Category: Life

but those Spider-Man 3 sheets that you’re about to outgrow are from two whole cinematic reboots of the franchise ago.

The last reboot didn’t even make it to a third movie (and, to be honest, I skipped that whole reboot).

Time will tell if the current Spider-Man makes it to a third film before Marvel alienates its core fandom completely or the kid who plays Spider-Man grows up.

So I spent most of yesterday in a serious mood given the events which transpired. So I thought I would give myself the chance at an easy win by examining and correcting a problem our vacuum had.

You see, on Sunday evening, it was time to do a haphazard and quick job on the weekend chores for my boys. The chores include vacuuming the common areas of the main level of the house. The youngest claimed to have done it, but when I came up, the floor contained visible bits of thread, paper, and the litter bits that vacuuming should clear. I told him to do it again, and he claimed to have done it again, with the same results. So I tried calmly to show the by-now angry, nay, GRIEVIOUSLY OFFENDED young man the proper way to vacuum, and as I started, I noticed something was resisting.

I turned it over, and the roller was not rolling. Apparently, on a previous vacuuming, somechild had vacuumed a cat toy. Which is a 45″ shoe lace tied to a ring of pom-poms and bells. Which must have immediately stopped the roller, but not the vacuuming. It might have been this way for weeks.

So I removed the obstruction and turned the vacuum on, but the roller did not spin, so I brought it down into my office for later investigation.

Which was late Monday afternoon, after, as I mentioned, my car broke down on the way to the DMV.

I thought I might have to open the roller housing and adjust the belt or something. So I plugged it in and turned it over and before looking for the means to open it, I thought I’d try it again, so I hit the power button.

And got a face full of dust and cat hair and the roller began to spin.

So it capped off the Monday of all Mondays, but it made me laugh, so it was worth it.

Also, I continue to look like a Real Man as I fixed another appliance.

So my driver’s license expired on my birthday, and I forgot about it because they sent me a reminder card in early December, which is far ahead of my birthday, and I treated it like a license plate renewal: You don’t want to do it months in advance, otherwise you’re early and losing some value.

But I remembered last Wednesday when I saw a headline in the newspaper that said REAL-ID compliant licenses would become available today, Monday, March 25. So I thought I would wait until today to renew.

So I got my beautiful wife to act as my chaffeur for the weekend, and this morning, I piled the boys into my the truck I just bought to take them to school and to stop by the license office on the way home.

As we started up a hill about a half mile from our place on the two-lane farm road, the truck lost power and would no longer go forward. I tried to power it up to the next turn-off, but no dice. The road does not have a shoulder; it has ditches. So I called my beautiful wife to bring the old, high-mileage SUV to take the boys to school, and I waited for a tow truck. While blocking traffic. Even with my flashers on, cars pulled up behind me and honked until I opened the hood in the universal symbol of This truck is going nowhere under its own power. A couple of people offered to help, which was nice. A young lady offered to help me push the full size SUV up the hill to the next turn off, which I thought was overly optimistic.

The guy at the garage was rubbing his hands together on the inside when he said it sounded like the timing belt. Which can cause significant damage to the engine if it breaks while the vehicle is running. Frankly, I’m hoping for less than half the cost of the vehicle at this point. It’s under warranty, hopefully, but we’ll see.

So eventually, I made it to the license office and found a great line of people getting their new REAL-ID licenses. With only one person processing driver’s license renewals. Which are taking about ten minutes per person because of the additional paperwork required. Which I did not bring because my instructions card from December covered a regular driver’s license, not the REAL-ID compliant one which, of course, requires more than the old driver’s license and a postcard.

So my truck broke down on the way to the DMV, where I couldn’t get the license I’d hoped for when I finally got there.

But everyone’s been very nice, and when they’ve said, “How are you?” I’ve responded “So far, so good,” and when they’ve said “Have a nice day,” I’ve said, “Thanks.”

A couple of days ago, my beautiful wife shared this meme on Facebook:

Oh, how I chuckled.

