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.
One side of the blue sheet is letters already transcribed, the other side is yet to be done. I still have a long way to go. That’s how it was a couple of weeks ago. It’s slightly better now.
The only way I can describe what went on the last few day is they were filled with miscellaneous stuff.
On Monday, I had a regular cardiology appointment. Everything must be okay, because the P.A., who was a touchy-feely person, said some back in six months.
On Tuesday, Lynda had a regular cardiology appointment, rescheduled at the cardiologist’s request. We figure everything was ok, since he said to some back in a year. On the way home, we stopped in a convenience store and got some pumpkin spice coffee for Lynda and house blend for me.
Also on Tuesday, I wrote a letter to my youngest grandson, finished typing edits to my latest Bible study volume, and submitted a proposal to our pastor for a new lesson series for our Community Group.
On Wednesday, I had an appointment with my new orthopedic surgeon, replacing the one who I had already seen but who left that practice. He said my knee was pretty bad and that I was a candidate for knee replacement without having to go through further P.T. But I have to get clearances from five doctors first (cardiologist rheumatologist, neurologist, PCP, and dentist). I’m working on those. On the way home, as a reward, I splurged and got a large Dunkin’ house blend.
Also on Wednesday, at 10:15 p.m., Lynda said her heart wasn’t feeling right and she needed to go to the ER. We did so, getting home after 4 a.m. after whatever was wrong corrected itself without the need of medicine. I slept well, waking at 7 a.m. to go about my day in a somewhat zombie-ish fashion.
Which brings us to Friday. We have the pest control people coming at 11 a.m. At 2 p.m. we have a follow up to the ER visit with our PCP team.
All week I’ve been reading in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. It’s a real slog. Thirty percent through and I’m getting nothing from it. I figure I should read this early mythology before I tackle The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but if I’m not getting anything from it…. I suppose I’ll plow ahead for a while longer. Surely it will get better.
This week I’ve also done a little research on St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Union Island in the Grenadines. The reason for this, apart from genealogy, will be revealed in good time.
Meanwhile, I continue my work of transcribing my father-in-law’s World War 2 letters. I now have 121 finished. The to-be-transcribed stack is still very large, still maybe 140 or so. Of course, that’s what I said twenty or thirty letters ago.
So it’s been a week of misc. stuff—filled with things to do, but without a nice rhythm. Perhaps next week will be quieter and better organized.
One side of the blue sheet is letters already transcribed, the other side is yet to be done. I still have a long way to go.
Having completed (more or less) my project of reviewing, organizing, and deleting redundant scan files (originally numbering around 3,400, currently less than 100), and having completed transcribing my great-grand uncle’s diary of his 1921 trip to St. Lucia (in preparation for my trip there in the next few months), I have now only one remaining active special project: transcribing my late father-in-law’s World War 2 letters.
I have made progress on this; yet I’m not close enough to the end to know when that will come. At the end of my transcribing on Saturday, I had finished exactly 100 letters. Each has been pulled from the green plastic bin it sat in for at least 30 years, been dusted off, unfolded, deciphered, and the words and other key information added to an electronic file created especially for it, one file for each letter. Then it was put back in the bin in correct chronological order based on date of writing, not on the postmark. At the same time, I entered the letter into an index file formatted for eventual inclusion in a book of these letters.
I have only a few wartime photos of Wayne, this one of him on the left and his brother Ray on the right,
They trace the life of Wayne Cheney from his graduation from high school in 1942 through his leaving home for work/school, his enlistment as an 18-year-old, until his discharge from the army air corps in late 1945. So far, most of the letters are those written by Wayne to his family (dad, mother, two sisters) back in little Fowler, Kansas. Many of the envelopes include a “censor’s stamp” when he was located at a forward base overseas. A few have words excised with a razor blade as the censor removed something he thought inappropriate. A few of the letters are from his mother, a few from his older brother who was also in the army, and a few from his sisters.
That’s based on the 100 letters transcribed so far. I haven’t counted the ones not yet transcribed. Such counting seemed like a waste of time. But based on the thickness of the letters not yet done compared to those done, I estimate I have 120 to 150 more to go. I find I can only do so much of this work in a given day before I hit a wall of fatigue and have to shift to something else. Three letters a day is about my limit. At that rate, it will take me the rest of the year to complete the transcribing, accounting for trips and holidays.
Once that’s done, my plan is to take Wayne’s war diary/journal and integrate it with the letters. Before his death, Wayne typed his WW2 journal, adding a post-war supplement to it, and printed it in multiple copies. I gave one copy to his son, kept one, and trashed a number of duplicates. The electronic version is somewhere on a diskette in an old Word Perfect file. I think I will scan the printed file to text and work with that.
I don’t have a lot of photos from Wayne’s service year, but what few I have I’ll add in.
I have no idea how long this book will be. If the letters average 500 words and there are, say, 240 of them, that’s a 120,000 word book not including the diary/journal. That would be a sizable undertaking, and is possibly biting off quite a bit more than I can chew.
