Category Archives: letters

letters, memories, Writing

Losing Track of Days

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As an exercise, I gathered all my 2011 outgoing and incoming letters (most were via e-mail) into a correspondence book and “published” it to Amazon. Here’s a photo of it. 559 pages. Of course, it can never be truly published like this because I don’t own the copyright of the incoming letters.

It’s Friday, my normal blog posting day. I try to write my blog posts the day before and schedule them to post on Friday and Monday at 7:30 a.m. Yet here it is, 10:45 a.m., and I just realized I hadn’t yet done a blog post. This one was to have been another in the climate change series, but I’m not ready for it. So I’ll have to settle with a fill-in post.

Today, my time has been taken up by busyness. I was up around 6:30 a.m. and out working in the woodlot by 6:45. I began moving cut branches and deadfall down the hill to a brush pile closer to the back of the lot. I also did more work on breaking down the brush pile near the front of the lot and moving it to the two piles near the rear. Lynda asked me to do this since the front pile was an eyesore from the street. She is right. Working on and off on it since spring, a 7-foot pile is now down to a foot and a half. The end is in sight.

After the brush pile, I did a little trimming of blackberry bushes and removal of weeds I sprayed a couple of days ago.

Back in the house, I took coffee and computer to The Dungeon. Devotionals complete, I was ready to begin my work shortly before 8:00 a.m. Friday is my biggest day for stock trading, so I had work to do to get ready for the market open at 8:30. I made seven trades and updated my spreadsheet and charts to reflect the trades.

Then it was on to writing, except my writing is somewhat shoved aside of late. Instead, I’m scanning old letters, converting them into Word files, then discarding the originals. Perhaps I need to explain.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I got into the habit of printing off e-mails and discarding the originals. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking ahead to the day when I would want to reduce the amount of my physical possessions, looking further ahead to the need to downsize as age took hold. Now here I am, with notebooks of printed e-mails (and a few handwritten or typed letters received in snail mail). Since I want to keep a record of my correspondence, I don’t want to throw them out.

I was transcribing some letters, mainly those in my genealogy research notebooks. I save each letter as a Word document in a nice and neat filing system with consistent document names. Then I throw away the printout.

My current goal is to get rid of 10 letters a day. I’m making progress at that rate. One more day and I’m done with 2002. Only three days more and I’ll be done with 2003. Most of what I’m doing now is with the scanner function on my printer. Scan the doc, pull it into Word, save it as a .docx file in the right place with the right name, correct formatting and scanner errors, and move on to the next one.

At this rate, I have no idea how long this will take. And I’m not sure I can sustain this rate and write too. The scanning and formatting of 10 printouts takes close to an hour. By that time, my mind is not on writing, and I’ve not been able to do much of that. Perhaps I need to reverse the order: get an hour or two of writing in then switch to scanning/transcribing. I’ll have to think about that.

I also did this with e-mails on my computer. I had emails saved going back to 2005, ever since I switched to Yahoo as my e-mail program. In the evening, while watching TV, I multi-tasked by saving the emails to Word files in the right place. At first I didn’t name them as well as I should have, and may have to go back—also as an evening, multi-tasking activity—and rename a number of files. All in good time.

Why this obsession with my correspondence? My love of reading letters has, I supposed, caused me to have the illusion that someone, someday, will want to read my correspondence. I realize the chances of that happening are pretty slim. But, if anyone ever wants to collect my correspondence and read it, they will find I’ve done most of the work for them.

How long will I do this? I don’t know. The notebook I’m currently working on covered 2001-2004. I finished 2001, and in less than a week will be done with the next two years. 2004 will take a little longer, probably to the end of August or even into September. After that, I may take a break from this work and get back to productive writing. The letter notebooks will be there for a later time.

Now, maybe I can keep track of the weekend days ahead, and have a better blog post on Monday.

expatriate life, family, History, letters

The Kuwait Years In Letters

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Some time ago, in July 2020 to be more precise, I began transcribing the many letters we had written home from Kuwait, which our families had preserved for us. My original intent for doing this was to preserve the information and the letters themselves. The act of transcribing meant gathering, arranging, typing, and storage.

I wrote about this in several blog posts.

The first post, on getting started.

The second post, on the acceleration of the transcription.

The third post, a brief mention on progress.

