Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I am not the Imelda Marcos of hats, gentle reader, but I have accumulated some in my time, and, at Nogglestead, they (and those owned by the other members of the family) tend to gather in two places.

One, the top of the video game in my office, is where my hats end up.

This is where I put hats which I do not wear often. A lot of times, these include hats I’ve bought on vacations to cover my balding head.

The collection includes:

• A cheesehead.
• The boonie hat I just bought in Florida last month.
• The paper hat I bought in Arkansas in 2023.
• Three (3) grey fedoras that I have bought at garage sales over the years before re-learning that grey is not really my color. One of these might actually be the first fedora I got while in college, which I wore when writing my first novel.
• Two (2) black fedoras that were my daily wear fedoras before they wore out–one has a hole at the top of the crown at the front, where you grab a hat to take it off. The other does not seem to hold its shape.
• Another straw hat with the Island Beach brand name on it, which probably indicates I also bought it in Florida.
• A little Tyrolean (Alpine) hat which I bought at Friestatt’s Ernte Fest a couple years ago (maybe 4 now?).
• Three (3) NRA caps which I got for renewing my memberships over the years.
• A John Deere cap which probably came with my lawnmower–I cannot imagine actually buying one. Oh, I see the back says Owner’s Edition, so, yeah, I got that sixteen years ago when I bought the
• A Canada cap which my mother-in-law bought for me as a souvenir on one of her driving trips probably fifteen years ago. Or twenty. They’re about the same when you reach a certain age.
• A youth-sized Green Bay Packers cap.
• A white Springfield Cardinals cap which I bought as part of a bundle at a silent auction or at the ballpark.
• A Springfield Cardinals 2012 champs cap (ibid.).
• A Milwaukee Brewers cap which I bought on one of the trips to the Dells–probably 2017. It was the go-to cap for a while, but it has gotten stained, so it’s in the… collection, I guess?
• A St. Louis Blues hat which I bought back when we were DINKs who went to a lot of Blues games.
• A Missouri State ball cap which I bought to wear to…. The one football game we went to a decade or so back? Or one of the two Ice Bears games we went to over the years (and widely spaced, which is unfortunate since the tickets are inexpensive).
• A SparkCon hat I got as swag at the Walmart Cybersecurity Conference the first time I went. Pretty sure it was not this year.
• The Confederate hat I got after my father died.

Jeez, Louise, that’s 24 hats. More than I expected when I started writing this post. They were not only atop the game but behind it, as the top of the video game was a frequent destination for the kittens (and the cats still hop up there from time to time). The hats need blocking, and they’re all covered with dust and cat hair. To be honest, if I’d written this post last week, many of them would have ended up in the Lutherans for Life rummage sale. Like the probably youth-sized bucket hat I’d hoped to take to Florida (but it was youth-sized, probably not shrunken via washing as I said earlier).

Atop the refrigerator, hats also accumulate.

This is where I put the hats I wear regularly, including:

• My current black fedora.
• The current paper hat, if any–currently, it’s the ladies resort hat I bought last month in Florida.
• The Big Cedar Lodge cap I bought at our aborted vacation last year where it kept the rain off more than the sun.

The rest of the family keeps their caps up there as well. These include:

• A Missouri State Pride Band cap that my beautiful wife got at one of their reunions.
• A Dennis Hanks Chevrolet hat. That was my mother-in-law’s car dealer. Not sure if it came with the Chevy when she downsized or if she gave it to one of the boys at some time or another.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from conferences.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from my oldest son’s current employer, brought back from his time behind the booth in Florida last month.
• A SparkCon cap with less cat fur on it than mine.
• A tech company swag cap which is for my wife’s company. Not sure how many of those she got or if it was a free sample when she ordered other swag.

Ah, gentle reader. As with book accumulation points, sometimes hat accumulation points get decommissioned. Not depicted in this post: The pile of hats which had been in the garage.

For a long time, I had a pile of hats on the little desk in the garage which included:

• The hat I wore to the range in 2008–what was that company’s name? Something-care–I know TimBob, Jack Straw’s friend and who visited this blog in those early days, where “early” means five years into it.
• A Netscape hat whose logo was off-center.
• The cap I got when visiting the bay area and which served as my painting cap for a multi-year turn around the fence.
• A Queen City Roofing Materials cap which I bought when we first moved here. I guess I wanted to be more locally authentic or something.
• Several (?) other straw or brush hats that I’d bought on various vacations and intended for gardening use.
• A Dogwood Canyon cap bought on one of our trips to Big Cedar or Branson where we went further south for an expensive walk.

