Category: Life

On this day in 2014, I posted:

Some of my behavior leaves my cats absolutely meowless.

Although the current crop does not actually meow anyway. Chimera cries and makes this weird gasping sound like he can’t even; Isis trills; Nico squeaks; Muad’Dib trills a little and raaars; well, I guess Cisco does sort of meow. And two of our relatively recent departures, Foot and Athena, did not meow either. Foot grunted like a rabbit, and Athena made this hideous sound like the pterodactyl in the video game Joust.

What are we doing to these poor cats to make them unable to speak the language ascribed to them by cartoons?

Was it only last year where I bought and placed a little resin Santa on the upstairs mantel to see if anyone noticed? Man, it has been a long year. I guess that’s why I feel as though I have aged so much, although partly that has been not hitting the gym or the dojo often enough.

At any rate, I decided that I would keep the tradition alive (although I honestly thought I’d skipped a year–I mean, this year has gone on forever–in 2024, the days were long, but the year was also long), and I looked for a cheap tchotchke at the Walmart. I found one that was under $2 which is good because I no longer have a fulltime job and am not sure if when I’ll get another.

Behold, the 2024 Christmas Pre-Straggler:

A little snow-covered church. A part of what looks like could be a little tealight-fitting village set which means I can collect them all over the course of years.

As with last year, I have just quietly placed it on the mantel, and we will see if anyone notices.

I might keep the tradition alive next year, but the year after that, the only anyone who might reside here to notice besides me might be my beautiful wife. Unlikely, but possible.

Also, “pre-straggler” is probably not the word I am looking for. I should probably think of something else. But I do have a whole year to mull that over.

I’m a cleaning expert — you’ve been using too much laundry detergent

Ignoring, again, from the self-proclaimed expert voices on the Tik-Tok clamoring from attention, I know, gentle reader, that I’m not using too much. To be honest, I’ve never felt the need to use a whole capful. Maybe when I first started doing my laundry in college, but not in a long time. I’ve recognized that the overage was just rinsed down the drain.

Same with toothpaste. Wait, no: I’m a toothbrushing expert: You’re using too much toothpaste. I just put a button, a small dop on the toothbrush, just enough to see I’ve put something on the toothbrush. It helps I have an electric toothbrush with a small head that only holds a drop that’s about the size of the toothpaste tube aperature. Even then, as I start brushing, most of it falls intact into the sink but I have enough froth to get my teeth clean. People shouldn’t rely on advertising, which feature great big gouts of toothpaste on toothbrushes, as instructions or suggestions for use.

And unlike other dental experts who are on the Tik-Tok who say flossing is worthless, all I have to say is if you’ve knocked something out of the recesses between your teeth while flossing after brushing, you’re more of an expert than they are. Maybe you need a Tik-Tok.

I might have alluded to my precarious job situation throughout the year. The company I worked for was the subsidiary of a larger company, and for a long time, I expected that the parent company would assume the subsidiary into it and probably lay off everyone. So for most of 2023, I was kind of applying for jobs.

Then, in January, it happened: My employer joined the mothership. All non-engineering people were let go (with six weeks notice plus severance, so it was pretty generous). Engineers were assimilated into the big mess that was the parent company (which was integrating three or four companies and their tech stacks at the same time).

Except: The parent company does not have QA Engineers. So they kept the two of us on and kept the whole engineering team on tenterhooks as the parent company was not very clear about the onboarding and expectations for our company’s remaining team members. Over time, it became clear that everyone on our team would have to become full stack engineers as that’s all the parent company had. The two front-end engineers were not excited. Neither was I.

So I quit.

The actual thought process was more agonizing than that. The job market is trash. I broadened my job search this year, and I’ve had only a few interviews. And the only offer I got was for a part-time contract in the evenings. And that, gentle reader, was enough for me to take the leap back to consulting.

So I’ve been a little quiet here as I deal with the fallout from it. We’re going to have to retrench a bit here at Nogglestead, which means tightening our belts even more. But don’t cry for us, Argentina. We’ve got plenty to fall before we bounce. No GoFundMes or Patreon pitches for you. But if you know someone who wants a little QA work done, you know a guy.