The fourth post, on how the project came together.

Yesterday, I received a proof copy of the book. I’ve gone through it and found only two typos and one formatting problem. Of course, spelling and grammar in the originals wasn’t always correct.

In that fourth post, I said I hoped to someday add commentary and photographs and make the project into a book for our family. That day finally came. Two years ago, I said I hoped the book would be 300 pages. It is 299 pages. It contains 181 letters and around 30 photographs. I’m not sure how many of the 103,600 words are the letters and how much is my commentary. I also put in the four blog posts mentioned above as an appendix.

The photos turned out better than I expected.  I’m still learning how to manipulate photos. One of them is dark; I’ll need to figure out how to lighten it, preferably using G.I.M.P. rather than PowerPoint, so I can keep it at a good pixel count. The photos include some of the picture postcards we sent from our trips.

Our villa in Kuwait. I need to work on the back cover still.

Otherwise, there’s not much more to do with this. Make the few corrections, including one to the back cover, publish it, and order three copies: one for us, one for our son, and one for our daughter. Then I will un-publish it so that someone browsing my list of books won’t order one out of curiosity. The grandkids, if they want one of their own…well, that is unlikely to happen until they are older. I’ll worry about it then.

Once this project is over (and it’s really, really close), what next in terms of letters? Maybe transcribe the Saudi years letters? Or start with our juvenalia and go forward from there? We’ll see.

letters, miscellaneous, self-publishing, Writing

Unfinished Projects

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Dateline: Thursday, 23 June 2022

At the moment, I feel like I’m running between different projects. Projects started but not finished. Projects wanting to get started. Projects developing in my mind. Rather than list all of them, I’ll just mention what today’s work on projects is shaping up to be.

First thing this morning, I sent in the order for a proof copy of a new paperback book. I won’t say what it is right now. It’s not a book for sale, but rather one for private purposes. The proof will arrive June 29; I’ll show it to one intended recipient on July 8; and I’ll make a presentation about it to a club I’m a member of on August 13.

Next, I transcribed two letters from 2008. That was after going through a notebook of letters from that year and culling all those already in electronic format. This is part of a decluttering project. It’s totally unnecessary to spend time on this at this stage of my writing career, but it’s something I feel I must do if we are ever going to downsize.

Now, I will work on the memoir I started earlier this month. I want to present a few pages of it to my critique group, the Scribblers & Scribes, tonight. It’s now 15 typed pages long. I don’t know that I’ll actually write a full memoir at this time. It’s a fill-in project of sorts, to be able to have something to share with the group, as I don’t figure they’ll want to see my Bible studies. That’s not really the type of stuff critique groups were made for. Concerning the memoir, I don’t have a lot to do to be ready for this evening.

The amount I plan to do on these projects today won’t take much time, so I will likely shift to another project. This is another letters collection. Letters between me and a friend who died a couple of years ago. I have pulled them into a book and done the majority of the formatting. All that remains is to insert some photos, figure out the book size, and go through the publishing process. This is another unnecessary project; it’s something I want to do, something I can give to his wife and daughter that they might want to read.

Also today, I hope to find 30 minutes to an hour to make those last changes to my website. It would be nice to check that one thing off the list.

Oh yes, one last small project was to write this blog post and schedule it for posting tomorrow. That one is done!

So, that’s the life of a distracted, unfocused writer—at least this one. I’m anxious to get these loose ends finished so I can get on with my next book.

Christmas, letters, miscellaneous

Uncategorized Creativity?

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Dateline: 16 Dec 2021

My parents didn’t send religious Christmas cards. These are typical of the leftover cards I’ve been storing for two decades plus, wondering what to do with.

On Tuesday just passed I attended the monthly meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers. This is a small club of people who enjoy writing letters. The emphasis is on physical letters and pen pals (though for me, e-mails are equally letters). I learned about them around the first of March 2020 and attended their meeting shortly after that at the Bella Vista Library. Then the pandemic hit, and the library closed.

During the pandemic, we didn’t meet for the first few months. After a while they decided to meet outdoors, under the drive-through canopy of a church not too far from my house. We had to bring chairs, and even in the outdoor venue stayed away from each other. We met like that for over a year. Sometimes we cancelled when the weather was too hot or too cold. But it was a way to stay in touch.

The cards have a simple, non-sectarian message.

