Category: Life

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?

Yesterday, a baby bunny ran over me.

I’m not making that up, although when I recounted the story to my six-year-old, he did not believe me. There are some drawbacks to being a fatherly fabulist: When something crazy happens, the children don’t believe it.

So.

It’s been four years since I last mentioned my children’s sandbox on this blog. Maybe it’s not; maybe that’s just the last memorable mention of it. But in that intervening time, my children have grown up, started shaving, and are being recruited by several prestigious universities for their athletic and mental prowess. Or, fatherly fabulism aside, they’ve grown too old to be terribly interested in the sandbox (although the youngest remains six and might still be interested in it on his own, he’s often drafted into his older brother’s adventures and doesn’t have the time to enjoy the sandbox aside from dumping the sand out of it and filling it instead with landscaping stones). Last year, bermuda grass choked out the square amusement center, and the beach toys faded and became brittle in the sun. So this year, I decided to remove it.

On Friday, before I could get around to doing my normal amount of nothing, I went into the back yard with a hammer, a rake, some gloves, and determination borne of just doing something before thinking about the more fun alternatives to work, such as nothing. I checked to directions in which the boards were nailed together and struck the first side board to separate it from its fellow.

As I banged on it, I felt something on my foot. “A field mouse,” I thought, and I looked down just as the something leapt into the sandbox. It turned, and in its profile, I saw it was a young rabbit that had emerged from a small hole next to the side of the sandbox. It fled through the fence, and when I whacked the board again, its little brother bounded out of the hole and out of the fence as well. The second was courteous enough to not jump on my foot as it went by.

So I really did get run over by a baby bunny yesterday.

If I were a better writer and less lazy, I’d write this up into a full personal memoir essay juxtaposing melancholy about my children growing older with the eternal youth turnover of the small wild animals around Nogglestead. But this is a blog, and I’m just a fatherly fabulist and not Joan Didion.

Look, I can tell, you still don’t believe me. Fine. I’ve got some footage from our security cameras below the fold so you can see how something landed on my foot, and how I startled, screamed like a little girl (although the security camera footage has no sound, you can almost hear the shriek from the way I act), and fled from the icky beast faster than the beast fled from me.

Continue reading “A Baby Bunny Ran Over Me: The Shocking True Story” →

What’s the next size up from large on this Whirlpool washing machine?

As large as your ex.

That’s just harsh.

Ever since we moved to the country, I’ve kicked around, often aloud, the idea of getting some livestock. Goats, maybe, or sheep. Then it was a cow or to for fresh beef. I almost had my beautiful wife convinced on that one, especially after a friend of ours mentioned having a cow once or twice (and he seems so normal!). Well, we were almost picking out a breed (but not a cow name because I knew that would be bad juju–if we named the cow, sooner or later it would be in the house and getting cow treats if it mooed on command), but she encountered a woman who had cows once or twice (and she seemed so normal!), and the woman mentioned how hard it was eating something whose name you knew. So my cattle dreams ended, or at least fell dormant.

Which doesn’t mean I can’t pick up a publication like this and leave it lying around the house:

I mean, the local Meat Rabbits guy is out of business, and let’s face it, he didn’t set a high bar for business branding.

Maybe I could even come up with the 49th key to rabbit raising success. And I wouldn’t share it.

On Facebook, I said:

I don’t get my fashion tips from Buzzfeed or other Internet sites. I take my fashion cues from old Cary Grant movies.

This, gentle reader, you know is true.

I forget what bit of Internet advice I saw that set me off about this, but I know I saw something about how hipsters roll their sleeves that identified Buzzfeed as someone whose fashion advice I’ll avoid from now until when Buzzfeed is as relevant as Geocities. I took offense because I roll my sleeves the way the forefathers of this great nation rolled their sleeves if they’d have rolled their sleeves, which I’m not sure they did because eighteenth century fashion and twentieth century fashion (not twenty-first century fashion, thank you) differ.

Where was I? I don’t know.

But not soon after I made that quip, I saw an abomination that reminded me one more place I don’t take my fashion cues from: fashion ads in slick magazines. Continue reading “When A Facebook Quip And Realty Collide. Not Really.” →

When my youngest child was in preschool at age 3, he won a pencil for something, and he told his teacher, “My daddy can put it in the garden!”

Which made no sense to the teacher, but it does make sense, sort of, if you know my son’s daddy.

I use pencils to mark things in the garden. When I plant a root that’s going to grow into something, I stick in a single pencil. For row crops, I use two pencils to mark the ends of the rows and then tie a string between them.

I mean, I could use a Contractor’s Grade Row Marker or a My Little Hobby Farm Organic Row Marker (either available at the local home center for $4.99 each), or I can use pencils I buy at Walmart at $3 for 20. They’re yellow and easy to see, and they are cheap and expendable.

So the lad likes to work in his garden with his father, and he cannot think of anything he’d rather do with a pencil that he won than to use it in the garden.

Although this is three years ago, I’m pretty sure he feels much the same way today, since I was working in one of the garden beds today, clearing away some weeds and old growth on the asparagus (and marking the asparagus with fresh pencils), and the boy was very upset that I was planting in the garden without him.

I recently read The Human Fly #15 (Marvel Comics 1978) with its cover line “War in the Washington Monument!”

The Human Fly is a stuntman who fights crime, and it’s apparently based on a real stunt man from the era who did charity events. But that’s neither here nor there.

The plot of this particular issue is that (SPOILER ALERT!) two Vietnam veterans, one confined to a wheel chair and one mentally unstable, have taken over the Washington Monument to protest the conditions at their local VA hospital where the greedy doctors enrich themselves at the expense of the suffering veterans. Don’t worry, the Human Fly prevents them from destroying the monument, but it’s still going to be closed to the public the next time you’re in Washington, D.C.

Thirty years later and many reforms later, and we’re pretty clear now it’s not the doctors who are the problem.

It’s pretty said that these particular plots can be recycled for a quarter of a century when dealing with government programs.

Note the family deal on this ride:

The family deal is only for three tickets, not four.

Back when my children were young, which was not so long ago and yet was a very long time ago, they’d watch a PBS program called Between the Lions which featured a segment called Cliff Hanger that had a little theme song:

Cliff Hanger,
Hanging from a cliff,
and that’s why they call him Cliff Hanger.

Ever since, I’ve been using this song for any three syllable phrase that ends in -er. Like the grocery store Price Cutter:

Price Cutter,
They’re cutting all the prices,
and that’s why they call them Price Cutter

(In the St. Louis area, you might want to substitute Price Chopper for the same effect.)

Or for the tabby I’ve nicknamed “Big Bopper”:

Big Bopper,
The bopper who is big.
That’s why they call him Big Bopper.

(Not to be confused with the recently former kitten I’ve nicknamed “Little Bopper” but who is now as large as “Big Bopper.”)

For some reason, Between the Lions came to my oldest boy’s mind recently, and he talked about a segment or episode of it at the dinner table. I said, “You know, that’s where I got the song from.” And he didn’t remember the Cliff Hanger segments or the theme song. Even though it was only a couple of years ago that he watched them.

Alas, this is why I must post these footnotes to the things I say to my children. Not just to prove that I’m not making everything up out of whole cloth, but also so that I remember in the coming years where these tropes come from.

Twilight at Nogglestead with snow cover looks like this:

Which reminds me of this Christmas album:

In my memory, the album cover is more grey than blue.

Which gives me a little Christmas feeling in February.

Not to be confused with the Christmas feeling I’ll get in March when I finally get to my thank you cards, but still.