Category: Life

I posted “The Gift Schtick” in 2007; it’s an essay about how you can come into a gift-giving theme for a person based on a particular brand, icon, or image that the recipient likes. For example, my friend the Elvis impersonator gets some Elvis kitsch whenever I send him a gift. My one aunt got chicken things (although the essay says she liked geese, and prior to that she’d liked flamingoes, so maybe I was never that close to her and got her more random than thematic gifts every year).

For a while about ten years ago, I bought Duck Dynasty things for my aunt who passed away in 2019. She’d mentioned she hated the show, so I gave her obnoxious things I came across such as a beach towel and a shotglass set to supplement sincere gifts.

On Sunday, I came across this on the free book cart at church:

The Duck Commander Devotional. It made me think of my aunt.

You know, when I’m wandering antique malls, I’m often drawn to eagle or owl tchotchkes as my mother collected them, so they were safe gifting. I only have a couple such items from her as inheritances–a single owl and a single eagle piece of wall décor.

I didn’t pick up the devotional, and I don’t buy the eagles or owls, but the gift schtick association helps me to remember people with whom the individual motifs are associated. Whenever I see a Father Christmas Santa, I think of a family friend we see infrequently and for whom we are not supposed to buy Christmas gifts (but we do).

It makes me wish I actually had more gift shticks. They’re like abstract personal relics for loved ones.

At any rate, I did not take the devotional as they are not really my thing.

Also, note the scorecard for the borrowed words in the blog:

Yiddish: 2 (schtick, tchotchke)
German: 1 (kitsch)
French: 2 (décor, motif)

I checked it out because I thought kitsch might be a third Yiddish borrowing, but it was not. Then I threw in the French borrowed words just to have a third language to list. Because blogging is about the game inside the game.

This summer, I read a couple of small collections of poetry that were given away by the Salesian Missions in the 20th century (The Way and Priceless Gifts). Late last week, I learned that I myself was on a Salesian Mission fundraising list:

I’m on a lot of Catholic charity fundraising lists since I subscribe to First Things (which is turning more into what the National Review used to be back in the old days rather than a Catholic magazine per se–it even has a lot of writers that used to or still write for the National Review and is getting into the habit of reviewing their books), Touchstone (which I will let lapse as I have not found it particularly engaging), and The New Oxford Review.

It’s possible that I’ve gotten Salesian Missions pitches for years and have not paid attention. They have not, however, had little poetry collections to my sadness.

I mean, I open all the pitches and harvest anything useful. Most of the time I collect the address labels which are so popular now (one day, the return address labels will stop coming, and I don’t want to have to buy my own like it’s the Reagan-Bush years, for crying out loud). Sometimes I get a notepad (I have not only a drawer full of them with my name on it, but many with my sainted mother’s name on them–I should probably make more to-do lists or something). I get little feet medallions, angel coins, and a rosary once. But no collections of poetry from Salesian Missions.

Maybe that’s reserved for the donor lists. Maybe I should send them $5 sometime and see what I get.

I did get a couple of Christmas cards out of this envelope. Perfect for second-strike Christmas card capability. Or for if we find we have enough leftovers from years past so that we do not need to buy a box this year. Especially the ones with glitter on them.

I mentioned to my ha’brother when I visited this weekend that I used to live just down the road. Which is true for some values of “road” and “just.”

I mean, US 67 runs through Oconomowoc.

In the St. Louis area, US67 runs up Lemay Ferry Road and turns at Lindbergh where it runs around the city and crosses to Illinois at Alton, Illinois. I lived in Lemay, before this blog. Was there ever such at time? Yes, but it was last century. And Lemay is not far from that corner where it turns.

This photo is not the corner where it turns; sharp-eyed readers from St. Louis will note that Highway 21 is Tesson Ferry Road, not Lemay Ferry Road–St. Louis has a lot of roads named for the ferries which were replaced by bridges, of course (and St. Louis also has a lot of roads named for bridges). But the light at Lemay Ferry Road changed before we could get the photo.