Even when the library re-opened, at first they wouldn’t allow groups to use the newly-constructed meeting rooms. The problem was a legal one. This is a private library, and the lawyers had some concern about outside groups, even groups sponsored by the library such as ours is, using the facility. They eventually worked that out, and we began meeting there in September.

That’s a long introduction to December’s meeting. We didn’t have a formal program. Rather, we were all to bring old cards to show around. That was perfect for me, because right now I have a lot of old Christmas cards out of boxes, making a mess of our house. These are cards, as seen in the photo at the beginning of this post, that I found at my dad’s house back in 1998. They appear to be remnants of cards my parents sent in the 1950s. You buy a box of 25 cards and use 22 out of it, putting the rest aside to use next year. When that comes around you buy another box of 25 and use 23 out of it, totally forgetting that you have three left over from last year. Now you have five left over. On and on it goes. A decade later you have a fair number of unused Christmas cards.

I’ve had these remnant cards in a box in the storeroom for all these years, sorted into their own large envelope, wondering what to do with them. I think there are between 35 and 40 of them, but only 4 envelopes. Last year I came to the conclusion we should send them as our Christmas cards next year (meaning now). Since these are a special size, without envelopes, what could we do?

The template, perfected on the third try and already put into use.

Well, for our meeting next month, the letter writing group is making envelopes as a craft project, and will share them around. We are to make 12 envelopes. If we choose to, of course. Now, I’m not an arts and craft person, and making envelopes as a craft project didn’t excite me. I pretty much decided I wouldn’t do the envelopes. Then I realized, I have a need to make envelopes, to use to send these cards.

Ah ha! A practical need is not really arts and crafts. It’s an environmentally friendly activity. Rather than trash those old cards, I can make envelopes to send them in. And, rather than use clean sheets of paper for the envelopes, I can use paper from the re-use stack, printouts of my writing that I planned on using the back to print other things on.

The first envelope off the assembly line. I like it. Not sure the wife will, however.

So yesterday, I took the time to create a template. That took a while. I used two sheets of paper to create envelopes before I had it right. Then I used one to trace the template on cardstock and cut it to size. I then made one envelope and tested it with the cards. It was perfect: just a little over-sized as I wanted it to be, since the size of the cards varies a little.

Envelope creation began immediately. I’m not sure Lynda will agree that sending these cards in an envelope created on the back of my writing sheets will be a good idea. No problem. If she doesn’t, I’ll just make others from clean paper and use these for the letter writers meeting in January.

It’s as close to being artsy-craftsy as I’ll ever come.

ancient letters, Carlyle, Documenting America, letters, self-publishing, The Teachings, Writing

Still Not Making a Lot of Progress

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Dateline 1 Oct 2020

“Adam Of Jerusalem” is a prequel to “Doctor Luke’s Assistant”, and is the first in my church history novel series. “The Teachings” fits in as book 3 of the series.

In January of this year I began writing The Teachings, the third (chronologically) novel in my Church History series. I had been reading for research some time before that. I worked on it consistently through January and February, then bogged down in March. My problem was I wanted to be historically accurate to events in 66-70 A.D., but didn’t want to overdo the historical stuff and not have the novel interesting for the characters and the plot. I started re-reading my main source, Josephus, but that just made me more uncertain of how to proceed.

So, as I have a habit of doing, I went to another project, my family history/genealogy research into the children of John Cheney of Newbury (1600?-1666). Genealogy research is always a pleasure and I figured it would be a brief, rejuvenating diversion. Some years ago I began this work on his youngest child, Elizabeth, who married the mariner Stephen Cross of Ipswich. I found much about them (mainly about Stephen, but that helped define Elizabeth’s life as well), and realized it would be a stand-alone book about them. I brought that book to about 60 pages in 2018, then set it aside. In March I picked it up again as the diversion, and by April 3 I had it up to around 80 pages and, I thought, close to finished.

The colonies did well governing themselves, until the King of England tried to impose new government on them. Resistance to that became the seeds of the American Revolution.

