I’m writing this Thursday afternoon, March 28. I’ve had a busy day. Devotions. Stock trading accounting. Writing in my work-in-progress. Stock trading. Writing a letter to my #2 grandson. Weekly trip to Walmart for groceries (mainly). Quick swing through the bank drive-through. Dealing with a minor insurance issue. Working on plans for a trip east. Lots of bits and pieces.
This weekend will be a three-day weekend. Tomorrow, Good Friday, is sort of a holiday. I have my work planned out. Trading accounting. Write 1,200 words in my w-i-p. Some yardwork. Filing of financial papers. Scan/e-file as many genealogy papers as I can; maybe some writing papers. Putting things back in place after the work in the house. Updating the checkbook and budget. Begin doing our personal income taxes. Cook some banana bread. Yes, lots to do.
Next Monday will be my regular post, which, being the 1st of the month, will be my progress and goals report. I will have a special post on Sunday, not a normal posting day. It’s a special 50th anniversary for me that I want to tell you about.
Then, next Tuesday, I will have a heart catheterization, hopefully as an out-patient. This is preparatory for me to have my genetically defective/abnormal aortic valve replaced. I don’t yet know when that will be. The heart cath is needed for the doctors to know if they can replace the valve in a minimally invasive way rather than by open heart surgery.
All of which just talks of the busyness of life. Friday will be busy, as will Saturday. I’m hoping to carve out a little time for Bible reading and prayer. I’ll start the days with that.
Dateline: Monday, January 15, 2024, Martin Luther King Jr. Day
I was about ready to leave The Dungeon and go upstairs, grab my sledgehammer, and fix the modem that way. Fortunately, our internet came up before such drastic repairs were needed.
It’s my regular blogging day. But I woke up this morning to find we have no internet. Thus, I can’t get to the blog to type in a post. I’m writing this on my computer, and will post it whenever the internet comes back to us.
Actually, it has been a horrible weekend for technology. Friday evening our cable kept going haywire. Picture breaking up, sound breaking up, occasional total loss of signal. We suffered through and saw a few things. Wound up streaming something via Amazon Prime, which worked. Or was that Saturday? The days are running together.
Anyhow, called Cox. They said they would have a technician out between 3 and 5 yesterday, and said it might involve a $75 charge. We had internet all day yesterday, but no cable.
The Cox tech was a no-show. But it snowed yesterday, a little over 2 inches, and the temperature never got above 1°, so I kind of understand why the tech didn’t make it. A call telling us that would have been nice. Alas, service providers of every type have ceased being proactive in communicating with their customers in this age of easy communication. Will it do any good to call the office today, on the holiday?
My post today was to be about January being off to a good start. I am one or two days away from the last editing pass through A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. Granddaughter Elise got the cover art done. So either tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll begin publishing tasks.
The first week of the year, while in Lake Jackson, I had a conversation with Elise about the next book in The Forest Throne series, and she read the prologue I wrote based on our prior conversations. She loved it, reading it aloud while our daughter was in the room and putting much drama into the reading. So a good start there on a project just a little down the road. Also, youngest grandson Elijah wanted to have a conversation about the fourth book in the series, which will be about the youngest child in the Wagner family. That book is planned for about four years from now. But we had the conversation and I got some ideas on paper. I may type them up and see what that future book will look like.
Sven months of letters from the Saudi years. The ones on the left are transcribed. The ones on the right to be done. It’s a big project.
I began transcribing the letters from our Saudi Arabia years. This was one of my realistic goals. On Fri-Sat-Sun, I typed five letters each day. I’m going to limit myself to five a day so as to keep the project from overwhelming me as the letters from the Kuwait years did. I have no idea how many total letters there are. As I look at the piles, it appears to be about 300, which is close to double the number in the previous project. But as we had no typewriter (or computer in 1981-83), the letters will likely average a little shorter.
I did a little reading for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Not much, but a little. What I read, however, makes me wonder if I’m on the right track with this volume. I’ll discuss that more in a future blog post.