And probably a couple of others I forget.

As part of the multi-year garage cleaning project, I gathered them and boxed them for a donation–and they remained in a box or two awaiting an opportunity to donate them (which was this Monday, as I mentioned). I did wear some of the straw hats while gardening from time-to-time, but got into the habit of just putting on my most-recently-too-stained-for-going-out cap since the noise-canceling-but-music-blasting headset can fit over a ball cap but not a fully brimmed hat. My current cap is my previous Big Cedar Lodge cap. The garage might also have another cap stashed somewhere for the other lawnmower riders to use, but most of those aforementioned caps are in the Trinity Lutheran gym (or are in a dumpster nearby).

My goodness, that is a lot of hats. And an awful lot of words about the hats. But most of them are personal relics now, pointers to past events to cue my memories.

Welp, in researching this post, I discovered a similar sentiment in 2024 (It Almost Feels Like I’m Giving Up). But I have done it. Well, that’s a pronoun without a proper antecedent.

So: The Lutherans for Life annual yard sale started accepting donations yesterday, and we took 17 boxes (and one piece of furniture) in two trips up to the Trinity Lutheran Church gym. We were not the only ones to deliver on day 1: On both of our trips, we encountered several other trucks with various (smaller) loads, although there was a U-Haul rented for such an occasion that we maneuvered around on our second visit.

17 boxes. Enough for a yard sale of our own, actually, which is atypical; usually, when taking things for the Redeemer Youth Garage sale (discontinued several years ago) or the Lutherans for Life sale, we have a couple of boxes. This stack comes from a couple of sources:

• We missed last year for some reason.
• I culled children’s videos from our library. Ah, when we had young babies, I started collecting kid’s movies on home media, DVDs and videocassettes, to watch with them or to play for them to entertain them. It was a thing, you know. You hear stories about kids watching films and wearing VHS tapes out. But: When we moved to Nogglestead, the video library was downstairs, and we kept the boys upstairs most of the time because the home offices were on the lower level. AND: We had DirecTV with built-in digital video recording capabilities, so we captured Sesame Street, Yo Gabba Gabba, Word Girl, a variety of craft shows, and other PBS works on hard drives, and those were our go-to watching entertainment–or child distractions, anyway. So we did not watch most of the videos at all. So I gathered a box of the things we didn’t watch and probably won’t, even with grandchildren, but preserved others (the entire G.I. Joe cartoon series and selections from The Muppet Show and related movies, for example. But a box or a box and a half of old media.
• The children’s books that I did not reclaim and which we did not keep for grandchildren when culling my youngest son’s library in January. So two or three boxes of books.
• Things from the garage, which I have been cleaning out for…. Three years now?

Ah, gentle reader: That is what feels like giving up (as I mentioned in 2024 and will recount again). I recycled a bunch of glass and bottles back in 2024, and I did not have only one bin to go through in 2024.

About a decade or fifteen years ago, I got the notion to drill holes into plates to insert clock movements into them. I did it with a couple of kid’s plates and trays and one or more ceramic plates.

So I bought a lot of plates and trays at garage sales (and a couple of hubcaps) and made clocks out of a few of them…. But, as with many of the things I was making, I came to a ceiling of sorts: I have a short circle of people to whom I give (gave) gifts, and I really didn’t have the confidence to make an Etsy shop or rent a craft or antique mall booth. So, I shifted to another hobby or craft so to give my Christmas gift recipients some variety. And I boxed a couple of things to spring on church’s silent auctions, although we don’t tend to have those any more, either.

I also mentioned (8 years ago) etching and painting wine bottles. Well, I also accrued many clear vases, wine glasses, and other clear glass to work on. And…. Well, I donated them to the Lutherans for Life yard sale. After a decade or so in the garage, they were covered with dust and cobwebs. And I did not take time to clean them.

I had gathered a lot of frames for various things. I had made pressed flowers from the gardens of Nogglestead with a mirror background (cut down from a mirrored tile or small mirror), so I bought a bunch of frames, expecting I would make many other things like the gift I gave to Gloria after she came to visit–and which she sent back shortly before she died. But I didn’t, and those microwave-pressed flowers have faded on the parlor wall since. But I had boxes of frames and shadowboxes and small mirrors.

Ah, gentle reader, as I rummaged through the boxes, pre-rummaging for the rummage salers to come, I wanted to keep all of it.

But I didn’t. I packed several boxes of frames and of glassware for the garage sale. A box or two of oddball plates I’d accumulated, some with thrift store prices written on them or garage sale stickers.

