Category: Life

Indeed.

I would say that it’s all my shell companies that I use to hide my ill-gotten gains, but, really, we have mail for two former owners of my beautiful wife’s company, two current owners of the same, me, and the “media company” owned by the son of this home’s former owners (nine and a half years gone) that left a couple of swords made from table legs and scrap lumber in our shed (that my boys still haven’t found and bludgeoned each other with and that I cannot throw away in case of apocalypse where I’d wish I hadn’t thrown them away should somehow I lose my two real swords and halberd and, oh, yeah, guns).

But six pieces of mail from what looks to be the same campaign? Indeed.com is casting a very wide net.

Well, it sort of emerged. I found another Christmas decoration in the first place you would think I would look: The mantel in the living room.

It’s a litte sculpture that was hidden behind a framed photo. I found it when I was dusting. I think it’s supposed to be a church. One of my sons made it two years ago, when he was ten. And he’s no worse with the polymer clay than I am.

You’re right, it’s the first time I’ve dusted the mantel this month, and I would have found it earlier if only I were a better housekeeper.

But I’m too busy blogging for my seven daily Google-search readers a day to bother with maintaining or improving the place I live. Besides, after nine years, we’ve about sucked the blood out of Nogglestead, and it might be getting time to find a new host.

And here I thought I caught the annual Christmas Straggler two weeks ago.

For Christmas, my oldest son received a gift card to a local sporting goods store along with a skateboard helmet, and at the end of last week, he actualized that gift card into a skateboard.

Which has led me to needing to announce the rules for the skateboard. Rules which I would have thought are akin to natural laws, that my pre-teen boys could reason or infer out of other rules that they have been told as well as the laws of physics they know.

Oh, but no.

I have had to promulgate:

• No riding the skateboard in the house.
• No skateboarding in the dark.
• No skateboarding in the rain.
• No skateboarding before 6:30 am.
• No skateboarding in the dark and rain before 6:30 am.
• No firing Nerf guns from on the skateboard.
• No shooting BBs at someone on a skateboard or bike. (I threw the latter in because it seemed like a good idea.)
• No skateboarding on ice.
• One person on the skateboard at a time.
• No riding the skateboard into the house or any part of it.
• No hitting another person with the skateboard.

And so on.

That’s why the call me Daddy Deutoronomy. Or they would if they’d thought of it.

I’m not saying my eating habits go a little primitive when my beautiful wife who is also a very good cook travels for business.

But for breakfast this morning, I’m taking a hunk (not slice) of cold roast beef and dunking it in coffee.

I have created the American Dip.

That’s pretty much the recipe, but you need some a priori roast beef for it. Which is not an Italian dish. It just means someone, for example a traveling wife, must have provided you with roast beef beforehand. Or, lacking that, you can grill a piece of beef instead.

Just make sure the coffee is black.

The meatloaf stain on my shoe.

I was rearranging the contents of the lower level refrigerator the other night. We use it mostly for drinks, so it’s generally full of water bottles and sparkling water, but we also use it for kitchen refrigerator overflow. We cook certain items in quantity and freeze them for later use or for sharing with people who might need a meal at church. So it’s not uncommon to find ten hamburgers, a couple packages of salmon, and/or a couple of loaves of meatloaf in there.

Kind of like the other night.

We had a couple gallons of milk to fit in there until space opened in the upstairs refrigerator. My oldest brought it down and put it into the refrigerator, storing one of the gallons on its side, which is a recipe for disaster (young men, it seems, have whole cookbooks full of such recipes). So I started adjusting the contents to move the milk to the top shelf, but the carton containing cans of sparkling water caught one of the glass pans of meatloaf, which caught the other pan of meatloaf, and both tumbled a bit to the bottom of the refrigerator. Thankfully, no pans broke and no meatloafi (because meatloafus is from the Latin) spilled onto the floor.

However, the following day, I noted an odd splotch on one of my shoes, and I could not figure out what it was for a while. But then I realized that some of the grease from a meatloafus had spilled.

I tried to clean it off, but the water contacting the stain elicited the savory scent of fresh meatloaf.

