Category: Life

So the National Weather Service had a little extra budget extracted from the invented money of the Fed, and they decided to engage in a bit of weather self-importance inflation of their own by naming winter storms.

Frankly, I look forward to the day when they give names to individual summer breezes. A’ course, they won’t go very far through the alphabet here in the Ozarks, but still. Summer Breeze Aidan can cool me for a second some July.

that ain’t me, babe, in the image for the UPS Store mailbox services:

I wear a black fedora.

And I don’t wear the damn brim up like a native hipster.

Please, be sensitive in your writing and right-thinking, and do not use the offensive term indie any more as an adjective, such as in indie movie.

They’re Native Hipster movies.

Highlights from Christmas 2012 at Nogglestead:

• Ammunition was given as a gift, ammunition was received as a gift.
  This….is….. SPRINGFIELD! Of course it was. Earlier this year, I accompanied my mother-in-law to the gun range so she could become familiar with her .38, so I got her a box of .38 rounds to encourage her to go in 2013. She got me a box, too, to encourage me to come with her. Her gift to me came in a bit of trickery; I had asked for a woodworking router for Christmas, and I unwrapped an Asus wireless router box, at which point my wife said, “Mom, that’s the wrong kind of router!” and they played it up as though it was a mistake. After they led me on for a bit, my mother-in-law told me to open the box, and inside was another wrapped box with a distinctive jingle of brass. At which point, my wife and I laughed harder because we had a box about the same size for her.
   
• Mizzou Leia
   
• My boys discovered that they could combine the marbles from their new Hungry Hungry Hippos game with the electronic car launcher from their new Hot Wheels set to create a devastatingly effective marble launching siege engine. That one chimp with the bone from the beginning of 2001? My direct ancestor, brother.

I hope yours was just as good.

In the mail today, I received two t-shirts from organizations I’ve recently supported. They’re a juxtaposition of sorts:

A public radio station and the National Review. I’m pretty lucky they did not come into contact with each other and destroy my mailbox.

I was going to proudly not bid on this auction because I expected it would be one of the later editions. But according to a seller answer to a question, it’s straight Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. eBay auction: Play D&D at Detroit’s Immortal ConFusion with 8 Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors!

Join 8 Fantasy & Science Ficiton authors for a classic game of Dungeons & Dragons at Detroit’s very own Immortal ConFusion this January

Join eight other fantasy authors in a classic game of D&D at Immortal ConFusion this coming January! The players include some of the best in the fantasy world: Pat Rothfuss, Peter V. Brett, Diana Rowland, Jim C. Hines, Mary Robinette Kowal and Sam Sykes. Authors Myke Cole and Saladin Ahmed will DM the game.

Of course, it’s still in Detroit, so there’s my reason for not buying myself one of those for Christmas.

But what’s up with the $7.15 shipping on it?

Also on the heavy commercial rotation during football games is this gem:

I work in QA, so I’m not going to be an early adopter of any computerized gee-gaws inserted into my body.

But I can’t help seeing that infusion of technology into the human body and think about how something like the cyborgization of your cellular phone and body might give the government warrantless access to your body.

No, thanks. Cuh-reepy, and that’s saying a lot coming from someone creepy.

Watching football the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten a heavy dose of this particular commercial:

Message: Chinese laptops make espionage easy.

Really? I guess Lenovo’s exciting ad agency doesn’t remember this:

The United States government is planning to spend roughly $13M USD on computers from Lenovo. The company, famous for buying up IBM’s PC manufacturing arm, is working on a deal with the US government to produce roughly 16,000 computers. Just recently, the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) has requested that Lenovo be probed for any concerns about possible spying, eavesdropping or worse.

The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues that a foreign intelligence like that of the Communist Party of China (CPC) can use its power to get Lenovo to equip its machines with espionage devices. Lenovo has strongly declined that it is involved in any such activities.

We bought a box of the miniature cereal boxes as a treat for the boys. It’s like a hotel minibar for children, and it yields the same gluttonous results.

My beautiful wife, who was once the Health Minister of the Alliance of Free Blogs, was astonished. “That’s six hundred calories,” she said.

