Category Archives: books

books, family, home improvements

One More Big Hole

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Here’s where they sat for over 20 years.

As I’ve posted before, my wife and I are slowly in the process of shedding possessions accumulated over the first 44 years of marriage. You would think that with the moves we made we would be lean in terms of stuff, but, alas, not so. When we went overseas our company paid to store our stuff so we didn’t have to get rid of anything. Now, being septuagenarians and knowing we will someday have to downsize, each possession is getting scrutiny. Does it bring us joy? Will we ever use it? Will we want to move it to whatever our next place is?

And here is the hole.

I’ve written before about some dis-accumulation we’ve done. Here’s a summary.

  • Dad’s tools. When Dad died in 1997, my brother and I split his tools between us, while my brother took all the hardware. My share, except for a very few I found uses for, sat in garages, unused, catching dust. It was in 2020 that I realized, “Do I really need six saws and eight planes?” Facebook Marketplace was my friend then, and I sold everything I didn’t see myself ever using.
  • They aren’t elegant to look at, but are obviously old. People like that.

    Mom’s books. In the 1930s and 40s, Mom accumulated books, some of them through book-of-the-month clubs, some through one-off purchases. Most of them were commonplace books with no sentimental value. Except they were Mom’s. I came to realize I never would read them, couldn’t keep them forever, and sold off about 800 of them. The last 120 or so went to thrift stores, with a couple figuratively stained by my tears.

  • And the “innards” aren’t splashy the way encyclopedias became—before they migrated to the internet.

    Dad’s Stars and Stripes. I’ve written about them before here and here, so I won’t go into it much. They are now in residence at the University of Rhode Island Library’s special collections, most likely in the inventory/curation process, waiting for scholars to pour over them.

  • Grandpa’s trunk. I also wrote about that not so long ago. The trunk Grandpa Oscar Todd brought with him when he emigrated from England to the USA is now at the home of a cousin, and much appreciated there.

So, what’s the new “hole” in our house, left from dis-accumulation?

  • Uncle Dave’s encyclopedias. These are a very nice, gently worn, 1900 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As our son urged us to do even more in anticipation of future downsizing, I listed them on Facebook Marketplace for a pretty good price. I had no action on them for a few weeks, then someone made an offer while we were out of town; I countered; a bargain was struck; and the transfer of money and books and bookcase happened on Saturday. The hole is in our entryway, which serves as an antique room.
A close-up of the covers. How they did encyclopedias in 1900.

The encyclopedias sat for many years (1950 to 1997) in the basement of the house I grew up in in Cranston, Rhode Island. Covered by a bedsheet, I found them one time in my teenage years, and had occasion to use them only once, in 1990 while visiting Dad. He said they were mine when he “croaked”.

I’m pretty sure they belonged to David Sexton, my grandmother’s uncle and the man I’m named after. He took my grandmother in when she was a single mother in a strange country and became a surrogate dad to my mom—or maybe a surrogate grandfather. He emigrated to the USA in 1887 and made his way to Providence in 1903. I suspect he bought the encyclopedias around the time of his arrival in Rhode Island.

A typical title page. Again, not splashy. Only a hole now because they belonged to Uncle Dave.

Our house here had the perfect place to display them. They took up little space and made a nice decoration for anyone entering the house. But are they something I would keep forever? I wish I could. When our son was here in January, he encouraged more dis-accumulation. My wife and I were at an impasse as to what to get rid of next, and as a result I decided these antique books would be next.

So they are gone. Even the bookcase, which was an antique of the same era, is gone. After confirming the sale, I wound up getting a full-price offer from another buyer. But, having made the bargain with the first buyer, I felt it had to go to them.