So I’m walking around with a meatloaf stain on my shoe, and I’m sure that everyone is looking at it. I’m not due to replace this pair of shoes anytime soon, so I’ll probably walk around with it until it fades eventually in the rain and puddles. Although I’m not ruling out rolling in the mud like a freshly walked dog. Not just to cover the stain, but also because it makes people nervous when I do.

Hey, my eyes are up here!

It’s no secret to our neighbors, but we burn Duraflame logs at Nogglestead.

Of course, if you’re a long-time reader, you might have expected as much. Of course, the Duraflame log depicted in that post from 2011 gathered dust in the fire box for seven years before I lit a fire at the end of November, 2017. And once I got the fire lit, I kept it going, lighting something almost every night throughout the winter last year.

I had a little other miscellaneous wood laid up for that ice storm in 2009, but they were what bundles I could find at the grocery store at the time. I never laid in a proper supply of firewood, so I tried with the fresh bundles I bought at the grocery store, but they were not very dry, and I often had trouble lighting them.

I didn’t lay in a supply of firewood this year as I couldn’t find anyone in my circle who knew someone selling it, and I didn’t want to go onto an Internet forum (Facebook marketplace or Craigslist, you damn kids call them) to have some random fellow deliver me a load of…. something (low trust society, donchaknow). I did read in the news that firewood sales are becoming scarce around here as land in the near-populated areas are getting cleared for development (and the trees piled into the middle of the lot and burned because that’s cheap and convenient).

So I’ve gone with Duraflame logs because they light easily, for the most part, and they last three or four hours (a little less if you light one when the remnants of the previous one is still hot). I mean, it’s more expensive than the wood would be at eighty dollars a cord, but they’re three dollars each when you buy a pack of nine at the warehouse club.

So I felt like a fop for about a year about it. It’s an expensive(ish) fire affectation, and the neighbors all know it because the scent of a wax log differs from that of real wood (also, it doesn’t crack or snap; it just makes a little bit of a hiss as it burns).

But, you know what? I’m not ashamed (too much) any more.

It’s not because I suddenly have embraced a 21st century-style identity of Person With A Trait Not Widely Accepted And Probably Needs To Be Corrected Who Suddenly Advocates, Nay Demands Everyone Else Adore It (the celebrated PWATNWAAPNBCWSANDEEAI lifestyle).

Mostly because I realized a Duraflame log is still more work than a gas fireplace, and the lack of effort bothered me. Also, I have insufficient know-how in all phases of firecraft, from selecting and stacking wood to lighting a nice fire easily every time, so I felt like a lesser Man for using Duraflame logs.

But it’s not like you just flip a switch or use a remote and there’s fire. It does include some work. I have to empty the ashes weekly and clean the gristle off of the glass in the doors. And I do have to stick the fire log (or firelog, as the package indicates) and light it.

Although, to be honest, I think that the clean-up work I accept for this facsimile of a log fire might mark me further as a sucker.

I am sorry I brought it up now.

As I might have mentioned, we took down our annual Christmas decorations on New Year’s Day, and I was very, very careful to go through all the rooms to find the decorations I put out. I actually put one tchotchke in our bedroom, and I got that packed up. I got the one on the end table that was hidden from sight because of the way we turned our sofa to make room for that *$&*@!! Christmas tree. I got the things in the dining room, including a little American folk are Twelve Days of Christmas thing that my mother-in-law gave us as a joke but which we put up every year where she gets to see it all through Christmas dinner.

But, ah, my foes, and ah, my friends, when I looked at the kitchen, I looked from the dining room at the space on the top of the cabinets where we put what few kitchen tchotchkes we have, and there was nothing.

I did not look at the counter.

It’s a little serving set that we got from somewhere that I set out on the counter where it gets in the way of Christmas cooking and baking, but what says Christmas more than something getting in your way when you’re already feeling pressured because of the holidays and you have to get something done and DAMMIT there’s something else?

At any rate, I will get them boxed and stored before I splatter them with eggs and breakfast materials this year, unlike Christmas stragglers in 2012 and 2013.

In 2016, we decided to get a second Christmas tree for our lower level. Because I didn’t like putting on Christmas lights–every time I did, I put a corner of a mantel into my kidneys while winding or unwinding the Christmas lights, I thought we could get a pre-lit or pre-strung Christmas tree for our upstairs–and move the old tree downstairs.

