All posts by David Todd

America, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, miscellaneous, Short Stories, The Forest Throne, Uncategorized

November Progress, December Goals

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Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day. 
  • Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
  • Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
  • Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
  • Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
  • Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.

Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.
Carlyle, family, holidays, home improvements, The Forest Throne

This Piece of the Universe, This Section of Eternity

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Games were on the schedule over Thanksgiving week.

Oops! I didn’t make a post on Friday, the first time in a long time to totally miss a day. I’ve been late a few times, but I didn’t even think of the blog.

What captured my attention? Family. Our daughter, son-in-law, and their four children came in Monday evening and left on Saturday. Our son and his husband came in on Wednesday, delayed a day due to airplane troubles. We had the normal Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, followed by a 1.6 mile hike on a trail loop near us (part of the route is on city streets).

I call this puzzling behavior.

Some of us put together a 1,000 piece puzzle. Some played games. We had other meals and conversation. Once I got up early to get grandson #1, Ephraim, out on his run on our semi-rural streets. Two other times I drove him to a track in Bentonville, where he ran timed miles. The first time he equaled his personal best. The second time he beat that by about 7 seconds, setting a new personal best.

The 2009 photo.

With #2 grandson, Ezra, I drove to the airport on Wednesday to pick up our son and his husband. That gave us some time to talk. He also helped me work in the yard on Tuesday. He and a friend of mine about his age, Liam, helped me move some large logs, both cut and deadfall, and cut out some wild thorn bushes that encroach on the blackberries. He earned his money. I also had him doing some leaf blowing, which he seemed to enjoy.

The 2019 photo.

With granddaughter, Elise, I had a lot of conversation. We worked together on the plot of the next book in The Forest Throne series. This will feature the one daughter in the Wagner family, Elizabeth. Elise and I worked out a prologue and discussed various plot lines. Tomorrow I will put some of those into a word document, filed away for writing a couple of books from now.

The 2023 photo, perhaps never to be done again.

With my youngest grandson, Elijah, I had a good time with a little roughhousing. We read together, and I gave him his first word exercise, now that he’s in 1st grade. He’s still a lot of fun, and wanted to work in the yard like others did. Almost all the baby toys we had for the kids are too young for him (and obviously the others), so I’ll be getting rid of them.

In the late evenings, after the games, puzzles, or whatever, we watched back episodes of Shark Tank. The three youngest kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, as did some of the adults. Mornings started with 30 minutes of reading. Ezra chose The Fellowship of the Ring, which is certainly a challenge for anyone, let alone a 12-year-old.

Saturday morning, as our daughter’s family were soon to leave, I remembered we had not yet recreated the photo from 2019 of me and all four kids. We shot that photo because at that time, a popular Facebook activity was to post photo comparisons from 2009 and 2019, ten years later. In 2009, I was on the floor reading to Ephraim, who was our only grandchild at the time. So we did a posed shot of me and the four grandkids on the floor. We wanted to do that again, and we just did fit it in before the trip was over. This is likely the last time we will ever get to do that shot.

Saturday, once our daughter’s family was gone, we had a quiet day with our son (his husband having left on Friday for business). We watched a couple of movies, ate leftovers for lunch, read, and went out for a simple dinner. An early morning airport run on roads we expected to have some frozen stuff on them turned out to be easy. Came home, rested, went to church to an excellent worship service.

Yesterday. I got back into reading Thomas Carlyle’s letters. He was visiting places in his native Scotland. In a letter he named the place he was at and said that this place was a piece of the universe and the time of his visit was a section of eternity. The place and time, “is very beautiful; doubly beautiful to me whose head has long simmered half-mad with brick wildernesses, dust, smoke, and loud-roaring confusion that meant little.”

That’s kind of how I feel. The last week, Thanksgiving, was doubly beautiful for taking me out of my routines. Today I’ll be back at it: writing in the Bible study in progress, trading stocks, doing housework. But last week will always be doubly beautiful, and I will think about it for a long time.

Bible study, books, critique group, family, home improvements, Magazines

Getting Rid of Some Books

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This was an okay book, not great. Not sure of its truth. Will never read it again, so it’s gone, today added to the sale/donation pile.

Our efforts at dis-accumulating continue. Perhaps not as fast as needed to do a downsizing in this decade, but we make a little progress. The last month has seen the old postcard collection acquired in the mid-1980s, having been left behind in the house we bought, for $115. But the buyer wanted me to ship it to Houston and so didn’t want the small, steel cabinet. I was able to sell that for an extra $10.

