Category Archives: travel

family, Health, travel

Oh the Pain of It

Leave a comment

Dateline: 14 June 2023, Lake Jackson, Texas

Nuisance turned away just as I snapped the picture. This was taken 6/13, when I had healed enough to try walking her again.

We have been in Lake Jackson, Texas, since June 2, a combination of seeing our son-in-law installed as pastor of his new church, followed by grandparent duty for the oldest grandchild and five pets while the rest of the family went to our denomination’s General Assembly in Indianapolis.

You really can’t say you’re babysitting a 15-year-old. You’re just providing adult supervision and authority, and perhaps not much of either. For five days, we cared for the pets, and occasionally pried the teenager out of his room for some food or a game of Rummycube.

But, while the rest of the family was still there, maybe on our third day in town, I decided to go for a morning walk. I thought, why not take the dog with me, and give her some extra exercise.  Her name is Cherry, but my name for her is Nuisance. Unfortunately, the dog and a snake saw each other before I saw the snake. They lunged at each other, stopping two feet from each other, Nuisance almost pulling my left arm off—or so it felt.

It was a beautiful area. Just watch out for alligators and snakes.

Back to the house, I self-assessed the damage and decided to go to urgent care. They determined nothing was broken, and the arm was still in its socket. It was just a bad sprain of a couple of muscles that come together at the shoulder, where the deltoid and the pecs come together. I was fitted with a sling and told to take lots of over-the-counter pain meds, and come back in a few days if it wasn’t better. Sleeping has been a little tough, but has gotten better every night.

It’s now nine days since the accident. Healing isn’t complete. but it’s come a long way. At first, I couldn’t raise my arm. I had to pull my left arm up with my right. Once I got it up there was no pain. Now I can raise it with just a little pain.

The first couple of days I couldn’t get my arm up to the computer keyboard. So it was a good thing I planned on taking the month of June off from writing. After a week of recovery, I was able to use a keyboard enough to do source gathering for my next Documenting America book. I didn’t finish, but I made a lot of progress for a man with a gimp arm.

Tomorrow we head home. It’s a 10-hour drive if we take only minimal stops. We’ll be on a road we’ve never taken before, at least for a good part of it.

I missed three writer group meetings this week, but that’s okay. I’ll catch them in July. Meanwhile, I’ll have half a month at home to read, clean up my writing area, or perhaps do a little editing of a Bible study, or plan out a new one. I have some books that were ordered that I need to mail out.

So, that’s my adventure to report, experienced and planned. Let the vacation commence.

Bible study, family, travel

On Duty

Leave a comment
Three of these are our grandkids. The oldest is a teen, so not in this children’s program.

My wife and I are on grandparent duty, again. Our son-in-law has taken up his new pastorate, further south and east in Texas. The family won’t move until school is out. He will follow a schedule of two weeks in the new location and two weeks home until they make the final move, probably near the end of May.

Since that left our daughter alone with the four kids, we came to dusty, dry, and windy West Texas to help her out. I’ve been taxiing kids to school, taking them to the library, reading with them, and being chief cook and bottle washer for 11 days.

I’m also getting some work done. Did my stock trading each market day. Worked on my Bible study book each day. Following up on author items. So it’s not been a bad gig. And with our daughter here the work is spread out a little more than when we babysat the grandkids for 11 days not all that long ago.

We head home on Friday. Hopefully I’ll get a better blog post done in a timely manner for Friday.

family, travel

The Dance of a Thousand Tumbleweeds

Leave a comment

Well, we got back home late Saturday evening from a 2082 mile road trip. Yesterday was mainly a restful day, including church. Monday will be getting back to normal.

We left home midday on Tuesday, Feb 7, driving to the Oklahoma City area. After dropping our recyclables at the great OKC drop-off center, we met up with Lynda’s step-sister and husband who live nearby in Norman. We hadn’t seen them since Sept 2020. The purpose of the visit, besides catching up, was to deliver to them a box of music we found at our house that had belonged to Katie’s mother. It had been left at our house years ago and was overlooked when we were going through Lynda’s mom’s things.