What more can I say? There is a hole in the entryway where they stood, and a little bit of a hole in my heart. But I have many other legacy books that belonged to Uncle Dave. Someday they will go the way of all earthly possessions, but not just yet.

books, memories, miscellaneous

Library Memories – Part 5: Later Adult Years

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This post continues in the series of my memories of times in libraries Earlier posts are: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

After moving to northwest Arkansas, with our children a little older, with a house that had space to accumulate books, with the school libraries apparently adequate, we spent less family time at the Bentonville library. However, from 1991 to 2000, my office in downtown Bentonville was across the street from the Bentonville Public Library. I went there frequently during lunch hours, even sometimes on breaks. Once in a great while, I would go there with some of my company work and find peace and quiet, away from the telephone and people, and get some real work done.

I don’t have memories of particular books or discoveries from this library. One thing I did was look at investment publications, particularly Value Line. You couldn’t check that out, so I would sit and read it over several days. Was it time well spent? I’d like to think so. The things I learned about stocks, for investment and trading, provided a foundation for how I use the stock market now for supplemental income.

The Bentonville Library built a new building at the edges of downtown, and our company moved way away from downtown. I used the Bentonville library less. In the last ten years, it has been more of a meeting place. I used to meet with our pastor there for coffee and conversation. I donated a number of my books to this library for their local authors section.

Nowadays, my library forays are to the Bella Vista Public Library. While I sometimes browse and find a book to check out, it’s more a place for organizations I belong to to hold meetings. My critique group, Scribblers & Scribes, meets there one afternoon a month. Another group, Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society, meets there one afternoon a month. And another writers group, Village Lakes Writers and Poets, does the same. So I’m in this library typically three or four times a month. A recent expansion makes it much more functional.

If it weren’t for the 2000 or so books in our house, which I’m trying to sort through and read those I don’t think I will ever read, or read again, I would get more books from the library. I actually checked one out last week. But that was at the Big Spring, Texas, Public Library. It was a biography of C.S Lewis. I had only a few days to read it, and couldn’t get through all the 300 pages in that time, not with the babysitting and pet sitting duties to read a whole lot. I read a number of sections, determined it’s a book I’d like to read in full, and returned it to the library on the way out of town. I’ll see if they have it in Bella Vista, or if I can get it on interlibrary loan.

This will be the end of this series. I conclude by saying: Long live the public library!

books, Magazines, memories

Library Memories Part 4: Asheboro, NC

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This post continues in the series of my memories of times in libraries Earlier posts are: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I learned a lot from reading Congressional Quarterly in the library.

In 1984, after returning to the USA from Saudi Arabia, we settled in Asheboro, North Carolina, instead of Kansas City. Asheboro, the seat of Randolph County and then was a city of less than 30,000 people, stretched out along a highway. In the downtown district was a very nice library.

Our children were 5 and 3 when we moved there, and many times in our four years in Asheboro did we take them to the library. That meant a lot of time spent in the children’s section. I think the number of visits increased as they became young elementary school students.

But it was in the adult section that I made two discoveries in this library. They weren’t, perhaps, quite as mind-opening as the atlas of the universe in Dhahran, but they led to other things.

The first was the magazine Congressional Quarterly. I had never heard of it before. It is (was; the name and format of the magazine may have since been changed) a reporting of Congress’s actions, and other things related to our national government. It may have been a weekly magazine then. For sure it was at least monthly, not quarterly as the name suggests.

While the kids were engrossed in their books, I would sit with CG and read for hours. Well, we didn’t really stay in the library for hours, but I could have. How interesting I found this publication. It seemed to me to be balanced politically, neither pro-Democrat nor pro-Republican. I learned much from its unadorned pages.

Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.

The second discovery was a large book—coffee table book size—about the Stars and Stripes military newspapers. Readers of this blog will know that my dad set type for the Stars and Stripes in Europe during World War 2. Yet, we kids didn’t know that in the basement was a steamer trunk full of those S&S, sent home during the war and preserved by my grandparents then passed on to Dad.

