Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The British press has a number of remote and/or secure locations profiled this week.

Uninspiring grey brick fort tower hides an amazing interior inside:

From the outside it looks like nothing more than drab, brick-built fort and a relic of Britain’s military past.

But step inside this 19th century tower and it’s a totally different story.

Martello Tower Y, tucked away on a quiet stretch of Sussex coastline, was built for a Napoleonic invasion that never came.

It was meant to repel the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and as such dates back to the early 19th century.

But a complete refurbishment in 2010 has seen the property scoop a number of architectural and design awards, with English Heritage labelling the renovation as “exemplary”.

It has been described as “one of the most original and soul-stirring modern homes in Britain” – and it could be yours for a cool £1.25million.

The three-bedroom home has a completely re-sculpted interior which perfectly blends period features with modern, contemporary architecture.

It even has a modern-day drawbridge as well as a wrap-around roof terrace so buyers can take in that stunning seaside view, which is classed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Magnificent Gothic 10-bed Welsh castle with 31 acres and stunning views of Snowdonia on sale for £2.85m:

Glandyfi Castle, set on a 31-acre estate overlooking the stunning Snowdonia mountains in Wales, is nothing less than a fairytale property – if it’s within your budget.

The 10 bedroom Gothic-style property is fitted with an octagonal tower, an imperial staircase and a pink marble fireplace.

Commanding a clifftop position and overlooking the Dovey Estuary and Snowdonia mountains, this magnificent castle is the perfect romantic property.

The breathtaking castle built from stone has recently undergone a major renovation, with a new glass roof for the courtyard and modern kitchen design.

Couple swap four-hour city commute for abandoned island:

An Irish couple have ditched city living and relocated to an abandoned island off the coast of Co Kerry – but say they are loving every minute of it.

Lesley Kehoe, 27, and Gordon Bond, 29, are said to be the only inhabitants at An Blascaod Mor, the largest part of The Great Blasket Islands, located off the coast of Co Kerry.

Tired of spending four hours commuting from Kildare to the Dublin everyday, the couple made the life-changing decision to move island which has been abandoned since 1954.

Lesley told the Irish Sunday Mirror : “I have always been interested in the Great Blasket Islands – I wrote my thesis about their heritage.

“As part of my research Gordon and I went out there and we stayed in one of the cottages.

“We just fell in love with the place and in January I saw a Facebook post advertising a job looking after the hostel there.

I don’t think I’d like to manage a hostel or a wedding and event venue. But the castle would be a treat, even if it sits on only 31 acres. I would feel like a marcher lord.

You know, I often get to the end of the weekend and wonder just what I did and how I wasted my time instead of accomplishing big projects or big personal goals. So, in the interests of my own sanity, allow me to bore you with the details of what I did so that some years in the future, I can return to this post and perhaps feel some satisfaction that I did not waste all my weekends.

Saturday

Saturday morning, I did the Republic Tiger Triathlon (super sprint) and took my kids to a martial arts class.

After that, we went to the local pizza buffet for lunch; after that, I napped.

When I got up about 1:30, we had a Family Meeting that lasted about 40 minutes.

Then I spent fifty minutes applying the third coat of paint to my third set of record shelves.

I rested a bit, and a little after 4:00, I went swimming with my family in the backyard pool for the first time this year.

We had pasta for dinner, and after winding the chores down for the night, I read a bit and went to bed at about 9:00.

Sunday

On Sunday, we went to church for early service; as it is the summer schedule, we didn’t stay for Sunday school and were home by 10:00.

I took an early nap.

After the nap, I moved some furniture as my boys have moved to separate rooms again.

I also moved some wall art around as my beautiful wife had just bought some things to hang in the guest room, and we moved them to the master bedroom and moved the existing master bedroom art around.

We then went shopping for a bit, looking at Best Buy for a reliable-looking cheap record player. All they had was the same unit that I just bought which failed after a couple months, and it was more expensive than Amazon. We picked up some groceries as well.

I grilled some burgers, and we assembled a meal for a family for church with an ailing member. My wife and boys ran the food over, and we had dinner.

I moved the new record shelves indoors and filled them with overflow LPs. I also took our box sets out of storage, and it looks as though I will need one more if I want to unbox my mother’s pop records or move Heather’s folk LPs upstairs. Or if I plan on buying new records ever again.

After dinner, I finished the chores and read a bit and talked with my oldest son, who has discovered James Lileks’ Mommy Knows Worst and thinks it’s funny. I got to bed about 10:00.

Conclusion

So that’s how the weekends pass. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing Civ IV, as I do on some weekends, but it passed nevertheless with chores and normal activity.