Then Lynda decided she was willing to part with the Gulf War memorabilia she brought back from Kuwait in 1991. They were supposedly Iraqi items. I listed them on Facebook Marketplace, not being sure they would sell. After one price reduction, a mom contacted me. She wanted them for her son (maybe a teenager), who loves military stuff. We were able to arrange a transfer that was convenient to both of us.

But really, the big thing we need to part with is books. For a bookiphile, that’s like cutting your wrist. But we have to do it. Despite the number of books we’ve gotten rid of, we still have at least 2,000 books in the house. I gave one away at writer’s critique group last week.

One book obviously isn’t much; we need to do more. In our living room is a built-in bookcase.  We are going to have to dismantle this to repair some water damage that appears to be from improperly installed flashing around the chimney. We have already removed some books from the lower shelves and piled them, to prevent them from being damaged and allow the bookcase to dry from a little moisture found.

As Lynda and I discussed it, she suggested that we get rid of a series of Bible study books that are shelved on that built-in. We went through one of those books together, and started a second. They aren’t bad books. I learned something from them. But when you have 2,000 books, and need to unload at least a thousand, I agreed with her to put those in the sale/donation pile.

I then suggested we also get rid of two books from the built-ins, the two books in The Bible Code series. We read these aloud together. They are an easy read because the books are not long, are well-written, and have lots of illustrations of where the Bible may have a code in the books of Moses. I say “may have” because, while the writer makes a good case, I’m not fully convinced it’s true.

At first Lynda balked. She was more accepting of the Bible code than I was and thought more of the books than I did. But then she agreed with me that we read the books, got something from them, and with all the other books in the house we were unlikely to read them ever again. So she agreed to get rid of them. I’ll move them out tomorrow.

I also have a fairly large set of magazines about World War 2 that I got from my dad. I had intended to read them, but it looks as if I never will. I have them listed on Marketplace and lowered the price twice. I think I’ll do so again and see if they will sell. Also on the getting-rid-of-block is my collection of WW2 history books. They are all good. If I had a shortage of books I would probably read all of them again. But, with a book surplus and a shortage of years ahead, I think they will also go up for sale.

Six Bible studies, two Bible codes are a long way from 1,000 books. A good sized box of magazines, and perhaps ten war books are not much. But it’s a start. I’m hoping over Thanksgiving, when our children are here, we will be able to take some time to go through a few things and, with their encouragement, get rid of some things we haven’t done anything with since the 1970s through 1990s.

And that will be a good start.

Bible study, construction, critique group, family, home improvements

Grinding, Part 2

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In my last post, I wrote about how I was grinding through a bunch of tasks, and, to keep them all straight, I needed a to-do list.  I’m in The Dungeon right now, writing this, and I don’t my current to-do list with me, so I’m starting a new one.

I do these on a long, narrow note pad that we’ve had for years. I found this pad in the desk in The Dungeon, something that isn’t used too much. I was given to us when we bought our house in Bentonville in 1991. Time to use it up I would say. It’s perfect for to-do lists.

As far as what got done from the last to-do list:

  • Flu shots.
  • Heard back from two contractors. One gave me a little more information on his schedule, moving the work out some. The other apologized for not getting me an estimate yet and established a date when he would. I would have to say, I feel a little better about contractors today.
  • Got my hair cut.
  • Continued to write in my current work-in-progress, A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I should finish a chapter today, putting me at 70 percent finished with the first draft. That puts me a little behind where I hoped to be by this time, but I’m not unhappy with my progress.
  • Got some filing done, though I have much more of that to do.
  • Attended my writers’ critique group last night. A good meeting; I might blog about it next.
  • Have started getting things together for Thanksgiving.

And Thanksgiving will dominate my next to-do list, which I started by interrupting writing this. Lots to do in terms of cleaning and organizing. Also buying in some groceries. I’m trying to plan our meals so that we get to Monday night’s supper, the last we will have alone, finishing the last prepared item.

It will be a good Thanksgiving, with both of our children, their spouses, and all our grandchildren here. It may also be the last family gathering at our house for a while, as henceforth we might shift these to our daughter’s house.

