Category: Life

On Monday, we were in the Walmart getting last minute gifts and groceries. I bought a dozen eggs and spotted a bag of hard-boiled eggs in the dairy case.

I commented on them, and she mentioned that they were for lazy people. Whilst I know an easy way to bake the eggs to the same consistency and have been known to do so when I go on a kick where I eat them every morning for breakfast, I was not quick to condemn people who might prefer to pick them up at the market.

Then, of course, I saw that said products were being recalled for listeria contamination:

More hard-boiled eggs and egg products are being recalled from stores nationwide related to a deadly listeria outbreak.

Nearly 80 different hard-boiled egg varieties sold by more than 30 brands have been recalled by Almark Foods of Gainesville, Georgia, according to a recall notice on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration site due to risk of listeria contamination.

The more processed the food is, the more chances it has to get contaminated. So I’ll continue baking my own.

Or will when I get back on that kick. I think it’s been five years, so it’s about time to get back into the habit.

So I had a little time to kill whilst my truck was getting a state inspection, and I went to a coffee shop with my notepad in case I wanted to write a poem–or work on one that will take me five years to complete. So I went in and ordered a cappuccino and a pastry.

Sorry to go all Instagram on you, but I got this:

A coffee thing served in a glass along side a fizzing clear glass of something.

I have never seen cappuccino served like this, and, to be honest, gentle reader, I was not sure what was in that other glass nor what I was supposed to do with it. Did the order taker hear something other than what I ordered? Did the shop have a liquor license, and I ordered myself some coffee-and-booze cocktail with a chaser?

I fear the unexpected and unknown consumable ever since the Great Sushi Incident of 2005, wherein I went to a sushi restaurant with a more sophisticated friend who was surprised to see me take up the pile of pickled ginger with my chopsticks and pop it into my mouth. Not as surprised as I was, although I managed to keep my face stony whilst the sweat burst forth from my volcanic pores.

So, yeah, I have no idea what that was, and I’ll probably fear ordering a cappuccino there again. The coffee drink was a small portion and not especially compelling. I didn’t even sniff the clear liquid, preferring to pretend I was sophisticated enough to know what it was and that I eschewed it knowingly. But, yeah, black coffee for me from now on.

I saw this on Facebook a couple times yesterday:

However, I used to know a girl named Eve when we were both wanna be poets in the St. Louis coffeehouse circuit. If I were still talking to her, I could say today, “Happy Christmas Eve, Eve” which DESTROYS this meme.

I think she went on to become a real poet, unlike me. Although I guess I did sell a poem for money once.

Gentle reader, here at Nogglestead, it has not really felt much like the Christmas season at all this year. What follows is a bit of a personal cri-di-coeur, so I’ll tuck it below the fold.

Thanksgiving came late, as you know, and my mother-in-law was ill and could not attend the holidays, which highlighted how few we probably have left with her.

After Thanksgiving dinner which was attended only by my immediate family and a single friend, I learned that my aunt in St. Charles had passed away that morning.

I had planned a little weekend getaway with my beautiful wife for that weekend, a polite fiction that would have allowed us to visit my aunt while having a date night with my wife. However, it turned into an extended stay ending in a memorial service.

Over the extended weekend, my remaining aunt, the caretaker of my recently passed aunt, walked with me through the house so I could earmark anything of hers I wanted. My aunt had decorated her house in fine wood furniture and antiques, many of which had been in the family for generations. But I have a complicated relationship with the possessions of dead family members. My father had once said about my sainted mother that she was sniffing around for money or would be when someone died. I don’t know what prompted him to say that, but it gave me a lasting fear that people would think that I was interested in benefiting from the deaths of my family. So I have always minimized what I accept after the death of a family member. Which sometimes leads to internal conflict when I think I could really use that, but it’s a practical need and not something to remind me of my aunt.

So I ended up with a collection of books, a nice console stereo, an entertainment center, a pair of cat sculptures, and some wall decorations. Which presented a logistical challenge for getting them from St. Charles to Springfield and have enough adult bodies to carry said furniture. I planned to to drive to Poplar Bluff with my youngest son, pick up my brother and nephew, and go to St. Charles, where we would rent a truck and drive the truck from St. Charles to Springfield, unload my things, and my brother and nephew would continue to Poplar Bluff to unload their things and drop off the truck. We could not do it the first weekend of the month, as I had other plans.