Also, note the town of Oconomowoc is close to Okauchee and Okauchee Lake. Which means that I was near two locations specifically mentioned in my poetry: “Okauchee Light” and on the highway (I39 six miles south of Tonica) from “Central Illinois Solo”. I was not far from Bee Tree Park in South St. Louis County, but we did not swing that far south in our travels (Jefferson Barracks to lunch to I44). It made me think of specific places I have named in my poetry, and that might be two of three (although some further review might be needed for an accurate accounting). At any rate, I thought about places named in my poetry for a bit during my drive home. You can conduct your own review of named places in Coffee House Memories.

Sorry, I digress.

So in addition to my home in Lemay being “just down the road” from Nogglestead (the Old Wire Road which runs through Battlefield, Missouri, and used to run through my neighbor’s pasture was a part of Telegraph Road in St. Louis County–both followed the telegraph line from Jefferson Barracks to Fort Smith, Arkansas), it’s just down the road from my ha’brother’s house. Of course, my brother in Missouri wins here, too: He lived in my sainted mother’s old house in Lemay after she passed, and he also later lived in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, so he has lived just down the road from my ha’brother twice.

During our trip to Wisconsin this past weekend, I told my beautiful wife that someone in the flight path of Mitchell Field painted “Welcome to Cleveland” on his roof to troll inbound air travellers (although he did it before troll was the word for it–seriously, where did that come from? Certainly not The Three Billy Goats Gruff).

So Facebook, listening in, showed me this particular sponsored post again:

Hey, if it’s in a Facebook sponsored post, or a funny story that Brian J. tells, it must be true.

As I mentioned, I was in Davenport, Iowa, over the weekend. As it happened, the Source Book Store was only a block and a half from our hotel (and a block from the conference center), so I stopped in there. It’s 5000 square feet of books across several floors in an old building. The proprietor, an older gentleman, said his grandfather started the store 89 years ago in a different location and gestured to a painting of an older man reading a book before some bookshelves. I only looked in a couple of places: Poetry (looking for more early Edna St. Vincent Millay editions), literature, and local history (so that if we attend this conference again next year I can tell my beautiful wife all about Davenport).

Also, if I thought I was safe from a book signing merely because I was several hundred miles away from ABC Books, I was sorely mistaken. The conference did not have many vendors present, but one was a table with a large display from an author.

So I got a couple of his books, too, but not one of each–he had like twenty books scattered among four or five series and one-offs.

At the Source Book Store, I got:

• A 1909 edition of Old School Day Romances by James Whitcomb Riley. I wonder if I should order more mylar for book jackets just to cover this book (and some others).
• The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway, his account of a summer in Spain watching bull fights.
• The River and the Prairie by William Robu. “Do you know Bill?” the proprietor asked. Apparently, the author used to call the book store when he was looking for things, but the proprietor is not sure if the author is still alive.

From author Ben Wolf, I got:

• Unlucky, a one-off Western.
• The Ghost Mine, the first book in the Tech Ghost series about an energy mine that has gone silent and the investigation thereof.
• Winterspell, a cyberpunk dystopian thriller and the start of the series which sounds maybe a little like William Devore’s Earthborn series, the second of which I have around here somewhere.

In all likelihood, I will pick up the Riley book and the history first. As to Ben Wolf’s sci-fi/fantasy books, I still have to get through five or six Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books to get through sometime soon, which might be in the next decade, first.

It sure has been quiet here, ainna? Well, gentle reader, this weekend I traveled to Davenport, Iowa, for CornCon 2024, a cybersecurity conference at which my beautiful wife spoke. The conference was on Friday and Saturday, but we rolled up some US highways through the river country to reach one of the Quad Cities on Thursday. And I was too shy to ask the locals what the fourth of the quad is. I mean, I know Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport. But what is the fourth? Bettendorf? Spoiler alert: It was East Moline according to Wikipedia; before East Moline was added, it was the Tri-Cities, and after Bettendorf grew, some people took to calling it “Quint Cities” but that has not become as popular. It also explains why some businesses I saw were named Tri Cities something and one was Quint Cities something.

