Musings from Brian J. Noggle

In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline:

Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and Battlefield, and other parts of Greene County):

The Brookline Post Office

It’s a two-room cinderblock building where one of the rooms is a lobby and the other half loads mail for our rural postal carriers. I’ve been in on occasion. Nadine is always friendly, giving my child leftover stickers or stamping his hand SPOILED. What, your post office has more than one clerk? That, my friends, is urban.

At any rate, I was driving into Brookline to vote today. I drive twenty minutes at highway speeds to get to my polling place, checked once by a stop sign and twice by traffic signals. I filled out my scantrons and stepped out of the polling station, a Republic Fire District station (professionals, although part of the near parts of Republic including my domicile are covered by the volunteers).

Here’s what I saw from the doorway. Forgive me for not stitching them together for you:

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

Views from my polling place

The only thing in sight is a Church of Christ.

If you want to see the photos, you’ll have to click through. And if you’ll pardon me, but I don’t have photos this time, but just a description of what’s changed.

The post office is still there; it never really handled Republic’s mail–there’s a post office down off of Highway 60 that handles it–and the Brookline post office no longer handles our mail–it’s handled by the larger Republic post office. The Brookline post office is just a storefront that sells stamps now and has a wall of post office boxes. Nadine is gone now, as are her replacements including Mark, the only other one whose name comes to mind. I haven’t been to that post office in a long time.

Our polling place is no longer at the fire house. Instead, the whole family now votes across the street at the aforementioned Church of Christ.

The intersection of MM and Sawyer Road there now has a stop light. And a giant Amazon warehouse. And a strip mall servicing trucks coming out of the various new warehouses in the area. And the Iron Grain District which is a “mixed use” development which has at least one restaurant and coffee shop plus other things, including a large gas station. There’s another large gas station across from the post office. And they’re talking about widening MM from 60 to the interstate to better accommodate the big trucks.

When we moved here, we expected the suburbs to expand west on Highway M / Republic Road, but they followed Highway 60 from west Springfield instead. New shopping centers and apartment complexes are working to fill that empty space, but the lot on the corner of FF and M remains mostly empty even after having been for sale and development for most of the time we’ve been at Nogglestead. It didn’t help that the local wireless retailer put its home office in the middle of it, which might keep it from developing as retail.

But over time, I guess everything changes. But I’m still mostly the same. Which probably says something about me, and perhaps not something good.

So for a while, off and on, I’ve been buying frozen treats for the family. Fruit juice bars in the past or ice cream sandwiches. I got away from it for a while when we skint, but our income situation has returned to an income situation, and we’re not hemorrhaging money like last year, so I’ve started picking up the frozen treats again, a ten-spot a week during the peak of summer. And although my youngest has made a habit–and, basically, a complete diet–of the ice cream sandwiches in the recent past, I have been the one eating most of them the last week or so.

Last week, on a lark, I bought a box of Drumsticks as well. If you’re not familiar, Drumsticks are ice cream cones with a chocolate and nut covering, akin to the dip you might get at Dairy Queen or other places. However, they’re pretty hard as they’re all frozen and individually wrapped unlike, say, soft serve dipped to order in molten syrup. And I shouldn’t say it was a lark, really, as I’d seen the boxes in the warehouse club freezers and thought about picking up a box for a couple of weeks before I actually did.

But, ah, gentle reader. How each one takes me back, just a little, to 1996.

I was living with my sainted mother in Lemay, Missouri. I lived with her after the university for two and a half years, and it seemed like such a long time. Those were busier days, then, and my perspective on time was that of a young man, where every year was a larger portion of my life than it is today. But now that my boys are on the cusp of leaving me, probably in less than that time frame, it doesn’t seem that long at all.

My mother handled all the shopping, such as it was. Not a lot of fresh produce–some apples and snack fruit, probably–and not a lot of things for home cooking–in addition to not being much of a cook (neither she nor, by her tutelage, me). Also, she worked second shift. The freezer was stocked with frozen things–and she would call the house line every night on her way home from work (she had a cellular phone, gentle reader, in the middle 1990s, in a bag) to ask me if she wanted me to pick up a Taco Bell Big Beef Burrito Supreme on her way home. She ate Taco Bell nightly, and would share the bounty with me if I were home and awake.

