Category: Life

I can’t believe I have to replace this belt already! I just paid $10 for this belt at Walmart three years ago and wear it almost every day.

Jeez, I’ve definitely turned a corner in aging gracelessly, ainna?

And don’t get me started on these cheap black sweatpants that I bought because I could not afford a gi when taking bujitsu in 1997. Can you believe they’re wearing thin in spots already?

Spotted in a shop:

It’s a decorative throw pillow.

That says Man Cave.

I’m not sure how the manufacture of this eldritch artifact did not immediately consume the entirety of the universe in some sort of instantaneous energy inversion triggered by the paradox.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. K. Hey, VftP readers, check out my IT-themed comic heist novel John Donnelly’s Gold and my (allegedly) humorous play The Courtship of Barbara Holt, both available on Kindle for .99 or in paperback.

So there’s some fad going around school. Who knows how second graders get these notions in their heads? But my son has been talking about Poconos cards. All his friends collect them and pass them around and trade them. So he said, “Daddy, can I get some Poconos cards?”

Well, my son, through the wonder of eBay, you can. To surprise him, I picked these beauties up:

He might just have the most enviable collection of Poconos cards in his class.

As you might know, gentle reader, my beautiful wife and I are pretentious enough that our cats have literary or mythological names.

Retired names include Galt, Ajax, and Dominique. Our current group of prowlers include Tristan, Aurora, Roark, Athena, and Isis.

But I hereby announce my intent that we name our next cats in the following literary fashion: H.P. Lovecraft stories.

Come on, there’s scarcely a title here that’s not suitable for naming a cat. The best:

• The Thing on the Doorstep
• The Haunter of the Dark
• The Lurking Fear
• What the Moon Brings
• The Doom that Came to Sarnath

I’ll have to stop there, or I’ll republish the whole bibliography in a different order.

I’m so inspired that I want to go to the feline recycling center right now.

We’re thinking about getting a new automobile, and to be honest, I’m a little leery of it since it’s gone from mechanical systems that can fail due to the laws of physics to software problems caused by an intern forgetting a semicolon. This GM problem doesn’t make me feel better about the prospect:

General Motors is recalling 370,000 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups from the 2014 model year to fix software that could cause the exhaust components to overheat and start a fire.

. . . .

GM said eight fires have been reported, but no injuries.

Hoping to get a better score next time, GM advises:

The company is asking customers not to leave their trucks idling unattended.

You know, the best place to be when your automaker’s software is going the full Edgar on you is inside the vehicle, where software-controlled door locks and electronic windows won’t hamper your escape at all.

There’s a little black cat with white paws that lives down in the little wooded gully at the front of our property. He comes around the house sometimes, but shies away from us if he sees us.

I’m glad to see he’s made it through the recent polar vortex.

I just wish he wouldn’t do that. It annoys our cats and prompts them to mark their side of the door from time to time.

Who else could read the first sentence of a story entitled I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users and think of home?

Well, the first sentence is:

The trailer parks of Jefferson County, Missouri, are a far cry from the international cartels of Breaking Bad, but this is the real picture of meth in America….

I lived in just such a place.

View Larger Map

Although the mobile home I lived in at this location was not quite so nice. As a matter of fact, it was the most ramshackle one in Siesta Mobil Home Park and it undoubtedly melted in the rain sometime between then and now.

The empty pad to the northwest, there, is where the Hittler trailer was. I still have the table they left behind when they moved their trailer.

The tree on the little hill in the back there? My brother tore his finger up falling out of it one day right before we moved, and my mother made him wait with a compress before taking him to the ER because she was showing the trailer to someone interested in buying it. He followed her (and my father’s) footsteps into the Marine Corps, so perhaps she was toughening him up for it.

At any rate, I left the trailer park for the house in the valley down the dirt road in 1987 or 1988, and I left that house for good before the meth problem really took off. Kinda like I left the projects before the crack epidemic hit. Why, it’s almost like people don’t take my leaving very well.

(Link via Instapundit. Colorful youth courtesy my parents.)

After the somewhat saddening striking of the Christmas decorations, we have the annual hunt for the Christmas straggler, the decoration missed when decamping them.

This year, it only took me a day and a half to find it:

I know! You’re saying, Brian J., do you decorate your empty gumball machine every year? Truth of the matter is that I do not.

That particular decoration started on the tree until the new young black cat harvested it. After that, I hung it on a nail over the stairs that had remained without adornment in the four years we’ve been in Nogglestead. I received a Green Bay Packers wall hanging for Christmas, so I swapped it for the wreath on Christmas day and put the wreath on the desk downstairs so I’d remember to pack it up when we packed the decorations, and then….