At any rate, I ended up attending only five of the sessions as cybersecurity, especially at the executive level, ain’t my bag, baby. But I spent a couple of hours walking around the downtown area of Davenport along the river. It’s a nice little city, but it has its panhandlers and homeless like other cities.

On our way to dinner on Thursday night, my wife said it was the return of City Brian. I asked her what she meant, and she said that I was a little more purposeful. Which is I guess her way of saying that I assume a more assertive posture and walk faster in the city. I certainly adopt a “Don’t mess with me, man” attitude. And when she asked if I had my lanyard and convention pass at one point, I pointed out that I had the lanyard looped around my belt and the badge tucked into my pocket because wearing a conference badge outside of the conference center is like saying, “Pick me, some dude!”

You know, I guess that’s a habit of mine where I go, the little local recon a couple of blocks around where I am staying; I did the same when I traveled for business to Chicago in 2022. I just like to know where things are around me, the restaurants and bars, the groceries, the other shops. I also strolled briefly on the riverfront–on late Saturday morning around 10:30, a 5K was finishing up–they must have started later than the ones do down here, which begin at 7am or 8am. A bandshell held a single guy with a guitar and some backing MP3s singing some Dave Matthews songs–that bandshell seemingly had a band constantly, as we could hear them if we stepped onto Brady Street at any time of day or evening. I strolled through a car show, and another singer or band was playing at a farmer’s market down the road. I wandered past the Scott County Courthouse, police headquarters, city hall, and a Federal courthouse on 4th Street. The symphony hall was attached to the conference center, and during one afternoon session on Friday, I heard the trumpet warming up in the hallway outside the theater which had been set up for a gala that night. So it was like a real city, for sure. My wife said it seemed more like a city than Springfield, but that’s probably mostly because the buildings were taller. In the business districts and downtown here, the buildings top out at four or five stories.

Was there a book store a block away? Yes. But you’ll hear a little more about that later.

On Sunday, we attended church in Davenport and then drove over to the Milwaukee area since we were almost there (almost meaning a three hour drive, but that is two thirds of the way). I visited my father’s grave. I visited my 96-year-old grandmother, probably for the last time (which I think every time I see her every couple of years). I stopped in on my half-brother whom I have not actually seen in person for seventeen years (!). I mean, I’ve been in touch with him via text message every couple of months and I did a video call with a couple years (a decade?) ago, but I haven’t seen him since the family reunion in Wisconsin on my oldest son’s first birthday (as it happens, it was his youngest’s first birthday, leading me to wonder if we are only destined to meet on first birthdays). He’s been in Massachussetts and Arizona for most of that time, and the last time I was in Wisconsin, he was moving that day so he didn’t have time to get together. But, still. Seventeen years. Sobering.

On Monday, we drove back from Wisconsin. We stopped in St. Louis for lunch, and I left some flowers at my mother’s grave, which means that I visited both of my parents’ graves on consecutive days which is a feat I am unlikely to repeat. Actually, I wonder if I’ll ever make it home to Wisconsin again.

We made it home safely before sunset last night to find that our boys, left to their own devices now that they’re eighteen and sixteen, did not handle the responsibility very well at all. Which is unfortunate, as it will give us pause in planning other trips without the boys.

So I am back at it. Unfortunately, I did not read a lot on the trip, but I did listen to a lecture series. Stay tuned.

Because so much climate change relies on:

• People moving around so that they don’t have actual experience year-over-year in the same location;
• Which allows controlling people and shallow parrots thereof to proclaim “This is the most year ever!”

The fact that it is going to almost be 90 this weekend is not the most year ever as my Facebook memories allow:

It was this warm ten years ago, so 90 degrees in October falls into the range of the possible and not a new extreme.