So carry on, everyone. My wishes to out to you, a bit early, for a happy Thanksgiving.

family, Genealogy, home improvements, miscellaneous

Grinding

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Dateline: Sunday, 12 Nov 2023

From time to time, life gets so busy that I fall back to a habit that served me well in my engineering career: making a to-do list. Not that my days are really so busy that I miss deadlines, doctor appointments, club meetings, etc. Those are relatively few in number, and easily remembered—at least those happening in the next month are.

But as I look around the house, I see lots of things that need doing. Some are small things, but they pile up. It is a needed task to clean up as much as I can before company comes Thanksgiving week. Here in The Dungeon, if I look over to the left, the worktable with our printer has piles of papers. The biggest pile is scrap paper, being kept for printing drafts of my writing for proofreading or critiques. It’s ugly, but it’s going to stay. Next to it is a notebook of genealogy files that I’m slowly scanning and saving to the cloud so that I can get rid of the paper. Also on that table are a few miscellaneous papers that I need to file. One is a charitable donation receipt I need to put with the 2021 tax returns. So far I haven’t felt like dedicating the two minutes needed to do that.

That work table also has two bank statements to file. That’s another two minute task I just haven’t felt like doing.

A little farther away are bookshelves lining the basement family room walls. At one time these were nice and neat, separated into fiction and nonfiction, and alphabetized. They may still be mostly that way, but years of reading and re-shelving, selling or donating, pulling other books from boxes, have resulted in some loose of organization. Fortunately, correcting that, while a big task, isn’t urgent.

What is urgent? Filing receipts! I suppose that’s number one. Many things I used to file have gone digital. Yet there’s still a big pile of them to file. Most of them are medical, the papers you get with each prescription. Some are medical info, others are receipts. Others are grocery store receipts, travel receipts, a few insurance statements, and a few brokerage papers that we haven’t yet switched over to digital. Once I set my mind to it, I can have these all sorted, ordered by date, and filed in about two hours. Maybe that will be a Monday task.

Then there are all the things involved with home repairs. We are inching forward with gutter and downspout replacement. My water damage restoration contractor bailed on me, so I’m having to go through it all again with a new one. I hope to hear something this week from him. And I still need to get the floor guy out here to figure out if I’ll be able to change out the ancient wall-to-wall carpet with modern flooring after all the other work is done. I guess I need to carve out a little time today to figure out which number I called was him and call to set up an inspection time.

Then there’s flu shots. We normally get them in early October, but couldn’t this year and I haven’t made appointments since then. That might be a today task as I can do that online. Oh, and the Silver Dragon need some routine servicing. I think Wednesday is free, if I can make an appointment on Monday. Oh, year, just remembered: I have some over the counter things to order as part of our Medicare Advantage Plan benefits. Better do that today as well.

Somewhere in there I need to work in some stock trading. The latter is mostly Monday through Friday, only 15 min to a half hour a day, plus an hour wrap-up on Saturday.

See why I need a to-do list? I have to grind through these things, trying to get everything done without letting something fall through the cracks.

I’m going to end this blog post here, and do those on-line things while I can. I hope on Friday I can post that I got lots done, and feel less stressed about everything.

books, miscellaneous, Writing

An Introvert and An Extrovert…

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Where the extrovert goes to talk, and the introvert goes to read.

An introvert and an extrovert walk into…let’s make it a coffee house rather than a bar. They are not together but arrive at the door at the same time. The extrovert pulls open the door and holds it for the introvert, who says thank you. They stand in line together, get their coffee at about the same time. The coffee shop is kind of crowded,  with almost all tables having someone at them, so the extrovert says, “Let’s sit together at that empty table.”

The introvert has a book under his arm, and was obviously hoping for a quiet time of reading and sipping his large house blend, but doesn’t want to be rude, and so says, “Sure.” They sit together and the extrovert keeps up a steady conversation between occasional sips of his latte. The introvert says little. He has placed his book on the table, hoping the extrovert sees it and recognizes what the introvert wants.

Fortunately, before their coffees get cold, the extrovert sees a friend enter the shop, excuses himself, and goes to the newly arrived friend. The introvert heaves a sigh of relief, picks up his book, and begins to read.

Is this a realistic scenario?  To me, who sits well out on the introverted side of the spectrum, it seems about right. I’m obviously not an unbiased observer.

But it seems to me that the introvert sees an extrovert and, rather than say, “Why can’t you be more like me, just keeps to himself and lets the extrovert do his thing.

Coffee, a book, and solitude when you want it or community when you want that. The introvert’s life.