On April 3, Lynda went into the hospital with her burst appendix and was in 19 days, requiring two surgeries. It didn’t look good for a while. Since due to the pandemic I couldn’t be with her at the hospital, to keep myself occupied I worked feverishly on the Cross-Cheney book. Before long I had it up over 100 pages. Lynda finally came home though was still weak and recuperating. I got the book up to 116 pages, polished it, and published it. So far, with 1 sale, it’s doing about as expected. A few of the figures were of poor quality, so I haven’t advertised it to the Cross or Cheney genealogy boards and won’t till I get those figures replaced.

After getting my diversion done, it should have been back to The Teachings, right? Well, a little bit. But soon I was working on another diversion. It started as decluttering, going through the many papers my mother-in-law left behind at her death. But that soon evolved into transcribing our Kuwait years letters. That took the better part of August and early September. That’s now done. I will someday turn that into a book for my children and grandchildren. That will take editing, adding commentary, and illustrating it with photos. I don’t see doing more on that for the rest of this year—although, I don’t rule out occasionally opening the file and adding some commentary.

Published in 2011, I really need to do something with this, update it for later publications and correct some formatting errors. So, I began the editing work in early September 2020, and hope to re-publish by the end of September.

That brought me up to mid-September. Time now to work on The Teachings. Except I still didn’t feel like it. I decided I would take another Amazon Ad Challenge in October, and that I would focus on the first Documenting America book as the next to advertise. But this book needed significant work. It was the first I published, long before I understood formatting.  I also figured I should add new material to bring the book up to date for 2020. I worked on this the second half of September, and began the re-publishing process on Sept. 28th. The last couple of days have been sufficiently busy with life that I haven’t had much time to work on it. But that’s now a today task for the e-book. I’ll have the proof copy of the print book on Saturday, so by Sunday Oct 4 the re-publishing process should be complete.

Then what? Work on The Teachings, finally? Maybe, maybe not. I want to get the Cross-Cheney book figures corrected and that book re-published and advertised. There’s always file maintenance. Plus, evenings in front of the television, I do e-mail “maintenance” and saving my correspondence to Word documents. That’s a tedious but fun process, something I can do multi-tasking, a non-urgent item to make progress on. But next on the list of items I posted on Monday is The Teachings. Will I finally get back to this?

Today, instead of working on finishing the Documenting America changes, I dusted off my Thomas Carlyle Bibliography.  Last night, as part of my TV-watching-multitasking, I opened the Carlyle Letters On-line and read a couple of letters. I discovered a short translation he did of a Goethe autobiographical passage that wasn’t in my list of his writings or publications. How could this possibly be? I have three other full Carlyle bibliographies, plus a partial bibliography that covers the period in question. Why would they leave this out? I documented it on paper and, since it was late, went to bed.

This morning, as my first item of business after devotions, was to add this entry in my bibliography. First, however, I found the document on-line, at a previously unknown (to me) site called the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Sure enough, in the January 1832 issue was the Carlyle translation. I checked the two thick bibliographies on my shelf and confirmed that this composition wasn’t in it. Maybe they didn’t add it because it’s a translation with just a paragraph of Carlyle commentary rather than an original piece? Maybe so, but those bibliographies include his other translations. I added all this to my bibliography. While I was at this, I found an essay on Carlyle I hadn’t seen before and downloaded it for future reading.

The fact that I keep pulling off my novel in favor of other, less important publishing tasks, is perhaps testimony that I’m not thrilled with how the novel is going. Or that it’s consuming a lot more brain power and I’m unwilling to expend that brain power at present. I’m not sure what it is, but, if I ever hope to get this novel completed and published, I need to get on it. Even if it takes a lot of brain power.

Stay tuned to find out if I manage to get to it.

expatriate life, family, letters

The Kuwait Years In Letters

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It may not look like 129 letters, but they are all there, collated by date after transcription. Now I need to figure out a better way to store them.

As regular readers of this blog know (all two or three of you), I love letters. I have a sizeable collection of published letter collections, and from time to time I pull one out and read it. Right now I have Volume 1 of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis on my work table in The Dungeon, and am trying to get in the habit of reading one or two of his letters every day. In fact, having not read one yesterday or today, I’m going to interrupt writing this post and will read a couple, then come back…

…okay, letters read, and I’m back. I’ve never understood this fascination of mine with letters, but it’s there.