But this morning, as I was downloading a new text editor, I confronted:

Now you, gentle reader, can chuckle as the joke is on me.

This variety of Tide, unlike the other leading brands, leaves your freshly laundered clothing smelling like fresh linen.

Which makes me wonder what the other brands or, more importantly, the other varieties of Tide leave your clothing smelling like.

(I know, I know: “Clean Linen” is a particular scent that gets added to a number of cleaning products. We have a number of Glade Plugin things that carry the same scent. It’s kind of like the “Grape” flavor in candies and Kool Aid: a common artifice. And you’re saying: How many colons can he use in one parenthetical? Just this many: four.)

The Springfield Business Journal has selected the 2019 40 Under 40 list, and I didn’t make it, again.

Of course, I’m no longer eligible, and these magazines don’t tend to create 30 Who Try To Act Like They’re Under 30 lists.

That said, I’m pleased to be on the 7.5 Billion Not Under Six Feet list yet again today. So I’ll start there for the day.

Spring, or as it is known at Nogglestead, “Repair the Gates Season.”

This year, I didn’t have any trouble with the hinges (so far) since I attached them with carriage bolts driven completely through the posts/gates and secured on the other side with a washer and a bolt.

But this year, the wind tore the edge picket off of one of my gates, and that’s where the hardware to close the gate attached, so it has been blowing in the strong winds of early march. So I replaced the picket today, eventually.

Because Spring is also known as “This Drill’s Battery Ran Out Of Charge/Where Is The Other Battery?” season.

I believe the Germans have a word for it, but it’s not as melliflous as the original Ojibwe.

Captain Capitalism tells us how he really thinks:

I don’t think the English language is robust or thorough enough for me to convey my hatred, despisement, and loathing of English majors. They are first and foremost lazy people who decide to major in a language they’re already fluent in by the age of 4. They are intellectual inferiors who think studying a subject to the point of atomic levels of anal retentive detail is a legitimate endeavor. And worst of all they are fascist tyrants who lord their technical, but impractical, knowledge of petty rules and laws of a “language” over the rest of us who use the language to live our lives, not make it our lives, because we have lives…unlike English majors.

I cannot overstate how inferior English majors are or how much I hate their loathesome and laughably inferior selves.

Ha, ha, your humble host laughs, that’s not me! I also was a philosophy major!

Is that hysterical laughter barely keeping me from tears?

You, gentle reader, must tease that out of the text and write a three page paper defending your conclusion.

The father glanced out the front window and looked again.
“What!” he cried.
He threw open the front door and shouted, “No! No power tools!” at his ten-year-old son who was lying in the yard using an electric hedge trimmer on the brown grass.

* * * *

You know, on Groundhog Day, they say if the groundhog sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter, but if he does not, it will be an early spring.

This always confused me as a child up north because six more weeks of winter would be an early spring.

I’ve been seeing a lot of memes like this on my Facebook feed:

And I think to myself, “It’s the beginning of March. Why would you people think that winter is over?”

I guess it’s because I live here amongst the soft, indolent southern tribes now.

I might have mentioned that I liked the album The Sunshine Project by Lily Belle. I play it from time to time, sometimes “Good Morning” to get my children up and moving in the morning (mainly because they’re preteens and hate the song).

So I did what the kids today do and visited YouTube to see if she had any new videos out, and it looks like she has just started a video series called “My Friend Sunshine” where she gives advice and whatnot. The first is called “5 Ways to Encourage a Hurting Friend”:

The second is “Five Ways to Jolt Your Creativity”:

Note that none of her tips are are actually Jolt Cola or any caffeine at all for that matter. Caffeine would be at least two of my five tips for creativity.

As of this writing, there are only two.

Kim du Toit decides if he has to go into Witness Protection Program, he wants to go to Traverse City, Michigan.

You know, I was just in Traverse City last year for a couple of hours, and it’s got Horizon Books as you might remember.