So, I found this book of the S&S, which consisted of copies of the newspapers along with narrative about the newspaper. I skimmed it in the library and was fascinated by it. When we were preparing to drive to Rhode Island one year for a holiday, probably Thanksgiving, I checked the book out and brought it with me. Dad looked at it with less interest than I expected. But we had a good conversation about the S&S. Dad was glad that one of his children took more than a passing interest in what had been most of his war service.

That was in 1985 or 86. Fast forward to Fall 1990. Kuwait was now behind us, I was spending a couple of weeks a month in Boston working a temporary job while the family stayed in NC. On weekends, I drove to R.I. to spend time with Dad. Somehow in our conversation the S&S came up. He said, “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He led the way downstairs and showed me the trunk with the newspapers. He said, “When I croak, these are yours.”

Dad died in 1997. Lynda and I drove from Arkansas to Rhode Island for the funeral. One reason for driving instead of flying was to be able to take the S&S back with us.

So, my obtaining the Stars and Stripes from Cranston RI came about probably because of time in a library in Asheboro NC. Like I said, perhaps this isn’t an earth-shattering memory, but it fits with my current theme. Thank God for libraries.

books, memories

Library Memories Part 3: Early Adulthood Discoveries

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Continuing with my library memories series. This post will likely be shorter than the last two. See them here and here.

This was a good library find, probably in 1976 or 1977.

A long, long time ago, back in the second half of the 1970s decade, I first discovered the joys of library use for other than school stuff. Lynda and I bought a home in Mission, Kansas in 1976. Early in career, early in marriage, there wasn’t much budget yet for buying books. So we found the nearest public library, and checked books out there.

Two particular books that I got at that library stand out in my mind, even after all these years. The first was The Origen by Irving Stone. This is a biographical novel about Charles Darwin. Stone has done many of these, and I’ve since read a couple of others. This was my first introduction to Stone and to the concept of the biographical novel.

I didn’t know a lot about Darwin at that time, either, other than what I learned in science classes, that he had put together the theory of evolution and that he was English. The novel treated Darwin very fairly, I thought. He was a sympathetic character, and I learned much about him from that. I came away with a favorable opinion of him. I’ve since read Origin of Species, and reviewed it on this blog. I’m currently reading the first volume of Darwin’s letters, although I’m still in the lengthy biographical preliminaries. Hopefully I’ll be in the letters themselves in a day or two.

The second book was a genealogy book on Lynda’s family, The Cheney Genealogy. This was published in 1898, and I believe I got it via interlibrary loan rather than it being a book at our local library. At that time, I was having conversations with Lynda’s dad and paternal grandparents about genealogy, and just beginning what would become a serious effort to trace family history.

In that book, I found much information that appeared to be relevant to her family, though with a missing link that prevented me from making a firm connection to the original Cheney ancestor, John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. Years later, in the internet era, I was able to build upon The Cheney Genealogy and make the connection. But it all started with my local library and the book I accessed through it.

23 Feb: Editing to add: One other book I found at that library was Rees Howells: Intercessor. This told the story of Rees Howells, a Welshman who was in the USA at the time of the Welsh revival around 1903. He went home, was converted himself, and began working in Christian ministries, including a Welsh bible college. He became known for his praying. The book tells about times of intense prayer in his personal life, in ministries, and in the life of the British nation during World War 2. The story of Howells has stayed with me, and in later years I picked up a copy of his biography for my personal library. Another good find at the Shawnee Mission Public Library.

Well, these are not profound memories, but they fit in this series, so here they are. Look for more going forward.

books, miscellaneous, reading, research

Library Memories – Part 2: The Company

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These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.

The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.

This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.

We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.

In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.

In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.

I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).

That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.

My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.

This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.

Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.

The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.

That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.

I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.

books, memories, miscellaneous, Mom

Library Memories, Part 1: childhood and teen years

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The Elmwood Ave. Branch of the Providence Public Library, in a recent picture on Google Earth. Just as I remember it.