Well, that was very easy. In 2017, when we put up the new pre-strung tree and plugged it in. All we had to do was put the ornaments on. Previously, it had been a two or three day process: Put up the tree, fluff it, string the lights, and decorate it. But the new process was essentially two steps and something we could do willingly in a day.

But that was then. 2018 was now. When we plugged in the tree, several sections of the tree were unlit. I spent an hour or so trying to identify the bulbs that burned out and knocked whole strands out, but ultimately I could not, and resigned myself to stringing additional lights in the dark zone before decorating it.

Then, after we got the ornaments on it, another section went dark. And remained dark because I would have had to fuss with the lights through the ornaments or lay a new strand of lights over the ornaments.

I was in the mood to pitch the thing (or donate it to a charity garage sale and let someone else fuss with it for a couple of dollars), but these lights were not embedded in the tree; they were strung on the tree. So if I took them off the tree, I would still have a tree for next year that I could string lights on. It seemed like a good, economical idea. Especially since I was not going to replace this tree with a prelit tree of any sort next year that I would essentially rent for a trouble- and hassle-free single Christmas.

So after I packed up the Christmas decorations and ornaments yesterday, I started on the lights. It was then that I discovered that:

• Some individual lights were held on with individual clips, which meant I had to pop off the clip on each branch of the tree except
• some lights, generally the ones at each side of a main branch, were zip-tied to the respective branches, so I had to carefully find the camouflaged zip ties and cut them without cutting too much of the branch or fake fronds with them and
• The strings themselves were not individual lines; several times, the wires separated and went to the other side of the tree for some circuit reason that made sense to someone other than myself. So I would come to these Y intersections and cut one section of them, hoping I would find the other end of it eventually.

The total time to remove 600 lights and their clips and zip ties: Four hours.

Which I guess isn’t too bad. 600 lights removed in 4 hours is 150 lights an hour, or 2.5 per minute. But the metrics ultimately don’t make me feel better.

About the time I really, really came to regret the decision is same time I thought I was almost finished. The total elapsed time of really, really regretting my decision and thinking I was almost done itself was about two and a half hours. But once I get onto a task like that, I must finish no matter the cost in sanity or spending my entire day off messing with that tree.

Worst of all, as I was working, I couldn’t help think that somewhere in China, some young woman has to put the lights on these Christmas trees, several a day, or she’ll be fired and have to return to the provinces to eke out a living on a substinence-level farm. The perspective didn’t help.

You know, I read a lot of Buddhist Zen and mindfulness stuff, but I never really got into the zone of it while working on the Christmas tree because I was too busy resenting the task. Which was probably even unnecessary. Clearly, I was hanging too much onto my self and a preference to do something else with that time even if I didn’t know what that was.

Worst of all, it kind of felt like a recap that replayed my 2018: A simple task, expanding to fill all the available time and leaving me having done something without actually feeling a sense of accomplishment for it.

So next year, I will pull the our existing Christmas lights out of storage (not the ones from this tree, which I basically cut off and would never have figured how to get onto the tree again given their strange separations), I will test them before I put them on the tree, and the tree will be lit the old fashioned way: Over the course of days, and with many mantel pokes to my back which I will appreciate as I never have before.

When filling the ice cube trays at Nogglestead, I have two settings:

1. I overfill the trays, triggering a minor ice age in the freezer as the ice cube trays freeze to each other or overflow, producing ice stalactites that hang from the ice cube trays and spill onto frozen foods below, forming structures only a wampa could love.
    
2. I overcorrect for the above problem so that the ice “cubes” are actually tiny little ice “tiles” about an eighth of an inch thick.

One would think with years of practice, I would be able to thread the basketball hoop of filling an ice cube tray properly, but I have not. I believe the word “incorrigible” applies. Perhaps “inveterate,” too.

Have you noticed that people who avoid saying “Merry Christmas” and say “Happy Holidays” instead, explaining that they want to include all seasonal holidays continue saying “Happy Holidays” after Hanukkah ends, but stop saying “Happy Holidays” after Christmas, even though Kwanzaa starts after Christmas and New Years’ Eve/Day and Epiphany are yet to come?