A child hung the ornament on the gumball machine. As I did not decorate the gumball machine, I did not think to look on the gumball machine for decorations. But it could not remain subtly hidden for eleven months. Oh, no, this misplaced wreath had to announce its presence the day after the Christmas decorations were safely ensconced deeply in the short closet beneath the stairs, safely defended by the in-home vacuum hose hydra and bicycle trainer. To taunt me with how much work I’d have to undo and redo in putting it into the bin with the other ornamentation.

Needless to say, I have not yet undertaken that step. Instead, I’ve blogged about it. And by the time I get around to actually putting it away, eleven months might elapse.

In the other room, the boys were playing Lego Batman on the Wii, and the seven-year-old said to the five-year-old, “Stop freelancing!”

Was he offering his younger brother career advice, advising him to take a secure position instead of working as a contractor? No, he was repeating something Kelly Chase used to say (and still might).

When listening to Kelly Chase do color on St. Louis Blues hockey broadcasts, he’d say a defenseman who moved out of position to try to join the play was “freelancing.” Usually he said this when the opposing team took the opportunity to use that newly free space to attack the St. Louis Blues goal.

And sometime in their (continuing) youths, my children’s father took to tell them, usually when they were wandering a bit far from him in a parking lot, to stop freelancing and get back into position. I also tell them they have to have their heads on a swivel, another Chasism, when they’re in a parking lot.

So what the older youngster meant is that his brother, acting as the second player in the game, should follow his on-screen Batman instead of wandering to other parts of the screen.

Which is probably better than other colorful metaphors children could learn from old hockey players.

(Yeah, the blog is going all Linkletter of late. But the kids have been home on break, and they’re saying better things than our self-appointed betters in the capitals are. Also, trivia to connect Art Linkletter to the St. Louis Blues more tidily than I deserve: Art Linkletter was born in Saskatchewan.)

The five-year-old got a checkers/chess game board for Christmas, and the older boy wanted to learn chess and got far enough to learn how to set up a chessboard.

So they’re in the parlor playing, and somehow they’re on the same side.

I believe this is the Molotov–Ribbentrop opening.

This is different from other game variants this morning, which have included Lego catapults firing checkers and Catzilla flattening the board.

I think they’re just about old enough to teach the dreaded Noggle Blitz.

Five-year-old child: “Daddy, how do they make paper?”

Daddy: “Like mashed potatoes, except with wood chips and glue instead of boiled potatoes and milk.”

The Springfield News-Leader offers a story about visiting the horse park in winter:

The wreath caught my eye, but the horses made me stop to take a picture. They looked so peaceful on a quiet morning at Valley Water Mill Equestrian Center.

. . . .

If you’re looking for a break from the holiday hustle, I suggest visiting the horses. The Christmas decorations at the facility are handmade by employees and each year they add a few more.

The equestrian center is open through the winter, weather permitting.

You know what I do when I want to see horses in the snow? I walk to my mailbox.

The new neighbors to our south have two new horses and have cleared the brush on the east side of their lot so the horses can graze. Further down the farm road, the neighbor across the street has a number of pintos. The house just south of us (and our new neighbors) had a number of horses, but they’ve been gone a season or two, so their big barn must be empty now. Beyond their house is a little hollow, but cattle often graze on the next hill. And to our west, although the Double Diamond Bar ranch has been broken up, the homeowner on one of its parcels has a couple of cattle and horses just because he can.

Funny how I’ve come to take these things for granted after living out in the country for four (!) years now. Strangely, I’m the old timer on the block all of a sudden. The new neighbors to the south and west. Only the house on the north has owners who predate us, and as they’re getting older, it won’t be long until they move on to something smaller. The next house north has just turned over, too, and I haven’t seen the new owners yet.

Also, given that Springfield is a small city of a touch over 100,000 located smack dab in the middle of not much extended suburbs–you pass through rural areas to get to the nearest bedroom towns–it’s strange to think that there are some people who live their entire daily lives within the confines of that city and rarely take an excursion outside it through the rolling hills and back country roads.

And they vote.

I don’t mean to go on about things one finds in the Forbes Life holiday gift giving guide (see also), but they’ve got $300 velvet slippers that you can get:

Today’s slippers announce you in a fashion far livelier than a flat-footed monogram. Go heraldic if you must, or sport the logo of dear alma mater, or your outlaw biker gang.

But the ones they choose to picture are crass. Continue reading “A Touch of Classlessness” →

Spotted in the Wall Street Journal, a friendly message from IBM:

Friends, if you don’t think some junior-level creative was snickering in his or her sleeve when he or she came up with this design, you have not worked with junior-level creatives.

I mean, it’s supposed to be a bar chart showing that IBM Cloud hosts 30% more of something. One could have designed an ad where the bars were of differing heights because IBM hosts 30% more than its nearest competitor (not all competitors who are tied). They could have put the IBM bar at the end. They could have made the IBM bar be, you know, 30% taller than the others (the bars extend some distance below the fold, which means the middle finger bar is not actually proportionate to the numbers claimed in the copy).