But the extrovert, encountering the introvert, not only says, “Why can’t you be more like me,” and then sets out to convert the introvert to the extrovert’s ways, insisting he join a group of six other extroverts for community.

Am I right on this, or am I being too harsh on the extrovert, or perhaps not understanding the extrovert at all?

At a literary agency blog that I follow, the post this week had to do with ways and means of marketing our books, but slipped in this statement:

A high percentage of writers are introverts, yet even they crave community…just on their own terms.

And I thought ain’t that the truth?

You ask what’s the point of this post? Maybe nothing. Perhaps I’ll print it out on cardstock half-size sheets, carry them with me, and the next time an extrovert tries to draw me out in a coffee shop, hand him or her a copy.

family, memories, miscellaneous, Stars and Stripes

Not Quite A Reunion

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Three posts ago, I wrote about a reunion I helped facilitate between my wife and an old friend, who was also an old friend of mine. Along the same vein, but different, was something that happened over the next few days. Let me set this up.

The man on the left is my dad, Norman Todd, somewhere in Europe during World War 2. Who are the other three?

I found the photo at the right in a box of photos at Dad’s house when he died. Dad is on the left. The other three men were mysteries. The photo was taken someplace in Europe. Once Dad was assigned to the Stars and Stripes, he was in Algiers (briefly), then Anzio beachhead, then up the boot of Italy with the mobile publishing unit, then southern France in three different places. Readers of this blog have heard all this before, at posts at this link.

I wondered who the other three men in the photo were. Most likely they were Stars and Stripes staffers, but who? And was there any way to find out?

Perhaps the most famous part of the S&S staff was cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Dad was at the same location Bill was on V-E Day (May 8, 1945), but how long they served together and in what locations was a mystery. Dad told me that Bill sometimes had him model for some of the Willie & Joe “Up-Front” cartoons.

I wonder if Dad modeled for any of these Bill Mauldin cartoons.

Bill is so famous that from time to time a post about him shows up in my Facebook newsfeed. I always comment on them about Dad’s connection to Bill, hoping someone will respond. Not that I think any of the men in the photo are still alive (unlikely) but hoping that someone would say something to me that might help me either identify the men in the photo or hear something that might bear on Dad’s war service.

One of those posts came up this week. A post by Grand Comics Database, showing a Bill Mauldin cartoon of Willie and Joe, the two sad-sack soldiers featured in his “Up Front” cartoon series. A number of people posted to it, and I added this comment:

My dad was a typesetter for the “Stars and Stripes”, in N. Africa, Italy, and So. France. He knew Bill Mauldin and was friends with him. Dad told me Mauldin often had him pose for the cartoons.

One woman answered with the following comment:

Your dad must have been in the same group as my dad, same countries, same background. Bill Maudlin drew this picture of my Dad on an index card, in pencil.

She added the cartoon.

I then took this to Messenger and sent her four photos of Dad with other men, including the one above. There was a delay of some hours, when she messaged back:

The man on the right third pic…is my Dad! what a shock to see him in your pictures. It is a small world.

later adding:

just could not believe I was looking at my dad’s picture, when you sent that one. I only had a few of him during the service and unfortunately he passed when I was only 13, so not enough years to know too much about the war….

His name is Fred R. Unwin. Born in London, he made his way to America (part of the story I still need to learn) and was indeed with the S&S in Europe. After the war he stayed in printing (as Dad did), as a pressman and later a supervisor, in Chicago and Phoenix. I’ll get some more info about him as our conversations continue.

Robyn sent me some photos of her dad, and I said to Robyn:

So, shall we call ourselves Stars and Stripes cousins?

She, of course, said yes. Thus now we are cousins.

When I made that post, I had hopes but no expectations that anything would come of it. But two men in the photo are now identified, Norman Todd on the left, Fred Unwin on the right. Will the two men in the middle ever be identified? Possibly not, but I feel good about having one more known, against the likely odds.

goals

October Progress, November Goals

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It’s that time to report how I’m faring with my writing

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Got it done, with only one, I think it was, hasty post. 
  • Attend three writers group meetings. I attended only two. At the time of the third one I was exhausted and decided to skip it.
  • Attend the Ozark Writers League fall conference in Branson. Yes, I attended. See the report here.
  • Finish all editing on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all episodes for publishing on Kindle Vella. I’m almost done with the editing, maybe two days left. Publishing them to Kindle Vella will likely take another three days.
  • Begin work on A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I have this pretty well planned out. I began this and made major progress, being close to halfway through with the first draft.
  • Continue to document the writing idea, The Artwork Of God. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend on this. I spent a little time on this, not a lot. On Monday-Tuesday this week I found some commentary that bears on this that I hadn’t expected. It makes me a little more sure that there’s a real project here.
  • Begin reading a book on colonial America, dealing with essays from a newspaper debate in Boston in 1774-1775. I read less on this than I expected, but did read some, thus fulfilling my goal but in a minor way.