We spent the night nearby, and continued to Big Spring, Texas. The next day, our daughter and son-in-law left for a 10-day mission trip to Thailand. That left us watching the four grandchildren, three cats, and one dog. Oh, yes, and one bearded dragon. For twelve days. Twelve days of taking kids to school, seeing that they took care of their pets, their lunchboxes, and clothes.

A couple of years ago, when the kids came to visit us, I created the rule that they had to read 30 minutes in a book—a print book—before they could get their screen. I didn’t get any pushback from them, and that’s been a rule for a couple of years now. I made that the rule in their house during our surrogate parent gig, but we did it in the afternoon rather than in the short time between rising and leaving for school. They also had to clean litter boxes, feed pets, and do some room straightening up.

Both Lynda and I were able to spend some good time with each child. Lynda did the daily reading with the youngest, both after school and before bed. Then I laid down with him and sang him to sleep. I read the Bible with the second oldest book, took him to boy scouts, and had some good conversations. I took our only granddaughter on an educational walk around the neighborhood. We had a number of conversations, and worked together to clean up a major mess in her room. The oldest boy, a freshman in high school, spent a few nights away at a friend’s house, and had a friend over one night. He and I had one particularly good and important conversation the day after the parents got back. It went well.

The cats were not a lot of work for us, as the kids do most of what’s needed. The dog was another matter. I walked her around noon every day. She’s a big lab mix, 66 pounds of muscle and excitement. The walks were generally a mile to a mile and a half. I came back really tired; she came back barely winded. One day another big dog hopped the fence of its yard and rushed us. I was barely able to control Nuisance (my nickname for her) until a neighbor, who I think was actually the owner of that dog, got it under control.

We were able to keep up okay with laundry, school requirements, church activities. We also got a lot of cleaning done, things the parents can’t really get to with their jobs. At the end of the time, we were quite tired but feeling good about a job well-done.

Two other bits of excitement happened. On the first Monday, I had a crown pop out. Fortunately, I was able to get into a dentist the next day. The crown was still good. The dentist re-cemented it fairly easily. Then, the second Saturday morning, Nuisance ate a box and a half of dark chocolates left out by one of the kids. We had some anxious moments trying to find a vet who could help us on the weekend, but were successful at that. I had to miss some of a church activities. The dog survived and soon thrived again. The grandkids were not disappointed that we missed some of their activity.

On Wednesday, Feb 22, we drove from West Texas to Santa Fe NM to see Lynda’s brother. Intending to drive home on Friday, we extended our stay until Saturday. It was a good visit. I got out of the house a couple of times: once to the library, once to get a Dunkin. Our drive there was an adventure in itself. It was the day of the big windstorm. We drove through Texas and New Mexico in much wind, sometimes having to slow down as if we were in fog. Then, as we got closer to Santa Fe, the winds increased and the snow started, the winds blowing it horizontally. We passed through one snowstorm, had blue sky for a while, then had another, more intense storm. The snow never accumulated on the roads, but was being caught by fences along the right of way.

We spent the drive dodging tumbleweeds as best we could. At Vaughn NM, we got out for a pit stop. The wind was near hurricane force. We made it into the store and back into the car, afraid we would be blown to the ground. After Vaughn, we saw an amazing thing. The wind was so strong that, instead of blowing tumbleweeds across the road, it was tearing the tumbleweeds apart. The smaller pieces—still recognizable as mini-tumbleweeds—no longer in pieces big enough to catch the wind and whiz by, seemed to dance across the highway, bouncing a few feet, then bouncing in place a while before moving before the wind. It was like a dance of a thousand little tumbleweeds in front of us. Quite exciting to behold, had I not been hanging onto the steering wheel for dear life.