Right now, say for the last three years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in libraries. I met our pastor for coffee from time to time in the Bentonville Public Library. The writing groups I’m in meet in libraries, either the Rogers Public Library or the Bella Vista Public Library. So four times a month on average I’m in a library. That’s not a lot, but it got me to thinking about libraries I’ve been in and memories I have with them.

Growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, you would expect me to have memories of libraries there, but I have none. I don’t think we ever went to public libraries in Cranston. They were a little too far to walk, there were no convenient bus routes, Mom didn’t drive much, and Dad didn’t take us, so for whatever reason we weren’t library patrons in our hometown. In my adult years, when visiting the hometown, we took our kids to Cranston Public Library—in a building that wasn’t there when I grew up—when we were home visiting Dad.

I don’t think our elementary school had a library, and I have almost no memories of a library at my junior high school. I know there was one there, and I used it, but don’t remember it. But I remember our high school library. I wasn’t in it too often, but was some. One main memory I have was a date in the library. I was talking with my sister’s best friend, two years older than me, about how I had never had matzoh (she’s Jewish). So she said she would bring some to school and share it with me. This was my sophomore, her senior year. We agreed to meet in the library a half hour before school on a certain day. We sat at one of the tables off in a corner, ate matzoh and shared pleasant conversation.

A recent photo of the main branch of Providence Public Library. Again, just as I remember it from the outside, though its neighborhood looks a little different.

You say that’s not much of a date, and you’re right. But, hey, went you had as few dates as I did (4 total in 9th through 12th grades, only 3 if you don’t count the matzoh date), you count everything you can as a date.

But, strangely enough, I have many more memories of public libraries in Providence, Rhode Island. I remember it was in 8th grade, after Mom had died. I had a history research and report assignment. Whatever library was in junior high didn’t have books that helped me. So I got Dad’s permission to hop on the bus and ride to the Elmwood Ave. Branch of PPL. We lived four house lots off of Reservoir Ave., right on a bus stop. The bus also stopped right in front of the Elmwood branch. You had to cross Reservoir twice on foot, but I think we had some traffic signals not far away.

So I did that. It must have been around wintertime, because I remember it was dark. I crossed Reservoir, caught the bus, rode it toward downtown Providence, got off at Elmwood branch, crossed Reservoir again, and entered a world of books. I still have some idea of the layout, of going to the history books and finding ten books that were suitable for the report. I spent an hour or more reading and taking notes (I didn’t have check-out privileges at PPL). I listed all ten books. Then I went home by bus. This probably happened from around 7 to 9 p.m. If memory serves me correctly, I did this a second time for this report.

As a side note, I listed all ten books in the bibliography of my report, even though I really only used two of them in writing the report. I remember I got an A on the report, and the teacher wrote, “Great bibliography!”

I may be unclear about one part of this. When Mom died in August 1965, Dad’s shift at ProJo ran from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m, usually with an hour or two of overtime. At some point they moved him to a 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift, usually with two hours of overtime. If his change of shift happened after my 8th grade year, it’s possible that Dad drove me to the library as he went to work, and I took the bus home. No matter.

When I got to high school, the Elmwood branch seemed inadequate, I guess, because I took the bus to the main PPL in downtown Providence and did research there. I remember it was closed stack when I first started doing this and open stack by the time I graduated high school. You wasted a lot of time waiting for someone to find the books you needed and bring them to you. The open stack shifted the searching function to you. It still took time, but at least you could look at other, nearby books once you found the one you wanted.

I probably went to PPL Main Branch between five and ten times per school year. I kind of remember the layout. In fact, I remembered where both the Main branch and Elmwood branch were and found them easily on Google Earth. They are still in the same buildings and look the same as I remember them. I suspect, of course, that the insides are much changed, as technology updates have surely been made. No more card catalogue. Yes, that’s how I found those history books at Elmwood: looking in the card catalogue, finding one book that sounded good, finding that shelf, and see a great treasure before me spread out left and right, up and down.