So looking back, it was a busy and productive month. One thing I did that wasn’t part of my goals was to do some minor updates to my website. Now, time to set goals for November.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend three writers group meetings.
  • Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella.
  • Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close.
  • Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project.
  • Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series.

Enough. It’s Thanksgiving month, and we will have a houseful of guests for close to a week. These goals may be more than I can achieve.

 

writer's platform, Writing

A Writers’ Conference Weekend

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I joined a local Bella Vista writers’ group in early 2023 as a dues-paying member. Alas, the group decided to fold mid-year. Well, technically, we merged with a larger group, the Ozarks Writer’s League, O.W.L. That happened in June. Part of O.W.L. membership includes attending attendance at two conferences, a spring and a fall. Since the merger came after the spring conference, it included the fall conference this year. And, since we had timeshare points to use or lose, the only cost was getting from NW Arkansas to Branson.

The conference was good. It included a social time Friday evening, at which I met a few new people and got reacquainted with some I hadn’t seen for year or had only “met” at on-line meetings. The main conference was Saturday, a day of classes and meeting people and trying to sell a few books—emphasis on “few”.

The classes were good. One on screenwriting (which doesn’t interest me, but the class was good). One on point of view, which is something I can always know more about. One on marketing, which was of the most interest to me. And a panel discussion on alternative ways of earning money from writing.

About 45 people attended, so it’s a smallish conference. But the price was right, even for non-members. Members could reserve a table to set up books to sell, and I did that. As I said, sales were few, but that’s to be expected. Writers are not my target audience. I didn’t get to talk with most of the others who had books for sale, so I don’t know if anyone did better than I did.

I’m glad I went, and glad I could do so inexpensively. Will I do so? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on where I am in my writing endeavors in the next year.

memories, miscellaneous

47 Years Later…

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Juanelle and Lynda. First time they’ve seen each other in 47 years.

We came to Branson, Missouri for a combination of writer’s conference and time away from home. We’re staying in our timeshare. Internet has been spotty, which is why I didn’t write a post yesterday or today. I may have to find a Dunkin’ and use their internet. Right how, as I’m writing, we seem to have a strong signal. Just as well, because as a result I have a different post to make.

Another part of the trip was a meet up I arranged between my wife, Lynda, and a long-lost friend, Juanelle. They were best friends in Kansas City before I met either of them. Both RNs, they worked together as teachers in the Research Hospital school of nursing. They ate lunch together, hung out, and had much in common. Juanelle attended Kansas City First Church of the Nazarene at the time, Lynda attended Rainbow Blvd. Church of the Nazarene.

Lynda and Juanelle on our wedding day.

It was at First Church that I first met…Juanelle, not Lynda, in a singles Sunday School class. About eight months later, I met Lynda, at a national singles retreat held by our denomination. Image, we lived five miles from each other and we had to go to Glorieta NM to meet.  We hit it off, and were married in January 1976. Lynda asked Juanelle to be her maid of honor. Here’s a photo of them on our wedding day. It was not too long after that that Juanelle moved from KC to California, and we didn’t see her and somehow didn’t get her address.

Fast forward to the 1990s. Through one of Lynda’s cousins visiting Juanelle’s church, we reconnected. Then we moved and she moved and we lost connection. Then I did some internet sleuthing and found out her contact information. Juanelle’s husband had just died. I wrote her a letter on behalf of Lynda and me. Some time went by before we received a letter from Juanelle in the mail. She had just moved from California to Springfield, Missouri to be closer to family. Springfield, I thought. Why, that’s just a two-hour drive from us!

Lynda and Juanelle in deep conversation while the rest of us talked among ourselves.

To shorten this story, I finally arranged a meeting with Juanelle. She came to Branson with her brother and sister-in-law, and we had a long lunch and getting reacquainted time. Three hours went by very quickly. I figure it was just over 47 years since Juanelle moved, after which until today we never saw her.

Here’s to meet ups with long lost friends. May we meet up again at least a few times before the great reunion in heaven.