestead as a future home. Of course, if a rabbit takes off running, it’s best to go very, very slowly, as parent rabbits will run away from their babies to try to draw the predators away.

At any rate, there are others I thought of and have forgotten. Four hours is a long time.

As some of you know, I met my beautiful wife on the Internet. Not the World Wide Web: We’re old school and met on the rec.arts.poems newsgroup. She read something that I’d posted and thought it was good, and because my handle indicated I was from St. Louis, she emailed me to ask me where one could read poetry in St. Louis. Which was a good question to ask me, as I was a frequent performer at open mic nights and could tell her where to read and what audiences in the different bars and coffee shops expected.

So we struck up an email conversation an email conversation that stretched into hundreds of messages. We had a lot in common and connected pretty well–I’d read Atlas Shrugged a couple of times, and she had a cat named John Galt. And so on.

But I’m pretty sure the thing that sealed the deal was when I quoted an Iron Maiden poster to her.

Now, I’m a little late to the heavy metal party. I had long hair in college and listened to some hard rock at the time, but not the evil bands. Like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Pantera, Sepultura, and all that. But one of the Daves I know, I know, was into that, and his bedroom circa 1990 was covered in Iron Maiden posters. Including the one for “Wasted Years”:

We were talking about something or other about our youth (given that we were twenty-five at the time, we were still in our youth), and I said something like “As Eddie from Iron Maiden would have said, ‘Do not waste your time searching for those wasted years.'”

That, gentle reader, Sealed. The. Deal.

You see, she was an Iron Maiden fan from way back, and she emailed to tell me that if I was an Iron Maiden fan, she was going to come to St. Louis to kidnap me. I demurred, and explained how I knew of it, but she was not dissuaded. But the points still counted on the tally of whether I was soulmate material. Enough to overcome the whole he lives in his mother’s basement thing, anyway.

So, thank you, Dave. You could never have known that your teenaged choice of personal expression in rebellious décor would help me win a wife, but it most assuredly did.

In a slightly related note, once I married the girl, I got access to her Iron Maiden collection, and No Prayer for the Dying is my favorite album followed by Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Not Somewhere in Time, the album upon which the song “Wasted Years” appears.

So for a couple of years, I kept a collection of scrap fabric in case I got into sewing. By “a couple of years,” I mean the last seven. By “collection,” I mean every bit of something worn out: children’s pants too torn up to hand-me-down; old towels; all the bibs; discolored t-shirts in line for use as dust rags; and so on. Sometime in that period, I got a single sewing lesson and a new sewing machine for Christmas. After a while, I recognized the whole “getting into sewing” thing was probably a non-starter, so I started taking bags of the used fabric to the thrift store drop box by the YMCA, as a friend told me that they can sell that stuff to crafty people like I could have been.

Then, I eventually emptied four or five bins’ worth of scrap fabric from the garage, and I wondered if there was anything else I could dispose of in this like manner.

Now, for someone who didn’t grow up in the Great Depression, I have a don’t-throw-it-away mentality. So I have bins of clothing in the closet for just-in-case I can’t afford to replace them with cheap stuff from Walmart sometime in the future. Including, of course, the collection of 20-year-old t-shirts I took out of the active rotation in my dresser:

I have a drawer full of t-shirts as it is, and I’m getting a new one or two every month from 5K runs and whatnot, so the odds of my needing one of these is pretty low. Still, it’s a time capsule of the early 1990s. It included:

• The Queensryche t-shirt that I’d thought had already become dust rags.
• A Neo-Futurists “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind” sleeveless shirt that I got in 1994 when I convinced a couple of guys we should drive from St. Louis to Chicago for the night, and a friend of mine in Chicago suggested we go see this improv group, so we did.
• A Class of ’62 Surf Boys shirt with the sleeves cut off. I saw this band at bars and festivals a lot in my college years.
• A number of workplace polo shirts that I bought at garage sales, including Walmart and Blockbuster. I’d often thought it would be great fun to wear the Blockbuster one into a Blockbuster and answer any question I got with, “We don’t have that kind of movie here!” But I never did, and the chance is gone forever.
• A couple of shirts from places my sainted mother and mother-in-law had visited, including Las Vegas, Canada, and Albuquerque.
• A GenCon 1996 t-shirt. This is not the year I won the costume contest as the Were-Smurf–that was 1995. In 1996, I went with a couple of people, Scott and Lisa, I was gaming with at the time, and we stopped at the convention on Sunday before leaving so I could get this shirt.
• A couple of worn Jeracor and QA Hates You t-shirts.

And so on.

A couple of items did survive the culling:

The shirt I bought my father for Christmas just before he died:

A QA Hates You t-shirt in baseball sleeve length that I got for some reason or another, but I forget what. But it’s still in good shape.

A black t-shirt with a bear on it. I kept it because I think it looks cool, and I wear a lot of black t-shirts now in my middle-aged Goth phase.

A t-shirt I designed for the college writing group:

Briefly, a last gasp of my pack rattery asked, “What if one of the boys would like one of these shirts?” They’re turning the corner into adult sizes, and it won’t be long until they fill out these shirts (and go beyond, no doubt). But I don’t think they’re going to be as sentimental as their father, so I disregarded that voice, stuffed them in a garbage bag, and deposited them in the bin at the YMCA.

Someone is going to unpack it and know exactly where it came from, but that person might suspect the husband did it under duress or the wife discarded them. But, no, I did it on my own. And I probably won’t miss them as much as I expect I will, which, if I dwell on it, could really affect how I see the world and the things I accumulate.

From an article entitled How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym:

A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that college students who went from not exercising at all to even a modest program (just two to three gym visits per week) reported a decrease in stress, smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, an increase in healthy eating and maintenance of household chores, and better spending and study habits.

WHAT? Here, I thought I was a gym rat, and I’m only doing a modest program? Ay, me.

It’s enough to make a man turn to doughnuts for solace. Not that I need much guidance in the doughnut direction, mind you.

The sign instructs actually instructs you to increase “Smash and Grab” crime:

There’s no smash in the smash and grab if the vehicle is not locked. There’s only grab crime.

A resident of South City (St. Louis, that is) offered this advice: Don’t leave anything in your car and don’t lock your car. Otherwise, the baddies will smash the windows to get in. Whether they steal anything or not, you’ll be on the hook for a new window.

Basically, the trade-off is this: Locking the car will stop a casual thief, but a determined thief will have to break the window to steal.

(History proves that I have never liked cities spending law enforcement budget on these things.)