As I have finished the last bits of the record shelving I started to build on Labor Day Weekend, I thought I’d show you what the Nogglestead record library looks like after a decade’s worth of book sales and visits to the antique malls ostensibly for “Christmas shopping” but in the “one for you, one for me” mindset.

In the living room, we have lifted the console stereo that I just “repaired” onto the long shelf and the two little emergency wings which I had to add when I discovered right after Labor Day that the shelf was not deep enough to hold the stereo. So I added a couple of little pieces to place along the sides–the console stereo rests on a single “leg” which is a crescent along the front and sides. The back is about a half inch above where the weight rests, so I only had to build for the sides:

I’ve moved the boxed sets except for the Beethoven collection to those shelves, and I moved all the Christmas records onto the shelf (to the right). The little bookshelf to the right has the Beethoven set (not complete, unfortunately) and some miscellany.

In the parlor, the long shelves beside the desk hold most of the collection:

You can see the gap at the back where the Christmas records were. The boxed sets had been stacked in rows in a giant column next to the shelves in the corner. You can see on the desk the albums I recently bought, which I will listen to once before putting in mylar and onto shelves. Beneath the desk you can see the two boxes of records we got from my mother-in-law’s downsizing; we have room for them now, and some room for maybe…. Organizing the records? Someday.

When my beautiful wife took an office for her business downtown, she took a shelf full of CDs with her, which left this wall bare, so I built some shorter shelves:

My wife’s mother’s former records will go here when we unbox them together. I should have enough record sleeves for them. And with that, all of our record library will be shelved finally.

And you are not mistaken, eagle-eyed reader; when my wife gave up her office in town–a nonprofit with which she works has space across the street from her former office where she can work while in town–so she brought the CD tower back, and it’s now in the foyer. Which is an odd place for it as we never (hardly ever) play CDs upstairs even though we have a 100-disc CD changer from back when that was a very big deal. Come to think of it, we hardly ever play CDs at all unless they have audio courses on them.

But records? Aw, yeah, you know we’re hipsters.

How many records is that? you might wonder. To be honest, I don’t even know. I’d have to go back and count my orders for 100-packs of sleeves and then guess from there. A thousand? Fifteen hundred? I honestly don’t know. Ask me again sometime if we get them organized and in a database. But the real question is: Do we have more copies of Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Whipped Cream and Other Delights? I am not sure–we probably have four or more of each–but probably the former which we will get to listen to soon.

A while ago, when cleaning under the kitchen sink, including the little tip-in tray that we have immediately in front of the basin which contains, the tray contains, not the basin contains, a sponge, a razor blade, and sometimes the rubber complete water stop for the sink, a while ago when cleaning out things from below the sink or that tray, I threw out a little brush like this. I thought it came with some set of bottle cleaners, perhaps baby bottle cleaners, perhaps a brush to clean the interior of the nipples–having such a brush some fifteen years after my boys stopped drinking from baby bottles would be fairly normal for the Noggle household, and by Noggle household I mean me who doesn’t like to throw anything away even though I don’t have an immediate use for it.

At any rate, I recently discarded a brush like this–or thought about discarding it but threw it into one of the bins of cleaning tools under the sink but not the tray.

I also recently discarded a baster because the baster, which my beautiful wife uses pretty exclusively to draw the grease from pans of meatloaf, developed a crack which limited its efficacy. It might have developed this crack because I have, on occasion, tried to jam the corner of a dish cloth into it. Once or twice, it might have made its way to the dishwasher. All the while, a brush that might well have come with it languished in the cabinet.

So I’m posting this here, gentle reader, as this blog is my artificial memory assistance, and I trust that it will help me remember what that little brush is for the next time my wife makes meatloaf.

Assuming, of course, I happen upon this post whilst the meatloaf is in the oven. So perhaps all is vanity.

You know, even when I was reading Hondo and looking at the films atop my video cabinet for something to watch, it took me several passes to realize that this John Wayne movie which I bought in in 2023, a year before I bought the book, is the film version of the book. And after I finished the book and clearly after I made the connection, I popped in the videocassette.