But there’s nothing to do but continue, and make this unfiltered history a little more accessible for the few who will be interested. If I’m able to complete the project, I’ll give a copy of the book to the Meade County Historical Museum, the Fowler Library, and give a copy to each near relative, I suppose. I’ll make it available on Amazon should there be a cousin or two interested.
Taking a break today from my last series of posts (on the Goldilocks Zone) to report on my recent doings.
Today is a rain day. No chance to work outside unless the rain clears this afternoon. So I’m working indoors. Also, since this is a Saturday, the only stock market work I had was wrapping up my weekly spreadsheet. I greatly simplified my spreadsheet in June when I resumed trading activities, so that spreadsheet updating now takes all of ten minutes.
I transcribed four of my father-in-law’s WW2 letters. I’m now up to 65 complete. It looks like well over 100, maybe as many as 200 yet to go. I never said it would be quick or easy.
Yesterday I finished the second editorial pass (the first pass having been two years ago) on Vol 6 in the A Walk Through Holy Week study. I think two more quick passes and I’ll be ready to publish.
Typical rainy day activities for me are filing papers and updating the check book. Not really feeling like doing either one today, but we’ll see. For sure I’ll get in an hour or more of reading. Oh, yeah, I’ll have to prepare supper, and perhaps vacuum.
The typing is tedious, especially reading 83-year-old pencil scratching…
It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.
So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.
…but I’ll get through it, one letter a day for now….
Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.
I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.
…but I have to admit I’m glad it’s not a bigger bin.
I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.
One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.
My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.
After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing. Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.
So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.
I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed. At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.
Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.
Last month I resumed setting goals for the month. I had suspended this practice, which used to include progress, as my injuries and medical issues piled up in 2024 and continued in early 2025. But I decided to resume setting goals but not taking time to report progress on the prior month’s goals. So here are goals for June.
Begin editing Vol. 5 of the A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series. Based on how the last couple of volumes went, it’s likely I’ll finish it this month.
Continue with work on computer files. This, for now, will mainly be checking scanned files to see if I’ve properly saved them and then get rid of the duplicate file.
Having done a good job on genealogy research this month, I’d like to continue it in June. This may be mainly organizing computer files, getting rid of duplicate material and superseded files, rather than new research.
Work some more on going through family photos. It would be nice to finish one of our four main families and send those photos off to the next family member who needs to deal with them.
Continue going through my father-in-law’s letter files. They are in approximate chronological order. I’m going through them one a day, from newest working backwards. At this rate it will take me a couple of years to get through them all.
Consolidate a few ideas I’ve had lately for future writing in the Documenting America series.
I have other things I’d like to accomplish, but these seem like enough to set for the month. Especially in consideration of the outdoor work I have to do in the blackberry patch.
Saturday, I wrote two letters, printed them, and made them ready for mailing. The plan was to mail them on Sunday when we drove by the post office going to and coming back from church. In doing so, I totally forgot that Monday was a federal holiday and the P.O. wouldn’t pick up the letters. No matter; I got that little task done.
So here it is Monday of Memorial Day weekend. I’m caught up with my correspondence. I set out chicken to thaw for supper. Rain continues to fall, with occasional breaks, so outside work isn’t easily possible. So today will be an inside day of work and relaxation.
With some remembrance of those who fell in battle, fighting because out country asked them to. In our family, Lynda’s great-uncle, Lee Thompson, died on the first day of fighting at Guadalcanal in 1942. He is the only one that I know of in her family and mine that died in battle. Others served with distinction but lived to rejoin civilian life after war. I take this moment, as one who did not serve, to salute Lee and those others who gave their lives for the USA.
As to filling the day, I started with some work on my deceased father-in-law’s letters. He was a letter writer and saver (as I am) who spent lots of time in his last three or four years writing long letters on his computer. He saved them in notebooks and on floppy discs. At some point we need to get rid of one or the other of these, so I’m taking time to organize the notebooks. Possibly I’ll computerize them, then get rid of either the hard copies or the discs, or possibly both.
Last night I updated my book sales spreadsheet. As I did so, I learned it’s become somewhat unwieldy and needs revamping. Not sure if I’m going to do that today. But today I plan to update my financial spreadsheet, something I let drop after my seizure back in December. I need to see where I stand financially overall. I also hope to update my checkbook. Since my handwriting is still very difficult since my stroke in September, I now keep my checkbook on a spreadsheet. And, yes, I still keep my checkbook, probably an anachronistic practice in this electronic era.
I have a lot of papers scattered over my work area in The Dungeon. I hope to, if not reduce them in number, to at least better organize them. That also goes for a few 3-ring binders on my shelves. We are very close to finishing with deciding what to do with the mass of photos from Lynda’s dad’s family. We could finish those today with an hour or two of effort. I’m anxious to see that completed.
