Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: January 2026

  • Love letters from Dad: part one – the timeline

    Back in December of 2017 I looked in the box marked “Mom correspondence” and read Mom’s letters. Somehow I skipped the letters sent from my soon-to-be stepfather, aka “Dad”. This new information from Dad’s letters all prompted me to check the dates and make a spreadsheet to track who did what to whom and when,…

  • Message from Mom beyond the grave

    I’ve been going through Mom’s old papers and correspondence. One thing she wrote was called “The Growing Old Part,” and now that I am too growing a little bit older, I read it with interest. She wrote the below musing to herself in 1984. She was born in 1934, so I guess she was a…

  • UPDATED: Tsk, this again

    More Northern lights they say. Columns this time. UPDATE: Well, turns out you had to have some magnetic BZ number that mid-Missouri did not have. Rest of the hemisphere had it, we did not.

  • TWIL: Keith Dudding has yet another outlet

    Keith Dudding, bluegrass expert on the now-defunct, mourned, eclectic OG KDHX radio station, has an additional place where you can hear him, because community radio in St. Louis will resurrect on Feb. 1. He says:: BIG NEWS! A great mix of music is coming to the web waves (for now) as Community Radio STL (http://www.crstl.fm)…

  • Trump is the new Bread Company Shoe Dude

    Trump has been so wacky lately that no one has really focused on his fashion choices. I didn’t know this, but sometimes he wears other lapel pins in addition to his Presidential Costume flag pin. I suppose I could say it’s like Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who was famous for her brooch diplomacy as…

  • My dentist has the coolest technology

    I was in bed at nine o’clock last night when I realized I had forgotten to go to the dentist. I was supposed to have contacted him sometime during the day — way before nine o’clock at night — because I’d had some dental work, and one element of it had to be removed. He…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 1/15/2026

    So this is the previous… This is the progress (I didn’t do much but lighten the table but that has to dry before I glaze)… And this is the goal.

  • Old suit new shape

    Ten years ago I bought a suit. It was my favorite, even though I did not attain the hourglass figure of the model. On me the suit looked more like this: I now weigh what I weighed when I bought that suit. Oddly, the weight isn’t where it was 10 years ago. The belly and…

  • I simply do not believe this

    Google Analytics has collected enough data that they can tell me the percentage of men who have visited this blog in its new post-TypePad iteration. Almost a quarter men? No way in hell. All I can imagine is that all the Chinese bots identify as male.

  • Ensure

    I woke up with chills, no appetite, and again the sensation of have been hit by a truck. I was barely hanging on at work and I knew I would have to be on my game for two hour-long meetings. I needed to be awake, and I needed nutrition, and I realized I had just…