Musings from Brian J. Noggle

In addition to gift certificates for a record shop and antique mall, I also received, along with the each in the family, an ABC Books gift card. So we headed out yesterday to spend them along with a Barnes and Noble gift card the youngest had and a Visa Gift card for $25 of some unknown provenance that I found in my gift cards.

So we stopped at ABC Books and “talked with Val” for a little bit and then Vintage Stock to pick up a couple albums I spotted whilst Christmas shopping and Barnes and Noble.

Here are the books I got:

The haul includes:

• Sid Meier’s Memoir!. I got this at Barnes and Noble, not off the discount rack, but sales and remnants of gift cards (my youngest gifted me the remaining $3 on his after he bought a toy–to the boys, any place that sells toys or candy means the gift card will go at least 50% to the candy or toys). Given how much of my life has been given over to Sid Meier’s games–starting perhaps with Gunship on the Commodore 64 and up to Civ IV–which I still play too much–and onto Civ VI and Sid Meier’s Pirates, which I just installed on my Windows 10 box, and it runs, but I haven’t spent much time on it because, well, Civ IV–I thought I might as well buy his book as well. It cost a little over $10 after old gift cards were applied.
• Like the Pieces of Driftwood, a short collection of poems by Tom Francis. So I can keep my poetry reading going during football games–and short collections of poetry are less expensive than art monographs at ABC Books.
• Descartes in 90 Minutes by Paul Strathern, a short bit on Descartes.
• The Great Optimist and Other Essays by Leigh Mitchell Hodges, a 1908 collection that was misshelved in the Poetry section. To be honest, I didn’t look too closely at the contents. I figured in 1908, it would not be too modern, and I was kind of shopping on price.
• Pamela by Samuel Richardson, an early epistolary novel mentioned in The English Novel audio course.
• The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar was an 19th century poet whom I read about somewhere in the past. I bookmarked his Wikipedia entry a long time ago in case I wanted to write an essay about him. Maybe after reading this book. It’s a nice edition from 1970 with mylar over the dustjacket and a left-handed inscription to Ann Elizabeth Quinn from Granpa(?) Lucas. The book was priced $18.95, so I put it back when I first spotted it on one of my Christmas shopping trips. However, this time, with the power of a Christmas present gift card, I bought it.

Now, gentle reader, I want you to understand that I behaved myself pretty well this trip. I actually put a couple books back. For example, because I had a gift card and because the nice leather editions of books are often 25% or 50% off at ABC Books, I took a look at them first. I spotted Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, mentioned in the audio course The World of George Orwell, I picked it up. It was priced at $275. Even with a quarter off (“Honey! I saved $70 when I talked to Val!”), I could not buy it. It’s unusual, but I also put back a $10 boxed hardback copy of Tom Jones, also mentioned in The English Novel (in the same lecture as Pamela, if I recall) because I figured I should only buy them one at a time and maybe, I don’t know, read the books I already have before buying another. Besides, by the time I might have gotten to Tom Jones, I might have found some other bit of classical literature on my shelves already. Especially if Pamela disappears into my to-read bookshelves for years. Which might happen here in a minute when I take it off of my desk.

So look at me: I put some books back which should somehow represent virtue.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this, but I have a definite pattern of browsing at ABC Books: I look at the local interest, I go down the aisle to the martial arts books, might stop by the art monographs down the same aisle, and then I go to the poetry and philosophy section (which are right next to each other), and then down that aisle to the classical literature (a new stop after listening to The English Novel. If there’s an author in the front of the shop, I’ll pick up one of that author’s books, and then I will be done. So I do all this damage to my poor bookshelves in only two aisles, essentially.

At any rate, I am excited to get started on these books. I predict I will read probably 2/3 of them in 2021 if I don’t lose them. Which I very well might.

So let’s get on with Christmas presents: I am often underwhelmed on the gifts I receive. Sometimes, it’s a little premature that I look askew at something under the tree, as the time when I got a Keurig single-use coffee maker which I thought I would never use, but as my life changed from upstairs-mind-the-children-by-the-coffee-pot to get-up-early-and-go-to-my-desk-without-waking-anyone-else-up, I use it every day. But sometimes I get some things that I’ll never use. Like an embosser that would put my initials in all my books–jeez, my hand hurts just thinking about using it.

This year, I received a Battery Daddy.

