Category: Life

I cleaned the top of my refrigerator this morning. I didn’t think you’d notice if I didn’t mention it, but I took a picture for you to see it.

You could probably start a Tumblr account featuring pictures of places people clean that nobody notices. You probably just did. And it’s already more profitable than this blog ever has been.

You’re welcome.

Here at Nogglestead, we do not dust and clean our varied myriad surfaces with the finest skins of virgin chamois from the Carpathian Mountains nor with the finest microfiber cloths from Price Cutter. Instead, we used cut-up t-shirts as dust rags.

Which makes every housecleaning chore akin to looking through an old album of photos in the triggering of memory.

To whit:

• 

  This Bleed Blue cloth was a free giveaway at a St. Louis Blues playoff hockey game around the turn of the century. Afterwards, it served as a burp cloth for one or more of my children. After the children stopped spitting up after a bottle, it went unaltered into the cabinet for dusting.

• This cloth comes from a long sleeved t-shirt that was also a giveaway at a Blues game. Although both I and my beautiful wife received them, I gave mine to her as well as I didn’t wear long-sleeved t-shirts for a long time. This particular cloth is getting holed and worn, and I’ll probably toss it to make room for more t-shirts with structural integrity failures.
• This black rag comes from the Queensrÿche Empire t-shirt I got for Christmas from Chris and/or Deb in 1990. I sometimes wore it under an open collared shirt as was not in style at the time, but was how I wore t-shirts.
• This grey cloth comes from a sleeveless Marquette University shirt I bought in the middle 1990s, after I graduated and when I was on a return visit to Milwaukee. I wore a lot of sleeveless shirts at that time, which is odd, because I didn’t really have the physique to support it.
• This t-shirt comes from one of my son’s Martial Arts USA t-shirts. He’d owned it for less than a year before getting caught in the crossfire of a gangland paintball/hamburger condiment fight accompanied by the explosion of an Italian restaurant kitchen. The only thing missing was grass stains from when he threw himself to the ground and slid down a hill into a muddy creek at the bottom, but there’s always his new white Orlando souvenir t-shirt for that. This particular memory does not very far back, but the memories of repeatedly trying to de-stain it remain.

I mean, sure, I’ve got a bin of worn old undershirts that I could use for this, but the old t-shirts provide me with something to think about when cleaning. Aside from wondering when the last time I’ll clean yogurt from the crown molding will come and how much I’ll miss it when it does.

So, last night, I’m inspired for a Tweet wherein I would say, “I’m the COTTON MATHER of Software Testing,” and then I think, what was Cotton Mather’s son’s name? It was another noun….

And I didn’t come up with it quickly. I might not have made it in the thirty seconds you get for Final Jeopardy, which seems like a long time when you know the answer immediately or a really short time if it’s on the tip of your tongue.

But then it came to me: Increase Mather.

Except you, gentle reader, know as well as I do, now that I looked it up to confirm my guess, that Increase Mather was Cotton Mather’s father, not his son.

I mean, what kind of intellectual lightweight screws up seventeenth century cleric lineage at ten o’clock on a Monday night? Certainly not someone who’s going deep in Jeopardy!

I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t get called into an audition this year.

My beautiful wife helpfully recorded my attempts to get them into the pets carriers:

I’m just kidding, of course, but in all seriousness, the man who invents proton packs that can capture and hold cats (or pull them from deep from under furniture) will deserve to win the Nobel Prizes. All of them.

Available currently at the DAV Thrift Store:

What looks to be a complete or nearly complete set of Star Trek, the uncut editions, from Paramount as well as the movies.

I couldn’t help but wonder if they were Phil Farrand’s.

You might be wondering, gentle reader, if I was tempted to buy the set. Although books like Farrand’s make me want to own the whole set and to watch them in order, this particular collection is one episode per videocassette, and, as the image indicates, takes up a lot of space (no pun intended). As such, I’d only buy this set if I could also use it as some sort of visual design or decorating element, such as making a wall of Star Trek where I could fit the individual cassettes into frames facing out with little cutouts for popping them out to watch. And, really, I’d have nowhere to put it.