The other plans, unfortunately, were not fun. My wife and boys were going to Camdenton for the First Lego League state competition. Last year, we turned it into a weekend in Osage Beach just down the road from Camdenton, and while the boys were competing, my wife and I could do some Christmas shopping and having a date day somewhere else. Unfortunately, this weekend was the first weekend I had to work on a Saturday, so I had to work instead.

While in Camdenton, my wife aggravated a slight sports injury into a major case of sciatica which, after she drove home on Sunday, left her barely able to move or walk on her own, so she needed pretty attentive care, and her debilitated state left us unable to attend any of the school or church Christmas programs–including a concert she was supposed to sing in as part of the church choir. She’s moving better now and is almost back to normal, but it did wipe out the Christmas program season.

She convalesced in our parlor, where our existing record player is, which limited access to the annual rotation of the Christmas records. And, of course, I could not leave her for my circuit of Poplar Bluff-St. Charles-Springfield, so I had to rely upon my beatified brother and nephew to bring my aunt’s furniture to me. Which he did.

The weather hasn’t helped. I’m from up north, so I expect winter to be, well, snowy. Even though my boys have had three snow days already this year, we have yet to see measurable snowfall. Kansas City and even the St. Louis area have had proper snowfalls, but nothing here. As a matter of fact, it’s spring-like, with temperatures predicted in the 60s through the week.

And, to be honest, I’m a little disappointed with the gifts I’m giving this year. I usually like to have something that I think will wow the family, but this year, the gifts are pretty rote and predictable. I also like to have something for the family from Santa, something a little out of left field for the whole lot of us, but this year, I haven’t thought of anything. Which is just as well. As I look back over the years, a lot of times those gifts have gone unused ultimately. So maybe this safe Christmas of giving will be better than previous years.

If it happens. The oldest boy has been under the weather a bit, so an abundance of caution might prevent my mother-in-law from attending Christmas dinner and gift exchange.

I am glad that I kind of follow the church calendar and mark Christmas as the beginning of the new year, as I am about ready for a new beginning. I’m off work for the next week and a half and hope I won’t blow the time sitting at the computer doing nothing. Except, perhaps, tapping out something on a mostly unread blog.

Meh, it’s a mindset that makes a feedback loop, where negative things leads me to see the negative things. I need to shake it, and I’ve generally found that when I’m finally able to talk about it probably means I’m on the upswing already.

As you might know, gentle reader, I come from a line of carpenters. My great-grandfather and my grandfather and then my grandfather and father were two sets of Noggle and Son remodeling. My father knew how to do everything and often did. My mother was unafraid to tackle large remodeling projects. My brother, too, is like a Borg infesting a house and improving it. And, as you know, I have done a bit of (rudimentary) furniture making.

I am pleased to say that carpentry skill is indeed transmitted genetically, as my boys (mostly the younger) has taught himself how to use tools (auto-didactic because working on anything his father does is like, you know, work). So they have set themselves to building a birdopolis outside their bedroom windows:

He used pine boards not cut but broken during martial arts testing and a couple nails, and not much more.

Apparently, the birds have seen these fine domiciles and have determined that the rent is surely higher than they can afford, as none have yet moved in.

Man, the centerfold in this week’s Springfield Business Journal is HAWT!

When I posted this on Facebook, my beautiful wife pointed out that the story on her company is not in the centerfold, but on page five. The math proves she is better than a Page 3 girl.

I was just talking to my grandmother this week, and she remarked on a twenty-year-old picture my wife and I that I sent her (my grandmother) in October. She said that she had forgotten how pretty my wife is. I have not, of course, although I do have some difficulty in convincing my wife how pretty she is.

I guess I have already mentioned that she’s all that from 1998 and more. This post was just an excuse again to show how I married up.

Not quite as legendary as the wallpaper gift wrap of Nogglestead, the M&M labels I’ve used for a couple of years certainly are noteworthy.

Because I buy Christmas gifts all year long, I need gift tags all year long. Which means I often run out of gift tags in February, and the Christmas wrapping material is no longer in stores. I looked for gift tags in the local Walmarts, and I didn’t tend to find them. So I went to Amazon and searched for adhesive gift tags, and I bought the least expensive ones I could find.

The title pretty clearly said M&M, and I am sure if I magnified the image I would have seen that they did, in fact, depict M&Ms in various party ways.

Did I send them back?

Of course not.

I have been using them for years.