I also have made a good start on an author interview for a future blog post. Possibly today I’ll be able to pull my interview questions together and send them to him.
Well, our internet just came up, so I will wrap this up and post this. I’ll have to leave The Dungeon to go upstairs to see if the cable TV is up. I’m not optimistic. But I’m still optimistic in general about 2024. I still expect to see those realistic goals met. But we will see.
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.
Grandfather Todd’s trunk. Came from Yorkshire to NYC in 1910, to Providence in 1912, to East Providence around 1914, back to Providence around 1945, to Cranston in 1950, to NW Arkansas in 1997, and to Myrtle Beach in 2023.
One of the consequences of being in West Texas on a long-ish (more than two weeks) grandparent duty is that I wasn’t home to handle one very important item, scheduled since January. This relates to decluttering and dis-accumulation in advance of a downsizing some day, specifically to the Stars and Stripes that I’ve written about before.
For decades it held wartime copies of the “Stars and Stripes”, but they are now gone.
Not really about the newspapers, but the trunk they were stored in. This is an old steamer trunk that was one of three trunks that sat in the basement of my parents’ house for decades. As a kid growing up, I never knew the origin of those trunks nor what they were storing.
Someone who knows trunks could probably figure out more about it, such as year of manufacture and value.
On one trip back to Rhode Island, in 1990, Dad and I talked about his war service setting type for the S&S. We went to the basement and Dad showed me all those newspapers he’d sent home from Europe, which his parents kept and put in the trunk.
When Dad died in 1997, I took the trunk back to Arkansas and there it sat, either in my garage or basement, until a few days ago. Last year I removed the contents and shipped them to the University of Rhode Island Library as a donation, keeping a handful of copies as keepsakes.
That left the empty trunk. It was a steamer trunk, nothing fancy. On one end “OT” was painted. I assume, therefore, that this belonged to my grandfather, my dad’s dad, Oscar Todd. He emigrated from Yorkshire, England, to the USA in 1910 at the age of 20. He was in New York City for a couple of years, then made his way to Rhode Island. There he worked, married, and raised a family.
The “OT” painted on the outside is the only real clue I have about the origin, and the reason I believe it belonged to my grandfather, Oscar Todd, and was probably the trunk he brought with him from England to the USA.
I assume that this trunk was the one he brought from England in 1910. I’m sure there’s a way to research it and determine its age and origin. But I’m convinced that’s what it is: my grandfather’s trunk. He kept it, and when those newspapers came in wartime mail, it became a good place to store them.
From 1910 to around 1950, the trunk was wherever Oscar was, in NYC, the Riverside district of East Providence, and Providence. From 1950 to 1997, it was in the basement of Dad’s house in Cranston. From 1997 to 2023, it was with me in two different houses. While not overly large, it just doesn’t fit in with the concept of dis-accumulation. So when I decided to donate the S&S, I decided to get rid of the trunk.
Neither of my children wanted it. I don’t fault them for that. The trunk would take a fair amount of restoration to be a display item. The heirloom value would only be to someone who knew Oscar, and he died before they were born. I thought of others in the family who might want it, and decided on a cousin’s son, Frank Reed. He and his wife have six children, Frank knew Oscar, his great-grandfather, briefly and remembers him, so that seemed the next logical place for it to go.
The problem is, Frank recently removed from New Jersey to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. How to get the trunk to him? Shipping was a possibility, though expensive. So in January I put out a call on Facebook for anyone making a road trip there who would be willing to take the trunk. Amazingly, a woman responded saying she would be going to the North Carolina Outer Banks and could drive the trunk as far as Raliegh-Durham Airport. Could my cousin meet her there? He said yes, and arrangements were made for the trunk transfer at a certain time on May 9.
But then, grandparent duties took me away from home at the time we would have to get the trunk to the woman who was driving it east. She contacted me; I was in Texas, not planning to be home before May 7, when the trunk needed to go to her.