I did keep the wood, the plaques, and the various articles I bought for woodburning. I saved the mirrors because I might want to put them in technological devices in the future. And I saved some frames because I might use them (and because I would have had to move the electric smoker to get to bottom shelf, and I didn’t have time for that yesterday).

Who knows? Perhaps the room in the garage will give me time to work on projects. I think my beautiful wife would like to park a second vehicle in our three car (three cars in the middle 1980s, so three small cars) garage.

But, yet. So much reified potential lost. Of course, the decade and a half where these things went unused was also lost. And continue to be lost.

Until I go back later this month and buy it all back.

Okay, not exactly true, but we did have a church potluck yesterday, and a couple-three weeks ago, I thought I should learn to make deviled eggs because they’re beloved at these things, second perhaps only to the triune God celebrated on Trinity Sunday as it happened to be. I mean, you can usually count on three or four people making deviled eggs, and if you get there two minutes after the pastor says the blessing, you ain’t getting any.

Since I happen to like the one or two deviled eggs available when I get there in time and when I push Gladys and Milt, those codgers, out of the way, I thought (angels singing “aw-aw” and a light shining down from heaven or there abouts, or perhaps just the sun coming out after a week of rain) that maybe I could bring in some deviled eggs. After all, I’m comfortable with baking them to make hard-cooked eggs in quantity. I did just subsist on (it seemed) hard-cooked eggs for the Whole30 diet in January. So that’s not the thing.

So, a couple-three weeks ago, I hard-cooked two dozen eggs (one Sam’s Club pack), and I tried the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (sized for 6 eggs). And I subbed in three kinds of mustard: Yellow, Dijon, and Horseradish. For the final set, I used the alternate Italian-style recipe with Italian creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese. And I labeled them and put them in the refrigerator, only to re-discover that my boys, raised Lutheran, don’t like deviled eggs. So I went through them and decided that I liked the Italian recipe ones best.

BUT: I took ill about then. I thought, “Oh, no, I bollixed the eggs.” I feared not only for my futures at potlucks but for my upcoming vacation. But! My beautiful wife also had a tetch about the same time, and she is the remainder of the household who does not like eggs.

SO: Alright, vacation saved, but this week approached, and I had some older (but good, I hoped) eggs in the refrigerator. So I baked them on Friday, thinking of deviling them to try out recipes. But, day-um, the most tedious part of making deviled eggs is peeling the eggs. I baked them, and then I spent a long time taking (most of) the shells off, and…. Well, I was not in the mood to devil them any longer. So, as in the Whole30 period of my life, I set them aside to eat them for meals and snacks, and….

Well, nobody brought deviled eggs today. I brought a double helping of pasta salad and a chocolate pudding pie, preparation of which was easier given the Sunday choreography of picking up my mother-in-law for service, accommodating my wife who had to speak at a church business meeting after service, picking her up after her speaking, and getting things prepared just so for church, I abandoned the plan of deviled eggs. I did, however, have one of the peeled hard-cooked eggs available for this photo. And then I ate the photo subject. Because I am not wasteful.

Given that nobody brought deviled eggs (or potato salad, jeez Louise, these modern Lutherans and their pizza provided and store-boughten coleslaw), I’m thinking of working to perfect and to get comfortable with my Italian deviled egg recipe.

But not in the near term. I feel like I’m living the slow-motion equivalent of the Cool Hand Luke bet scene (I haven’t seen the film, but perhaps I should look for it) where he has to eat 50 hardboiled eggs at once. Ask me now, and I’m not eager to eat another even though I have six remaining in the refrigerator.

Maybe if I did it in moderation, but: I have a lot of Lutherans to feed. Also, let’s hope for a good potato crop, because apparently I am also in charge of the potato salad now.

In a review of Sue Klebold’s book A Mother’s Reckoning (her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine, Colorado, school shooting), Holly Math Nerd might well indict me:

The Klebolds were running a parenting operating system that is extremely common in non-poor American households — and I suspect it is the dominant mode in middle-class white America — and the system was running as designed.

The problem was not malfunction.

The problem was the system itself, and what it cannot do.

I am going to call this mode role-execution parenting, because performative parenting sounds like an accusation of phoniness and that is not what I mean. Role-execution parenting is sincere. It is loving. It is competent. It is the mode in which parents identify the tasks and milestones and observable indicators of good parenting, execute them well, and treat successful execution as evidence that the parenting itself is succeeding.