I am about to finally run out of them along with that fabled wallpaper, so I am going to have to buy some Christmas ones while they’re available and somehow come up with gift tags for birthdays and whatnot.

However, if I order from the Internet again, I will look more closely.

The funny thing is, though, I am not sure anyone has noticed this family ‘tradition.’

So my boys’ school has a program that pairs kids from higher grades with kids from lower grades for a bit of story time and crafts. The program is called Big Friend/Little Friend.

So one of the the Christmas projects is a candle holder wherein the urchins paste some tissue paper squares on glass.

In his 2nd grade year, he made a little one when he was a little friend. We put it on the little mirror shelf that is the only real repository for knick-knacks and figurines at Nogglestead. It’s been up there ever since with a collection of little candles we’ve acquired in various places.

Now, in his 6th grade year, he’s on the Big Friend side of the equation, and he made another with his Little Friend. However, as he was older, he grabbed a Mason jar instead of a little votive.

I thought it would make a poignant photo of how the boys are growing.

I was going to end with a quip about how I hope the youngest does not expect the Mason jar to go on display as well, but in picking up the small votive, it broke. I have picked it up to dust it once or twice in the last four years (maybe three times), but when I grasped it by the lip of the votive, the glass broke and was only held together by the tissue paper. So even the small votive won’t be on display.

So, suddenly, we’ve gotten a different life lesson from this act of photography. I’m not sure what it is. Tempus Fugit, and whatever the Latin is for “sometimes in setting up the artifice of a photo to illustrate life lessons on my little-read blog creates its own bad lessons.”

I saw this on Facebook:

It didn’t resonate with me as me. Which is not to say I’ll not be grabbing my beautiful wife in, erm, twenty or so years (that soon?).

It reminds me of a guy I worked with in the print shop circa 1996. Kenny had worked at the shop since The War, forty years by then, and he’d worked with a lot of the employees for a long time as well. I find it hard to believe now, but many of the employees had been with the shop for decades, having moved with it from the city of St. Louis out to the then-hinterlands of O’Fallon sometime in the 1960s. So these people had worked together a long, long time.

A woman named Della worked on the bag presses as a boxer. Every day for innumerable years, she took bags as they came off the printer and after they’d run through the glue and folding channels, and she placed them in boxes. Whenever she would walk by Kenny’s little t-head press, he’d hoot and catcall her. And she was someone’s grandma probably. Maybe great grandma.

But Kenny had known her when they were younger, and maybe she was quite a looker in the 1950s. So he still made suggestions that he should probably consult his doctor before attempting, and she laughed at him.

I thought it might make an interesting novel: A tight knit group who’d work together a long time gets blown up when the woman in this case, who has flirted with a male employee for decades, looks at her retirement and finds it wanting so she sues the company for allowing sexual harassment. I think I got as far as naming a few characters, but that was it (twenty-some years ago).

In the actual print shop, though, there as no tension, and Della might have been flattered.

As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve come to understand something of Kenny’s viewpoint. To twenty-four-year-old Brian J., Della was old, but that’s because I met her when she was older. But I’ve known my wife for over twenty years now. Technically, she is old enough to be a grandmother herself (somehow); by the time my mother was her age, I had graduated college, and it would only be a year or so until my mother was a grandmother. My own grandmother was a grandmother much earlier.

I think my wife is as beautiful as she was when she was twenty-five. She is that girl and the woman she has become. So she’s that girl and more. She’s all that she was plus all she has become since then. I don’t think I can quite explain it, but there it is.

So as I get older, like Kenny, I shall likely continue to make suggestive remarks even as I advance to an age where that will make me a goat. Because of Kenny. And the Spenser novels. And my wife, who will become even more beautiful (although I’m not sure how the math works on that).

Nerf gun, yeti teddy bear make most dangerous toys list

To be honest, though, they’re old enough to have discovered power tools and sledge hammers, and they think they can operate them without adult supervision. The youngest got to use a hand saw for the first time this weekend, and after we had packed it all up, he got it back out and cut himself with it.

So dangerous toys are not especially at the top of my parental concerns list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s inside?

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

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

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

Cute, but not racy.

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

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

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

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

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

Which seems like an odd question to me.

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

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

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

So, yeah, I know some veterans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than 100 vegetable products recalled over listeria concerns

Also not affected, fortunately: Coffee, wine.

So basically my diet remains unaffected.

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

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

So apparently I did do that in the 1990s.

It’s amazing the details one forgets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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