Our trip home on Saturday was relatively uneventful and, for me as the driver, relaxing compared to every day of the trip before that. We got in about 10 p.m., having lost close to 1.5 hours of time with stops related to picking up some items that were supposed to be delivered to us at Christmastime.

Would we do it again? You bet we would. For our kids and grandkids we would be temporary caregivers/guardians in a heartbeat. For the pets, well, let me thing about that a little.

family, reading, The Forest Throne, travel

A Pleasant Weekend Behind, Crunch Time Ahead

Leave a comment

On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.

Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.

I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.

We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.

I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.

Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.

The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.

 

expatriate life, family, letters, Stars and Stripes, The Forest Throne, travel

More On Those Three Special Projects

Leave a comment

Back on September 26, I posted about three special projects I was involved in and how they were keeping me from writing. The projects were:

  • inventorying the Stars and Stripes newspapers before donating them to the University of Rhode Island Library.
  • Digitizing years of printouts of letters, as a deaccumulation project.
  • Finishing the Kuwait Letters book and make it available to family members.
These newspapers, on which Dad set type in Africa and Europe during WW2, are on their way to their new home and, hopefully, permanent place of preservation.

I wrote about each of these projects in the previous post and won’t detail them here.

By a strange set of coincidences, all three projects finished on Friday, November 11.

I finished inventorying the Stars and Stripes not too long after I made that post in September. But the newspapers sat waiting on me to make up my mind whether I was going to ship them to the library or not. I hemmed and I hawed. I carried two of the three boxes upstairs. I gave it much thought. Did I really want to trust this precious cargo to a shipping company? At last I made a to-do list of all the things I have to do and included shipping them.

Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.

When I saw the large number of tasks I must complete, I decided to go ahead and ship them. I self-scheduled that for Friday afternoon and brought the last of the boxes upstairs from The Dungeon. I loaded them in the car and headed to UPS. I wasn’t impressed with the people there and how they might handle them. They recommended re-packing the newspapers in their boxes, which provides better assurance of safe delivery (and insurance against damage). I decided to go ahead and do it.

I left the boxes there. Due to busyness on UPS’s part, I wasn’t able to hang around and supervise the transfer to new packaging. I’m trusting that they will do it right and, when they are delivered this Thursday, November 17th, the Library will find them undamaged.

See that tall stack of paper? About half of it came out of old correspondence notebooks.

Also on Friday, around 9:00 a.m., I completed scanning the printouts of emails I found in a thick, bulging, 3-ring binder. These were from 2002 to 2005, consisting mainly of e-mails and messages that I sent or received when I was a member of and later moderator/administrator of a couple of poetry critique boards. I wrote a little about that in this post. The letters were arranged more or less chronologically, but were interspersed with printouts of poetry critiques I made during that time. Those critiques, posted at the poetry boards, might be considered correspondence but I chose not to do so. I will deal with the critiques some time in the future.

That one notebook is now devoid or letters. It is full of those critiques, but they are consolidated from two smaller binders and are in an arrangement that I can tackle with less effort sometime in the future.

These are not all the letters I need to digitize, but they represent the lion’s share of them. I have one other notebook that contains letters from about 1990 to 1999, a mix of typed, handwritten, and e-mail letters. I started on them Saturday. But it’s just a 3/4-inch binder and will be short work. I hadn’t even counted them as part of the special project. Why? Because this binder is small enough that I won’t mind if it stays on the shelf for several years. It won’t, but it’s not part of the special project.

The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed.

The other special project was my book of correspondence, The Kuwait Years In Letters. I’ve blogged about this several times, one of the best of those posts being here. When I wrote that, in June 2022, I had the proof copy in hand. My wife and I were either just starting or well along in the proofreading process. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. But before publishing, I decided to ask the family about the cover and if they wanted changes in that. Yes, they did. I put together four alternate covers, and they chose one as the best.