Which is a nice thought as I have a whole desk cubby stuffed with batteries, but it’s more than 180 batteries. Also, although the Battery Daddy says it has place for 8 button batteries, I have far more than 8 button batteries of various sizes, not to mention a couple spare rechargeable batteries for sundry devices. Well, they might be spares, or they might be the old ones I replaced waiting for me to take them back to the battery store the next time I need to replace their replacements. Regardless, this packaging would only neatly store some of my batteries, so I’ll probably continue with the existing system, which is old check boxes with sorted batteries. Not an unsorted junk drawer.

I also got this piece of Packerphernalia:

My mother-in-law tends to get me Packers stuff, as I generally get her Mizzou things, our respective gift schticks. She also gave me a calendar; looking on the back, I only know the numbers if a couple of the players these days, which means I am getting old, I guess. As to this particular bit of art, I opened it, and I liked it right away, and my thought process went, a bit slowly, like this:

I like it…. Hey, that’s kind of like that thing on the wall at that sports bar…. Coyote’s Nixa…. I took a picture of that and texted that to my mother-in-law…. With the message “Christmas gift idea….”

She found something similar on Etsy, I guess.

I also got a gift certificate to Stick It In Your Ear, a full price record store downtown–and the intel that they know someone who works on old stereos, so perhaps when this person returns from Europe I will be able to play records on the console I inherited from my aunt–and you probably won’t get me out of my living room. I got gift certificates to Relics Antique Mall which I will be more careful with this year since I know they expire relatively quickly. To be honest, I already have an idea on what I want to get–I saw a starting fencing set for about fifty dollars; I think it said it contains 2 sets of everything. If it has two vests, two masks, and two foils, I will be all over that. And in case you’re wondering about that trip to Relics that I took for last-minute gift buying last weekend, I might have picked up a record or two–but I did get some nice gifts for others as well.

More important than what I got is what I gave. The home run gifts this year were those silly-but-expensive titles of nobility. I bought the oldest a Lord title in Sealand whose story he loves. I couldn’t let the older boy be a lord and not the younger, so I did a thing where I bought a square foot of Scotland to for the youngest, and according to tradition, any landowner in Scotland is called “Lord.” To be honest, the he is more excited about owning the land than being the Lord. So that worked out. Other gifts included apparel with the logos of the older boy’s high school for everyone, pajamas (a tradition here at Nogglestead), and socks for my beautiful wife. That’s right, mostly clothes.

My boys are becoming young men with tastes that make them more difficult to buy for. I try to get everyone something unexpected and delightful, something they would not have thought of but that I did. I don’t think I did as well this year as in years past–such as the 2007, the year that I had my wife’s then-unused trumpet re-silvered and repaired, and she cried with joy and asked, “How did you know?” To be honest, that’s a hard bar to clear again, but I’m ever hopeful.

And I always start very early in the year buying gifts, so when it comes time to opening them, I get the same surprise that they do. I wandered away when my brother and nephew started opening their gifts, and my brother thanked me for the tie. “What tie?” I said. “The Marine Corps tie,” he said. Oh, yes! The one I bought in Branson in May, when I predicted:

On the way back from breakfast on Monday, we stopped at a craft mall and bought a couple of Christmas gifts which I’ll wrap up and forget what they are by Christmas. Which gives me the same surprise and joy for the gifts I give that I get for the gifts I receive.

Do I know me, or what?

I also got my nephew the first two books in the Earthborn series, probably in June right after I read the first, Earthborn: Awakening.

At any rate, you might be wondering if I have started Christmas shopping for 2021 yet. Well, I have been burned in each of the last two years by people dying before Christmas. But that won’t dissuade me. One of the gifts I ordered for my wife has yet to arrive, so that’s either a gift for her birthday or a gift for Christmas. As to buying for my boys, well, there’s no telling what they will be into in a year, whether interests or, heaven forfend, clothing sizes. So I will likely wait until at least spring before I start for them.

Well, Christmas at Nogglestead, along with its various stresses, near-crises, and scandals, has passed.

We went to church on Christmas Eve–my beautiful wife and youngest son played trumpet for three of the services, but I only attended the three o’clock. In lieu of candles for the candlelight service–which would have required people to move their masks to blow out and to close the gap between families to light the candles–we got little battery-operated candle simulacra.

Which allowed me to re-enact a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, Lethal Weapon.

Come on, you know what I am talking about, ainna? I mean, I realize it’s an old movie, but:

Let it be noted, though, that Lethal Weapon 2 is not a Christmas movie.

And just so you know, I cannot recreate this scene on a normal year because it’s packed, and we don’t light the candles until right before singing “Silent Night”. Also, I am a sissy.

Thank you, that is all.

Via Wirecutter, we have this image:

We never see that at Nogglestead: A wall without bookshelves? Impossible!