How secular, really, is it to say “Happy Holy Days,” anyway?

Also, what is the adjective to apply to celebrations of the Epiphany? “Happy Epiphany”? “Merry Epiphany”? If we as a people have not yet set one, I should like to wish everyone a “Personal Epiphany.”

I can explain that thing on the sink.

For starters, “The Thing on the Sink” is not an H.P. Lovecraft short story, although with a title like that, it might be a good one.

No, this particular thing on the sink has travelled throughout the lower level of our home with feline assistance. I hope. Otherwise, it might be something out of a Lovecraft story.

I not-so-recently changed the toner on my black-and-white printer (which is why I’m not afraid to throw extra hyphens into this blog post–I have enough toner to print them if needed). I’d bought a two pack of the the toner cartridges on the Internet, and they came in a box with foam packing at the ends. I’d already used the first of the two toner cartridges and had taken it to Staples, where I would eventually get a $2 coupon to use in thirty days that I would not actually use because I only go to Staples to recycle toner cartridges for the two dollar coupon that I never use. It doesn’t make much sense to me, either, but that’s what I do.

Since I used the second cartridge, I took the foam ends out of the box because I save foam packing like it in case I need to add filler material to a project I’m working on, but I never do because I’m lazy and haven’t done anything with a monitor bezel in years, but I’m still accumulating foam for my next project in a couple of years.

So I left the foam ends in my office, and one or more of the cats decided one of them was a cat toy. So it made its way from my office into the living room, and then into the hallway between the living room and our offices. I picked it up off the floor to vacuum and put it on the cat tower in the hallway, meaning to take it up to the garage at some point in the future. But I didn’t before one or more of the cats took it from the tower and into the bathroom, from whence I put it onto the sink.

See, it makes sense. And, one day, it might make it into the garage to get used in a project, or more likely, to be saved for a project I never get around to.

You see, I can explain the seemingly random placement of seemingly random things at Nogglestead. Basically, it boils down to one or more things, sometimes in combination: Cats, children, and/or laziness.

Also, I just wanted to let you know that sometimes I know what something odd laying around is, unlike that one time or that other time.

Every year, we start the holiday season hoping to get Christmas cards out in a timely fashion. Not long after Thanksgiving, I started on a Christmas letter, but busyness and, to be honest, the typical we’re working, the boys are in school, playing sports and doing band, and we had a vacation template bored me a bit, so it got set aside. I managed to finally tap out that we’re working, the boys are in school, doing band and playing sports (see how I freshened it up?), and we went on vacation this year. So last weekend, we were ready to get some Christmas cards to start the writing. But Walmart was out of Christmas cards. So I started the preliminary work to panic, but Saturday afternoon, we found another Walmart had plenty of cards.

The Christmas cards we selected this year have little bits of glitter on them to make them sparkle like snow. Which means I have a lot of glitter on me. I finished the cards up yesterday, for the most part, but I still have the glitter on my forehead, in my beard, and on my clothing. I am not this festive or fabulous in real life.

I write little notes in the cards, personalized for some (Gimlet and his family got a little \m/, the ASCII equivalent of the rock-and-roll horns favored by Dio.

But the standard message was Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2019. Except I cannot shake the nagging feeling that at least once I must have written best wishes for 2018.

I packed and shipped packages to relations in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Poplar Bluff this morning. One of the items for my aunt seemed to be a softcover book. I don’t remember what that is. And I came home to find a gift that I was supposed to ship to Poplar Bluff on my desk where I’d set it when repacking the box. So now I wonder whether I forgot anything else or sent gifts to the wrong places. I guess I’ll know in the next few days. By the way, it costs about $15 to ship from Springfield to each of these areas, and it should be delivered tomorrow. Or I could spend $100 to overnight each box. I asked the young lady if UPS still used the zone system, but that probably went out of favor before she was born.

The various school programs and concerts are done, and now that the cards and packages (except for the one I will ship to Poplar Bluff tomorrow) are out, I can relax and just watch the snow fall.

Wait, I guess I am in the wrong place for that.

I traded my pickup truck in for a more family-friendly SUV.