Feed the child nutritious meals. Read to the child at bedtime. Drive the child to soccer practice. Attend the parent-teacher conferences. Set bedtimes and curfews. Provide structure. Provide opportunities. Provide consequences when warranted. Provide praise when earned. Do the things the parenting books say to do, with sincerity and attention.

Most American parents who are not poor are running some version of this mode. It mostly works. Most children raised in it grow up reasonably well.

Ah, gentle reader. My youngest just turned 18 and graduated from high school. My oldest has gotten a job which should allow him to move out on his own. And how have I done with them? How can I know?

Role-execution parenting tends not to develop the skills of interior attunement — the slow, patient, often uncomfortable practice of being present to a child’s internal weather independent of the child’s external performance.

To be honest, I am not sure what this means. Of course, I think that you cannot really know someone aside from their actions–I believe the oldest actually asked me about something like this based on something he’s recently read or has seen in an Internet video.

And I’ll never know how I’ve done as a parent because I’ll hopefully never know how their entire lives have gone.

The lottery machine was down at the grocery store this afternoon, so I could not buy a Powerball ticket. Ah, gentle reader, this is where I am in my career now: No full time job, but playing the lottery.

Ah, but the scratch-off vending machines were operational. My youngest doesn’t understand why I didn’t pick one of them. He’s just 18, and he bought a scratch-off himself once, but that’s all he’s interested in.

I’ve never been a fan of scratch-offs. Why? Because I’m not a Calvinist.

When you buy a scratch-off ticket, it is or it is not (probably not) a winner. But when you buy a numbers drawing ticket, you are not a loser until the numbers are drawn in the future. So you’re spending that (ever-increasing) dollar total on possibility, not actuality.

Perhaps the explanation was not the best.

As I mentioned, I read almost a year’s worth of Readers Digest magazine last week (that year being 2024-2025), and I have been thinking about the experience this week.

I found myself on several occasions telling my beautiful wife about something I read in the magazine. That doesn’t happen with what I read on the Internet; mostly, I read political blogs and Substacks, and the news media I read tends to lean toward crime and celebrity. Instapundit has some science links and sometimes music links to innumerable Matt Margolis PJ Media pieces, but, man, I miss general interest magazines.

Readers Digest has “Drama in Real Life”, the various humor sections (now overtaken by reprinted and perhaps uncompensated tweets–remember the old days when they paid hundreds of dollars per anecdote?), some health bits, generally a bit about food (November is good for reminding us where cranberries come from, which is generally Wisconsin), “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” (which I just scan looking for words I don’t know–generally, I know 14 or 15 of the 15 unless they have a strange theme), and so on. Every month it runs a piece on “The National Interest” which is a touch to the left of the spectrum, but not crazy. Things like “Teachers don’t make enough money and are leaving the field” (touching mostly on the money, not the institutional flaws which also might account for it). And a lot of articles still mention climate change, although that will probably diminish over time. Even though it was 2024, nothing hammered on Trump or lauded Biden–Elizabeth Warren got a shout out from someone who got scammed out of $30,000 as she (Warren) agitated and/or legislated some customer protections, but probably not the kind that says “Don’t Venmo thousands of dollars based on a text message from an unknown number.”

You know, newsstands used to be full of magazines with this sort of content. Lighthearted, light weight often, varied, and generally interesting. Even at the high end, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker proffered longer but varied bit which I often read cover to cover.

But those have all gone leftwing nutso after the turn of the century (when George W. Bush was the worst thing in the world). I gave up my subscription to The Saturday Evening Post about a decade ago when its contents got to be a little one-sided (see this for example). National Review used to have decent book reviews and pop culture stuff, but I let that lapse when it went all anti-Trump and started shifting its editorial viewpoint to match the full page Google ads–First Things kind of fills this void now, one of the two magazines I subscribe to now (New Oxford Review being the other, although I get the NRA, Ducks Unlimited, AAA, and electric co-op magazines for free).

I don’t have a current Readers Digest subscription–I let it lapse because they sent me constant reminders to renew my subscription before my subscription was lapsing–and sometimes, I ended up paying ahead for a couple years because I was not attentive. But maybe I’ll resubscribe if I get another card sometime soon.

Or, maybe, I should not and instead focus on clearing out the drawer full of decade (or more)-old magazines which piled up. History magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, even Beer magazine…. I probably have First Things and National Review magazines from the Obama administration in there somewhere. Maybe, with enough vacations, I can catch up on them.

But I probably won’t mention tidbits from them in conversation.