Playing outside, my son came to the back door and knocked. I opened the door and said, “Are you selling encyclopedias? Great! I’ve got a report due on the exploration of space!”

Because:

The child, born twenty years after the commercial, didn’t get it.

But my humor is not for his amusement; it is for mine.

Whenever I’m doing sets at the gym, lifting tiny amounts of weight with great difficulty, I find myself counting the reps. I marvel at things like the number 3 and 4 and pause for a long while to reflect upon their essential nature in the cosmos, and I stop pushing or pulling because, man, those numbers are big and meaningful.

That is, when I count by ones, my effort tends to dwindle when I get to certain numbers in the set, and I stop a little earlier than I can.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve tried something different. Instead of counting by ones, I start counting my sets using multiples of another number. I start counting by fives, or I start counting by sixes. So I do 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36….

Doing it this way engages my brain as I go along, so I don’t get to about the sixth rep and think, Man, this bar is heavy. Instead, I’m worrying about remembering the next number in the sequence. Which leads me to get more reps in.

On the plus side, I get to tell people I only did 56 or 81 reps in the last set. Also, if I get to the multiple of 12 in a set, Mrs. Perkins will give me a gold star. On the other hand, once I get really good at my multiplication tables, the trick will lose its efficacy. Or I’ll start having to work with larger numbers until I memorize enough multiplication to get a job as a mentalist at the county fair.

And I can’t stop saying bro, bro.

In advance of a pool party this weekend, we picked up a couple of theme-oriented pool noodles from the dollar store.

Each of which had this set of warnings on them:

Caution: This is not a lifesaving device. Do not leave child unattended while in use. Adult supervision required. Submerged product, once released, may propel out of water and strike face or eyes.

Retain information and keep for your records.

Do I file that under P for pool or N for noodle? I wish the instructions were more specific.

So I dropped a couple items off at Trinity Church on Tuesday for the Lutherans for Life garage sale, and I discovered there that they had a couple of TI-99 4/As in the original box.

So you know I went up there today the minute the garage sale opened to buy my precious.

I haven’t hooked them up yet, but I’ll try them out soon and perhaps dig out a couple of cartridges from my stash. I’ll be the children would like to play Surround or Hustle.

I have to wonder about the story behind these two becoming available at the same time. A pair of TIs for a pair of siblings in the 1980s whose parents cleaned out the garage? Probably something like that.

And this means that I’m now at parity between TIs and Commodore 64s in the house as I have five of each (although a Commodore 128 means I’m still tipped to favor Commodores). In case you’re wondering what I’m going to do with them, my beautiful wife suggested that I display them all in my House on the Rock clubhouse. When I get insanely wealthy. Which I have a better chance of than finding an old Apple II variant at a garage sale in the 21st century.

Home efficiency upgrades fall short, don’t pay: Study:

Home efficiency measures such as installing new windows or replacing insulation deliver such a small fraction of their promised energy savings that they may not save any money over the long run, according to the surprising conclusion of a University of Chicago study.

The study, which used data from a random sample of 30,000 low-income Michigan households that were eligible for an Energy Department home weatherization program, found that the projected energy savings were 2.5 times greater than actual savings. As a result, energy bills didn’t decline nearly enough to eventually pay for the initial cost of the upgrades.

“The problem is that the real world is screwy,” said Michael Greenstone, an energy economist and head of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “The models project much larger savings than are realized by homeowners.”

Strangely enough, projections and modeling designed to influence or dictate behavior don’t bear up under actual scrutiny and real world experience. Just another place where science and government statistics diverge. Well, no, I guess it’s the same place, the one called “everywhere.”

It was Easter, so I was at church in a suit that Ace Atkins would mock. After the morning service, the church offers a fellowship half hour where you can generally eat doughnuts, drink coffee, and socialize, but, on Easter, the youth group made real breakfast food as a fundraiser. And, man, I could use it. The church service, filled with infrequent visitors, included a communion.

