Category: Life

Cardinals baseball finds new Springfield home on 102.1 The Won

As I’ve mentioned, the stubby antenna on the radio-playing headphones still going strong sixteen years after I bought them can pick up, clearly, two stations in all corners of Nogglestead: 92.3 which was country and 105.1 which is now “old” country (see also).

But! 105.1 was also the home of Cardinals baseball. Which meant that while I was on the lawnmower or, sometimes, painting record shelves outside or painting the fence, a song, probably a good one, would abruptly end and “The St. Louis Cardinals are on….” would replace it. And not the game–an hour of pregame interviews and things. Ah, gentle reader, I sometimes scheduled my lawnmowing around the baseball games just so they would not interrupt me.

Sorry. I know some of you (Friar) are baseball fans. But although I did grow up having ball games on in the workshop or whatnot, I’d rather listen to music when I am on the lawnmower. And now I won’t have to worry about it.

As long as 105.1 doesn’t become the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today or, heaven forfend, hot country.

So, the weekend before last, I mentioned moving some books from the table beside the sofa upstairs which had been on the table for years, mostly untouched–I’d placed them there whilst I was awaiting my high-school-aged son to come home from closing the restaurant where he worked at the time so I could read them while waiting.

Well, a week after I cleared it, other books moved in.

I have finally convinced my oldest, for whom we waited but now he’s almost done with juco, to not only watch videos on things but to read primary sources, of which Nogglestead has many.

So he’s started to nibble at them, and he’s stacking them up. The copy of Meditations is the one I gave him during the coronavacation in 2020–the one I read in 2019, not long after we moved to Nogglestead, was a Classics Club edition, one of the only ones I’ve read. Jeez, sixteen years…. Maybe I’m due to read it again myself.

Still, I hope he continues to actually read, or at least continues to start to think it would be a good idea.

On this day in 1972 (Richard Nixon’s first administration, gentle reader–basically pre-history), I was born eight weeks early and weighed four pounds, four ounces. Which was about too small to survive in that era. The doctors gave me a 50/50 shot of surviving the first night.

Ah, but, gentle reader, an even more statistically improbable event occurred 25 years later.

A poet in Columbia, Missouri, read a poem I posted on a newsgroup and asked me where you could read in St. Louis. Which was right in my wheelhouse because I knew all the places, which nights of the week they were, and what kind of crowds to expect. I would later quote an Iron Maiden poster to her, she would come to St. Louis to read on a Sunday night (on the very day that Brandt’s turned their weekly open mike to a bi-monthly)–so we walked around St. Charles and the Central West End for a while, and I was greeted by name by two different groups, so I must have seemed like quite the poetry big cheese at the time (and she had to come back the next week, too), and then I would recite the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her mother the first time I met her.

At any rate, my oldest is currently in a “girls are icky” phase. He’s dated semi-seriously a couple of times and has had many “appointments” with young ladies his age, but he’s starting to think modern girls aren’t all that.

I thought that, too, in the middle 1990s. I thought you had to pick either a smart girl or a moral girl, but that modern (1990s) girls had little overlap. But, as the philosopher says, out of the blue one appeared who was also hot.

I guess sometimes you have to trust the process you have no control over.

When we were kids, our exposure to foreign cuisine came from the grocery store. Pizza came in boxes with doughy crusts, sweet tomato sauce in a packet, and desiccated cheese. And Chinese food came in a can. And to this day, I can still hear the jingle “La Choy makes Chinese food…. swing American!”

We got these things, along with Rice-a-Roni, sometimes, and they were always a treat. A break from the Hamburger Helper that was the staple. My sainted mother was many things, but a cook she was not.

As my beautiful wife is traveling this week for business, I picked up a can (well, a package of two cans taped together). But instead of going with the chow mein, which is probably we got annually or twice every three years, I went with the sweet and sour chicken.

And…. bleh.

Decades later, I have a more sophisticated palate, having eaten a variety of different cuisines at various levels of competency. But there are definite limits in what you can put into a can, and this is it.

Although perhaps I didn’t do it right–I didn’t rinse the vegetables enough, and I absolutely messed up the rice by thinking the 1/2 cup scoop was 1 cup (leading to some very wet rice).

Maybe I’ll try again with the chow mein. And add a little red pepper to it. Maybe beef instead of chicken.

But, man, the 1970s. We lived there. It was different.

Warm winter weather prompts early plant budding, but frost threat remains in Ozarks. The slug on the home page says:

Meteorologist Nick Kelly breaks down why some might consider holding off on planting even though we’re back in a warm stretch.

