That’s what happened to me yesterday. I hit the wall. By 9 a.m., I felt like I couldn’t do another thing. Yet, I had done very little except for Monday morning stock market work. I couldn’t work family finances, at which I’m falling desperately behind, couldn’t work on my three letter projects, couldn’t work on post-move organization. I did manage to get my wife to her cardiology test appointment. I also managed to get a long message chain done with a newly found cousin on Lynda’s side.
Today has been somewhat better. But here is it not quite 4 in the afternoon and I’m out of steam. I guess I’ll try to read for a while.
The mirror over the piano was tricky to hang, but the guys did a good job on it.
Yes, taking it easy today. Remembering, though, our service personnel who died while serving. No one in my immediate family did. Lynda had a great-uncle killed in the first day of fighting on Guadalcanal in WW2.
We just finished a busy three or four days. Our oldest grandchild, Ephraim, graduated from high school. The ceremony was Saturday evening. Uncomfortable stadium seating, lots of walking, some rain. But the accomplishment was excellent and I’m glad I was able to witness the event.
Also on Saturday, our son Charles and his husband came in for the graduation (also for a birthday in Mario’s family) and became our first overnight visitors since moving here. We went to the furniture store on Saturday and, with their help, finalized the purchase of living room furniture. It will arrive on Thursday.
We bought this grouping on our trip to Greece in 1988.
On Sunday, as Lynda and I skipped church to be with Charles & Mario, and to hang pictures. Or I should say I found pictures stuffed in packing boxes in closets and they hung them. I have no artistic sensibilities and Lynda has no energy. So I got the pictures out, fetched and handed tools, and they found good places and did the hanging. We concentrated on the living room and breakfast nook. With furniture selected, we knew what spaces we had to fill.
Once the furniture arrives, with the walls decorated in the room we use the most, it will seem less like camping out and more like home. There’s still a lot of pictures to hang, but we had done all we could and they are for other rooms that can wait another day.
Cloth items bought in China in 1983 on the left; our kids’ graduation photos on the right.
And this relatively small amount of exertion over a couple of days has worn me out. I expect to do relatively little today. Maybe some household budgeting. Maybe get through 20 or 30 pages in my current read. Re-stow a few boxes and photos; prepare other boxes to go out next recycling day. Empty one box of table games to put in closet spaces no longer occupied by wall hangings. Perhaps work a little on my three books of letters projects. Maybe write a letter. And watch some TV.
Try to come to Tuesday rested up, ready for regular routines with a smidgeon of helping a friend out with transportation to a couple of things.
It’s a mess for a while, but it will all come together fairly quickly.
Retirement sure is a busy time. As much as I have to do, I wonder how I survived 45 years in the working world (not including 8 years pre-college graduation). But I did, and am now—surviving, that is.
By saying “surviving” I’m not implying a lack of enjoyment. I have plenty of enjoyment times: my noon reading time on the covered, screened patio, evening TV time, before bed reading time, morning devotions, church activities, frequent times with our daughter’s family. Yes, in the midst of my self-imposed busyness, I have plenty of time for enjoyment.
Take this last week, for instance.
On Saturday, I pulled out a large box of packed photos with the intent of sorting them and finding permanent filing for them. That job is half done, and the office floor is a mess. I hope to finish today, Monday.
Last week I made major progress on the book of my father-in-law’s World War 2 letters and journal. As of work completed yesterday, I have only 27 letters left to proofread, a one-day task including adding them to the book file. Between 20-40 letters require comparison to the original letters, a Tuesday task. Hopefully I can get that done in a day.
Then I scan to text his war journal, which may not be as many pages as I thought it was. No prediction on when I will get to that, though hopefully it will be this week.
Now that our home in Bella Vista AR has sold, it’s time to get serious on replacing the tub/shower in our bathroom with a walk-in shower, and buying the furniture we need (chairs and a table, maybe a replacement couch). I’d like to get the ball rolling on that the week, but fear it will slide to next. I did a little scouting last week on Friday.
Two of the ideas for future books, which are far enough out that I can’t predict if/when I’ll ever get to them, have started to gel in my mind. I hope to have some outlines done, at least in part, by the end of the week.
So yes, life is busy. At least in part fulfilling. Oh yes, two more things I should really do this week: Catch up on mail/filing/budgeting/bill paying. And figuring out how much I have to pay the IRS in quarterly payments this year in anticipation in next year’s taxes. That’s a two or three hour, spreadsheet-driven task I’m not looking forward to but which will be very good to have behind me.
This will certainly be task one, making needed additions and corrections.
As I reported in my last post, my 8-volume Bible study is done. I suppose nothing is ever done for the self-published writer, because there’s always things to do (improve covers, check for formatting errors, fix the dreaded typos once found). But I can lay all that aside for a while and move on to more pressing items.
I hope I get back to this series fairly soon.