As I got into the very long, line, a couple of family friends met with me. The wife presented me with a bag and said it was a gift for my beautiful wife and I.

“I hope it’s something to eat,” I said. “I need something to tide me over while I go through the line.”

The wife said it wasn’t, but the husband disagreed, saying it could be if you were hungry enough.

So I looked into the bag, and it’s a little stuffed Chewbacca, a Hallmark Itty Bitty. “You’re right, it looks to be a little Chewie,” I said. Ha! I kill me^* and make others want to.

So I stuffed the plush sculpture into my suit jacket pocket where one would normally put a handkerchief. In my university days, the early denim jacket days before the final trench coat days, I carried a little stuffed panda (Edwin) in the jacket pocket. I was a strange young man, but I’ve evolved beyond that.

On Easter, I hoped someone would ask me about the Chewbacca just so I could respond with, “Do you know the story of the Easter Chewbacca?” When the questioner would undoubtedly answer in the negative, I could respond, “Neither do I. I was hoping someone would tell me, because someone gave me this on Easter, and I hoped there was a story.”

So I’ve brought the Easter Chewbacca home and put him atop the grandfather clock in the parlor.

He sits opposite a small leather mouse whose story I know, sort of: Slim, the man who bought the clock and later married my aunt, put the mouse on the clock because of the nursery rhyme (“Hickory Dickory Dock”, I explain to you young people whose modern nursery stories are Minecraft or Five Nights At Freddy’s). As each new owner has inherited the clock (my aunt, my mother, and then I) and as each owner moved, that little mouse ended up atop the clock.

Now, the mouse has a partner. And we have a mystery for the ages: Why, exactly, did I receive a Chewbacca on Easter? Perhaps it was for my beautiful wife, and she knows the story. I suppose I could ask the friends who gave it to us, but, honestly, the truth is generally more disappointing than idle speculation, especially when you have an imagination as vivid as mine.

Perhaps you know the story of the Easter Chewbacca. Please feel free to leave the “truth” of the matter as your fevered imagination invents it in the comments.

Below, Chimera offers a commentary on the Easter Chewbacca:
Continue reading “The Story of the Easter Chewbacca” →

The diner where I often, well, dine, has its booths upholstered with a fabric I think looks like a bunch of hungry birdlings in a nest straining for a worm from their parents.

Tell me you can see it:

Or am I just overly imaginative?

This year, my children and I went to the annual ArtsFest on Historical Walnut Street in Springfield, Missouri. We parked a little ways down unhistoric Walnut Street and walked down the block.

As we neared the festival, we came upon a house. “Is that a pig?” I asked. Indeed, it was a pig statue in the front yard.

We walked to the next house, and there’s a more modern piece of art out front:

“And there’s the bacon!” my eight-year-old said.

I’m not sure if that’s intentional, but that is certainly the effect.

Here they are on Google Maps:

I opened the most recent copy of Garden & Gun magazine, and I laughed out loud. Not at the Roy Blount, Jr., humor piece it contained. Not at a joke or intentionally humorous piece, actually. At the ensemble in the Table of Contents:

Go ahead, if you dare, and click for full size. Then, note in the lower left corner, this text:

Crop top, $3,990, and skirt, $9,700, by Zuhair Murad, at zuhairmurad.com.

That yellow outfit costs as much as a car.

I wonder how much more expensive if the top had sleeves and covered the belly completely.

I can’t talk, of course, as I’m a bit of a clothes horse myself these days. Why, just two weeks ago, I bought a new shirt at Walmart for $9 because the shirts I’ve received as inheritances from my father-in-law (fifteen years ago), uncle-in-law (seven years ago), and mother (six years ago) are starting to show some wear. And I’m outgrowing them as I continue to triumph over being underweight.

What part of the chicken is the nuggets?

Its back

Otherwise, you would have to think that the sign person misspelled “it’s” when using a pronoun that does not agree with the related plural noun “nuggets.”

Why do you always think the worst of people, unlike me?