As it turns out, my own house is littered with letters—letters that I’ve sent over the years. When we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1981, we had no telephone in our flat. Using the phone at the office was not terribly convenient, so we wrote letters: to my Dad, to Lynda’s mom and dad, to grandparents, and a few to siblings or friends. When we moved to Kuwait in 1988 after four years back in the States, at first we didn’t have a phone, so again we wrote letters. We got a phone at some point, perhaps nine months after we got there, but, with international calls being very expensive no matter which side of the ocean they originated on, we still wrote letters to the same people. The recipients of those letters, our parents at least, kept them, and later gave them back to us (or we found them in their possession upon their deaths).

The Saudi letters will be an even bigger challenge. For now they can stay in their bin, awaiting my attention at some future date (measured in years, not months).

Now we have those letters. When we moved to this house in 2002, with some space to lay things out and organize papers, I began to “gather” these letters into boxes and bins. They all went into a plastic bin at first. I started transcribing a few of the letters from the Saudi years, but put it aside and have no idea where that computer file is. Perhaps I’ll find it. But no matter because I didn’t have more than ten of them transcribed.

Two months ago, when I began going through my mother-in-law’s papers, looking to downsize/declutter after her death, I found a plastic sack with some letters we had sent her. These were a surprise. That caused me to find the bin and put them in it. Then I thought, perhaps I should separate the Saudi years letters from the Kuwait years letters. So I did that. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to get back to transcribing these? Since I didn’t know where my Saudi years computer file was, I decided to do the Kuwait years.

So on July 19, 2020, at 11:07 a.m., I created a computer file and transcribed a letter. Before that, of course, I had pulled them out of the bin and collated them by date. I’ve read enough letter collections by now that I knew pretty much what to do. The next day I transcribed another, and the next day another. This went on for a while. Occasionally I might do two letters a day, or even three, if they were short (as many of mine were to my dad).

Then, somewhere around mid-August, finding myself enjoying the transcription, I decided to just make that my work for a while. I began typing for all my time in The Dungeon that wasn’t taken up by stock trading or book marketing or promotion. I spent several hours a day transcribing. As I did, I saw holes in the letters for some month and people, especially to my wife’s dad. I know we wrote more to him than the number I found. I went hunting in the house. He tended to discard the envelopes and put letters into notebooks. I found them in a box, and found another ten or so letters we’d written to him. I think many to him are still missing, and perhaps with a little more digging I’ll find more.

Most of the letters I found around the house are ones we sent back to the States. I did, however, find a few letters we received. Since we returned to the USA for vacation right before Iraq invaded, we were able to go back only after the Gulf War. Our villa was a mess, we had many things to ship back more important (so I thought at the time) than letters, so we must have trashed most of the incoming letters. I don’t remember any of that, but the lack of having them makes me think that’s what happened. The incoming letters that I did find I also transcribed.

This box has other letters and miscellanies, not necessarily from overseas years. Yet, I need to go through it. Maybe I’ll find the missing Kuwait years letters in it.

Tuesday morning I typed the last two, incoming letters just after the Iraqi invasion from my father-in-law. The record is now as complete as I can make it. It’s 129 letters and postcards, 145 typed pages, just under 84,300 words—then length of a medium-sized novel. I have some editing out to do, and I think the final word count will be around 82,000. To this I will add commentary, footnotes, historical perspective. We have numerous photos with which to illustrate this, probably covering all the events mentioned. For the most part the photos are all in one place in the storeroom in a clearly marked box.

So what’s next? At some point I hope to add the commentary and perspective, and to illustrate this with photos. I hope to turn it into a book (‘t’will be around 300 pages, I think), not for publication, but to print off a few nicely-bound copies via my Amazon KDP account, and present them to our children and grandchildren. I wouldn’t offer it for sale. Who would want to buy it? Very few people are like me and love letters. And my lack of notoriety works even more against it ever being in demand. No, I’ll have the copies printed, pull it back to draft status, and leave it there should I ever need a few more copies.

As for the letters from the Saudi years, they will have to wait. I really need to get back to my regular writing and publishing schedule.

Health, letters, miscellaneous

The Best Laid Plans

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I’m interrupting my planned posting schedule, once again, due to a health concern. This time it’s me, not the wife. Yesterday, after a quick, early-afternoon trip to the pharmacy for some needed meds, a huge wave of tiredness came over me. I was unable to do any writing, nor did I feel like doing my afternoon reading in the sunroom. I sat, caught up on e-mails and Facebook (i.e. wasted time), but had not gumption to do much else. Heated up some supper and dished out some already prepared dessert.