But otherwise, I will mainly read. About 15 minutes is all that’s left on one magazine. It would be good to get more than my 10-page quota read in the literature and missions books I’m reading. Maybe the evening will find us watching an Agatha Christie movie on Britbox or U-Tube. And, the Carlyle Letters Online are always there should I need something to fill up a half-hour. As is my too-long neglected journal.
The work is nearly complete on this non-commercial project. My proof copy should arrive by Wednesday next week.
Family, friends, and regular readers of this blog know that we lived in Saudi Arabia once upon a time. That was in mid-1981 to 1983. Our children were 2 1/2 and 5 mo. when we first went there. The company I worked for at the time, Black & Veatch, had lots of engineering work in the Saudi Eastern Province, and I was one of those sent there for civil-environmental engineering work.
At the time, the Iran-Iraq war was in its second year. The country was still rather primitive. The road network was good, and rapidly being improved. The shops were full of the world’s goods; you could find almost everything you wanted (except when all shipments of peanut butter were held up in customs for a month). Plenty of other expatriates lived and worked nearby, and we struck up fast friendships. And we had a church to go to, meeting with permission of the Saudi government on the condition that no evangelism of Saudi natives take place.
But the one thing we didn’t have was a telephone. That infrastructure was way behind in development, and only offices, stores, government offices, and probably a few wealthy Saudis had phones. We could go to the B&V office and make calls (frightfully expensive), or, if previously arranged, receive one. So to keep in touch with the home front, we wrote letters. That seems almost anachronistic now, but a fair amount of our time was devoted to writing letters. I wrote about this before concerning our years in Kuwait from 1988-1990.
Transcribed in 2020-2022 and published in 2022, this was my first collection of letters to publish.
Back in 2020 to 2022, I spent a lot of time transcribing letters from the Kuwait years and making a book out of them. It was just for family members. I think a total of four copies were bought (3 by me) before I removed it from sale. My second-oldest grandson read it and seemed to like it. He enjoyed reading errors in his mother’s letters. She was 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old at the time. His family’s copy of the book is on the bookshelf in his bedroom.
Having completed the Kuwait years letters, I took a break for a while, other than bringing our letters-in-hand to a better state of organization. Then, in early 2024, while recovering from my first stroke and not getting out much or doing original writing, I decided to transcribe the Saudi letters. I had almost all of them done by September when I had my second, bigger stroke and my open-heart surgery. In October, our daughter visited us and began the process of selecting photos to illustrate the book and scanning them.
The letters, along with my 1983 travel journal.
I completed the scanning last month and cropped them and loaded them into the book document over the last two weeks, taking time to arrange the photos in some logical way relative to the text of the letters. I finished the process yesterday. A quick pass through the book showed that my pagination was acceptable. So, this morning I “slapped” a cover together and uploaded the book to Amazon. One photo needed adjusting, which I got done. The Zon then said the book was acceptable. I ordered a proof copy. I’ll use the copy to doing any proof-reading needed, and will have the finished product ready in a month, maybe less.
This book is more richly illustrated than the Kuwait letters book was. I’m coming to learn a little about working with photos and how to use the tools at my disposal. I’m far from an expert, but I’m for sure better at it now than I was three years ago.
I’m scheduled to make a presentation to our letter writers group on letter collections when we meet on June 10. My voice has not fully recovered from the stroke and seizures, but I think it has enough to allow me to make myself legible. Thus, I think I will present this rather than one of the letter collections I’ve read.
Our son snapped this picture just as they called me to begin prep for surgery.
As the title of this post says, I’m somewhat uncertain about what my life if going to be like in the future.
As to the heart surgery, I’m healing well. I’m being careful to follow the discharge instructions the hospital gave me. I’ve been seen three times by home health, once in clinic for blood draw, and once in clinic for the post-op appointment. Almost every day I sense healing happening in my body. Yesterday, after working with our daughter putting one bedroom back together following down-sizing activities, I had my first real time of pain at the incision point. A Tylenol was sufficient to help control it.
As to my stroke of 3 Sept, progress on the lingering impairments is slow. Typing has started to improve, but remains both slow and painful. Handwriting is also slow to return to normal. It takes me a long time just to sign my name to anything, and the result is barely legible. Writing anything takes much more time it ought to.
But, I’ve been able to do some light writing tasks. I began work on the next volume of my Bible study series. Not actual writing yet, but creating the book files, loading the scripture in and dividing it by chapter, and planning the subsections. I think I’m perhaps a day away from completing the preliminaries and beginning the writing.
The other writing project is the book of family letters from our years in Saudia Arabia. All that’s left is adding photographs. That involves scanning to digital, resizing, loadings into the books, then formatting the pages. As I’ve said before, the words are written. I scanned some photos previously. But the scanner is in the basement and I’m still not allowed to do stairs. Our daughter did a lot of scanning. I have at least 40 scanned photos to go through and load into the book. I will work on that some this week. About the time I finish that, I’ll be at the point using stairs again, and can complete the scanning.
So healing is happening, and writing tasks are getting done. Hopefully on Friday, I’ll be able to report increasing progress.
