Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The church picnic had a couple of crossstitched pillows in the silent auction, and although I did not actually bid on them in the auction, I picked them up later amongst the remnants, paying more than I would have bid on the items.

The woman who had made them had taken them home but brought them to church on Sunday, so I am not sure if the money I gave her went to the church or to her at that point. Probably the church as she’s active in it and a good congregant. If not, well; the amount I gave her was probably enough for the kits (if she bought them retail) plus materials leaving some pre-labor reform wages for her effort. I know how that goes; when thinking about how much my handiwork in woodburning or whatnot could retail for, the cost was generally less than the cost of the materials if I bought them retail and even if I used scrap, the wages for my effort would be below minimum wage.

I told her when I asked about them that my mother had been very creative and sewed/embroidered/creweled a bunch when I was young. She was even a hostess for the Creative Circle organization which had the late 20th century housewife sales parties but for kits for sewing and not home décor or kitchenwares. So maybe she seemed like she was doing a lot because she was making her sample kits. But I remember latch-hooked pillows and samplers on the wall. But at some point, she just stopped. Maybe it was in the move to Missouri, or maybe it was because she got a full-time job with a two hour daily commute that sapped that energy to do things at home or the later second shifts which tampered with her diurnal cycle. Maybe she spent that time on home maintenance/home improvement when she got houses of her own. Or maybe she continued her whole life but I stopped noticing. Probably not the latter, as I went through her effects after she died and did not see much of that.

As I mentioned, I used to do a lot of handicrafts. Beaded jewelry, woodburning, glass etching, making clocks out of old trays and platters. I guess I was most active with it when I was not full-time or between contracts and when I was hopped up on watching Creative Juice and That’s Clever! and The Joy of Painting with my young children. As I made things, I boxed them up, and honestly thought maybe I would box them up until a silent auction at church rolled around. I thought about a spot in the antique or craft malls, but my work was pretty rudimentary, and I don’t think I would be able to charge enough to cover materials and retail space, much less any effort. And as I got full time work and contracts, I just kind of wandered away from making things for the most part.

And the church didn’t really have many silent auctions over the years. The one at the picnic is only one of a few in the last couple of years, and the auction itself revealed why: Nobody bid on most of the the hand crafts. I picked up a stained glass angel for a Christmas present, but we’re only buying presents for a couple of people these days and don’t need many such articles. So it’s not like I’ve had a place to dump my excess crafting cheaply and for a good cause.

I didn’t share anything anyway. When I unpacked some of the things when the church called for donations, I discovered that the stained glass painting I’d done in 2012 were ruined. I’d wrapped them in old shirts to protect them, and over the years, the paint adhered better to the shirts than the glass. Unwrapping them peeled the paint off of them. So I guess the best way to cast it is that I now have a couple of glass pieces to etch or to paint with the stained glass paint again, but I guess it’s a decade old now. Not that I would have anywhere to go with the completed product.

Ah, this started out as a post about how my mother did cross-stitch until she didn’t. It turned into a how I did crafts until I didn’t. I wonder if reasons were similar, and if my mother ever thought about it.

As I mentioned, I cleaned my store room last weekend, and as part of the cleaning process, I actually disposed of some items in the store room which I will probably never use.

One bin contained phone and Ethernet cabling supplies. I bought some Ethernet cable ends, crimping tool, and wall plates twenty-five years ago when I took hardware classes at the community college and thought I might pick up some free lance work running cables. I (badly) pulled cables from my office to that of my beautiful wife in our home in Casinoport (which included running some conduit pipes the length of the house in a ceiling cavity). I ran Ethernet cables between our offices in Old Trees as well following the phone lines outside the house. And although I got a bid for professionals to do it here at Nogglestead, I ended up running 30′ of cable between our offices and drilling holes in the wall instead of using wall plates (the professional bid was $1000 in 2009 dollars, which is something like eleventy billion in Bidenbucks). I’d originally ordered a kilometer of Cat5 cable, but I sold that at a garage sale at some point in the early part of the century. Somehow, though, I ended up with smaller spools of Cat5 and phone cable, but to be honest, it was not likely 1 Gigabit cable, and as everything is wireless these days (and Nogglestead might well be my last house), so I thought I’d get rid of the cables. I somehow also had a small box of coax cable, so I bundled them together.

A church group has called for donations for its fundraising rummage sale, so I thought about including it with the several boxes of bric-a-brac that has been cluttering my garage for years (somehow, we miss the annual fundraiser some years). But instead of dumping it on them, I called the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a retail store where Habitat sells donated building materials. The guy who answered the phone had to go ask if they would take the cables, but when he came back, he said he would.

So I ventured up there on a Saturday morning, and I’m sorry I did.

The place was a zoo. A jacked up pickup truck had broken down or something and was blocking part of the entrance not only with the truck but with people clambering around it and under it. The parking lot was too small for the number of vehicles there. People were just parking willy-nilly and wandering through the parking lot without looking. I found an actual parking spot and had my youngest grab the box of cables, and….

The guy receiving the donations was completely dismissive of our donation. He reluctantly took it off of our hands and said they could probably recycle it, but he might have thrown it in the dumpster when we turned away and tried to navigate our vehicle out with minimal property damage and loss of life.

You know, excessive gratitude for little donations like this embarrasses me. However, disdain or annoyance at my small bit to try to help, that boils my blood every time.

The food pantry that my church supports is on the north side of Springfield, which means it’s a bit of a drive for us, and I used to take our old canned goods up there. But the volunteers there ranged from indifferent to annoyed, so I started dropping stuff at the food pantry in Republic where they’re generally pleasant.