Well, yes. They are boy children, and they consume about two thirds of a box of the new and improved 12 ounce boxes of cereal each morning, so, yeah. Wait until they get about twelve and fourteen.

Good god, man, the United States is an imperialist nation.

You don’t see us measuring things in kilometers, do you?

So I was discussing homonyms and homophones with the lad today, and I started thinking about words that are both homophones and homonyms. That is, words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings for the same spellings.

Speaking to a six-year-old, an early example that arises is butt which has two meanings (to hit with the head, the backside) and has the same pronunciation as a word spelled differently (but).

So I’ve been kind of zoning out of conversations and whatnot over the last two days as I run through words in my head. I got row (roe). My beautiful wife contributed ball (bawl).

A bit of a word on the homonyms: I disqualify slang words or meanings that are obviously related, like dough (doe), where dough’s meaning for money is because it uses bread as a metaphor or tie (Thai) because the men’s neckwear is called that because you tie it. Although one could argue that the Twin Ion Engine acronym is a different meaning, but it’s a fictional thing and an acronym and not a proper noun, which is okay. You see, the rules are in flux.

Sorry for injecting that virus into your brain’s clock cycles.

I guess I’m on a diet since I bought thin-sliced bacon by mistake. Some percentage fewer calories than the thick-sliced bacon I normally buy.

Why, it’s almost like health food.

I see Roberta X.’s moon over Roseholme Cottage and raise her one moonset over the Jones place:

I didn’t have time to mount my camera on a tripod for the shot as I didn’t have much time between deciding to take a photograph, getting the camera, and getting the photo, so it really doesn’t capture it adequately.

On the other hand, add this to one of my accomplishments in the 1:15 for this morning. If you can call it an accomplishment.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. X.

Hey, readers of The Adventures of Roberta X., I have a novel available called John Donnelly’s Gold that’s exactly like I Work on a Starship, except it’s not in first person, the main characters don’t actually have a job, there are no starships involved, and it’s a comic heist novel where four laid off IT employees seek revenge on the CEO of the company that laid them off. So it’s exactly the same in that it’s self-published. Roberta X. herself said of the novel, “it, too is quite an adventure and one that will have you wondering how it all turns out until the very end.” Also, it’s the only place in the world where the names Brian J. Noggle and Larry Correia are mentioned together unless my nephew talks about his annual Christmas gift.

My most productive hour and fifteen minutes of the whole day comes between 6:15, the time the alarm rings and preparation for school begins, and 7:30, when I load the children up into the truck for school.

In that magical period, I get the following done:

• Make breakfast for the children (really, it’s only pouring cereal and milk, but).
• Make lunch for the children (sandwiches, fruit, snack in a sack).
• Empty the dishwasher (if dishes are clean).
• Load dishwasher (if it’s empty and there are dishes to load).
• Make bed; sometimes, I’ll change the linens completely.
• Shave and dress.
• Start a load of laundry.
• Fold a load or two of laundry if available.
• Clean up children’s breakfast dishes.
• Get children dressed, enforce tooth brushing, get their assorted gear sorted and loaded.
• Brush teeth.
• Sometimes check a blog or two.

That’s a pretty quick moving hour and fifteen minutes, but it’s full of productive tasks, aside from the check a blog or two bit.

Yesterday, my next hour included:

• Go to the supermarket.
• Change linens on children’s beds.
• Make breakfast.
• Eat breakfast.
• Tap out a couple of blog posts.

Somehow, the day’s list of accomplishments runs downhill from there. I mean, I did some work and I checked some blogs, but sitting at my desks leads to a uniform experience where time just passes and only a few bullet points get done, not all of them salutatory (you checked Instapundit again? You played Civilization again?)

If I had the same focus as I have that, well, not first hour of the day–I’m often awake for an hour before the alarm rings, an hour unfocused because I’m “waking up,” I would be a millionaire. Or I would feel much more content with what I do every day. But.

The reason I’m so efficient in that hour is that I do it six times a week (including Sunday, where “church” replaces “school”), so I’m very efficient at it, having drilled in it for a couple of years now. The remainder of the day is much more fluid and changing, so I can’t have developed that efficiency and productivity that yield the (same daily) bullet points of accomplishment in them.

