Category Archives: letters

family, Fowler, letters

Letters, Letters, Letters

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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.

Bible study, History, letters

Working

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Slowly making progress transcribing these.

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 fun days of retirement.

 

Bible study, Christianity, Decumulation, family, letters, travel, Writing

July Goals

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  1. Have a meet-up to deliver batch 1 of family photos to the one who has been clamoring to have them. Good riddance.
  2. Somehow, carve out enough time to finish editing my book-in-progress. Down to 3 chapters, but was unable to do any editing today, nor will tomorrow.
  3. Continue transcribing one letter a day of my father-in-law’s war letters.
  4. Continue to dispose of unneeded scan files on my computer and One Drive. Down to less than 1,450 now.
  5. Keep up with yardwork.
  6. Handle various financial matters and travel bookings.
Bible study, family, Genealogy, letters, stock market

Summer Schedule, New Project

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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.

Stay tuned….

Bible study, Christianity, Decumulation, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, Health, letters, Writing

Goals for June 2025

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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.

America, Carlyle, letters, movies, reading

Holiday Weekend

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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.

expatriate life, family, letters, self-publishing

The Saudi Years In Letters

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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.

Bible study, Health, letters

Where Do I Go From Here?

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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.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, expatriate life, letters, self-publishing, Short Stories, Writing

August Progress, September Goals

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Vol. 2 may be published this month—if I can make my goal.

Well, August was another strange month, as I continued to recover from the two freak household accidents I had in July. While my output was certainly affected, I wasn’t shut down from some progress. Here’s how I did relative to my goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Did this. I had lots to write about.
  • I’m not making a goal of attending any writers meetings, partly from not knowing how my surgery and illnesses will lay me up, and partly because one meeting may be cancelled due to lack of a venue. I went to one meeting.
  • Complete two editorial passes through A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol 2. I managed to do this. Actually, I made three editorial passes through and have declared it “Done”. Publishing tasks to follow.
  • Figure out any final changes to the latest Danny Tompkins story, then finish and publish it. Did this, and published the short story on Aug 5. Made changes to it over the next few days.
  • Complete the commentary between letters. If I can get that done, begin selection of photos and insert them in the book. Did this. Completed commentary, Introduction, proofreading the letters and commentary, and started selecting photos.
  • And, one more for good measure: Make a start at outlining Vol 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week. Nope, did not work on this at all.
Hopefully, I’ll come very close to finishing my next book of expatriate year letters this month.

September will be an odd month. My heart surgery will be on Sept 30, and I have lots of pre-op stuff before that. So I don’t plan on any writing this month. Publishing tasks will take precedence.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend three writing group meetings. I present at the one on Sept 10.
  • Complete publishing tasks for A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 2 and publish it to Amazon. I may have to do so with a temporary cover.
  • Complete adding photos to the Saudi years letters book. A really stretching-it goal would be to do enough formatting to order a review copy.
  • Spend at least a little time organizing Vol. 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week.

That’s it, and it may be more than I can accomplish. But it’s better to have a goal that requires you to work hard and efficiently.

letters, Writing

One Project: The Words Are Done

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This is how I’m storing the letters—at least for now. Not sure if I should find a more permanent container.

A week ago I wrote a post about the two projects I was working on. I’m pleased to report that I finished one of those on Saturday.

But I need to qualify that. I finished the words part of the project. And I did a small amount of proofreading on Sunday, so I guess I should say Sunday was my completion day. I’d better explain.

The project was the book of letters during our years in Saudi Arabia, 1981-83. As I explained before, we didn’t have a phone in our apartment, had limited access to the office phone for personal calls (expensive and inconvenient), so we wrote letters home. Our parents, grandparents, and others kept most of them, and now we have them. In addition, we have some that were written to us from home. We must have brought those back with us when we were repatriated.

Here are the little darlings, collated in their box.

The collection, as it currently stands, is 191 items. I say “items” instead of letters, and “currently stands” because the collection includes a few things that aren’t letters, such as envelopes of receipts from some of our travels. Also, we have a number of empty envelopes in our files, addressed to a parent. The letters themselves were removed and are presumed lost. Or are they around the house somewhere?

This project actually began somewhere arounds 2008, I think it was. I gathered all the Saudi letters together, collated them, and began to transcribe them to a Word document. As I did, I left the letters out of the envelopes and put them opened flat in a folder, thinking that was a better way to preserve them. Later, as I studied how letter collections were gathered and preserved, I realized they should be left in the envelopes. So a few years later I returned them to the envelopes.

The Kuwait letters book served as the prototype for the other collections I’ve put together.

Or did I? Problem is, I remember finding the folder and seeing the letters laid flat and the envelopes on top, but I don’t actually remember ever putting them in the envelopes. Did I do it? I don’t have a list of which letters I transcribed, and the computer file is long gone from various computer upgrades. It makes me wonder if that folder is still there, buried beneath a pile of other things, waiting for me to do my work.

No matter right now. Today I have set aside some time to look for that folder and see if there are other letters to collate and transcribe. I don’t think there are, but we’ll see.

This was a fun, if often tedious project. The document I’ve created is over 109,000 words and spans 190 8.5×11 pages. It includes a four page Introduction, a list of the letters, and a list of correspondents. The only words that are missing are those that will go on the Copyright page. Well, that, and whatever captions I add to pictures once I get them added to the book.

Yes, I intend to publish it. It’s just for family, a way to preserve some of our history. But I’ll publish it as a paperback to Amazon, print off a few copies for family, then un-publish it. It will remain on my Amazon author’s bookshelf, ready to be re-published should some family want more copies (such as my grandchildren when they are older).

So the next step is to generously illustrate the book with photos. I plan on using some time in the afternoons over the next couple of weeks to go through the mountain of photos we have, select 50 or so good ones (maybe more), scan them, load them into the book. Then all that’s left is converting the Word file into the correct size pages for publishing, moving the photos to the right place, adding captions, make a suitable cover, and publish it.

And I did it with this collection as well, though it had only a handful of illustrations.

No, that’s not a quick and easy task. But I’ve already done that once with the letters from our years in Kuwait, so I sort of know the drill. Moving photos into place is actually kind of easy. The final sizing and positioning takes some care, but it’s quite doable.

That’s my afternoon job over the next couple of weeks.

My morning job? The will be picking up again A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 2, and doing the next round of edits. I’m not really sure how long that will take me. Could be a week, could be two. I’ll also have to decide if I need another round of edits before moving on to publishing tasks.

I felt a great weight fall from my shoulders on Saturday when I typed the last words in the Saudi letters book. It’s good to see it reach this milestone.