Are you new here? Actually, many might be.

In years past, I have planted too early in that first bit of warmth, only to see my live plants struggle through a cold snap. But never in February, gentle reader, never in February.

One of the benefits of having lived at Nogglestead for sixteen and a half years is that I’ve seen the ebb and flow of the seasons. So I know that it will get cold again in March, and maybe April yet. Last year it was cool and rainy into June before warming up. So I will plant from seed sometime in March. Perhaps some broccolini, which Susan Lamb has been researching and writing about for the Stone County Republican.

I did walk out yesterday to look at the sole remaining peach tree in the front yard; it is indeed budding. But we’ll probably not get blossoms this year, much less peaches, because the temperature dropped to -10 degrees one or two nights. And I walked through a swarm of bugs taking out the trash last night. I’ve heard tell that warm snaps like this are good to keep the insect population down in the summer because they hatch and die in the next cold snap before laying eggs. We will see. It would be nice to sit outside in the evenings again, a habit I’ve given up the last two years because the bugs have been bad.

The old joke about the flood, sorry, the parable of the drowning man, goes:

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”

“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”

God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

That’s longer than it was in Readers Digest. But.

I mentioned in September 2024 that I received a packet from an heir hunter outfit who informed me, with some degree of truth but the exact amount of which I remain uncertain, that a distant relation with an estate died without a will, and I could sign with them to put in a claim. Well, the heir hunter managed to gather 12 or 13 of my closest distant kin to sign on–including my brother, but not my mother’s sister. The estate published for the required weeks in the Mound City News. A claimant put in a charge for an unpaid bill in January 2025, but the online court docket shows nothing since.

Well, we must be getting close to some sort of resolution, because we received a second packet from the heir hunter last week, telling us we still have to time to sign on.

I have spent a sleepless night overthinking it, but my beautiful wife has conducted some research that indicates that if I don’t put in a claim, that bit of money might go to the state’s Unclaimed Property fund. So maybe we will look into introducing ourselves to the Holt County Court after all.

I might have mentioned that I’ve been cleaning my desk, mostly, over the last couple of weeks, slowly, in between doomscrolling and whatnot. Well, in between trying to vibe-code an app that will sell more than three copies (I think all three of my apps in the Apple App Store are up to three copies each, so…. win?)

And I came to the birthday cards I received last year.

I get two birthday cards these days. One, mailed, from the martial arts school I’ve attended for…. fourteen years now? That many/is that all? They used to also periodically send out cards with encouraging notes as well, signed by one of the instructors, but I haven’t gotten one of those in a while. Perhaps they think I’m plenty encouraged as it is. Maybe too encouraged.

The other, from my mother-in-law, I tend to receive hand-delivered. In the past, it’s been passed along from my beautiful wife, generally, who saw her most frequently of us. But she’s been coming to church with us almost weekly after her fear of The Deadliest Thing Ever!!!1! passed and after she got a hip replacement and can walk again. She often includes a check for a dinner, presumably at Piccolo or Avanzare here in town, nice Italian restaurants.

But…. That’s it. And it’s been that way for a long time–my aunt who passed away in 2019 was the other holdout who did traditional things like that into the 21st century.

I thought of this, of course, because this year’s card from kyoshi arrived. So the cards have been on the desk, under piles or under bins and organizers, for a year.

Will I place them in the binders which act as scrapbooks of Nogglestead, where I can review them in their succession? Or will they float around on the desk for another year?

Time will tell!

As I mentioned, I had the end label sticker for a Vanguard Atari 2600 cartridge on my desk for a while, and I was going to do something about it, but I didn’t find the cartridge missing its label in the drawer beneath the television, so I metaphorically shelved the idea of affixing it to its cartridge….

Well, until I had a little time yesterday afternoon, when I got off my duff and went into the storeroom. And laid my hands easily on the box containing our overflow Atari cartridges. So I got them out, dusted each one of them, and found the cartridge missing its label. As Vanguard starts with V, it was at the bottom, natch.

And, in the process of unboxing them, I knocked the labels off of the ends of five other cartridges.

Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I glued these labels back on as well.

Jeez, Louise, I have a lot of Atari cartridges.

So now they’re on my desk, and who knows how long it will take for me to schlep them the fifteen feet to the box in the storeroom. So the Vanguard label is not technically off my desk at all.