Which is why, in the olden days when I worked at an interactive agency, I had to keep my mind in the gutter.

Yesterday, my beautiful wife participated in the running portion of the Turkey Trot and ran five kilometers, which are Canadian miles, and she did this without stopping, sobbing, or being chased.

Whereas I cross-trained the five kilAH!meters with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. How do you cross-train a 5K, you ask? Well, I:

• Walked fast a couple hundred meters.
• Ran a few hundred meters.
• Walked real slow a couple hundred meters.
• Repeated this cycle at intervals throughout.
• Swiveled my head 180 degrees Linda Blair style to keep in sight a sprinter and a dawdler.
• Carried 50 pounds for a kilometer because it was too tired to walk.
• Put down the 50 pounds when it saw the finish line and wanted to run across it.
• Helped up the 50 pounds who ran through the finish gate with its arms raised triumphantly and promptly tripped over the finish line–or at least the timing mat across the finish line.

I ask you, gentle reader, who got the better workout?

Sorry I’m late to this one, but I’m often behind in paper periodical reading. From the May 27 copy of Forbes, in an article called “More Telcos Launch 1 Gbps Internet In Google Fiber’s Afterglow“:

In the dry, northern district of downtown Omaha, scores of technology entrepreneurs and creatives are hunched in front of their computers in what was once an abandoned furniture factory. They come to the Mastercraft building for space the size of nearly three football fields.

Soon they’ll come for the blistering Internet speed, too.

On May 6 Omaha became the latest rural American city to get an Internet speed of one gigabit per second, or 100 times faster than the U.S. average.

So. A city is a large group of people together. A rural area is not many people far apart. What is a rural city?

One of those small, backward cities on the interior of the continent, no doubt. Where they’re not really cities because they don’t have rail urban transportation of one sort or another or good sushi restaurants (in the writer’s estimation, even though the writer might never have been in a rural city looking for it).

Strangely enough, one senses a rural city is not considered a real city, contrasting with the government estimation that small towns are urban areas.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. K.

So I’ve been sporting a Van Dykish bit of facial hair for the last year and a half or so because that’s what IT professionals do in Missouri. Also, that’s what a lot of other people do in the Ozarks. However.

But trimming last week, I broke the guide on my little $10 grooming tool. It was a little trimmer with a plastic guide that snapped on and had a couple of settings for beard lengths. One of the little pegs that gripped the notches in the side of the trimmer snapped off as I was putting it back on after cleaning it, so it became useless except for cutting facial hair close enough to shave off. I’d just put new batteries in it, too.

So I picked up a $14 unit at the department store. This one was a little snazzier, with a dial that controlled a clipper that does not come off. Also, it’s hard to see exactly where the guide is in relation to the clippers as they lie askew the device and the guide is, as I mentioned, affixed to the device.

I set the thing to its second lowest setting–I’d used the lowest setting on my previous trimmer, and I took a pass, and….

Apparently, 2 is the hipster setting. It mowed the facial hair to the level of stubble.

I can only imagine what the lowest setting is. 600 grit sandpaper, perhaps.

Given that the trimmer had mostly eradicated my beard, I took the razor and finished it off.

And suddenly, I’m startling myself every time I look in the mirror.

I don’t know if I’ll go bare-faced for long, or if I’ll miss the facial hair and slowly grow it back and see if the new facial hair trimmer has any setting that allows me to have facial hair.

But I do know one thing: I look younger, strangely. Probably because I didn’t grow facial hair until my late 30s and think I look like the pictures from my youth. But for a little while, my chin will be cold.

So yesterday was All Hallow’s Eve, and there was an event featuring costumery of children, and we attended.

The youngest dressed as Darth Vader, so Daddy’s all getting into the 21st century thing, and he (being I) determined that the Star Wars Imperial March was in order.

So I pulled it up on my phone in YouTube.

But that would not allow me to loop it, so I paid for an iTunes download and struggled with getting it to play and looping it (how did I get to be an old man who does not understand technology? It happened last night, apparently, and I don’t know how). And I placed it in my coat pocket so the Imperial March would be heard as he walked up to the cars at the trunk or treat thing and asked for goodies.

That was the plan, anyway.

In the excitement, the only person to notice was another little boy who we were following in the circuit. He was tall enough (that is, short enough) that his head was about the level of the trench coat pocket, and he kept glancing at it. Probably wondering why I wasn’t answering my phone.

But it’s important that you, dear Internet, understand I am the unheralded Best Dad Ever. Or at least the best dad my kids have.

Well, our pumpkin harvest this year was not what it could have been. Many of the plants fell prey to powdery mildew and, honestly, a bit of inattention during the dry period in August and September. As a result, the pumpkins we picked were a little on the small side.

Never fear: The watermelons did okay. Continue reading “The Nogglestead Jack o’Lantern 2013” →