But it also has a good hat shop just down the street from Horizon Books, and I spent enough time dithering over whether to buy a new fedora with a liner that we overstayed our parking meter and learned that Traverse City has a very convenient Web site for paying your five dollar parking meter fines.

Also, it has snow in the winter.

I mean, it’s not Wisconsin, which is God’s best creation, but it’s not Minnesota. Or spit Illinois.

So if I could not choose Wisconsin, and I probably could not because I go on about it all the time, I’d take witness relocation in Traverse City or even Petoskey.

While the northern part of the nation is having a snowy winter like I used to know (Milwaukee has been getting hammered, and not just in the beer and brandy sense) and even the St. Louis area has been seeing a snowy weather pattern like I remember from the late 1980s and early 1990s (this weekend’s forecast: Storm to drop 3-5 inches of snow and wind in St. Louis on Sunday, then temps bottom out).

But here in Springfield, we rarely see that much snow. We’ve had a couple of snowyish winters at Nogglestead, where we’ve had a couple of snowfalls of a couple of inches that has stuck around for a couple of days, but this year, we’ve fallen at the lower edge of all the precipitation-producing weather events which now bear names for some reason. This means that we’ve gotten rain or, sometimes, a glazing of ice.

My children have had, what, three or four “snow” days this year based on a slight accumulation of ice that has generally cleared by midday. Once, all the schools called the night before precipitation based on the meteorologists fantasies, and we got a little rain before a nice day.

On Thursday, they were off again based on a little ice.

The poor lads don’t get proper snow for their snow days. They don’t get to go out and play in the snow, build snow forts, have snowball fights, or sled (just kidding–they’ve never owned a sled or even snow boots because what’s the point of it in Springfield?). They go out, play like they’re clearing the ice from the driveway and deck using a variety of gardening implements (remember, as a parent, I must make things explicit, such as “Do not chop the hoe down on the deck.”) Then they come in, ask for some hot chocolate like they’re in the Alps or something, and then they want to go to a pizza buffet, which we often can since the roads are clear by lunch time.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the snowfall totals in places I’ve lived previously, and I’m all:

For some reason, my ten-year-old son decided to bid on some gold-painted near-filigree Christmas decorations in a silent auction last week.

Which he won. He’s giving one to his grandmother, but he’s got the other in his bedroom.

Of course, I had to state clearly, “Do not sleep with the Christmas decoration.”

Because just about everything ends up in their beds, and they routinely sleep on books, radios, flashlights, decorations, radios, electronic devices, and, well, anything that they can bring or sneak into their room.

Of course, my clear statement of the rule does not mean that they will not sleep with the Christmas decoration at some point or another. But I try.

Also, you are correct in noting that the decoration is covered in glitter. I had almost run out the stray glitter clock on the Christmas cards–although just last week I picked up a speck from the pile of papers on my desk that predates Christmas last year, the sightings were fewer. But the church bundled the Christmas decorations with other auction wins, and one of them is on my desk atop the aforementioned pile of papers, and it is shedding bits of gold glitter that I’ll wear for month to come.

I was digging through a box of old photos looking for something, and I came across an old black and white photo of my maternal grandmother.

In this photo, she’s got to be in her thirties or forties.

And I couldn’t help contrast it with this photo from last year of my paternal grandmother:

My grandmother is 93 years old, and clearly she’s very vital. When I too infrequently talk to her, she laments that she can only mow her lawn or work in the garden for a couple of hours without needing to take a break.

But she does not look fifty-some years older than my other grandmother in the first photo.

What accounts for this? A dated hairstyle and glasses, a prim smile of the capital-A Adult from the middle of the last century (the smile itself a relative innovation, at least as far as photos are concerned) contrasted with color and a more modern hair style? Good genetics? Healthy living?

I don’t know, but I do know that I’m hoping to channel my Nana more than my Grandma, as the latter died like so many of her line at age 60 after a long battle with cancer.

The first lines of Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Clearly, I feel the same way about things, which explains, partially, the neglected Personal Relics category here.

Also, initial impressions of Endymion: It’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” but stretched into three or four Netflix seasons.