Eh, well, someday, it will be. And someday I’ll get around to writing the “10 books that influence me” and “10 albums that influenced me” blog posts that were a thing, what, ten years ago? Which have stood at 6 and…. well, I cannot find the albums one right now, but it’s under a printer or something. I should write out those/that post sometime with fewer than 10 entries just so I can get it off my desk.

Also, memo for file: The box also contains an un-end-labeled Galaxian cartridge. So that label might still be floating around on my desk somewhere as well. Even as relatively clean it is, it’s still a black hole that sometimes emits something from the long past.

I’ve had a label for an Atari cartridge floating on my desk for a couple of years. Well, not too, surely. But I did some filing a week or so back and rather worked to clear the desk, so I thought I would take the appropriate step of gluing it back onto the cartridge. But, I was surprised to discover it was not a label for Galaxian.

Because for a while, I had a Galaxian label, but I must have finally just put the two or three minutes in a row it took to reunite it with its proper cartridge.

I tried it with this label, but the Vanguard in the drawer under the television had its label.

Which means I have overflow in a box in the store room with a Vanguard cartridge (one of the other three others I have) missing its label. And I cannot be arsed right now to go looking for it.

So I put it into a little tub of odds and ends in the hutch above the monitor. Which contains many such tubs. And many such odds. Probably as many ends.

But it’s one step closer to a cleaner desk and one step further from an interesting Five Things On My Desk post.

In 2019, I posted about the book accumulation points of Nogglestead.

Since then, we’ve not spent that many Sundays watching football, so the sofa-side table in the family room table only has video controllers on it (although it holds my collection of read literary and Ideals magazines on it.

But we’re going to talk, briefly, about a book accumulation point that has come and gone: The side table by the sofa in the living room.

When my oldest son got his first job in high school, he sometimes worked until closing, which meant he could be home 11:00 or later, and my beautiful wife and/or I would wait up for him. So I had a selection of books and magazines on that table, generally browsers, poetry, or magazines which I could pick up and put down.

Eventually, he got a different job where the fast food joint closed at 9pm (and later jobs with more regular hours), so I didn’t as often sit there in the living room under the fairly dim lamp to read.

But the books and magazines remained there since that time several years ago. As part of the weekly (mostly) grind, I have dusted them the whole time in the interim, but it’s only in Saturday that I put the unread Readers Digest onto the stack of unread magazines in the parlor and only yesterday when I moved the books and decks of cards from the table.

I took the bookmark from an introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas and put it back on the shelf; I think I started reading that on my trip to the Dells in 2022. I put one of my two books on Tai Chi Walking with the bookmark intact onto my reading chair side table–if I took the bookmark out if it now, I would probably not every restart it, and it’s not like I’m missing much by forgetting what I’ve already read (and I have another book on Tai Chi Walking around here to polish up the skill should I need to). I also put the book of prayers that was someone’s personal time capsule on the side table by the chair–I’ll get back to nibbling at it, but my experience in the past is that you really don’t get much from powering through a bunch of prayers all at once.

As to the remote control–to be honest, I’m not sure what that’s for. I will probably throw it into the bin in the storeroom with several decades’ worth of orphaned remotes and a couple of optimistically acquired universal remotes that were not. But that might be another couple of years.

I have mentioned before the slow pace of change at Nogglestead. I mean, I’m the only one who really notices these things, I think. The rest of the family is rather screen-bound (and I waste too many hours doing nothing on my computer, too, don’t get me right), so maybe it matters less to them. I dunno. But if you put something on a table or desk at Nogglestead, it might be there for a very long time indeed.

So, I’ve been looking for quality assurance work for over a year now, so I guess I have a little room for a bit of a cri de cœur about it.

Continue reading “Job Huntin’ in 2026” →

“What, Brian J., does your to-do list look like at the end of the day?”

Ah, gentle reader, incomplete. Incomplete. As you can see, “Potatoes” is on the list for what might be the 25th consecutive day, but it is getting more likely that I will complete it. Some months (in multiples of twelve, maybe) ago, I found a recipe for oven roasted potatoes on the Internet, and I liked it, so I did it a couple of times. When I fell away from it, my beautiful wife cut the recipe to fit to a 3×5 card and put it into one of her recipe boxes. I tend to fold the recipes I want to use again and tuck them into the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. So for a while, I didn’t have access to the recipe I liked, and Find it again on the Internet was a prerequisite for the task. But! Sometime in the middle of the month, she found it for me and set it atop her recipe boxes in the kitchen. Then! It disappeared; I don’t know if it went back into the recipe boxes or something more sinister. Now! She has rediscovered the recipe and put it on my desk (where it has a greater chance to be lost or something more sinister. But the oblong spheriods are back in my court. And if I don’t cook some today, I will have to write Famous for Potatoes on my list for January 26th.