I won’t recap the plot of the film as it does closely track with the plot of the book, although it does cut out some of the interiority of the characters, especially Hondo. In the book, he’s a rougher character at the outset. In the film, he’s John Wayne.

I will comment on some of the places where the film would have differed had it been made in the 21st century. Uh, spoilers below the fold (but no pictures of Geraldine Page, the only woman in the film):

Continue reading “Movie Report: Hondo (1953)” →

Yesterday, I said something was not a poem:

The housebound, television-informed senior wanted steak,
went to order Walmart delivery
but gasped because the price was so high,
her vote for Kamala
safely in the mail.

That, gentle reader, is contemporary commentary with line breaks.

Why do I not think it’s really a poem?

• No real imagery to speak of; I mean, I guess you could “see” a television or a mailbox if you stretch, but the text is not very evocative of any senses.
• Not univeralish. It speaks of one situation, one moment in time, and a very particular situation: The election of this year. Would a reader in 2038 know who Kamala was? I hope not! Assuming anyone reads in 2038, and he or she likely won’t be reading this.

It’s short, though, and might serve as filler if I were padding out a book of poetry, but probably not. It targeted to people of a certain political persuasion in an overheated environment instead of all of humanity even if it’s not derogatory to the opposition’s supporters.

So, no, not a poem. Not worth thinking about or mentioning again. Although your mileage may vary.

Spoken as a man who read part of an Ideals magazine’s Easter issue which will be forty when next Easter rolls around and then went to bed with the doors open and thought, “Ah, the smell of spring” because he was under the influence of poems about new flowers.

So your mileage and my sanity may vary.

I mentioned that I inherited a console stereo from my aunt who passed away in 2019 and that I took delivery of the stereo courtesy my brother and nephew in December of that year. When it came, it had a known issue of the turntable not working, and I placed it on my list of someday: I would talk to the guys at the local record store and get their recommended repairman out to fix it or start taking it apart myself to figure out what was wrong. Someday.

Well, that someday became now because once my moose of an oldest son and I lift this stereo onto the record shelf that will go under it. The other record shelves from the Labor Day weekend are already holding records in the parlor; however, when sizing the shelf to go under the stereo, I go the width/length of the console correct, but I did not factor in the depth of the unit. the shelf is 13″ deep and the console is 18″ deep. So I constructed a couple of little “wings” to go under the ends of the stereo. I built them that they can hold records, without the backing I usually put on the units as this might just end up being a tunnel for cats. I screwed the two-by-fours together over the weekend, but this was apparently an Ozarks rain dance, so I have not yet been able to paint them.

The delay, though, has given me time to consider the problem of the turntable. So I watched a couple of YouTube videos on console stereo turntable repair and started my troubleshooting by popping one of the hillbilly gospel records I got in the grab bag gift I received in May. It kind of picked up some sound but not clearly, but the sound was strong. So I looked closely at the needle and cartridge and–wait a minute, this arm does not appear to actually have a needle.

So I went to TurntableNeedles.com and found what I hoped I needed (I was going on the console model number, which they do not recommend because someone might have replaced the cartridge which holds the needle which would mean the needle won’t match the console spec). I ordered it, waited for eleven days for the first class envelope to arrive, and then….

In two minutes, I popped out the old needle assembly which did, indeed, lack a stylus and popped in the new needle, and….

Hillybilly gospel loud and in the deep, rich low sound of an old console stereo.

I speculate that console stereos have that deep, rich sound because they were optimized for the lower end frequencies that AM radio preferred (or so I learned from Jean Shepherd’s Pomp and Circumstance on a show where he talked about the different microphones and why they changed–FM handles higher frequencies better, which might be one of the reasons vocal styles changed from low crooners in the AM days to higher pop music singers when FM became more prevalent).

So it took me five years to spend the two minutes to fix it. Which is about what one would expect from me.