I did bring some projects to fruition: I completed my third Tiger Triathlon, but I didn’t end up doing the longer distance Sprint length, which is good, as I have not trained for it much, and it wore on me.

I finished the record shelves, but I started them three weeks ago, and they’ve been in my driveway for a couple weeks awaiting the complete paint job. So I didn’t take a real sense of accomplishment out of simply clearing my driveway.

And so it goes. Tempus fugit.

I saw this on Facebook:

Surely, someone is making mock of the concept, ainna? You cannot post and share something like this without a sense of humor, hey?

I spend a lot of time on Facebook typing comments that correct spelling and then abandoning the comment without leaving it.

Facebook alone knows my restraint.

So last night, we went to the local arcade 1984, and I again made the leader board on two different games, although it might look like I was going in alphabetical order:

I found that you didn’t even have to get through the second level on Space Invaders to beat the default high score. And I got a higher score on Spyhunter than I did in 2017, and as a bonus, I got it when I was showing one of my son’s friends how to play the game.

I beat my previous high score on Elevator Action, but the current high score was almost 20,000, and I only got about 16,000. I also tied the high score for Omega Race right as we were leaving; perhaps I’ll focus on that one next year as it looks pretty easy to play and perhaps dull enough that the cool kids leave it alone.

Although it looks like 1984 thinned out its selection of games a little bit. Perhaps as part of opening a location in Branson this year. And the price has gone up. Still, ten bucks for a couple of hours of video game time is worth it as long as you, you know, play the video games. I think I again spent most of my time wandering around looking at video games.

As I often mention, gentle reader, I live my life with a bit of a double-effect narrator in my head. Even when I am in the moment, I recognize that right now will someday be a memory, so I tend to reflect on right now as though it has already passed even as it is passing. Perhaps that’s why I read so much Buddhism and Stoicism: they justify the way I already experience the world.

As such, certain sounds have always heightened this experience. One is the passage of wind through full trees.

I remember very acutely sitting on the back steps of the house down the gravel road. The back steps were really just three concrete steps from the door at the back of the garage. We didn’t have a deck. We didn’t even have a stoop. Just three concrete steps.

The steps looked out on the back yard. We had an acre or two, but only about one of it was level and clear; the remainder, across the creek, climbed up our slice of a hill and was heavily wooded. It was summer, about sunset, but it was already darkening on the eastern side of the hill. I was back from college for a couple of weeks, as most of my break time was spent in Wisconsin, working and going to festivals. I closed my eyes as the summer breeze tousling the treetops and recognized that my college years, my youth, were passing like that wind.

I’ve closed my eyes from time to time when sitting out on my back decks in Casinoport and here at Nogglestead when the wind has moved through full trees, and I could almost reach through the years and feel exactly as I did then, whether the then was sitting on those concrete steps at age twenty or underneath the crab apple trees at age thirty or the glider at age forty-five. To know I would likely again sit with my eyes closed and listen to the wind in the trees sometime in the future and remember now. I feel eternity a bit, I think, when I do.

About the same time as I was sitting on those back steps, Sting’s “Fields of Gold” hit the radio.

It was 1993, and I was about to finish up college. I was mooning over a girl who didn’t care for me, as was often the case in those years, so the thought of a love was a hopeful speculation at that point. But the song has the double-effect narrator who recognizes that the profound, eternal loves of youth pass like the wind through barley.

When I hear that song, as I did yesterday, I feel the very same melancholic nostalgia that I do every time–the same as when I first heard the song, before I had anything to really feel nostalgia for.

And when I hear it in the future, even if it’s just reviewing this post in the days or years to come, I will feel the same, and the connection to my youth and my now (which will be my youth when I’m older).

Even if my life isn’t facing a big transition as it was then (from college to post-college), these sounds remind me of the passage of time, and that I will transit to different things in my life and will only remember now, maybe, then.

As you might know, gentle reader, when I first moved to Nogglestead, I began planting an orchard of pear, apple, peach, and cherry trees.

It has not been particularly rewarding. To make a short story long, deer ringed the apple trees the first year–they stripped bark all the way around the trees, which killed them. I replaced them and resuscitated one, only to discover the signs of life it showed came from the crab apple root stock and not the grafted eating apple part of the tree. Then, we’ve had cold winters, late freezes, droughts, and Japanese beetles so that I did not get any yield even almost a decade later.

Until this year, when we have had a moderate summer and a wet spring which apparently kept the beetles at bay. The harvest of the peach trees in the front was small peaches and just enough for me to snack on them when I went out to the mailbox and back. Growing fruit here is a little like Edge of Tomorrow; every year, we get a little closer, but something gets the harvest.