I have not done a “room” on TryHackMe. In a while. But I’ve added it to the list recently in case I need to pivot to cybersecurity from quality assurance to find a job (spoiler alert: probably). I did, however, figure out that the “AttackBox” option doesn’t actually work these days, and to do a room, I’ll have to spin up a virtual (on the Web) Kali Linux device. Which means I can pick up where I left off now when I left off… What, two years ago? I will need some review. I think I took some notes, but in the interim, I might have discarded them.

FreeCodeCamp.org offers online courses in basic (not BASIC) programming in a variety of languages. I completed the HTML/CSS one and got a little certificate for it…. five years ago? Ah, in the interim before my last full-time position. I also started the JavaScript one as it was the language I was noodling in at the time, but I abandoned it because it was very time consuming. These five (apparently) years later, it remembers where I was in the course, but it cleared all previous work I had done, so I have to start over. Which, okay, I can speedrun it, but: Now it has “workshops” where you do a little program going line-by-line, where you have to write a variable declaration and then a console log using whatever concept/method the lesson covered, and now it’s very time consuming. I am closing in on 10% done after a week, so speedrun is not the word to use. I thought I’d plough through JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python fast because a lot of “job postings” indicate they prefer “experts” in a language, and I have a hard time considering myself an expert in any of these languages, even though I’ve used them a bunch. But time will tell how long my patience holds out on these things.

GTO Spec refers to writing a data model and identifying a set of screens for a new project I’m thinking about so I can prompt an LLM to scaffold it up for me. It should be easy. Why am I procastinating?

A number of the chores are part of the Choose Your Own Grind protocol; I clean the upstairs and the bathrooms weekly and the downstairs every two weeks (generally). Cleaning the bathtubs and the shower was on the two-week schedule but has fallen to a once-in-a-while schedule. As this is week two, today’s list includes dusting and vacuuming downstairs, but….

Not depicted on the list: Since my boys have given up reading now that they have phones and computers (hold out as long as you can, young parents), I decided we would cull their bookshelves and move the two full-sized bookshelves from the youngest’s bedroom, formerly their shared bedroom, to the downstairs. For years, I’ve been stacking oversized art monographs and coffee table books haphazardly on bookshelves in the main living area, and my wife had mentioned it looked cluttered. So I thought sometime in January, after the Christmas decorations were up, we would tackle that. So, yesterday, we did. I gathered five boxes of children’s books for donation (the bookshelves were still stocked with, well, not board books, but with books written for elementary and middle school students); a bedful of adult books which he wanted to keep or I, in sorting them, decided he would keep; a half bin full of old school workbooks, old magazines, and torn up books for recycling; and three boxes of books I wanted to keep, which includes books of mine that ended up on their bookshelves, comic books that they’d bought or I bought for them when we went to the Comic Cave, and books they owned which I wanted to keep, maybe for grandchildren. We moved the bookshelves downstairs, and I got the art books/monographs/binders we have instead of scrapbooks onto one set of bookshelves. Today, I will tackle the audio courses; I will sort the books in the boxes in my office; I will move the donation pile from the living room (where my wife went through them to see what she wants to keep) to the garage and will restack/repack the donation boxes in the garage; and I will use my week’s allotment of semicolons even though it’s not Sunday.

And! I will do these things before I dust and vacuum downstairs as the not-depicted-on-the-to-do-list project, which I did after cleaning the upstairs, left detritus on the floors upstairs so they had to be swept and vacuumed again.

Also, not depicted: Writing long blog posts about the whole effort. Sometimes I do add blog posts to the list when I have an idea but not the immediate drive to write a post (I started this one before breakfast, but that was an hour ago–I should get to the things on the list). Also, the normal chores of daily life including laundry, dishes, some cooking, et cetera. And the shoveling which I might undertake (and which will take four to six hours should I choose to partake in the joy of being outside in the snow–six inches instead of the 20 they predicted, but enough to leave southwest Missouri snowbound for three or four days, except for delivery drivers (my oldest ordered pizza last night, but from the shop in Battlefield, so not a long drive for the poor rascal) and people with, you know, real jobs.

So: Will I update you tomorrow? Eh, probably not.

The last couple of weeks, I have been diligent in creating a to-do list to guide my days since my contracts have gotten a little thin or gone into remission, and if left to my own devices, I’ll doomscroll and refresh job boards (professional doomscrolling) and end up with nothing done.