I played a couple of records which sounded good, but about the third or fourth, they began to get stuck. Maybe I have the needle on the wrong side (it’s a needle you can turn for different reasons, one of which I presume is to better work with 78rpm records). Or perhaps I just need to tape a penny on the arm. Time will tell. And, to be honest, it might take another five years to get around to it. Otherwise, I will have to rearrange the living room to better support spending more time in there reading.

A week ago last Friday, I received an unexpected FedEx package. The contents reeked of scam.

A genealogy researcher–actually, one of a whole firm of them–found someone who just filed for probate on behalf of the estate of a distant, up-and-down the removed generations of my family tree, relative and offered to retain an attorney to place a claim on the estate as an unknown heir.

I asked my brother if he received one, as he should if it had any chance of legitimacy. He did not; I posted on the work Slack that I was pleased that some grifter thought I was a big enough whale to try to impress me with a FedEx.

A little while later, my brother reported that he, too, received one, and he called the number. My brother told me that the story was that the person died without a will and without any close relatives, and if recipients did not put in a claim, that the money would go to the state. That’s what my brother said, anyway, so I started to dream a bit, a little more than I do with lottery tickets. Even a small windfall would come in handy at Nogglestead these days as major household systems need repair or replacement–a roofing inspector from our preferred roofing company came out to look at our single skylight, and his recommendation was to pray for hail storms this spring. So I thought maybe we could replace that, and perhaps the deck…. But when I actually read the letter I received, the story my brother told did not match the letter.

But: I did a little research of my own, and discovered:

• The probate court filing is Personal Representative Supervised With Will.
• The cousin on the mother’s side is the deceased’s first cousin, not some distant relative whose relationship to the deceased is as convoluted as ours.
• The maternal cousin is not a she as mentioned in the FedEx letter.
• The common ancestor is our great-great-grandmother who was sibling to the deceased’s ancestor. However, they were 2 of 12 siblings, which means this FedEx could have gone to twenty or fifty people, not just my brother, me, and our remaining aunt on that side of the family.

So: The “investigator”‘s cut is a third, minus the fees for the Missouri attorney that he has to hire (and anything shared between the attorney and the “investigator” such as a finder’s fee) of whatever settlement is made. Given there is a will, they might be angling for a “go away” settlement of some sort, where the estate is big enough that the executors/personal representatives can carve out some cash that is less than actually fighting the claim in court. To be shared amongst all claimants who received FedEx envelopes and signed on. So they might get a coupon for their next spurious claim for free at the end of the day. Illegal? Probably not. Sketchy? Eh….

I, on the other hand, cannot in good conscience lay claim as the deceased had at least one direct cousin, and a will, and the “investigator” got the pronoun wrong and might have misled my brother on the phone. Also, I am skeptical and suspicious, probably too much so.

On another limb since I’ve already used both hands, my brother has triggered the process (or is one of many of our other cousins twice or three times removed who have). So it’s entirely possible that in a couple of months, my brother might not only have a 25-acre homestead but a million dollars or two. At which point, I will really have to ask myself if I’m playing this game right.

And I wonder how I would react if my brother’s portion of a settlement is indeed sizable. How high would my price be? Where would my chest-thumped integrity go then?

I mentioned last month that painting the fence and tending the pool left me with a number of empty buckets in my garage and in my driveway, and I was not sure if I knew what I was going to do with them.

Well, this weekend, I used a bunch of them in lieu of saw horses to keep the new record shelves I was building out of the grass so I could paint them.

Also in Nogglestead news: I have finally built the record shelving that I’ve needed since, well, before I got deluged with free records in May.

I have three short stackable shelves to fit the empty wall in the parlor where we used to have a CD holder. But my beautiful wife took it to furnish her office downtown, giving us space for more record storage.

But! She gave up the office before I built the shelving, so the CDs are now in our foyer.

I hope to put the longer set of shelving under our console stereo. However, in the middle of the night, I spent far too many brain cycles thinking, “Aw, man, I measured for the length of the stereo, but what if the shelving is not as deep as the stereo? What will I do then?”