I hope my grandchildren will have equally fond memories of libraries. I try to take them our ours whenever they visit, and to theirs whenever I visit them. We have a sizable library of books in our own home—as they do in theirs—but it’s not quite the same.

And, before some of you express being aghast at a 13 or 14 year old boy taking the bus in Providence, Rhode Island unaccompanied by an adult, after dark, all I can say is it was a different world and a different city then. And greatly different family circumstances that required it.

Bible study, books, Carlyle, Christianity, Emerson

A Coincidence of Reading

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I completed this book yesterday, from a Word doc from Project Gutenberg, uploaded to my Kindle library. My second reading of it.

I’m usually reading several things at once. I have a reading pile in the sunroom, where I go around noon most days to get a break from my tasks. That reading usually consists of printed books, and sometimes a magazine. I have a reading pile in the living room as well, and a basket of magazines I’m way behind on. This is usually evening reading, after all else is done for the day.

Then there’s my phone, through which I read using a Kindle app, a Nook app, and Google books. My phone I might use anywhere, and the things I read on it usually are easier reads. That may not be the best description. But I think they take a little less concentration and can be read in places such as waiting rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. Any place I have a few minutes and want to engage my mind with more than people watching.

So yesterday, I read a little more than normal, and to my surprise, I finished reading four different items on the same day. How odd is that?

I always enjoy reading Poets & Writers magazine, and, on those rare occasions when I buy an issue, I read it slowly, enjoying each article. I even look at the ads.

In the sunroom, I finished reading an issue of Poets & Writers magazine. I buy one of these at Barnes & Noble from time to time. While this mag is very much oriented towards the Master of Fine Arts crowd and is far from my writing world, I enjoy it more than other writing mags. Anyway, I had only two pages left in this particular issue, and finished those pages yesterday. At a future writers meeting I will pass this along to someone.

Still in the sunroom, I next looked at an essay I’ve been slogging through on Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Years ago I downloaded this from the Bulletin for Biblical Research and printed it (at a time when the company I worked for had a generous policy of making personal copies). I may have read most of it before but, having come across it in a notebook while working on my near-continuous dis-accumulation efforts, I decided it was time to read it, absorb what it said, and get rid of it. The essay is about 60 pages long, heavily footnoted.

While I enjoyed reading it, the article was a bit of a chore to get through. When I started yesterday, I had about ten pages left to read. Maybe I had come to an easier part of the magazine, or maybe my mind was better engaged, but I got through those last pages. I’m not quite ready to discard the sheets, but within a couple of months I’ll extract the info I need from it to go into a future Bible study I plan to write.

Then, in the evening, I finished the last nine pages (of 633 total) in a biography of David Livingstone. This tome took me three months to get through, though admittedly I laid it aside several times to read other things. Other than the small print, and smaller print on the extensive quotes from Livingstone’s letters and journal, it wasn’t a hard read. Ten pages at a time was fairly easy to get through. And if I hadn’t been reading other things simultaneously, I think I would have been able to finish this in a month. It’s done now, and will likely take two blog posts to review.

Lastly, I finished re-reading Volume 1 of the correspondence between Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Years ago, long before Google Books and Kindle, I found this at Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, and formatted them in Word for a blend between tight printing and easy reading. Using those printing privileges, I printed them and put them in notebooks. Meanwhile, I have recently learned how easy it is to upload a Word document to Kindle for your personal library. I did that with Vol. 1.

As I’ve said many times before, I love reading letters. Wanting something “light” for those odd moment reads, I sent this to Kindle and began reading it perhaps a month ago. I found it delightful, as I did perhaps 20 years ago. Yesterday, I came to the end of Volume 1.

This is sort of waste-of-time reading, since I have so many things to get through. But it was quite enjoyable. I was able to read it fairly quickly, including in the hospital last week with Lynda. At some point yesterday, I read a letter by Emerson to Carlyle, and was surprised to find it the last in the volume. So I promptly found Vol 2 on my computer and uploaded it to my Kindle library. Not sure when I will start this.