Like a derecho wind this spring that blew through the Nogglestead side yard, where it knocked over a couple of apple trees and sent a large tree crashing against one of our side light posts, destroying it.

The apple trees were pushed over, but they were still alive. Until the deer came along and could suddenly reach all the leaves.

But I see that, in addition to the remaining a couple of small apples (hopefully, not crab apples, it has sprouted some new leaves.

I’m not sure what I am to do with the tree and its smaller fallen brother closer to the woods. Perhaps in the spring, I will hook it up to my truck or my tractor (lawn mower, but I don’t feel as rural if I admit that) to try to stand it up or continue to let it grow crooked.

Probably the latter, as I am lazy.

As my beautiful wife and possibly anyone who has been following my Good Album Hunting posts could have guessed, two tiers of record shelving, with roughly eleven linear feet of record storage, cannot contain all the records at Nogglestead.

So I quickly assembled a third tier, and as I was priming it yesterday, I noticed something.

When painting something, I always go from left to right or counterclockwise around the item.

I credit this to being old enough to remember a typewriter, and I’m just doing what the typewriter does with paint.

I dunno, maybe it’s more because that’s my dominant hand. But I like the typewriter analogy better.

Also, please note that I am not sure if roughly sixteen feet of shelving will be enough.

Thank you, that is all.

As I have mentioned a time or two, I scan the local society pages because, as Springfield is a smaller city, I can often see people I know or know of on the pages of 417 or in the photo galleries of the News-Leader.

And, to be honest, I started wondering when we would appear in those very galleries.

I mean, we have attended charitable functions from time to time, although we haven’t been back to a mega-ticket capital G-gala since the Springfield Symphony Guild Debacle of 2015. Even when I see the society photographer, he refuses to make eye contact. Still, I expected at some point I would be able to put down the beer and smile with my arm candy.

My beautiful wife has begun attending local business functions as she is a local business owner with a viable, proven software product on the market, and she is the first to the galleries with an image in the Biz 417 gallery for the Springfield Chamber of Commerce Luncheon 2019:

Compare that photo to this one from a recent book signing:

Of course, when you get to a certain age, sixteen years ago qualifies as recent.

But it proves that she is an ageless beauty.

Best friends are both hospitalised after challenging each other to do 1,000 SQUATS in one go during a video call:

Two best friends in China have both been hospitalised after competing with each other to do 1,000 squats in one go.

Tang, 19, said she and her friend carried out the challenge earlier this month during a video call which lasted for about three hours.

* * * *

Tang went to a local hospital accompanied by her boyfriend. She claimed that her legs ached so much she could not even be carried by her boyfriend.

At last, she had to move slowly on her own to the hospital and was found to have a serious syndrome caused by muscle injury, known as rhabdomyolysis.

Rhabdomyolysis is a potentially fatal condition that occurs when muscles are injured and they release their contents, including a muscle enzyme, into the bloodstream.

That sounds dangerous. I’d better sit down.

Although trying to do 1000 squats sounds like something I would try. Fortunately, though, I tend to forget to do squats at all unless I’m at the gym or the dojo.

I changed the linens in the boys’ bedroom this week, and it was the last time I would make up my oldest child’s bed with sheets with cartoon characters on them.

They’ve had Spider-Man, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mario, or Star Wars sheets on their beds ever since they had big boy beds. Oh, and how delighted they were when I would spend twenty bucks at the Walmart to pick up a new set and they would come home to vivid new colors and heroes. They were easy to delight when they were young.

They started out in separate bedrooms with their cribs and then their big boy beds–a set of bunk beds separated by a wall. A couple years ago, we moved them into a room together and activated the bunk bed feature of the bunk beds. We made the corner bedroom into a guest bedroom and painted it a pleasant orange, but we never got around to decorating it with wall hangings. It idled, as we haven’t had many guests to Nogglestead in recent years. Mostly, the boys used it as a playroom as their extensive Lego holdings resided in that closet.

This summer, though, as my wife thought she would spend a lot of time in the room after recent surgery, she ordered some art from a catalog, and I put them up. She didn’t end up spending much time in that room after all, but we’ve decided to again separate the boys into separate bedrooms, and the oldest will get the former guest bedroom and its full-sized bed.

So he’ll go to bed with adult sheets now and forever more (unless he’s a modern young man who might end up with cartoon sheets in adulthood). I guess it’s fitting; at 13, he has moved into adult-sized clothes that his mother often puts into my drawers.

But it puts one in a melancholy mood to start the morning. My children are growing up, and most of our lives will be spent apart.

A melancholy solved by actual exposure to those siblings who begin squabbling the minute they awaken (hence the separate bedrooms soon). Suddenly, I’m Can I send them to military school starting today?