Our neighbors had a key to our house to water the plants. I contacted them and they were happy to help out. The first transfer, from our house to our neighbors, happened on the 6th. The second transfer, from our neighbor’s to Kimberly’s van, happened on the 7th. The third transfer, from Kimberly to Frank’s son’s car (he went to pick it up), happened in the cell phone lot at Raleigh-Durham Airport on the 9th, and the drive to Myrtle Beach the day.
So much work to get a simple trunk halfway across country. But it happened. Now Frank and his family can decide how best to display and enjoy this family heirloom, either as-is or with restoration.
Very late today. We had our Thanksgiving meal today rather than yesterday due to one family member’s schedule. And a good meal it was, including good fellowship.
I have great hopes that this will be one of my better sellers. Two of my grandchildren, Ezra and Elise, think it will be a best seller. We’ll see.
I interrupt the review of The Control of Nature to just talk. Last weekend we were in Big Spring, Texas, doing the grandparent thing. We drove up on Thursday, had a grandson’s birthday party on Friday with many 6-year-olds and their parents, a grandson’s cross country meet on Saturday, taking or picking up grandkids from school or activities. It was quite enjoyable.
Then, on Saturday, the family drove to western Oklahoma for our son-in-law’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They boarded the dog, which left Lynda and I alone in the house with the three cats. That lasted only about 30 hours, but it was a good time.
During the days, when the kids were at school, Richard was at work, and Sara was either working at home of going to the office, we had lots of solitude. This was quite enjoyable.
For me, it was like being on a writers’ retreat. I had no special projects to work on, no household chores, no yardwork, just peaceful time. So what did I spend my time on? I got back to work on the sequel to There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Titled The Key To Time Travel, I had written a prolog, chapter 1, and most of chapter 2, consisting of around 3,650 words. But I hadn’t done any work on it for close to a month—other than re-read it and edit. I had just been too busy with those special projects and things around the house.
But from the first day, I found time to write in it. About a thousand words a day. The plot flowed easily, the words found their way to pixels on screen. By the end of four days, I had 5,500 words added to the novel, pushing it to 9,200 words, or just under 25 percent of where I think the word count will end up.
I asked our granddaughter, Elise, to read it, which she did (all but the last 500 words or so), and she loved it. She mentioned certain things that made it good, things she liked to see in a book. So I think I’m on the right track.
We drove home on Wednesday. I’m writing this on Sunday. How many words do you think I’ve added since I got home? None, that’s how many. I made progress with my special projects. I finished one book I was working on both before and during our trip. I did a major amount of yardwork on Saturday. Then I had to prepare to teach our adult Sunday school class, a new series that I developed. That took a fair amount of time on Saturday.
Here it is Sunday evening. I’m brain dead. The microwave quit this morning, only a little over three years old. Lynda has a medical appointment tomorrow. Let me rephrase that. She may have a medical appointment tomorrow. She thinks she cancelled it and we’ll have to check first thing Monday.
So I don’t expect to get lots written either tonight or tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday.
It was just me and the missus this year. Leftovers from the Thanksgiving dinner we had last week with our son, reading, walking, and lots of phone calls.
I’m not a big fan of talking on the phone, so I can’t say that was pleasant for me. Strange, after all the years in the workforce, dealing with clients, contractors, and colleagues, that I should dislike the phone, but I do. Maybe 44 years of engineering work and the required phone time means I used up my lifetime store of phone time.
I can’t say that I feel like I got much done. I was a couple of days behind on my devotional readings, and I caught up. I did my usual morning stock market accounting even though the market was closed. That saved me from having to do it Friday before the market opens for a half-day session. I had a couple of messages of people wanting to buy stuff off my Facebook Marketplace listings. I responded, started to gather those things, they decided it could wait until Friday. I read eight pages in C.S. Lewis’ letters. I had hoped for 10 pages, so was a little short.
I walked a total of 2.67 miles, according to my app. I went out, came back to find Lynda walking toward me, so we went out again. I think it was a little over 1/2 miles together. A beautiful day in the mid-60s couldn’t be passed by. As I said above, supper was leftovers, a turkey casserole I had made a week ago, the last of the butternut squash, cranberry sauce, and then just snacking.