So, that’s the story of the strange circumstances that had me finishing four very different reads on the same day. It’s unlikely to ever happen again.

Time to pick up some new reads. One I’m already 40 pages into. What else will I pick up next?

Bible study, books, The Forest Throne, Writing

2022 Recap

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This was one of my two new publications in 2022.

In terms of my writing career, what can I say about 2022? It was productive, but not overly so. That seems to be the best I can say.

As 2022 started, I finished the first draft of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel, and was ready for beta readers and to figure out what to do about a cover. Also finished, and not yet published, was our church’s Centennial book. I had finished it—all I could see to do on it—in October, and was waiting on proofreading and editing. So two books were essentially ready to go to publication.

While waiting for those to projects to grind through to publication, I began writing a Bible study. Our Sunday school class has been studying Holy Week, during the run-up to Easter. It is a multi-year effort. In a few weeks we will start our fifth part of this, the Roman trail. I had no intentions of developing this into a published Bible study, but in early 2022 said, “Why not?”

I began with what we studied in 2021, the Last Supper. That was our third year. I made some progress on it, then came the time to teach the fourth year, Gethsemane and arrest of Jesus and the night trials. I found writing it as I was teaching it much easier than trying to write what I had taught in prior years.

I count sales of these in the year’s total, even though it wasn’t a royalty producing project.

I worked on the current year and the previous year simultaneously. By the time the end of April rolled around, I had the current year’s mostly done, the previous year’s about 40 percent done, and a plan for the entire series. Although it is a six-year study, I came to see it should have been a seven-year study and that the published books should be divided into smallish seven volumes.

That’s when other things got in the way of writing. That included the three special projects, as well as a number of things around the house and health concerns. Writing lagged behind. Publication went forward, however. The Centennial book was published in April and seemed to be well accepted. TNSTATT was published in June. On-line sales are nonexistent, but in person sales have happened, with much effort and pushing on my part.

Gary is gone, but the letters between us live on.

In July I began work on the next book in The Forest Throne series, titled The Key To Time Travel. After delays of putting a major effort into it, I knuckled down in December and finished it. It is now waiting on beta readers, as well as for me to edit it. Early chapters have passed muster with my critique group.

The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed. Now done, distributed, and un-published for now.

Two other publications in 2022 were letters collections. One of these was the letters with my good friend, Gray Boden, as a tribute to him after his passing in 2020. I suspect this book will soon be un-published, as it actually includes items for which I don’t have permission of the writer (i.e. copyright holder) to publish. The other was the collection of letters from our Kuwait years. Copies of his have been obtained by all family members that want them and has been unpublished. These were not really commercial ventures, but took time away from what could have been time on writing and marketing books.

I took part in three author events near the end of the year, and spoke three times to the letter writers society I’m a part of. I wasn’t aware of any other events I could have participated in. I’m hoping 2023 will see more of them.

I wound up selling 279 books, my highest year ever. Without the Centennial book (which I count as sales for me even though it was a non-commercial venture), I would have been a little behind 2021 sales.

So I enter 2023 with a completed, unpublished project, two works-in-progress and another soon to start. Here’s hoping and praying that 2023 will be more productive than 2022 was.

Bible study, books, Christianity

A Determinist Sociological Development

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In our evening reading aloud, Lynda and I are reading in two books right now. One is our denomination’s Lenten Devotional book Sacred Invitation: Lenten Devotions Inspired by The Book of Common Prayer. It’s been good, though for thirty years I never once heard celebration of Lent promoted in our church and don’t understand why it is being so now. But perhaps that’s a subject for a different post, or an essay. The book is an easy read. Daily morning and evening scripture readings (which I assume come from the Lectionary) along with a couple of pages of text and a page of questions to spark spiritual growth. The text is small, 11 point font or less—I think 10 point font.