Also, our cats have, in the past, expressed interest in knocking down ornaments and getting into the tree, but not in knocking down the tree itself.

Merry Christmas, gentle reader.

When I was up at ABC Books this last weekend, I got to chatting with the owner while she prepared the final batch of emergency gift cards for Christmas, and she mentioned that they would not be able to travel to spend Christmas with their family this year as her husband works for a school district which has placed restrictions on its employees.

So I got my beautiful wife to extend an invitation to have Christmas dinner with us. And they accepted.

Which caused a bit of a CRISIS! here at Nogglestead. We have not had dinner guests aside from immediate family in years.

I mean, my brother and nephew are coming for Christmas this year, and we have had my mother-in-law and a family friend for holidays in the interim, but they only trigger a normal cleaning of the house. With guests who have not been here before, we would need a real cleaning and other preparations.

CRISIS, I say!

• Some people have nice towels to put out when they have guests over. At Nogglestead, we do not have ‘good’ towels. We have towels, and then beneath them but sometimes in rotation less good towels which are shortly on the way to the garage towels. So we would make sure that the less bad towels are out for the guests. And maybe that the towel holder was tightened against the wall so that it would not fall off the wall when the guests wash their hands. Well, all tight, it is held in with a toggle bolt that can handle a hundred pounds, but it still loosens to the point that it will jingle festively at times.
• We do, however, have good toilet paper, and I’d need to make sure the hall bathroom had it. When toilet paper supplies briefly tightened this autumn, I picked up a couple packages of the most economical and, coincidentally, what Walmart had left. It’s single ply, little more than spider webs. It’s so sheer that if my beautiful wife wrapped herself in it, I would find it seductive. Of course, that’s not saying much as I find my wife seductive in pretty much any apparel. And I do not have any affinity for gossamer toilet paper, although I did watch The Golden Child over and over as a youth because it was on Showtime and I was not supposed to leave the trailer when my mother wasn’t home all day. Where was I?
• Okay, gauging their relative heights, we would not have to clean the high places like the top of the refrigerator. We still would probably want to clean the walls, the floors, the furniture, and probably the ceilings. Given that we’re out of the home with church activities almost all day today, that would have meant a late night or two of cleaning and, worse, exhorting the children to help.
• My beautiful wife planned a menu for six, a simple meal of turkey, salad, cranberries, rolls, and pie–I planned to pad it out by trying to make mashed potatoes for the first time in, what, seven years? and the second time in, what, thirty years? However, with Real Guests, we would need to have gravy, and this has been something that my mother-in-law has contributed in circumstances where we needed gravy. So what would I do? Try to make gravy from the, what part of the turkey is it that you make turkey from? Or I could buy a can of gravy at the supermarket–they sell gravy in cans, don’t they? And deal with the SCANDAL! of canned gravy. So the addition of two people made our menu suddenly an EMERGENCY!, although we would have had enough pie for everyone.
• And let’s face it, Nogglestead is getting a little long in tooth. As I mentioned, it hasn’t changed much over the years. The carpets that were old when we bought Nogglestead are very old now. We have not done any significant upgrades aside from painting some of the walls. The kitchen floor and cabinets are in pretty rough shape–as is the trim throughout the house. I mean, I get excited and proud when I fix a little thing in the kitchen. So it’s looking a little shabby. However, given that I blow most of my money on charity and books instead of home improvements, perhaps they would understand–especially since I spend so much at ABC Books.

I know, I know: In the Christmas language, the character for “crisis” is the same as for “opportunity” (it’s right here on the Internet, so you can believe it). And, actually, I was excited to have some new people come to visit. I was looking to showing off the over-stuffed bookshelves and saying that it was their fault. I was concerned that I would say that the last dinner guests we had were serial killers (which is not likely true; the serial killers were the penultimate dinner guests, and as far as I know, the last people we had to dinner seven or so years ago were not serial killers, but they do travel widely, perhaps the better to keep the police from their trail of murder).

Unfortunately, the husband who works at a school somewhere, somehow, was exposed to The Continuing Unpleasantness, so he has to quarantine for two weeks, his entire Christmas break, and they won’t be able to attend after all. Which averts the artificial and not very crisisical crisis.

And it would have been a little different, a more memorable Christmas than the same-old, same-old Christmases from the past. The last couple of years, they have followed a pattern: Cinnamon rolls in the morning, church, opening presents, dinner, clean-up, and then a normal evening. I hate to be bored with such a blessing, but I need a little shake-up.

My brother and nephew are coming, though, so it will be a good Christmas. With less housecleaning.