My goodness, she and I could eat nothing but junk in those days. I lived on frozen pizzas and Taco Bell and other fast food, and I tried to gain weight and lifted weights, but to no avail. I was eating several thousand calories a day, including weight gain shakes, and nothing. We both were skin bags over bones.

The freezer also has another treat: Drumsticks. The warehouse club was way up in Earth City in those days, an hour away by car, so she was not buying them in bulk, but the freezer almost always had Drumsticks in them. Oh, boy, and did I eat them. What was I doing at the time? Laying out the St. Louis Artesian? Hanging out in the gap between jobs? Playing Gemstone Warrior 3 on America Online? I had two jobs, spent a lot of time at coffee shops and open mike nights, and still somehow had a lot of time to sit in my mother’s (well, my aunt’s) house and eat Drumsticks.

I shall probably look back at this time of my life and say, “Wow, I had a lot of time.” And I spent it eating Drumsticks and feeling, briefly, twenty-four again.

On Sunday mornings, we take the backup vehicle, an 18-year-old Chevy Trailblazer, to church because we pick up my mother-in-law, and at 83 years old, she gets better into it (her old truck when she was still independently mobile) than into our primary vehicle, an 18-year-old Lexus SUV that just turned 220,000 on the odometer (the Chevy still relatively spry with 100,000 fewer miles on it and still mostly hers as her independently mobile driving took her to New England, Canada/Michigan (almost the same, especially on multi-million dollar houses on islands in northern Lake Huron), the Grand Canyon, and Florida many times when she was taking care of her brother and later his estate. The Trailblazer now serves mostly as the younger boy’s go-to-work and go-to-school (now that he’s in college, but also when he was in high school) vehicle. So: It’s a mess, and the windshield, well…. A gentle lens for an aging actress, let’s say, with what I presume is soda spray on the inside and dust and pollen that can only be poorly cleaned using the windshield washer since the wiper blade is in pretty bad shape.

So we’re going along on the farm road where it dips between hills and trees by the pipeline pumping station, and my beautiful wife says, “Deer.” I start slowing down, and sure enough, a young deer comes running from the left side of the road. I braked, but not to a complete stop, and it thumped against the vehicle. I didn’t go over it, and I didn’t see it in the rearview mirror, hopefully because it ran off feeling abashed. It was only several miles down the road, on the way down to church, that I stopped because I was suddenly afraid that I had been dragging the poor thing. But the car showed no signs of damage.

We did have a bit of a contretemps in the car though. My wife assured me that I did not hit the deer, and my youngest and I were pretty sure we did. She had seen a deer on the right side of the road, which we did not hit, and had not seen the one on the left, which proceeded to hit us (he said defensively, more defensively than he drives, obvs).

BUT: The impact site was between the wheel well and the door, an invisible dent but that had bent that part of the fender/quarter panel juuuust enough so that the door rubbed against it loudly. Of course, taking it to a body shop for repair might have totaled the car as they recommended new fender and door panels and maybe hinges. So I (when I remembered to, when the temperature got closer to 100 degrees outside) went out with a rubber mallet, some plastic body pry bars, a screwdriver, and some pliers and…. Well, I wish I could tell you that I did an exemplary job fixing it right, but I bent it enough to minimize the rubbing so that it’s not really loud when you open the door.

I was in a similar situation just last week: I took a different route home from town than I normally do, a farm road that I only travel down once every couple of years. It’s curvier than ours, and I slowed way down on it, which meant that the frolicking young deer were able to cross safely in front of me then. I also remember that about ten years ago, someone was driving down that road hit a woman on a horse and drove on, thinking that she had hit a deer. I know how it can happen. I imagine myself doing it. But this was a deer, I assure you.

It’s the first collision with a deer that I’ve had even after 17 years in the country, so I guess I should count myself lucky more than a good driver. I might have hit a squirrel many years ago. I did hit a dog once on a pre-dawn commute through a transitioning neighborhood. Same thing; he came running from left to right, and although I braked hard, I went over him and felt him bump something under the car, but not under the wheels. I came to a stop and saw him standing in the road and decided I was not going to chase him to take him to the vets.