Then, around 7 p.m. or so, I noted “weakness” in my left arm. I don’t know how else to describe it. No pain, just weakness. Since heart attacks and strokes are sometimes first indicated in the arms, I paid attention all evening to how it felt. Took a low-dose aspirin. No change. Didn’t feel like doing our reading aloud.  Went to bed early, around 10:30 p.m.; no change. Prayed. Got up after half an hour to sit in my chair, figuring I’d better stay awake to monitor it. Prayed. Fell asleep at some point.

Woke up around 1:00 a.m. and felt much better. Barely any feeling of weakness in my arm. Went back to bed and slept well. Up around 6:00 a.m. with just a twinge of the same weakness. Decided to go about my business, but not go outside for my early morning yardwork. The extended darkness due to heavy cloud cover, with thunder rumbling from storms to the west, helped convince me to just get my coffee and go to The Dungeon.

So far I’ve transcribed three letters (two were almost duplicates of one from before) from our Kuwait years into the Word file. That’s now up to 92 pages and over 50,000 words. It looks like about 25 more letters to go, though I’m not sure I’ve found all the ones we have.

Meanwhile, the weakness in my arm is almost gone. I’m wondering now if I did something yesterday to slightly injure it. I’ll take it a little easy today. At least typing doesn’t seem to bother it. Maybe I can add 1,000 to 1,500 words to my novel. And, re-do my now-in-a-shambles blogging schedule.

Health, home improvements, letters

Change Of Plans

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So far I’ve transcribed 2/3 of the letters in this box, and they run to 31 typed pages (the box is not full). Edit: The letters originally in this box are all transcribed. Many more are added and I’m just starting on those.

When I made my blog post on Friday, I had intended on the post for Monday to be the next in my series on racism, moving on from how to combat racist acts to how to end racism. But that’s not happening due to a change in plans.

You see, on Friday, while working in the storeroom, moving a smallish box of books, I caught my leg on a trunk on the floor and took a tumble forward. I dropped the box of books as I was going down to free up my hands to brace against the fall. I did this on another box of books that was on the floor in front of me.

A fall is never good, but I was glad this was a minor one. It’s the first one in the house, my several others having been outside. I tried to scoot a stick out of the road while walking and went down. I slipped on leaves in the woods and went down. I slipped on a slick driveway and went down. I slipped on an icy driveway at that neighbors and went down hard. That was in February 2018, and I haven’t fully healed from that. Otherwise, the falls outside didn’t do much damage. An hour or so after those others I was back about my tasks. I figured the one in the basement would be the same.

This plastic bin has more incoming letters than outgoing. Most are not from our overseas years. We will have a hard decision of what to do with them.

Alas, I soon after went upstairs to fix lunch and thought to myself, “Why is my knee hurting so much?” Then I remembered: I fell fifteen minutes ago. Ah, well, no big deal. I took an Aleve, ate lunch, then went to the sunroom to read. While there, my knee kept hurting. I looked down at it to check for swelling and saw that my leg was bleeding, down near the ankle. Obviously that came from raking across the trunk as I went down. Naturally it was my leg with the bad knee that I caught on the trunk.

I cleaned and bandaged the wound with a gauze pad and went back to my afternoon activities. Slowly my knee got worse, the pain being in unusual parts of the knee. And my leg started hurting below the knee all the way down from the ankle. Not the abrasion, which I could barely feel, but the shin and calf. It felt muscular, not skeletal. I was certain it wasn’t a break. Muscles and tendons or ligaments had suffered trauma. Just sitting in my reading chair in the living room was painful—as was lying on the floor on my stomach. Another Aleve didn’t do anything.

Slowly it got worse as evening wore on, the main pain being in the lower leg, not the knee. I went to bed a little early but couldn’t sleep. I used a topical muscle rub that may have helped some. But an hour and a half of tossing and turning caused me to move to my reading chair, then out to the sunroom. Eventually I was tired enough to sleep through the pain. But that was at least an hour after I took a hydrocodone pill.

Ah, this one had the Saudi and Kuwaiti year letters besides the 25 or so I started with. I see hours of enjoyable transcribing ahead.