I bought that truck new in March of 2001. I wanted a pickup truck so that I could haul video games. I’d bought an upright Thunderblade off of eBay, and I hoped to pick up some other games at auction and maybe start a video game or vending route in my spare time, so I got a small, economical truck that could handle them. I did haul a couple back from auction, but I never did start a business around them.

I did, however, eventually learn that it was not a half ton pickup truck. Not the hard way, fortunately, but someone told me and set me straight. It could still handle over a half ton of soil and landscaping material as I built the famed gardens of Old Trees and Nogglestead. Without destroying the suspension.

I didn’t put a lot of miles on it. I started working from home not too long after I got it, and it was not arrayed to ferry children. It had a jump seat in the back, and it’s only since my boys have outgrown their car seats that I could drive them around in it. They were very excited to ride in Dad’s truck, briefly. Unfortunately, often when they rode in it, we had to accommodate two boys, two backpacks, one or more brass instruments, and/or three or four gym bags full of martial arts uniforms and equipment. Suddenly, it was not an effective conveyance.

I can’t help remember the people who’ve ridden in that truck. My friends Doug and Brian from Wisconsin visited the week after September 11, 2001, and were among the first to ride in the back. I spent a Saturday going to yard sales with my Aunt Dale before she passed, and she thought my plan to have a vending machine route showed I had “hussle.” My sainted mother fit into the back seat once or twice before she passed away and rode in the front seat other times.

Look at those bumper stickers: A “I’m Proud Bush Is Our President” sticker I thought of removing once or twice and might have tried. A Packers sticker. A foil-backed flag sticker that faded to nothing but the foil. The RIC decal. A Webster Groves Historical Society member sticker (a membership that I have kept current whenever they have bothered to send me a renewal). Little reminders of who I’ve been for almost two decades.

It was starting to show its age. Well, it was starting to accumulate little things that I didn’t bother to fix. The rear window clasp on the passenger side had been broken for a long time–I held the window shut with duct tape. The third door opener was broken, so anyone getting into the back had to climb between the front seats. The CD player didn’t play–although it had quit on me for a while once before and healed itself. The air conditioner failed on it last summer or the summer before, but I don’t need air conditioning unless my beautiful wife rides with me–I even had told the car dealership when I bought the car that I didn’t need it, and I wanted to pay less for a truck without it. But the dealership would have had to order one from a lot in Alabama to get me a truck with no air conditioning, so I ended up with the amenity. The bed of the truck was starting to get a bit rusty, and the paint on the walls of the bed was getting scratched up. A little was due to the time I scraped a Love Tester machine when putting it into the bed after an auction, but most of it was because the boys started using it as a fort for Nerf wars.

My beautiful wife could not drive it; it has a manual transmission, and although she tried to learn a couple of times, she grew very frustrated with it. So when I had the boys in the family vehicle, she couldn’t go anywhere. So it really was probably past time to replace it.

I didn’t use the truck that much, but it certainly came in handy when I did need to haul something. Even now, I still think about picking up some lumber, and I think, no, or I fancy throwing my bike in the back to take it to the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield for a ride, and I think, no.

The former family car is getting high in mileage, so we’ll replace it in the next year or so, probably with a full size pickup truck with a crew cab and automatic transition. But the odds are pretty good I won’t drive it for almost twenty years.

Or a winter classic, I reckon. “Jingle Bells” lyric sheets contain one or more grammatical errors.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way

is incorrect. The singer is addressing the bells, so it needs a comma for the noun of direct address:

Jingle, bells; Jingle, bells; Jingle all the way.

It could probably use a semicolon or two as well.

The misunderstanding of the song has made people think there is a class of bells called “jingle bells,” but in the song, the class of bells is probably sleigh bells which jingle.

Actually, I have no idea of if any of the preceding is true. I’m just sitting here trying to do my Grammar Virtue Signalling, wherein I expound upon some fine point of grammar that no one disputes because nobody knows grammar like I think I do and because nobody continues listening when I go into Grammar Nazi mode. You yourself are probably not reading these words.

There’s a light display in Camdenton that includes a police car:

Does that look like a reindeer police officer to you? Or does it more resemble another animal?

The designer should really have gone with another color for the horns as they’re lost in the frame of the car.