It’s almost enough to make me less kind.

And at least the crap is out of my store room.

of free time on the Memorial Day weekend.

Oh, gentle reader.

I have recently added little air filters to a couple of rooms in the house, particularly where cat litter boxes are present (during the recent reign of litter box averse cats from the previous generation, we added cat litter boxes in the living room up stairs and in a corner of the den downstairs to give the old cats options, and we’ve left the one in my office where the kittens were sequestered during their first days in the house). And I have been pleased to note how much the little $50 devices knock down the dust in those areas, so I thought, “Why not put one in the store room?” as this room holds three litter boxes (and, indeed, for a long time were the only litter box location in the house).

To put one in the store room, I would have to find an electrical outlet, presumably one behind the boxes of miscellania on the shelves. Hey, I was planning to swap out the cat litter boxes for fresh litter and to mop the room anyway. Why not dust everything at the same time? It’ll only be a couple of hours, ainna?

Oh, but no. Gentle reader, it took me over 10 hours to remove, dust, vacuum, mop, dust again, and replace everything. Steps included:

1. Removing old cat litter
2. Dusting and moving out all boxed old computers, comic books, old files, those bins of cables I cannot yet part with, and personal memorabilia as well as unsorted loose items meant to be put in the appropriate place “someday.”
3. Removing shelving units
4. Sweeping the floor
5. Mopping the floor
6. Hosing off shelving units
7. Setting up fresh cat litter boxes
8. Sort the, er, unsorted items and put them into the proper bins or boxes
9. Dust (again) boxes before returning to the store room
10. Dispose of certain items earmarked for donation or other, er, disposal

Not included: Dusting my office where I put the boxes and whatnot while I swept and mopped.

My goodness, almost fifteen years’ of cat litter leaves quite a patina on everything. Not everything had been undusted in that time–I’d dust or wipe things as I got into them or whatnot–but the fine, fine dust on everything stuck to my hands such that I had to wash them like Lady Macbeth to keep from leaving dust on things I was dusting. And a couple of the shelves had an inch or more of cat litter under them where the cats had scratched and where the thrown litter had fallen through the holes in the shelving.

As I started the room reassembly, I groused about it or demonstrated frustration with the fact that it would eat up my Memorial Day, and she asked me if it was worth it. And: I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s going to see it, and nobody at Nogglestead will notice (as I’m generally the one who goes into the store room. But, c’mon, man, it needed to be done. Which I wonder if it isn’t thematic of my whole existence: Doing what needs to be done, but nobody sees it.

At any rate, look upon my works, ye mighty, and join my despair:

I hope the new filter can keep up with the cat litter dust. And that I can keep up keeping the new filter clean.

And hopefully after a few more days, I will stop smelling that dust.

Or maybe I need to read the manuals or online help or related articles. But whenever I try to take night photographs with my iPhone, I am very disappointed.

For example, on Sunday night, we’d had storms, and fog began to rise from the moist ground. Across Nogglestead, the 4th family to live in the first part of Whitaker’s Folly since we moved into Nogglestead keeps their front porch light on. From my vantage point on the glider on the deck, I see the light diffused through the fog behind the a lone tree standing in our field, and it’s an interesting shot.

But with my iPhone, it’s:

I took several shots with several different settings, and that’s the best of the lot. It has a sort of Impressionist feel to it, but if only I could have captured it more clearly, I think it would have been a better shot.

I’ve thought from time to time about taking up photography as a hobby–enough that I have acquired more than one tripod–and I have one or more books on photography in the stacks. And I once tested a photography class sharing Web application when my best client took a photography class and founded a startup to support it as one does. But I’ve never gotten serious about it. Or serious enough to actually discover what those little icons on my phone’s camera app mean.

I guess that’s a story of my life: I thought about something, but did not pursue it with vigor.

I might have mentioned that life is a bit transitional here at Nogglestead these days. The boys are getting older (one has graduated), so they don’t need their dad as much–as a matter of fact, I see them too little these days as they go about their endeavors. And my job situation is uncertain, and it’s taking its time to resolve and might for some time yet.

So, in my uncertainty, I have seized upon something I can control to make myself feel more in control, and that’s taking care of Nogglestead.

In the olden days, when I was watching the boys most of the time or immediately after they were both in school full time, I cleaned the house metronomically. I swept every day; I cleaned the bathrooms completely on the weekends and the bathroom counters on Wednesdays as well. I painted several rooms. I mopped and vacuumed weekly at least.

But with the contracts and the employment, the housecleaning slowed. Dusting happened every couple of weeks. Dusting or vacuuming the lower level fell to once a month. Yard and garden work, at least my part of it, fell to half-hearted plantings in the spring. Sometimes, especially toward the end of the previous vinyl liner, pool cleaning and maintenance occurred intermittently. In my defense, some of this was delegated to teenaged boys who would prefer to do other things over the summer than work, and we were to busy and, frankly, inattentive or lazy to insist.

But now? Again with the metronome. Pool on Fridays. Dusting upstairs and bathrooms on Saturdays. Cleaning the hall floors on the weekends. Dusting and vacuuming the lower level every other week. I’ve started mowing the lawn every week or ten days (which will slow in the drier summer), and I have started completely weed trimming and edging Nogglestead. Mowing is three to three and a half hours each time, and the trimming/edging is two to four hours spread over a couple of days/charges of the battery packs we have for the trimmer.

And you know what? Everything looks nice. And I’m a little eager for time to pass so I can start these chores over again. But I will enjoy the tidiness of Nogglestead while it lasts.

Hopefully, things will even out again, and Nogglestead can fall back into untidiness.