Musings from Brian J. Noggle

It’s no secret to our neighbors, but we burn Duraflame logs at Nogglestead.

Of course, if you’re a long-time reader, you might have expected as much. Of course, the Duraflame log depicted in that post from 2011 gathered dust in the fire box for seven years before I lit a fire at the end of November, 2017. And once I got the fire lit, I kept it going, lighting something almost every night throughout the winter last year.

I had a little other miscellaneous wood laid up for that ice storm in 2009, but they were what bundles I could find at the grocery store at the time. I never laid in a proper supply of firewood, so I tried with the fresh bundles I bought at the grocery store, but they were not very dry, and I often had trouble lighting them.

I didn’t lay in a supply of firewood this year as I couldn’t find anyone in my circle who knew someone selling it, and I didn’t want to go onto an Internet forum (Facebook marketplace or Craigslist, you damn kids call them) to have some random fellow deliver me a load of…. something (low trust society, donchaknow). I did read in the news that firewood sales are becoming scarce around here as land in the near-populated areas are getting cleared for development (and the trees piled into the middle of the lot and burned because that’s cheap and convenient).

So I’ve gone with Duraflame logs because they light easily, for the most part, and they last three or four hours (a little less if you light one when the remnants of the previous one is still hot). I mean, it’s more expensive than the wood would be at eighty dollars a cord, but they’re three dollars each when you buy a pack of nine at the warehouse club.

So I felt like a fop for about a year about it. It’s an expensive(ish) fire affectation, and the neighbors all know it because the scent of a wax log differs from that of real wood (also, it doesn’t crack or snap; it just makes a little bit of a hiss as it burns).

But, you know what? I’m not ashamed (too much) any more.

It’s not because I suddenly have embraced a 21st century-style identity of Person With A Trait Not Widely Accepted And Probably Needs To Be Corrected Who Suddenly Advocates, Nay Demands Everyone Else Adore It (the celebrated PWATNWAAPNBCWSANDEEAI lifestyle).

Mostly because I realized a Duraflame log is still more work than a gas fireplace, and the lack of effort bothered me. Also, I have insufficient know-how in all phases of firecraft, from selecting and stacking wood to lighting a nice fire easily every time, so I felt like a lesser Man for using Duraflame logs.

But it’s not like you just flip a switch or use a remote and there’s fire. It does include some work. I have to empty the ashes weekly and clean the gristle off of the glass in the doors. And I do have to stick the fire log (or firelog, as the package indicates) and light it.

Although, to be honest, I think that the clean-up work I accept for this facsimile of a log fire might mark me further as a sucker.

I am sorry I brought it up now.

As I might have mentioned, we took down our annual Christmas decorations on New Year’s Day, and I was very, very careful to go through all the rooms to find the decorations I put out. I actually put one tchotchke in our bedroom, and I got that packed up. I got the one on the end table that was hidden from sight because of the way we turned our sofa to make room for that *$&*@!! Christmas tree. I got the things in the dining room, including a little American folk are Twelve Days of Christmas thing that my mother-in-law gave us as a joke but which we put up every year where she gets to see it all through Christmas dinner.

But, ah, my foes, and ah, my friends, when I looked at the kitchen, I looked from the dining room at the space on the top of the cabinets where we put what few kitchen tchotchkes we have, and there was nothing.

I did not look at the counter.

It’s a little serving set that we got from somewhere that I set out on the counter where it gets in the way of Christmas cooking and baking, but what says Christmas more than something getting in your way when you’re already feeling pressured because of the holidays and you have to get something done and DAMMIT there’s something else?

At any rate, I will get them boxed and stored before I splatter them with eggs and breakfast materials this year, unlike Christmas stragglers in 2012 and 2013.

In 2016, we decided to get a second Christmas tree for our lower level. Because I didn’t like putting on Christmas lights–every time I did, I put a corner of a mantel into my kidneys while winding or unwinding the Christmas lights, I thought we could get a pre-lit or pre-strung Christmas tree for our upstairs–and move the old tree downstairs.

Well, that was very easy. In 2017, when we put up the new pre-strung tree and plugged it in. All we had to do was put the ornaments on. Previously, it had been a two or three day process: Put up the tree, fluff it, string the lights, and decorate it. But the new process was essentially two steps and something we could do willingly in a day.

But that was then. 2018 was now. When we plugged in the tree, several sections of the tree were unlit. I spent an hour or so trying to identify the bulbs that burned out and knocked whole strands out, but ultimately I could not, and resigned myself to stringing additional lights in the dark zone before decorating it.

Then, after we got the ornaments on it, another section went dark. And remained dark because I would have had to fuss with the lights through the ornaments or lay a new strand of lights over the ornaments.

I was in the mood to pitch the thing (or donate it to a charity garage sale and let someone else fuss with it for a couple of dollars), but these lights were not embedded in the tree; they were strung on the tree. So if I took them off the tree, I would still have a tree for next year that I could string lights on. It seemed like a good, economical idea. Especially since I was not going to replace this tree with a prelit tree of any sort next year that I would essentially rent for a trouble- and hassle-free single Christmas.