So, yeah, I am unschooled on the protocols of what to do when you hit an animal. Stop to make sure it’s dead? Put it out of its misery? Take it to the vet? I guess I should ask my brother; before he retired, he was hitting deer every couple of months on his morning, two-hour-on-country-highways, pre-dawn and post-sunset winter commutes. I am pretty sure that my father hit his share of things–he often had a few beers before driving up north the go hunting and a few beers on the way, but, of course, I cannot ask him, either, as he has been dead for almost thirty years now. Regardless of if I do the right thing or merely do an acceptable thing, I will mull it over for a long time and feel vaguely guilty about it all.

4-island package on US-Canada border hits market fully loaded for $2.3M — boats included

It’s on the northeastern corner of Lake Huron (whose name I already know how to pronounce, thank you), so mighty cold in the winter (probably no ice bridge to Canada or they would have mentioned it). More of a summer home than anything else. But, dang, it looks awfully nice. As long as you don’t run out of bug spray.

I check in on two Daily Dammit, Gannett newspaper Web sites: The Springfield News-Leader and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I don’t read much of them because their articles are mostly behind a very good paywall, but I do check out the local contests.

But I guess the ad pool is shrinking, because not only do we get ads for things that are not local in the “Shopping” section:

I mean, I listen to the radio all the time, so I know a lot of local jingles, but, brother, that ain’t one of them. Maybe it plays before streaming videos, YouTube content, or on obscure channels all the time. But, yeah, no clue what that is.

And we get contests clearly targeted to people in other regions, like this one:

At least, I presume the Michigan one is targeted to Wisconsin and Michigan people, but it’s on the News-Leader web site. I know that I’ve filled out the form before for a contest for a getaway at, what, the Indianapolis 500 or a golf getaway only to get denied (presumably after my contact information was saved somewhere for sale or rent) with a message that indicated they did not accept entries from my location.

Not cricket, and probably indicative of how the ad and marketing budgets are drying up for the big papers.

Oh, and I’ve also started getting calls and texts from one of the companies sponsoring the contests even though I meticulously opt out. So, in desperation, Gannett is courting a class action suit somewhere down the line.

Eh, free Internet content is worth what you pay for it, gentle reader, as you well know but are too polite to say.

WE NEED ANSWERS!

Ah, but to quote the universe, “However, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

Yeah, security sense says no clicky, no stoppy. Also, none of your business my honest opinions. You want them, you come to the blog like everyone else Rob.

Or, since I am reading fantasy novels these days (only one, but it’s relatively recent and top-of-mind), I could alternately title this The Undead Orchard of Nogglestead’s Revenge.

So I hit a stump two weeks ago, which bent the baffle on my mowing deck and one of the blades. It was the second stump I hit in recent weeks.

As it has become drier here in the Ozarks, which happens every August and September and sometimes even July, one of the mowings will turn the grass brown for the season no matter how much rain we get thereafter. So I’ve been delaying the cuttings. Which means a month or so back, I hit the more solid of the peach tree stumps in the front yard.

When a couple of pre-existing young maples lining the driveway were gutted by poor pruning leading to splits, I cut the maples down and replaced them with peach trees many years ago. I said that every year we learn a new way for peach trees to not produce: If the temperature drops to -10 degrees in the winter, they won’t blossom; a warm spell in early spring can cause them to blossom only to be deflowered by a cold snap later; if peaches grow, Japanese beetles come around. The one year when all the conditions were right, we got some very small peaches. Once. Well, I tried to properly prune one of the trees, and it died. The other one beside the driveway died as well, so it probably wasn’t me (and the one in the middle of the yard is half dead). Last year, I cut the two dead ones down for kindling (“You know what I grow in my orchard? Firewood.” is also a common quip).

So, as I said, a month or so ago, the penultimate mowing, I went over the more solid of the stumps in the front yard. The smaller I hit once or twice already and cut it below blade height, but I was still going around the big one. I’d meant to get out there with a pick/mattock to chop it up a bit, but I had not. So the mower grabbed the stump and pulled it out, trapping it under the mower deck. I tried circling the edge of the driveway to pull it out (perhaps damaging the mower deck in the process), but I had to jack the mower up almost a foot to work the new bit of kindling (big enough that maybe it’ll be a main feature although misshapen log) through the blades and then out the discharge.