In the evening I read aloud from the current issue of the Nazarene Compassionate Ministries magazine that we get, finishing it. That paves the way for us to start a new book today. I read a couple of Thomas Carlyle’s letters from 1832, finding them enjoyable as always.
The main task I did, I guess, was formatting a document in MS Word. I won’t say what it was. It’s a bunch of copyrighted items that I downloaded concerning an author I study. I will read it some day; actually started on that some years ago. Now the document is set up in printable form, should I decide to do that. For some reason, formatting documents is a task I find enjoyable. So I worked on that off and on beginning around noon, and finished it around 9:30 pm. Over 200 pages. Done, ready for whatever I want to do with it next.
So here it’s Friday morning. I was up at 6:15 a.m. and have already got stuff done. I’ll head upstairs when I finish this to get my second cup of coffee. Then I’ll see all that I must do and want to do today. Work, walk, and read are my main courses, with a side of eating and conversation. Looking forward to the day.
Thanksgiving week is usually a busy week for us. People are coming in. Last year was larger than normal, as both of our children were here, with grandchildren, a sister, and a cousin, plus spouses. We had to set up an extra table for dinner. Thanksgiving has always been a busy time, yet a fun time.
This year, the pandemic has canceled all that. It will just be Lynda and me. Our son was here with his partner last week. They quarantined for two weeks in Chicago before coming, as did we here, so we all felt safe doing that. Charles also came for a week in October, and, if plans work out, they will do the same in mid-December. Our daughter’s family has sickness running through it. Not the corona virus, but the strep throat that kids seem to get every year in school and pass on to parents. So they will hunker down in West Texas.
Last week we had an early Thanksgiving dinner with our visitors, not quite traditional but close. We are now eating leftovers and soon I’ll be making soup and figuring out how much turkey I have to freeze, along with other things. For sure we will be eating leftovers on Thursday. So Thanksgiving will be a quiet affair.
That is actually back to normal. Life is quiet for us. Lynda’s health issues would have forced us into quietness even if there hadn’t been a pandemic. The double-whammy means we don’t go out. I still go to Wal-Mart for groceries and meds, but try to shop so as to go every nine or ten days instead of every five or six days as I used to. I still go to church, except when quarantining. We still see our neighbors on occasion. In this rural neighborhood we have more vacant lots than built-on lots, so you have to go out of your way to see you neighbors. Getting out of the house mostly means taking walks, not drives.
This week, as I look ahead on Monday and build my to-do list, looks to be a writing week. My stock trading activities are now quite efficient and don’t take more than an hour a day. I normally stretch that out to two or so. Last night I spent some time on a writing project: adding commentary to the transcribed letters from our Kuwait years. This went fairly quickly. I want to keep commentary to a minimum. At this point I’m halfway through the book with just a few hours work, and could easily finish it this week. I still have editing to do on the letters, then proofread it all and compare it to the original letters, then decide if I’m going to add photos and if so how many. I don’t know that I’m going to make this a continuous task or rather work on it in odd moment as the spirit moves me, such as when multi-tasking before the television.
I might spend a little time fleshing out the next Bible study I want to write. I’ve selected it and, having taught it twice, have a lot of beginning material. But other studies have been nagging at me, suggesting I develop and write them instead. I will have to spend some time deciding.
A letter to an old friend of my wife and me is in the offering, perhaps as early as today. Listing more things on Facebook Marketplace will also be a task quite soon, maybe even today. While I’ve been pleased with how that has gone, I’ve found it is time consuming. I plan on listing my box of JFK assassination magazines that I bought at auction some years ago, as well as our old treadmill and older bicycles. All of that will take some time. As will a few other downsizing activities.
Which brings me to my novel-in-progress. Yes, I want to get back to that. I think I know how to plow ahead with it and not be stymied by the historical elements. Ideas are floating through my mind and I need to get them written before they totally float away. It is a featured task on my to-do list, though I may need to do a few others first.
