Musings from Brian J. Noggle

We’re thinking about getting a new automobile, and to be honest, I’m a little leery of it since it’s gone from mechanical systems that can fail due to the laws of physics to software problems caused by an intern forgetting a semicolon. This GM problem doesn’t make me feel better about the prospect:

General Motors is recalling 370,000 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups from the 2014 model year to fix software that could cause the exhaust components to overheat and start a fire.

. . . .

GM said eight fires have been reported, but no injuries.

Hoping to get a better score next time, GM advises:

The company is asking customers not to leave their trucks idling unattended.

You know, the best place to be when your automaker’s software is going the full Edgar on you is inside the vehicle, where software-controlled door locks and electronic windows won’t hamper your escape at all.

There’s a little black cat with white paws that lives down in the little wooded gully at the front of our property. He comes around the house sometimes, but shies away from us if he sees us.

I’m glad to see he’s made it through the recent polar vortex.

I just wish he wouldn’t do that. It annoys our cats and prompts them to mark their side of the door from time to time.

Who else could read the first sentence of a story entitled I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users and think of home?

Well, the first sentence is:

The trailer parks of Jefferson County, Missouri, are a far cry from the international cartels of Breaking Bad, but this is the real picture of meth in America….

I lived in just such a place.

View Larger Map

Although the mobile home I lived in at this location was not quite so nice. As a matter of fact, it was the most ramshackle one in Siesta Mobil Home Park and it undoubtedly melted in the rain sometime between then and now.

The empty pad to the northwest, there, is where the Hittler trailer was. I still have the table they left behind when they moved their trailer.

The tree on the little hill in the back there? My brother tore his finger up falling out of it one day right before we moved, and my mother made him wait with a compress before taking him to the ER because she was showing the trailer to someone interested in buying it. He followed her (and my father’s) footsteps into the Marine Corps, so perhaps she was toughening him up for it.

At any rate, I left the trailer park for the house in the valley down the dirt road in 1987 or 1988, and I left that house for good before the meth problem really took off. Kinda like I left the projects before the crack epidemic hit. Why, it’s almost like people don’t take my leaving very well.

(Link via Instapundit. Colorful youth courtesy my parents.)

After the somewhat saddening striking of the Christmas decorations, we have the annual hunt for the Christmas straggler, the decoration missed when decamping them.

This year, it only took me a day and a half to find it:

I know! You’re saying, Brian J., do you decorate your empty gumball machine every year? Truth of the matter is that I do not.

That particular decoration started on the tree until the new young black cat harvested it. After that, I hung it on a nail over the stairs that had remained without adornment in the four years we’ve been in Nogglestead. I received a Green Bay Packers wall hanging for Christmas, so I swapped it for the wreath on Christmas day and put the wreath on the desk downstairs so I’d remember to pack it up when we packed the decorations, and then….

A child hung the ornament on the gumball machine. As I did not decorate the gumball machine, I did not think to look on the gumball machine for decorations. But it could not remain subtly hidden for eleven months. Oh, no, this misplaced wreath had to announce its presence the day after the Christmas decorations were safely ensconced deeply in the short closet beneath the stairs, safely defended by the in-home vacuum hose hydra and bicycle trainer. To taunt me with how much work I’d have to undo and redo in putting it into the bin with the other ornamentation.

Needless to say, I have not yet undertaken that step. Instead, I’ve blogged about it. And by the time I get around to actually putting it away, eleven months might elapse.

In the other room, the boys were playing Lego Batman on the Wii, and the seven-year-old said to the five-year-old, “Stop freelancing!”

Was he offering his younger brother career advice, advising him to take a secure position instead of working as a contractor? No, he was repeating something Kelly Chase used to say (and still might).

When listening to Kelly Chase do color on St. Louis Blues hockey broadcasts, he’d say a defenseman who moved out of position to try to join the play was “freelancing.” Usually he said this when the opposing team took the opportunity to use that newly free space to attack the St. Louis Blues goal.

And sometime in their (continuing) youths, my children’s father took to tell them, usually when they were wandering a bit far from him in a parking lot, to stop freelancing and get back into position. I also tell them they have to have their heads on a swivel, another Chasism, when they’re in a parking lot.

So what the older youngster meant is that his brother, acting as the second player in the game, should follow his on-screen Batman instead of wandering to other parts of the screen.

Which is probably better than other colorful metaphors children could learn from old hockey players.

(Yeah, the blog is going all Linkletter of late. But the kids have been home on break, and they’re saying better things than our self-appointed betters in the capitals are. Also, trivia to connect Art Linkletter to the St. Louis Blues more tidily than I deserve: Art Linkletter was born in Saskatchewan.)

The five-year-old got a checkers/chess game board for Christmas, and the older boy wanted to learn chess and got far enough to learn how to set up a chessboard.

So they’re in the parlor playing, and somehow they’re on the same side.

I believe this is the Molotov–Ribbentrop opening.

This is different from other game variants this morning, which have included Lego catapults firing checkers and Catzilla flattening the board.

I think they’re just about old enough to teach the dreaded Noggle Blitz.

Five-year-old child: “Daddy, how do they make paper?”

Daddy: “Like mashed potatoes, except with wood chips and glue instead of boiled potatoes and milk.”

The Springfield News-Leader offers a story about visiting the horse park in winter:

The wreath caught my eye, but the horses made me stop to take a picture. They looked so peaceful on a quiet morning at Valley Water Mill Equestrian Center.

. . . .

If you’re looking for a break from the holiday hustle, I suggest visiting the horses. The Christmas decorations at the facility are handmade by employees and each year they add a few more.

The equestrian center is open through the winter, weather permitting.

You know what I do when I want to see horses in the snow? I walk to my mailbox.

The new neighbors to our south have two new horses and have cleared the brush on the east side of their lot so the horses can graze. Further down the farm road, the neighbor across the street has a number of pintos. The house just south of us (and our new neighbors) had a number of horses, but they’ve been gone a season or two, so their big barn must be empty now. Beyond their house is a little hollow, but cattle often graze on the next hill. And to our west, although the Double Diamond Bar ranch has been broken up, the homeowner on one of its parcels has a couple of cattle and horses just because he can.

Funny how I’ve come to take these things for granted after living out in the country for four (!) years now. Strangely, I’m the old timer on the block all of a sudden. The new neighbors to the south and west. Only the house on the north has owners who predate us, and as they’re getting older, it won’t be long until they move on to something smaller. The next house north has just turned over, too, and I haven’t seen the new owners yet.

Also, given that Springfield is a small city of a touch over 100,000 located smack dab in the middle of not much extended suburbs–you pass through rural areas to get to the nearest bedroom towns–it’s strange to think that there are some people who live their entire daily lives within the confines of that city and rarely take an excursion outside it through the rolling hills and back country roads.

And they vote.