This ultimate mowing, I had no more trouble with fruit tree stumps out front, but I hit the stump of the apple tree which toppled, but did not die, in a derecho in 2019. It had kinda lie in the back yard for those five years, sprouting some branches growing straight up but no blossoms. So I finally cut it down with a bow saw this winter, after the peach trees out front (it still lies atop the wood pile to be cut down to logs and broken into kindling). I’ve managed to mow around it all summer, but knicked it in the penultimate mowing and grabbed a hold of it this time, pulling much of its stump out. But the deck continued to make noise, so I brought it to the blacktop to check for something stuck under it, and I managed to cut my hand twice on the baffle discovering that the blade was hitting it.

Although my brother has now indicated this is an “easy fix” involving changing a bolt on the mower and hitting the baffle with a hammer a couple of times, I’ve already sent to mower to the local (and fairly close) shop to have them check the front wheels (the tires have trouble holding pressure, so I wonder if the wheels themselves are damaged and cannot make a good seal with the tubeless tires) and to adjust the steering bars so they do not overlap (a quick fix I could have made with spacers or by bending the bars, but my uncertainty and lack of historic success with small engines and equipment left me uneager to try).

And: It’s been two? almost three? weeks, and the grass has continued to grow. Scratch that: Some of the grass and other flora has continued to grow seedheads which make everything look untidy (except for the brown front grass, which I cut before I disabled the mower).

Ah, what to do? Last time we had an acquaintance starting out his lawn business do the deed, he charged us $300. Not eager to take on that expense, we demurred.

I have the small push mower that I used in Old Trees in the shed, where it’s sat for almost 20 years. I could try to clean the carb and replace the spark plug, I reckon. I think the fuel line might have been cracked as well. As I’m not sure about the availability of the parts locally and because I’m not very good with small engines, I’ve put this off as well. Perhaps that would be a good project for me to do sometime to, you know, get better with small engines. And maybe get my tiller started again. Ha, ha!

I also have a reel mower which was dull and had dry-rotting tires when I got it. Not likely given the state of the meadow.

So: I have taken the line trimmer to part of the interior back yard. I got about 20% of it with a round of battery charges. I think I will continue this course of action until I’m done with it or until the main mower comes back. The result is uneven but better than its overgrown state, and by pre-cutting, when I get the mower back, it will mulch this part of the yard better and not choke out. The rest of the yard? I might have to overlap the cut portion a bunch so that the uncut portion does not choke out the mower.

And, ah, have I used that extra space in the garage for other projects in the interim? Oh, but no. The last couple of weeks I have fallen back into the bad habit of sitting at my desk too much to too little end. And even writing long-winded blog posts count as an end.

Oh, the humanity. At least the cuts on my fingertip and palm have stopped bleeding and stopped hurting.

One of the things I unboxed from my closet last week, along with some DVDs, videocassettes, and books, was a videocassette cleaner.

For you damned kids, it’s basically a videocassette, except instead of a ribbon, it’s got a bit of a cloth attached to the reels, and you put a little rubbing alcohol on it and run it through your videocassette player (let’s be honest, they’re all VCPs these days; not a lot of R’ing being done). In theory, it will wipe any gunk off of the heads that read the information from the tape. I’m not sure if they really did anything, but in the 1980s, youngling, we were studious caretakers of our cassette players, both video and audio.

You know, I see these from time to time at estate sales, but it’s not something I would buy. Now I own one, I guess. Several years ago, I thought it worth sticking it in a box addressed to myself.

But, do I dare? And do I dare? The videocassette player does not seem to have much trouble with videocassettes. Well, some are degraded, but some are not.

So I will probably keep this in my back pocket until I experience difficulty that I think might be explained by dirty heads. Until then, where should I keep it? In the unwatched videos cabinet? In the cabinet with the tech stack? Ah! The closed cabinet with the extra video game systems in it. Perfect!

Every day last week, different “companies” have posted basically the same job every day slightly different:

The job descriptions are the same, basically:

Continue reading “It’s Not Hard To Spot The Grift” →