The other is A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. This was a book of our son’s when he was in college, for it has his name and a date from his college years written on the inside. It includes marginalia that does not appear to be his handwriting, so perhaps he got it used. In that case we are at least the third owners of it. It’s 595 pages of text, plus a lot of pages of endnotes. It is also in 10 point font, so it’s a lot of reading. We’re only on page 37 after three or four days.

Whether we finish it or not is a big question right now. I’m re-reading some of the early pages which Lynda read aloud and I was a little distracted in my listening. On page 6 I ran across this statement:

Under the influence of Hegel and his scholarly followers, Jewish and Christian revelation, as presented in the Bible, was reinterpreted as a determinist sociological development from primitive trial superstition to sophisticated urban ecclesiology.

That’s a mouthful, for sure. I know who Hegel is but know nothing about what he thought or taught, nor about the “school” that follows, or followed, him. That phrase though, “determinist sociological development”, threw me. What the heck does that mean? I looked up “determinist” and had a sort of idea of what it means: the opposite of free will. I kind of know what ecclesiology is but looked it up to be sure: the study of church doctrine is the way I would say it in layman’s terms (the definition wasn’t real clear to me). So this is saying that Hegel and the folks who follow his teachings consider the history told in the Bible moves from lack of free will to something scholarly, something sophisticated, something urban.

I’m sure I’ve got that wrong, but that’s the best I can do. Now, a couple of things come to me from that. I find those kind of hard to understand statements a couple of times on each page. I spent ten minutes or so trying to riddle this one out. If I do that on every page, we’ll never finish the book. On the other hand, do I really need to understand that to understand the history of the Jews? Do I need to know that some dude (I guess he’s a man) and his minions have a complicated idea of what Bible history is teaching, that the author is getting ready to say is not correct? Probably not.

Elsewhere in the book, we’ve been running into lots of words that need looking up to understand, two examples being adumbration and aggadic. Thirty seconds on the cell phone provides those definitions but perhaps not that much greater understanding. Which makes me think this book is not for us.

Meanwhile, in other writing work, I’m engaged to write a book on the history of our church for our 100th anniversary. That happens in July, but because of pandemic fears and some major construction adjacent to the church, the actual celebration has been pushed back to a date not yet established. For that book, I’ve been researching our charter members. I’m probably doing too much research into our charter members. But given how research way leads on to way, I’ve pulled up some interesting church history documents. I have allowed myself to go down these rabbit holes. One document I was in today, a PhD dissertation, included this statement.

The manner in which nineteenth-century advocates of holiness reconstructed the Wesleyan/holiness cultural-linguistic system emphasized an imagistic religiosity which heightened individual awareness of spiritual autonomy.

Cultural-linguistic system…imagistic religiosity? This did me in. I have no idea what the PhD is talking about. This tells me nothing about the history of the church or the particular religious movement, nor does it help me live a better life. Nor will it help any Christian minister to be a better pastor of their flock. So what is its purpose? I’d answer that question, but I don’t have a spare week of continuous study that I would have to spend to do so.

All of which tells me I should do what I just read in a different book. I should stick to my lasts and leave the scholarly documents to the scholars. Back to my the Bible itself, a devotional book, books of letters, and Agatha Christie books.

books, family, home improvements, miscellaneous

A Busy Time Ahead

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On Friday this will all expand. Additional tables will be set up and moved out into the driveway and yard. I hope much of it goes.

For the next two weeks (at least), my life is going to be too full to keep up a regular blog schedule. I normally post on Monday and Friday. For a little while, however, I will likely do just once a week, probably on Monday.

What’s going on, you wonder? Since July my wife and I have been in the process of downsizing our possessions (not yet our house). We came to the realization that we have too much stuff, accumulated over 46 years of marriage and retrieved from the houses of three parents upon their deaths—or their own downsizing. We had to get rid of it.

This is a cute horse. Pinch its ear and it whinnies and moves it’s head and tail. But they grandkids don’t use it when they come. It fetched $25 on FB Marketplace, and some young child probably loves it now.