But what’s next? I’ve been thinking that through for some time and have been developing a mental to-do list. Monday evening I started writing the items down. Let me list them here. It’s a combination of revising existing works, completing long-planned works, and trying to figure out if anything that’s been keeping my brain from resting is worth pursuing. I’ll give the list as bullet points.
Do my income taxes. The deadline approacheth. I started on this yesterday. Looks like I owe the IRS.
Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I added the recently found letters on Tuesday and re-formatted the chapter. I need to check the formatting of the entire book, then re-publish.
Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Kuwait. That will include adding a lot more photos.
Put together the book of my father-in-law’s service in WW2. This includes syncing up his war letters with his war journal, and finding enough photos to add a little spice. I started on this on Wednesday, loading the first 20-odd letters into a file. On Thursday I proofread them and made corrections. I can see that I’m going to have to do this differently.
Write/publish book three in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled You Can’t Change The Past.
Write/publish book four in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled Lost In Time.
Decide if I want to do any more books in the Documenting America series. Ideas for more books have been refusing to leave me alone, but they take a lot of research and writing.
Decide if I want to write a book with the tentative title Nature: The Artwork of God. That’s another thing that’s taking up brain space.
Get a start on a couple of essays I’d like to write and publish.
That’s enough for both short-range and medium-range planning. I’ll have to see how it goes.
The view this morning from my computer desk in The Dungeon. The rest of the house looks more or less the same, probably a little worse.
That’s all we have left at our current home. Just a week and a day. Then we move to Texas.
The whole house is discombobulated now, with packed boxes, half-packed boxes, packing materials, sorted and unsorted stuff strewn everywhere. If you’ve moved anytime recently, you get it. We haven’t moved since 2002. If you’ve downsized, you get it. We up-sized in 2002 and remained in accumulation mode, rather than decumulation.
Ah, well, decumulation began in 2020, when I decided I’d had my dad’s old tools for 22 years, had done nothing with them, and that other people needed them more than I did. I found lots of buyers on Facebook Marketplace. Before long, my garage looked better. With a little help from our son on one of his trips here, we even got to the point where we could get one car in.
Then I tackled the books, and between selling and donating them, we got rid of a couple of thousand. Before long, I moved on to paper items, digitizing my genealogy files and recycling the paper. Then on to writing files, making sure I had digital copies and back-ups, and again recycling the paper. All told, I was able to get rid of about 200 3-ring binders. The last 50 will go in our estate sale, each with a few tab dividers and sheet protectors in it.
I’m not sure whether I’ll get to post again from this side of the Red River, though I’ll try. If not, I’ll be back at it at some point. Y’all be good in the meantime.
The box of Wayne’s letters written during World War 2.
My sleeping rhythms have been off lately. If I wake up at or near 3 a.m., I can’t get back to sleep. I’m restless lying in bed. After a half hour of lying there awake, I generally get up and try to sleep sitting in my easy chair. That will work maybe one day out of three. Sometimes I read for an hour then am tired enough to sleep for an hour. Other times I just recline, maybe dozing a little but mostly trying to still my racing mind.
Monday-Tuesday night and Tuesday-Wednesday night was different. Oh, the waking up at an importune time for getting back to sleep happened. But after an hour or so passed, putting me in the 4 o’clock a.m. hour, I decided why the heck am I trying. I got up, got dressed, took my computer to The Dungeon and decided to begin my day. I worked on the letters, and in those two days was able to finish the transcribing work. I also was able to go back and correct one letter I realized I hadn’t completed.
The rest of the work consists of putting the letters into one document file, formatting it, sorting through photos of that era and adding them to the file, then computing publishing tasks. Proofreading will be included at some point.
Unfortunately, all that will have to wait until our move from Arkansas to Texas, plus finding the energy to set up the new house. When I get the book done—perhaps I should say IF I ever get it done—we’ll have to see.
We move from NW Arkansas to Lake Jackson, TX either Jan 31 or Feb 7. Or maybe a day either side of that.
Where there once was a little organization there is now chaos. Where there was once order that is now…something, I suppose disorder is a good enough word.
But where there used to be areas jammed with stuff, there is now much less stuff. It may all be in disarray, but a lot of stuff is gone. Some was taken on to Lake Jackson before Christmas. So has been tossed out. Paper and cardboard has been recycled. One refrigerator was emptied and moved, the other is much reduced in contents at we consume what was in it. I wonder why we ever bought a 3-lb bag of frozen blueberries. They will be fully consumed by tomorrow. I took a package of what I can only call mystery meat out of the freezer last night. We’ll see shortly if its thawed enough to know what it is, and if we’ll be having it for supper tonight. The pantry is bordering on empty now, although there’s enough canned goods left to give us some interesting meals the rest of the way.
I’m not sure whether I’ll find the time to post again this side of the move, but maybe next Monday.
Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.
Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.
But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.
Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.
There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.
The probate file confirmed what we had pretty much concluded beforehand, that George Victor Hepburn was NOT my great-great-grandfather. More likely he was my great-grandmother’s brother—though that is not yet confirmed.