I guess I will find out this afternoon when I bring the shelving in.

And then I guess I’ll finally put the buckets in the shed with the extra wood that I bought for the shelving which I did not end up using.

Will this be enough to make me comfortable going to the book sale next weekend and buying a stack of fifty cent records? This, too, will be TBD until I get all the records off of the desk in the parlor (and maybe out of the boxes under the desk in the parlor which we received as part of my mother-in-law’s downsizing two and a half years ago–not to mention the box or two of my mother’s pop records which have been in storage for a long time as well).

The cardboard twelve-pack cartons that convince you they’re soda dispensers.

They’re oriented so the cans are on their sides, which means that if you tear them to act as a dispenser by tearing the top of one end comes off with perforations, it leaves a half of the end glued to hold the cylinders in. However, one often over-tears or loosens the glue holding the bottom part of the end, leading to unwanted dispensation.

Also, they ensure that they consume the cubic volume of 12 cans in your refrigerator whether they contain 11 cans or only 1.

My oldest has taken to bringing them home and opening them according to the instructions. After which I empty them and stand the cans on their ends properly in the refrigerator to make room for delicious leftovers, and that lasts a couple of days until the next twelve packs arrive.

when I lived there: Public housing is home: The story behind the stories of Greentree apartments in Milwaukee:

Through the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, I spent 15 months capturing life at Greentree, a low-income housing complex that sits on 14 acres on Milwaukee’s north side and is home to more than 700 residents.

An apartment in there was my first home, where my father fished my first bike out of the communal dumpster.

We moved into the housing projects about the time I was four.

After finishing my death march of painting all of my fence in a single year, I had another project to tackle: The toy box in the pool area that we use to store pool toys and floats.

It started out as a recepticle for my young children’s outdoor toys. You know, big plastic trucks, various balls, a wiffle ball set, a batting tee, a big ball-with-handle for bouncy rides, plastic lawnmowers, and so on. As it was built to hold large toys and with the thought that young boys might climb it, I built it strong. And, let’s face it, fine furniture at Nogglestead, at least the things I build, are really just two by fours screwed together (see also the record shelves I built five years ago). Although the toy box had some two by twos and one by threes screwed on it as well for some reason. Aesthetics? Extra stability? Who knows.

Well, my boys outgrew the outdoor toys, so I painted the toy box red and moved it to the pool area where it could hold the pool toys, noodles, floats, balls, dive toys, and such.

Over the course of a decade, the dripping toys made their mark on it. I noticed that the base of it was rotting at one side. So I thought I would bang out a couple of boards and replace them and repaint it.

Oh, but no. The rot was not just the end of the boards on the bottom, but also the framing holding the walls to the sides and the smaller boards at the bottom as well.

So my youngest and I completely took it apart, cut down the rotting boards, and rebuilt a new similar structure from the remnants, and painted it red again from the same can of paint, and:

It’s smaller, but that’s okay. Even though I’m personally spending more time in the pool these days–I try to hit it once a day, but that’s fallen to only a couple times a week this month–it has lost its enchantment for the boys, who hit the pool four or five times a day the first summer we let them swim without us. I have been told that the oldest got into the pool for the first time this year last week, and the youngest has let us drag him out there a handful of times. We haven’t had anyone over to swim in a long time. Maybe once last year?

So it might be the last time I deal with the pool fence and certainly with this toy box.

And, I am pleased to say, the garbage men did not balk at a little scrap wood in the bin. Which is another story in itself.

But what shall I do with this small amount of red paint I have remaining? Put it back in the garage for the next round of garage cleaning, which is on track to be a multi-year project.

Ah, Brian J., you might wonder, what has your fecund imagination invented to worry about today?

What if a coronal mass ejection hits the earth and is mistaken for an act of war by a nuclear power?

It might keep me up at tonight. If we make it that long.

(Inspired by a post at Silicon Graybeard.)