I started with my mother-in-law’s papers in July. Some I was able to discard, such as old health records and old financial records after shredding, but much my wife has to see before we can do that. She’s been in the process of that since my sorting gave her enough to look at. Things are being put into recycling. Cards and letters will all have to go, a very few saved for sentimental value.

Of course, I interrupted that work to transcribe the letter from our Kuwait years. They are now in the cloud and backed up. Someday, when life calms down, I’ll put them in book form for children and grandchildren. They aren’t great literature. No, simply a record of our time there. Someday I’ll do the same with the Saudi years.

Tools from Dad’s house. I’ve been surprised at how well tools are selling. Sure takes a lot of messaging, however, to get the sale made.

Slowly, slowly, we have been getting Esther’s things out of her room or our large basement storage room and making them ready for sale. Shelf decorations, boxed crystal, books, and clothes are all being gone through. It’s a slow process. I can only do so much and Lynda’s health and strength doesn’t allow her to work longer. She’s actually doing very well with it. I’d make the decisions on many things, but I know she has to be the one to do it.

Getting rid of Esther’s stuff, stuff that we don’t want or need and our children don’t want or need led me to look at our own stuff. While waiting on my wife’s strength to come back, I realized I had lots of stuff to get rid of that had come to us from Dad’s house back in 1997-98, stuff I never used. I wrote about this process before. All I’ll say now is last Saturday I found another tray of tools that can be sold.

But, it seems, no one wants this old, French postcard. Alas. Not sure where or how we will get rid of the postcards. We took hundreds of them from the house we owned in NC that had been left by the previous owner.

For all of this we are using Facebook Marketplace as our primary sales venue. For now, the only sales venue. I like the success we are having, but it is a slow process. Gent a new item listed and approved and almost immediately you will get “Is this item still available?” You tell them yes in a return message, and…never hear from them again. For one set of tools this resulted in five different people showing interest, even to the point of making appointments to come see and probably buy them. To the garage I went at the appointed time and…nothing. They didn’t show. Didn’t message that they wouldn’t show. Next day I get a message saying oh sorry but I just couldn’t come. Meanwhile I’ve told two other people that the tools are spoken for. Trying to be fair with buyers is turning into a lengthy and frustrating process.

This is a hard one. This tea and coffee brewer was a wedding gift for Lynda’s grandmother back in 1924. Hard to part with it, but we have decorations in abundance. Alas, so far almost no views of it on FB Marketplace.

Slow, frustrating, even maddening. But things are selling. First was a rocking horse that the grandkids have all outgrown. Then it was a 3-gallon aquarium I found on a shelf in the basement that neither of us knew when we got it or if we even used it. Then came the tools. Then came an old kerosene heater we haven’t used since about 1995. Clothes are listed but no one is looking at clothes ads. We have a few decorations listed but it’s too early to know if we will get any interest in them. I found a bunch of unused postcards that apparently belonged to my dad and listed those in several lots, but that doesn’t seem to be the type of things people are going to FB Marketplace to buy.

Meanwhile, we are setting up for a garage sale that will be this Friday and Saturday. I hate garage sales and said I would never do another. But here we are. The neighbors were doing one so we said we would do one too to try to generate more interest. At our last sale I think we did a little less than $200 worth. I’m hoping for a lot more this time around, but am prepared to be disappointed. The work involved is way too much for the reward.

But, the true downsizing/de-cluttering test comes when the sale is over and you have lots of leftover stuff to deal with. A friend has said, “Don’t bring it back in the house. Take it straight to Goodwill.” I’m prepared to do that but I’m not sure the wife is. That didn’t happen after our sale and we ended up with tables in the garage for years. I’m hoping and praying that doesn’t happen this time. If an item is marked as “we don’t need this anymore”, that should apply whether you could get money for it or not. Right?

A few of the bigger, more valuable items, the kind of things that potential buyers for are unlikely to be yard sale shoppers, sure, those can be kept for selling. But most things I think not.