Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Ozarks pumpkin harvest is less than normal so far: Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity

Ladies and gentlemen, the pumpkin harvest at Nogglestead:

One pumpkin smaller than a baseball. Our watermelon harvest was similar, but apparently the deer have cleared the melon bed pretty good as the autumn has approached. We had one mound of pumpkins, one of watermelon, and four of cantaloupe which did produce three or four melons for us.

The subhead says Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity. We had plenty of that. What we lacked for much of August and September was rain which is what fills them.

Overall, the gardens of Nogglestead provided us with about what we could handle, actually, except for tomatoes. I had a couple of zucchini per week for much of the summer from three mounds. I had a late harvest of a pound or two of radishes which was about what I could eat. We had enough cherries to make one pie before they disappeared. We never did get a blackberry harvest suitable for a pie. And I haven’t actually dug out my potatoes yet, so who knows what lies beneath.

The deer, though, made out like the hooved bandits they are.

Thirteen years ago, I said:

I’ve had the shell of that empty Sears monitor sitting on a desk in my garage since then. I haven’t settled on idea what to do with it. Fishbowl? Make it into a fake fireplace-style decoration? I’ve also got the shells of a number of LCD monitors that I’ve planned to put corkboard in or whiteboard cut down from larger ones I pick up, but I’ve not jumped on that either.

So much of the multi-year garage cleaning project is being overwhelmed by the sheer number and volume/cubic footage I have of craft materials of various stripes that I’m not entirely sure I want to give up just yet. I mean, what can I do with the computer monitor shell? I’ve removed the cathode ray tube and electronics. I could, I suppose, make it into a corkboard or a whiteboard using the bezel and scrap the rest. Or maybe look for an LCD screen that fits it which I can put a Raspberry Pi in it for a digital picture frame or something. But it’s not been pressing for the last thirteen years, to say the least.

Pretty sure I did something with the eMac bezel though.

I’ve added a new t-shirt to the CafePress store:

You can order one if you’re so inclined here.

Strangely enough, my CafePress store has proven to be the most profitable endeavor of my “throw it out there” attempts at passive income. I’ve had it since 2004 when I made some off-color bumper stickers and then some political things which never sold. But when I started adding IT things badged with QA Hates You, I sold a couple–especially Project Manager Wall Clocks which have sold enough that I got a check from them back when they were new and which still sell steadily enough to cover the costs of having a CafePress storefront.

The Nico Sez line of apparel? I bought one to see how they would look. I’m wearing it as I type this blog post, actually.

The two apps I have on the app store? I sold one copy of Boxing Drill Companion to someone in Eastern Europe on the day I released it. I sold two copies of Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker: One to my beautiful wife, and one to her mother (who uses it every day, by the way, so: yay(?)). Which is almost $3 in revenue against $99 for an annual Apple developer account.

The books? Yeah, build your brand online didn’t work; not only did I spend $300 for a cover, but I sent out 50 to newspapers, magazines, and bloggers and got, what, five reviews? I’ve sold fewer than 100 copies of it and a handful of copies of the other books, but I’ve done my own covers for the others and have not sent out review copies except to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Contest or whatever it’s called. Which might explain one of the reasons that I haven’t written much long form in a while.

And this blog? I think I got a check from Google AdSense once over a decade ago. Against the ever-increasing costs of hosting and, fortunately, no longer the cost of updating the SSL certificate, but, yeah, not a profit center.

With apologies to Stephen Crane, a poem:

A man said to the internet,
“Sir, I exist!”

Maybe I should focus on more Civilization IV. I lose less money that way.

I have said that Nogglestead has the trenchcoat schtick, where you can find anything at times somewhere (in the linked example, I found a jump ring on the kitchen counter that I could use to make a pendant out of an English pound coin).

But sometimes the things one finds are of dubious utility.

I’m on a multi-year project to slowly clean out my garage which is not impassable but is getting there. For too many years, it’s been a life of “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it” even if that is atop something else just put down instead of away so that after a few rounds or strata of that behavior, you cannot find anything. Or even the multi-year process of cleaning the garage involves taking things from the shelves and sorting them into bins and then determining I need more bins, and then leaving the bins scattered around the floor for weeks until I get additional binnery which I just set down atop other things when I unload them from the car (combining the best from “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it”).

Also, as I’m culling things, I’m building up a solid bank of boxes of items to donate to charitable garage sales and whatnot (but they only arise once a year or so, so I cannot clear them as they go).

So, basically, I’m moving the clutter and reorganizing it and, once in a while, throwing something out. But not a lot. Maybe a couple of cubic inches every couple of months move to the garbage bin. I even finally discarded the child-sized foam martial arts sparring gear that my boys have not used in almost five years and have since way outgrown. The web-drenched martial arts bags, though, remain on the pile.

Whenever I think about buckling down and doing it, I’m overwhelmed. Which means the “process” is mostly me wandering around and nibbling at the margins. It came to a head Thursday when we had a garage door man in for a bit of repair, and he asked if I had any bolts. Ah, gentle reader, I have several sizes of carriage bolts that I have used, this summer, for repairing my gates–along with matching nuts and washers. But when he asked, I could not find them. Hours later, it occurred to me that I’d used a bucket to carry them to the places where I used them, so instead of looking for them in bins under the piles on the floor, I should have been looking for buckets under the piles on the floor.

So while the garage door man worked, I wandered around the garage, wondering where, again, to begin.

And I began by taking this from one of the built in shelves:

And putting it into a box on the rick of donations that we’ve gathered.

Model rocket wadding? Why do we have this? I don’t remember the boys having model rockets at all, although I don’t remember every gift they received (or even that I gave them) which they might have messed with for a day or so and then set aside. I haven’t seen any other parts of model rocketry in the garage. I just…. don’t know.

So it goes into the donations bin in hopes someone will find a quarter’s worth of use out of it, but….

Well, I wish every decision I had to make was this easy.

You would think it would be just as easy to determine a fate for every pine board that our family has broken in martial arts classes testing over the last fifteen years would have an easy solution, but no. I think I need another bin or two to contain and consolidate the collection. So I will leave them where they are for now.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, gentle reader, but our holiday trunk this year will be used car salesmen. So I have been haunting thrift stores trying to find not only loud sports coats and shirts for our family to wear but also a cheap used Little Tikes car for our tableau.

I went to Red Racks, and I had trouble finding the men’s apparel because it was on the opposite side of the store from the other clothing. As I wandered, I found the toys section and one of the standard orange Little Tikes cars for $20. Perfect! I might be done shopping the first week!

So in my rotation through the store, I found the men’s section and sourced an ugly yellow plaid shirt, and I was passing through the records section on the way to the toys. I half-heartedly flipped through some of them, and as I headed to the toys, some guy was wheeling the car to the cash register.

So I know how this feels.

I cannot tell you how many of these I have seen at garage sales this year because I was not looking for them. Now, I can tell you how many I will see: 0.

Doesn’t help that cross country season runs right up to the Trunk or Treat, and I won’t have much time to crawl yard sales looking. But we’ll think of something else if we don’t find one or two.

Ted Gioia laments the loss of American arts, including jazz music, opera, books, and whatnot from the middle part of the century (Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?), but he says:

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books.

Clearly, he has not been into a local library recently.

I suppose university libraries still have old books in them–depending upon how old the university libraries are themselves–but I am pretty sure I have long lamented how few books are in the local library branches here and how many of them are skewed toward contemporary books–and how you would have to order the classics via inter-library loan.