You know, gentle reader, it is the simple joys of life. On Monday, I mentioned how I thwart my own contentment.

But I do experience some simple joys, albeit they’re seemingly few and far between, and they’re not only recognized and their passage mourned while they’re happening, but I seem to forget them once they’re done.

Case in point: One day a couple of weeks ago, my youngest and I walked out to look at the garden and around the property.

He is finishing the cross country season, and he’s started applying for jobs. Which means that he, like his brother, will spend more time outside the home than in it, and these simple, unscripted, and ad hoc times together are coming close to an end. Not that we have a lot of them now; it’s only because he was grounded from electronic devices that directed him from his room and online games. So he was eager to be entertained.

I’d planted some cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes in September as I expected we’d have a couple of months before it got cold. After all, it was cool a couple of months later in the year this year, with it only getting warm in late June. So I figured it would be warm a couple of months later than normal and we could sneak in a late autumn crop. Well, we had a surprise freeze one night which ended the cabbage and cauliflower dreams, but it only seems to have slowed the radishes down. Which is fine; I like radishes more than cauliflower or cabbage.

We looked in on the garden, and then we wandered to the opposite side of the property by the wind break. I don’t even remember why. But the Osage orange trees were dropping the hedge balls, their softball-sized inedible (unless things are really bad) fruits. So we spent a couple of minutes picking them up and throwing them at a tree some yards off. We had about the same arm strength and accuracy, I’m proud to say, mostly because I’m pleased with my performance.

A nice little moment which I enjoyed even as I knew they were coming too soon to an end.

And I probably won’t personally remember that day too clearly on my own in a couple of years. Like I don’t remember watching them in the now-long-departed sandbox. I kind of remember running around in the enclosed back yards with them when they were toddlers. But once they were in school and I was back to fulltime work, time has been a runaway escalator to our soon-to-be (in a couple of years, which is the future tense of recently or was just).

I just read something that says that when you remember something, you actually re-write the memory with some modifications, so the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory can become.

Still, hopefully the next book on Buddhism or mindfulness will be the one that silences the double-effect narrator in my head who very vocally mourns each passing moment before it passes.

In the time between now and then, we have had the windy days that have denuded the windbreak, but the hedge balls remain visible through the leaves. Something must eat them or they break down very well, as we never remove them but they’re always gone by spring.

When filling out my address, I sometimes get Brookline Station pre-populated in the city field.

As I have mentioned (most extensively twelve years ago), my post office is up in Brookline, which was a small railroad town on the Frisco line. So I always assumed that the Station referred to the train station up in Brookline.

For some reason, I was looking at a map recently and noticed that it had another entry called Brookline Station far distant from Brookline:

Brookline Station is actually closer to Nogglestead proper.

This history gives an account of the history of Brookline Township (from 1883, so a recent historical account) which indicates that the town of Brookline, which is in the upper corner of Brookline Township, was indeed a railroad town. It does not mention Brookline Station at all.

However, Brookline Station might have been a part of the Butterfield Mail Stage Route.

Fifteen years on, and I’m still learning about the area. Not that my neighbors have deep historical ties; only two or three families in the immediate area precede us in residency.

Simple one-legged balancing test determines your biological age – so how old are YOU really?

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic found the amount of time you are able to balance on one foot indicates how strong your bones, muscles and nerves are, which are the signs of frailty.

Being frail makes people more vulnerable to health problems because it reduces the body’s ability to cope with stressors and recover from falls and illnesses.

The average 50 year old was able to balance for roughly nine seconds, whereas an 80 year old is only able to manage three seconds.

As you might know, gentle reader, I’ve been studying martial arts for a decade or so (what? already?), and before each class begins, I stand on the mat and work on my balance by lifting one leg and holding or going performing a series of kicks without dropping my kicking leg. I’ve even recently started closing my eyes, spinning, and hopping foot to foot while changing directions of the spins.

So, yeah, I guess it makes sense that I would do better than average on this particular test.

For all the good that will do me in the real world. Apparently, the prognosis is that I will live until I die.

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.