I guess I need to make a daily set of bullet points of accomplishment each day beyond those seventy-five minutes and then to work earnestly to ensure that they’re meaningful and that I recognize x hours of paying work, a single bullet point or a couple of lines on a time sheet, are valuable, too. Also, I should get some things done away from the computer to break it up and have, if not dramatic impact, at least some visible sign that I did something besides checking LinkedIn or Twitter.

Well, there’s the alarm. Time to get something done.

We’ve reached a point in our lives where we’re actually decorating for Christmas. For a while, we’ve put up a Christmas tree, since we had a family. But we’ve gone past that now and into putting little Christmasy tchotchkes around the house. Well, the living rooms. We’ve not hit that middle-of-life suburban point where we swap out artwork on the walls–unlike a certain aunt of mine–but we do put up mementos. Mostly it comes from me, of course, with my personal-relicophilia. If my mother put it up on the shelf once when I was young, it represents a Christmas tradition going back throughout the centuries. Now that the number of people with whom I’ve shared actual Christmas traditions from my youth dwindles, I need these silly little memory triggers to make sure I remain increasingly depressed during the Christmas holidays. Now, what was I saying before I was rummaging through the junk drawer for single-edged razor blades?

Ah, yes.

So now that we’re doing the little knick-knackery for Christmas, we spread them out on hearths, on bookshelves, on the piano, and whatnot. We disperse them so that when you look, you might catch a little bit of the spirit or whatnot. However, at the end of the holiday season, when we take down the decorations in early January, we don’t always get all of the bric-a-brac back in the boxes. For a week or two, we’ll find another something here or there. A sleigh. A pine cone. A stuffed Christmas tree. Something that had faded into the background over the course of the month that our eyes skipped right over it when it was time to de-Christmastiate.

If we found it in a couple of weeks, we’d still have the wherewithal to pull the boxes out of the most remote storage location in the house, which we always reserve for Christmas gear (although at Nogglestead, it’s a small closet beneath the steps, where we have to bend and twist to get the things out, but it’s not as bad as the attic at Old Trees). But after enough time has elapsed, we sort of let it go and either tuck the tchotchke into a drawer or just let it hang out for the year.

This year’s Straggler of the Year is a little elf-bearing-gifts on the clock:

My Nana gave me that a couple years ago, sometime after my first son was born. I think it came with a little boy doll that she gave us to decorate his room. For a while, it did, but after we left Old Trees for Nogglestead, the doll moved to the basement and the little elf rightfully became a Christmas decoration. Well, it would have, if we put it away after Christmas.

But atop the clock, it’s outside the normal range of the eye as it travels through the room. I sort of hid it a bit behind the clock’s facade for much of the year, but now that it’s appropriate again, he’s stepped out.

Hopefully, one of you will remind me sometime in January to pack him away this year. Undoubtedly, though, next year we will have a different winner of this annual award.

Good god, man! Have we unlearned so much as to unleash this upon our young again?

Purple pants? Must we repeat everything of the 1970s again?

Allow me to dictate a rule of fashion to you people who aspire to be something like men, except with sore thumbs not from hitting them with a hammer while trying to be something like a man (a real man has evolved to hitting the actual nail) but from playing video games all day (although some real gamers would say they’ve evolved to have strong thumb muscles that no longer get sore, with which I would quibble over the word evolve). At any rate, the rule is:

No purple pants unless you are a clown.

Which is a bit of a tautology. If you’re wearing purple pants, you are a de facto clown. And not a scary, nightmare-fodder clown. A clown like Shakespeare would have wrote about. A buffoon from, well, not the country in the modern case, but rather from some enclave in the city where they have Brooks Brothers stores and where women smile warmly and not in mockery when walking next to someone wearing purple pants. Although I am not 100% sure that the female model in this ad is not laughing at the model in the purple pants.

I’ll not be shopping there, thank you. I’m holding out hope that George Zimmmer hasn’t loaded Men’s Wearhouse with these things so I don’t have to deal with them in the event that I buy a good suit in the near future. I’d hate to have to (and by hate to I mean “would really love to but would be conflicted by the expense of”) go to London to get a real bespoke suit.