Obviously my normal heavy yardwork on Saturday was out. I took it easy, reading, and transcribing letters. Same for Sunday, with some on-line church and Life Group thrown in. Came Saturday evening and I thought the leg felt better. Come the night and the pain was as bad as Friday night. I finally went to The Dungeon and laid back in the recliner. Finding a comfortable position was still hard, but I think I slept a little better than on Friday.

What does that have to do with my intended blog post? With my leg in more or less constant pain, I didn’t think I would be able to concentrate on the important topic of ending racism. So you have this fluff piece instead. The letter transcription was an enjoyable diversion. I completed the 28 letters I found a few weeks ago in an unexpected place in my mother-in-law’s things, all letters to her from our Kuwait years, all but a couple from Lynda to her mom. While I shouldn’t have, I decided to drag out the larger bin that has letters from Saudi and Kuwait.  Actually, I had to pull three different bins/boxes off the shelf to find the rest of the letters from the Kuwait years. I will consolidate all of them into a single box, properly label it with large, black lettering, and put it where I’ll never have to hunt for it again.

Letter transcribing doesn’t get the weeds pulled, or cut posts for the completion of the fort I’m building with the grandkids, or trim the bushes in the front yard. It doesn’t burn off the pounds I so definitely need to lose. It doesn’t get my novel-in-progress back to where I actually see progress. It provides great satisfaction for me, however. And it stirs the memory, as I read through things I experienced and documented but now don’t actively remember.

As of Sunday evening the text file of letters was up to 49 pages and just under 30,000 words. So far fewer than half the Kuwait letters are transcribed, and the Saudi letters are untouched. This will be a long project, most likely multi-year. What will be produced in the end is not yet clear. But at least I see hours and hours of what I would call oddball satisfaction for the transcriptionist.

books, Health, letters, memories, miscellaneous, stock market

A Strange but Good Day

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Tuesday, July 28, 2020. A most interesting day, and perhaps typical of the jumbled life I live right now.

You’d think life would be simple, being retired and mostly staying at home due to the corona virus pandemic. You’d be wrong, however. I suppose the reason is in part that I have too many interests. Let me catalog some events from the day.

So far I’ve transcribed 2/3 of the letters in this box, and they run to 31 typed pages (the box is not full).

I woke around 6:15 to see my digital alarm clock flashing. Must have been a power failure in the night, probably momentary but enough to reset the clock. I got up and weighed and checked my blood sugar. No change in weight (still at the lower end of the range I’ve been bouncing around in). My blood sugar was 81, a good number. The day before my new doctor’s nurse called to convey the doctor’s follow-up comments on recent blood work. All was normal, except iron, which is a little low. Since the nurse didn’t mention the reduction in insulin dose that the doctor said, and since that reduction wasn’t in the printed office visit summary they gave me, I told the nurse what my blood sugars had been with the lower dose—the same as they had been with the higher dose. She said she would tell the doctor. Fifteen minutes later the nurse called back and said the doctor wanted me to reduce my sugar further by a couple of units.

But that happened on Monday. I’m talking about Tuesday. It was raining at 6:15, which meant I wouldn’t be able to go outside for my morning yardwork. Instead, I went into the sunroom and just rested for 30 minutes. I then got up, dressed, got my morning coffee, and went down to The Dungeon for my normal work. Everything seemed very normal. I read devotions, prayed, recorded my health info, checked my book sales, opened my stock trading programs, then checked my e-mail. And the first surprise came.

I had an overnight e-mail from a man with Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. They wanted to use a photograph from this blog for training purposes; would I let them know how to acquire the rights to do so. Wow, this was strange. I spent 15-20 minutes trying to figure out if this was legit. I found web pages for that organization and it all looks legit, except the man’s name was nowhere on it. He’s in an administrative position, however, and they don’t list any administrators on the site. So I sent him an e-mail to try to verify that it’s a legitimate claim.

Shortly after this an e-mail came from Amazon, confirming my order for $543 and change. Except I have no orders outstanding with Amazon. I compared the e-mail with the one from my last order. They looked much the same but there were telltale differences. So I contacted Amazon, confirmed it was most likely a phishing attack, forwarded the e-mail to them for investigation, and went back to my normal business.