So after I packed up the Christmas decorations and ornaments yesterday, I started on the lights. It was then that I discovered that:

• Some individual lights were held on with individual clips, which meant I had to pop off the clip on each branch of the tree except
• some lights, generally the ones at each side of a main branch, were zip-tied to the respective branches, so I had to carefully find the camouflaged zip ties and cut them without cutting too much of the branch or fake fronds with them and
• The strings themselves were not individual lines; several times, the wires separated and went to the other side of the tree for some circuit reason that made sense to someone other than myself. So I would come to these Y intersections and cut one section of them, hoping I would find the other end of it eventually.

The total time to remove 600 lights and their clips and zip ties: Four hours.

Which I guess isn’t too bad. 600 lights removed in 4 hours is 150 lights an hour, or 2.5 per minute. But the metrics ultimately don’t make me feel better.

About the time I really, really came to regret the decision is same time I thought I was almost finished. The total elapsed time of really, really regretting my decision and thinking I was almost done itself was about two and a half hours. But once I get onto a task like that, I must finish no matter the cost in sanity or spending my entire day off messing with that tree.

Worst of all, as I was working, I couldn’t help think that somewhere in China, some young woman has to put the lights on these Christmas trees, several a day, or she’ll be fired and have to return to the provinces to eke out a living on a substinence-level farm. The perspective didn’t help.

You know, I read a lot of Buddhist Zen and mindfulness stuff, but I never really got into the zone of it while working on the Christmas tree because I was too busy resenting the task. Which was probably even unnecessary. Clearly, I was hanging too much onto my self and a preference to do something else with that time even if I didn’t know what that was.

Worst of all, it kind of felt like a recap that replayed my 2018: A simple task, expanding to fill all the available time and leaving me having done something without actually feeling a sense of accomplishment for it.

So next year, I will pull the our existing Christmas lights out of storage (not the ones from this tree, which I basically cut off and would never have figured how to get onto the tree again given their strange separations), I will test them before I put them on the tree, and the tree will be lit the old fashioned way: Over the course of days, and with many mantel pokes to my back which I will appreciate as I never have before.

When filling the ice cube trays at Nogglestead, I have two settings:

1. I overfill the trays, triggering a minor ice age in the freezer as the ice cube trays freeze to each other or overflow, producing ice stalactites that hang from the ice cube trays and spill onto frozen foods below, forming structures only a wampa could love.
    
2. I overcorrect for the above problem so that the ice “cubes” are actually tiny little ice “tiles” about an eighth of an inch thick.

One would think with years of practice, I would be able to thread the basketball hoop of filling an ice cube tray properly, but I have not. I believe the word “incorrigible” applies. Perhaps “inveterate,” too.

Have you noticed that people who avoid saying “Merry Christmas” and say “Happy Holidays” instead, explaining that they want to include all seasonal holidays continue saying “Happy Holidays” after Hanukkah ends, but stop saying “Happy Holidays” after Christmas, even though Kwanzaa starts after Christmas and New Years’ Eve/Day and Epiphany are yet to come?

How secular, really, is it to say “Happy Holy Days,” anyway?

Also, what is the adjective to apply to celebrations of the Epiphany? “Happy Epiphany”? “Merry Epiphany”? If we as a people have not yet set one, I should like to wish everyone a “Personal Epiphany.”

I can explain that thing on the sink.

For starters, “The Thing on the Sink” is not an H.P. Lovecraft short story, although with a title like that, it might be a good one.

No, this particular thing on the sink has travelled throughout the lower level of our home with feline assistance. I hope. Otherwise, it might be something out of a Lovecraft story.

I not-so-recently changed the toner on my black-and-white printer (which is why I’m not afraid to throw extra hyphens into this blog post–I have enough toner to print them if needed). I’d bought a two pack of the the toner cartridges on the Internet, and they came in a box with foam packing at the ends. I’d already used the first of the two toner cartridges and had taken it to Staples, where I would eventually get a $2 coupon to use in thirty days that I would not actually use because I only go to Staples to recycle toner cartridges for the two dollar coupon that I never use. It doesn’t make much sense to me, either, but that’s what I do.

Since I used the second cartridge, I took the foam ends out of the box because I save foam packing like it in case I need to add filler material to a project I’m working on, but I never do because I’m lazy and haven’t done anything with a monitor bezel in years, but I’m still accumulating foam for my next project in a couple of years.

So I left the foam ends in my office, and one or more of the cats decided one of them was a cat toy. So it made its way from my office into the living room, and then into the hallway between the living room and our offices. I picked it up off the floor to vacuum and put it on the cat tower in the hallway, meaning to take it up to the garage at some point in the future. But I didn’t before one or more of the cats took it from the tower and into the bathroom, from whence I put it onto the sink.

See, it makes sense. And, one day, it might make it into the garage to get used in a project, or more likely, to be saved for a project I never get around to.

You see, I can explain the seemingly random placement of seemingly random things at Nogglestead. Basically, it boils down to one or more things, sometimes in combination: Cats, children, and/or laziness.

Also, I just wanted to let you know that sometimes I know what something odd laying around is, unlike that one time or that other time.