All of this is possible because of the quiet Thanksgiving. I will miss not seeing my children and grandchildren all together. But I will also feel good knowing they are protecting themselves where they are, perhaps getting some rest rather than going through all the trouble of travel. We will look forward to making Thanksgiving a busy time in 2021.
Had an on-line sale of this one day, then two days later had another, plus one of the prequel. I’m hoping it means someone bought it, not realizing it was the second in the series, liked it, bought the first, then convinced someone else to buy it.
Thanksgiving is over. Well, almost over. My sister is still in town, and we’ll get together again this afternoon and evening. Our full household, however, is back to two, just me and the wife. We have much after-company work to do yet, but the yesterday we took our rest, and this morning is normal routine. Tomorrow or Wednesday will be full routine.
I gave up writing work during this time, except for a little editing in the Leader’s Guide for Acts Of Faith. I rarely went to The Dungeon since two Saturdays ago.
But, now it’s time to get back at it. Complete editing of the Leader’s Guide is step one. Simultaneous with that I’ll be reading for my critique group, Scribblers and Scribes of Bella Vista. I have two pieces to read to get ready for the meeting Wednesday evening. Plus, I need to send out again for critique my short story, “Tango Delta Foxtrot”. I haven’t written any more on it, but still have a few pages of it to read to the group.
I’ll make the cover for the print edition of the prequel of this look much the same. Delete “Again” and change the photo.
Next, I’ll get back on publishing tasks for Bessie Black’s first book, Once Upon An Island. It was a work-for-hire, but she received a license to self-publish it as a print book since it’s gone out of print. I’ve already done most of the formatting. I want to read it through once more to look for typos. I figured out what we’d do for the cover. I hope to publish that for her before the end of the year, which looks very doable.
The other thing that has surprised me recently has been some unexpected on-line sales. I had two sales of Headshots and one of In Front Of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as well as one of Acts Of Faith. Those came about a week ago over a three day period. It’s nice to see sales at the same time from both the back list and new items. I hope this will be a trend.
So, back in the saddle, for three weeks at least, before the next holiday interruption comes.
Somewhere in this house, most likely in one of two places, I have a list started of blog posts I want to do. The list is on paper, one of the pads I want to use up rather than just discard. Do you think this morning, my regular day for blogging, I can find it? Of course not.
Instead of whatever I was thinking of for today, I’ll just post a stream-of-thought thing. What popped into my head was: I still haven’t found my new normal in retirement.
I have many things I should be doing. De-cluttering is a key one. Lynda has started on some de-cluttering, in a small way only but it’s a start. I’ve been working on it for a while, but haven’t done anything major for a while.
My main decluttering has been a little printing I did. How is that decluttering, you ask? It was four pages for the members of my new critique group. I printed them on the backs of old printed pages. I have two stacks of these, which are somewhat unobtrusive piles in two places, one quite large the other small. But, since I brought the pages back home with me, you might ask how is that decluttering? Once I incorporate their comments into my chapter, I’ll discard them into recycling. This is a departure from the past, where I kept all such critique sheets. No more.
Also yesterday I printed my completed novel, Adam Of Jerusalem, for my last editing pass through it. All 217 sheets are on reused paper. So, once I finish with this, it will be taken to recycling as well. The pile I pulled all these sheets from may in fact look a little smaller.
Today is a holiday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But now that I’m retired, it’s the same as other week days except the stock market is closed. I’m free to do whatever I want. I don’t even have to prepare any food, as we have left-overs from the prior cooking.
So what am I going to do? I should try to read 100 pages in the novel, editing as I go. I will try to find that list of blog post, and put it where I can find it when I need it. I’ll hit the elliptical, and try to do 1.2 miles on it in 0.2 mile increments. I’ll walk outside, hopefully my 2.4 mile route. It would be nice to read something for leisure, maybe something out of the large magazine pile (which will be multi-tasking since it will also count as decluttering). We may also head into town for a noon service celebrating MLK’s life. We’ll see.
Tomorrow will be another day into retirement. Perhaps, with the stock market open and having trades to make and watch, it will feel a little closer to a new normal.