So I’ve started making lists of discrete tasks to accomplish throughout the day. Sometimes, they’re chores. Sometimes, they’re repeated tasks.

I’ve been using the free giveaway notepads that various charities send me as part of fundraising pitches. For the most part, the charities get nothing because 1) If they’re big enough to buy my name on a list and send me monthly come-ons with little printed gifts, they’re too big and 2) Runnin’ on a lean mixture, man.

So I end up with a list, and I cross out some things (but too often carry them over to the next list). Currently, in heavy rotation, I have St. Jude’s Research Hospital, who has me on their Whale list either because 1) I ran a (less than) 5K supporting them in, what, 2021? It was the weekend I then drove over to Poplar Bluff to help my brother remove the shingles from his roof–pretty sure it was after his first wife died or 2) because my sainted mother supported them (she met Danny Thomas once and interviewed him, perhaps at a fundraiser for St. Jude’s). Or 3) Because my name is out there as a Whale from the before times.

So, the current notepad has something extra in the footer. The word hope.

Yeah, thanks, no, that is not on my to-do list, thanks. Please do not add things, generic tablet designer.

Also, note: Since beginning this a couple weeks ago, I have actually used up one of these notepads. Which is amazing, honestly, as in the past, I’ve jotted later-inscrutable words and phrases on them before they get pushed under a printer or pile and get exhumed later with little comprehensibility, only to have the top sheet removed and the pad put back in the set of recent unused arrivals.

My goodness, if I keep this up and can use up one every week before a new one arrives, perhaps I can start making way on the backlog or even the drawerful that contain my sainted mother’s name on them (and maybe some with my long-departed aunt’s) which I inherited almost seventeen years ago and could not discard then and cannot discard yet (because if I open that filing drawer, I might not be able to close it again.

Oh, and if you’re keeping track, the number of to-do lists I’ve actually completed? One or two. Maybe more, but I would not take the over on that bet. Potatoes, that is, roasting a double batch of oven-roasted potatoes, has been on the list for most of January, the Whole 30 era. Fortunately, the more perishable eggs has been on the list a couple of times and has been removed as I’ve actually cooked them.

From a piece in St. Louis Magazine entitled A guide to taking a Viking river cruise along the Mississippi from St. Louis:

Day 4: Stop in the Quad Cities, Iowa, the “Breadbasket” of the United States. Visitors will begin their day with a visit to the John Deere Pavilion and Deere family homes. Afterward, guests can choose between an optional tour of local farms or stroll through the city itself, visiting the Figge Art Museum or the Quad City Botanical Center.

Technically, the Quad Cities are, get this, four cities. The list of attractions includes stops in three of the four: The Deere things are in Moline; the art museum is in Davenport; the Botanical Gardens are in Rock Island. Only Bettendorf is omitted. I wonder if residents of the area think of the whole region as “the city.” I presume not since there is a river to cross to get from Davenport/Bettendorf to Moline/Rock Island.

Aren’t I Mr. Knowledge from having been to Davenport twice in the last two years? And I haven’t even read the history book of the area that I picked up in 2024. But that and the final Ben Wolf novel are definitely in the short queue before October this year.

And I looked at this article with some interest. Mrs. Noggle would like to go on another cruise after 27 years, but I’ve been a bit reluctant. So I kinda priced this one out and… Holy Huck Finn: $30,000 and 30 days for a round trip. I guess the Caribbean it is. Someday.

Facebook must know this story already to have presented this to me:

I lost on that word in 8th grade in the spelling bee, the feeder that could have taken me to Washington, D.C., although probably not–the words the kids win on these days are crazy. Maybe they were easier forty years ago, but I would have topped out maybe in districts at best. Maybe state, but probably not.

But I lost very early on threshold when Mr. Biedenstein, my 8th grade teacher and later (but still in the 1900s) became mayor of the new town of Byrnes Mill (old town, but newly chartered or whatever), when Mr. Biedenstein pronounced threshold with three Hs.

Not that I am bitter or anything.

Actually, no. Although I dominated the class-based fun-and-games from 8th grade Speech and Drama class games Alphabetics (not unlike Password) and Show-Offs (not unlike charades) and on to Honors Western Civ’s Jeopardy! my senior year of high school, when it came time to do actual competitions with other schools, I did not do so well. I did not study, so I got bounced out of the Civics/History trivia competition my senior year of high school very early.