Normal business on a weekday includes stock trading. I placed a trade and it filled. Good work. Then, instead of working on one of my books, I began transcribing letters from our Kuwait years. Have I discussed this before on the blog? I can’t remember. I won’t go into it much now except to say that morning I transcribed three letters. That brings the total transcribed to sixteen. In the Word file they run to 24 pages. I have ten more to go in this box, and dozens more in the main box. These are just some I found lately going through my mother-in-law’s things as part of our decluttering effort. They will be added to the large plastic bin (30 x 24 x 6) full of other letters from our Kuwait and Saudi years, all waiting to be transcribed. I also managed to do a little over a half mile on the elliptical.

That got me to lunch time. From that point on the day seemed more or less normal. I made a quick run to the nearby Wal-Mart pharmacy for a couple of prescriptions, had some reading time in the sunroom since the day was cool enough. The wife and I did our evening reading in an Agatha Christie mystery. Normal seemed good.

Throughout the day I was careful of what I ate, though I wouldn’t say I dieted. Yet, when I weighed Wednesday morning I was at my lowest weight in over two months. I followed a similar eating regimen on Wednesday and we even lower on Thursday. This was while reducing my insulin dose (per doctor’s orders) and seeing only a small increase in my blood sugar. Maybe my health is improving.

As I finish this post on Thursday afternoon, I have a generally good feeling about where things stand. A good felling and outlook is…well… good. Bring on Friday. Bring on the isolated weekend. I might even get some time to work on a book or two.

book reviews, letters, poetry

Book Review: Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet

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This isn’t the volume I read, but I don’t have my camera right now to take a photo of it. Same book, different wrapper.

Some time ago, I picked up the book Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters To A Young Poet somewhere. When I picked up the book from my reading pile recently to read it, I found a receipt in it dated 9/21/2009 for $0.99 plus tax from the Goodwill store in Andover, Kansas. We used to stop at that store occasionally, so I assume that’s when I bought it. It’s been in my reading pile in my closet for a long time.

I bought it because I love reading letters, and I love poetry. What would be not to like? I don’t know much about Rilke, other than having heard his name in poetry/literature circles, and, after reading this, I still don’t know much about him. The first letter is dates February 17, 1903, when Rilke was just 27, so he appears to have gotten some notoriety early in his life as a writer and poet.

A younger man, Franz Xaver Kappus, also an erstwhile poet, had written to Rilke, apparently asking for advice and passing along some poems for Rilke to critique. Rilke wrote back, their correspondence being in German. He declined to provide the requested review of Kappus’ poems, instead talking about his life as a poet, and giving the young man advice of what he could expect.

As I read these letters, I didn’t come away with much advice as to writing poetry. It did give some insight into Rilke’s life. Although, it almost appears that Rilke was playing the role of the unreliable narrator. To read the letters, he was always sick, always moving around, and never able to work, even finding it difficult to sit and write letters. From these letters I got the impression that Rilke’s best and productive days as a writer were already behind him at age 27 to 34.

That wasn’t true, however. A quick study of his life shows that Rilke had a number of books published during the years these letters were written, books of both poetry and prose. It’s true he moved around a lot, as he sought places most conducive to his frail health and his writing. I think each of the ten letters in the book came from a different place.

I’m glad I bought the book and finally, after allowing it to sit for ten years, read it. However, except for the measure of enjoyment and distraction it gave me it wasn’t all that useful. Now I have a decision to make: does it go into my library or do I donate it to a thrift store?

In favor of keeping it, as I said at the outset, I love reading letters and I love poetry. I should keep it. I wouldn’t know where to place it on the shelves, in my collection of volumes of letters or in my poetry collection. It’s not poetry, so I suppose it would go under letters. The question, though, is will I ever read it again? Did I find enough value in it to ever take it back off the shelf and re-read it? I can’t predict the future, of course, so who knows what I might want to read in twenty years. I have enough un-read books in the house already that I won’t have a need to re-read anything. From that perspective only, it should go.

Then there’s the decluttering factor. As we have been getting ready for our Thanksgiving gathering this week, we have once again become acutely aware that we have way too much stuff. Things need to go. Wednesday I took a load to Helping Hands, our favorite thrift store. With that load taken, I see no dent in the amount of clutter.

So, I’m afraid this 123 page volume, slim as it is, will soon find its way back to another thrift store and there await rescue by someone else who likes either letters or poetry or both. May it give pleasure to someone again.