Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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.

Last night, whilst grilling, I was pleased to go outside and see a bright star in the sky.

I got out my binoculars and took a look; yes, it was indeed two planets so close together that they looked like a single unit to the naked eye. I don’t have a tripod for my phone, unlike the artist formerly known as the One Hand Clapping Guy. So you get a dot, kind of like I saw.

My oldest saw me taking the binoculars out to the driveway, so he followed; he thought it was cool, so he told his brother, whom I then took out on the deck for a peek. I even coaxed my beautiful wife out to take a peek. They all thought it was neat, and then they went back to their other [electronic] endeavors.

You know, when I was in middle school, I was all down with astronomy. One of my father’s childhood books, a volume on astronomy, passed down to me, and I checked other books out of the library to read up on astronomy as it was understood in the 1960s. I lay on my back on my aunt’s yard in St. Charles and tried to draw a sky chart. I was very in tune with the position of the planets daily–but that came with the help of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which posted that information along with the daily weather report. But when 1986 rolled around, and we were living in the well-lit trailer park when Halley’s Comet came around. I might have seen it. I saw a smudge in the morning sky where the paper said it should be.

About that time, my interest in astronomy waned, which is just as well. I lived in well-lit areas after that. Even the house down the gravel road had close neighbors on either side with lights in their back yards and on their chicken coop, and I had a massive hill immediately for my western horizon.

Still, I thought the night was very dark when I moved to Nogglestead, but the horizons are shrinking with light from new developments and growing towns to the east and west. But I have, when I have thought of it and when news coverage prompted me, to go try to see a meteor shower or whatnot. I might have actually seen a meteor once a couple years back, but it was blink-and-it’s-gone, so I’m not sure.

So I was surprised and mutely delighted to actually see an astronomical phenomenon. One that Genghis Khan might have thought was a good omen. I’d like to try to treat it as such, but I am all-too-familiar with the Bayeux Tapestry.