I am pleased to note, however, that when I attended my sons’ Scholar Bowl tournament at their high school, I found I would have cleaned up on most but the fast-calculating math questions.

So I have that going for me, which is nice.

I mean, why not spell it right out, unsolicited email? Sus, indeed.

Ah, gentle reader. It started out so promising.

The day we left for Branson last week, that is, late Sunday morning, my beautiful wife was preparing to roast some pecans in the oven when she heard a pop, and the oven did not heat up. Ah, heating element again.

You might remember the saga last year:

To be clear: Apparently, this part shipped from St. Louis, Missouri, two days later (December 28), and:

• Arrived and left the carrier facility in St. Louis twice.
• Arrived in Kansas City on January 1, and then left the facility twice.
• Arrived in Springfield facility January 2, last Thursday, twice.

And there it sits. It is still scheduled to arrive by Wednesday, after I ordered it and twelve days since it shipped from St. Louis. Which is a three hour drive away. For some reason, it was routed through Kansas City for a week.

I guess I did not follow-up on that experience, but that particular part was shipped from St. Louis unpadded in a 1″ tall cardboard box which arrived bent, and the heating element in it was bent 20 degrees itself. So, unusable. I was able to return it even though the Amazon seller was a Ukrainian(!) company shipping from St. Louis or something–probably used parts from a junkyard or something. But they gave me a refund, and I got a heating element from a US-based (maybe) source and installed it.

Well. It lasted a year. But I ordered another from the same seller on Amazon (ending my tweehad against them for the moment)–getting ready to leave for the week, I felt too rushed to look at appliance parts sellers themselves on the Internet, and it was only when I was in Branson that I thought I hope I didn’t just order from the Ukrainian company again. But it came properly packaged and intact.

And since I had already done this and because it’s basically two 1/4 bolts and two screws to attach the leads, I had the oven up and running in under a half an hour.

So, on Sunday, I decided to crack open the refrigerator. Again.

Pretty much since we got the refrigerator, it would rattle when the compressor/evaporator fan stopped. But late last year, it started getting louder and rattling longer, so I figured I would take a look at it. Which means I would have Nico take a look at it.

A couple of years ago, I successfully defrosted the frozen drain line from the frost-free freezer, so I was unafraid.

I’d done some research, and the things on YouTube (which featured far younger refrigerators than this one, which is 26 years old and has metal parts in it) indicated it might be dirty coils or ice buildup on the coils leading to the fan nicking the ice. It might have been motor bearings. We cleaned it out, and it looked as the fan was running smoothly, but it did rattle when running. The shaft holding the fan on had a couple millimeters of give where it could go into and out of the motor that far. I guessed that it would be something we could live with whilst I researched maybe replacing the fan and/or motor.

But it seemed like the fan was running more frequently than previously. Several times an hour, it rattled for the length of the runtime. After I closed it back up, my wife said it sounded different. Perhaps I left the sheet metal on the back a little loose? After dinner, I thought to look at the temperature controls to see if maybe they might have changed. And the freezer was set to the absolute lowest setting. A-ha! I thought. When I tried to dial it up, though, it resisted and then popped. But now the fan was permanently on. Not good.

So, after a couple hours of listening to the beating of his tell-tale heart rattling fan, I had us move the contents of the 26-year-old refrigerator to the 45-year-old drink refrigerator behind the bar downstairs while we explore our options (buy a new refrigerator with an expected life of 10 years).

Not without some self-doubt, gentle reader, not without some self-doubt. My father’s handy angel on my right shoulder encourages me to fix it (and expresses silently doubt that I can), but that might involve a cycle of ordering a $60 part, nope, that’s not it, ordering a $60 part, no, that’s not it until I listen to the devil of modern disposable culture on the left. So, yeah, we’re getting a new refrigerator.

Next internal conflict: Do I keep this refrigerator to try to fix it in my spare time? Well, no. The garage does not have room for it. And maybe I should actually get into the habit of taking care of things before I get these ambitions. So, no, they’ll haul it away and either recycle it or fix it and resell it. Which I could do myself were I so inclined, but history has shown I have not been so inclined.

Maybe the theme of the year should be Get away from the damned desk and take care of things.

At any rate, I have ordered an extra heating element for the oven. Which might end up cluttering the garage and its museum of parts for appliances Brian J. fixed but then got sick of and replaced (with several dryer wheel kits for an old Whirlpool dryer and tub suspension rods for a Samsung washer).

And, wait a minute. Does the exhaust fan motor sound different?