Part of the reason for our recent trip to St. Lucia was to see what we could learn about my St. Lucia roots. We have a lot of what I call “family lore”, but not much of that is backed up by documentation. My maternal grandmother talked about St. Lucia all the time, and how they were high society there, having servants.
She came to the USA in May 1918, and my mother was born in September that year. I found documentation for those two events, a combination of recordings on calendars made by my grandmother’s uncle David Sexton. And we knew my grandmother’s mother, Henrietta (Hepburn) Sexton Harris. She lived well into her 90s, and I knew her and spent many a holiday when she visited in Rhode Island.
Although, it wasn’t until I made contact with cousins in New York City, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s half-sisters that the full story came out. But it came out as family lore. Henrietta was one of six siblings, but the cousins couldn’t agree on who those children were, nor on the name of her father. They agreed on three of the six, but not the other three. So, as the years progressed, I knew a trip to St. Lucia was necessary. But would it be productive?
My grandmother, Alfy Sexton, a year or so after emigrating to the US.
The answer is yes. The first morning our son and I drove to the St. Lucia archives. It’s not a big building from the outside, and they were in the process of moving from one building to another. But the women working there were friendly and helpful. I paid the research fee, then Charles did most of the talking. He had the names we were interested in, the type of documents we hoped to get copies of, and the years of interest. Meanwhile, the archivists were anxious to see the photos I had, and to scan them. One lady worked on scanning while another did a preliminary check of their indexes to see if maybe some of the documents we were interested in were in the archives. After the public hours closed, they would do a more complete check.
This was actually more than we’d hoped for. I had heard that the St. Lucia archives had few documents, and those disorganized—that many documents were destroyed in major fires in Castries in 1927 and 1948. Maybe some records were lost, but it seemed they had many extant, and an organized system for retrieving them.
We went back the next day to see what they actually found (in many places, sometimes an archive index can be erroneous). This gave us a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to have copies of. While we were doing this, I noticed the receptionist had one huge book open and was transcribing records. I didn’t come up to look over her shoulder to see what the records were. Suffice to say that additional deeds or marriages or birth records or powers of attorney or probate matters were added to the digital archives that day.
Those were the only two days we went to the archives. We paid fees (cash only, though they take US dollars) to receive digital copies of the documents, and they came a week later as email attachments. Family lore was confirmed in some cases, but confusion added by other documents. Oh well, we have time to sort it all out, come up with ancestral link conclusions and working theories of paths for future research.
I’ve researched in a few courthouses in the US, but this was the first time for me to go to a foreign archive in the hope of receiving relevant documents and data. A good experience, though I suspect this was a one-time only experience.
Years ago, I hoped to someday travel to St. Lucia, the land of my mother’s ancestors. Well, that was their land for a generation or two. They came to St. Lucia from St. Vincent, their neighboring island in the Caribbean.
But life got in the way. There was work and marriage and raising children then overseas posts many miles and time zones away from the Windward Islands. Our travels during our expatriate years took us in other directions.
An unusual view for a Thanksgiving dinner.
Then there was more work, days of accumulation in anticipation of retirement. That retirement finally came. We had money and time to go, but no real gumption. It seemed that all the years of activity had consumed a lifetime of initiative, and so here we sat, in Northwest Arkansas, waiting for energy to overcome declining health and move us from our easy chairs to seats on a plane.
Finally, in June of this year, our son said, “Let’s go to St. Lucia,” giving us the needed push. Two other family members wanted to join us on the trip, but in the end were unable to. In trying to accommodate the most people, we settled on Thanksgiving week just past. We had timeshare points to burn.
The view of Castries harbor on our last evening.
So, on Nov 24 we flew from NW Arkansas to Charlotte, NC, spent a night (as planned) there due to the difficult connection, and flew on to St. Lucia. We had seven wonderful nights there, flying back on Dec 1, able to do it all in one day due to an easier connection.
The trip was a mix of genealogy research, meeting people I’d met online in my preparation for the trip, meeting a relative there (2nd cousin once removed), seeing the house my family owned and lived in, and experiencing my family’s culture, though obviously far removed in time from when my grandmother emigrated to the USA in 1918.
One post will not be sufficient to tell of this trip. It was sort of magical. In terms of genealogical research, we accomplished more than I expected. We should soon receive information that will allow us to get back one more generation with confirmed documentation. I found my great-grandfather’s grave in a cemetery with no grid pattern, and where most of the stones were broken or badly weathered to the point of being unreadable. The family house was awesome to see, and we learned much more about its history.
Alas, it wasn’t all fun and research, as a future post will tell.
Expect additional posts over the next few weeks, as time allows. I’m still waiting on photos from others, and am very busy buying one house, prepping this one for sale, and moving hopefully before two more months pass.
Meanwhile, many people have told me I have to write down everything I’ve learned about this side of the family. I actually started on that last Tuesday evening. The tentative title is Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lie. As they say, stay tuned.