I uploaded that cover to Amazon, and it was approved with no changes. I again sent it out to the family. My daughter liked it, but found one typo on the back cover. I fixed that on Friday night, and uploaded to Amazon. Since the only difference between that cover and the last one was a single letter on the back cover, I knew it was going to be accepted. I went to bed Friday night knowing it was all over but the ordering. Sure enough, I started Saturday morning by looking at an e-mail from Amazon. The cover was accepted and the book published. I quickly ordered family copies. Once they arrive and are in good condition, I will unpublish the book.

So, in a 14 hour time span, those three special projects that were preventing me from doing much writing came to a close. I will continue to worry about the Stars and Stripes until I hear from the Library. I will continue to scan a handful of letters most days, probably into early December. I will anxiously await the arrival of the Kuwait Letters book and the family’s reception of it after Christmas.

But I think, now, I will feel much better about carving out time to write. When will I start? Maybe as early as today. The Key To Time Travel awaits my attention. Eddie is in trouble, and I need to figure out how to extricate himself from it.

travel

A Traveling Post

Leave a comment

Today will be a traveling day. This morning I have no time to write and post. Possibly this evening I’ll be back to fill in the details. If not, then tomorrow.

So here it is, Tuesday morning. We are back home and re-establishing routines. Last Monday, following an afternoon medical appointment, we headed to West Texas. We got as far as Oklahoma City and spent the night in a hotel. We made it to Big Spring early afternoon on Tuesday, early enough to pick up the grandkids at school, a surprise for them. That night was the awards ceremony for Ezra (finishing 5th grade) and Elise (finishing 3rd grade).

On Wednesday, Elijah graduated from pre-K-4. Having a graduation for that level is something new to me, but it was a fun evening.  He was excited during the whole ceremony, and after.

On Thursday morning, Ephraim had his 8th grade award ceremony. He received recognition for having made the National Junior Honor Society in 7th grade, and also won the award for cross-country. The other sports must have had separate award ceremonies. It was a different type of ceremony than for the younger kids.

They are braver than I am.

That afternoon, Sara and Ephraim boarded a plane for Chicago to spend the weekend with our son, Charles. We stayed to help Richard with the children. Now out of school, they worked around the house on Friday—fairly willingly, I might add. Or at least without complaint. They seemed happy to realize they had done a job well.

That evening, we introduced Ezra and Elise to Rummycube—the adult version, not the kids’ one. They both took to it and did really well. We played each night after that. I must admit that I would rather have been reading, but we took the time to get them off their screens. And just to spend time with them. 11-year-old Ezra is already a master at it. He has learned to maximize the manipulation of tiles on the board to reduce his holdings. 9-year-old Elise is also quite good, though she is somewhat too exuberant for this old man, playing the game half in her seat and half jumping up to do something.

Little Elijah, going on five, wanted to play. I let him draw my tiles for me, which satisfied him. When he heard the TV go on in the other room, he naturally went to watch Obi Wan or whoever work through their adventures.

The trip home yesterday was uneventful. Contrary to predictions, traffic was light. Also contrary to predictions, gas prices had not spiked anywhere for Memorial Day weekend. In fact, at most places they dropped a couple of cents. We dropped recyclables in Oklahoma City, dropped used cloth at Goodwill, and shopped in there a little. I found a book about C.S. Lewis to add to my collection. We got home around 8:20 p.m., having made really good time for a somewhat late start and the stops on the way.

We will be mostly home now for a while, working through medical appointments and yardwork and writing and stock trading and decluttering. A quick trip back to Big Spring may happen in July to fetch kids for week’s stay. Other than that, nothing planned until my twice-delayed high school reunion in August.

May the routines recommence.

Bible study, Christianity, critique group, family, Harry Potter, travel

A Mishmash While Away From Home

Leave a comment
Elise, working on her “word” for earning money from Grandpa, while Nitwit surveys the scene from above, watching out for Useless and Nuisance.

We are back in West Texas for a visit with our daughter’s family. I know, we were just here a month ago, but they had need for a babysitter last Friday night, and we said we’d come do it. We drove here last Thursday, and will likely leave for home tomorrow, though possibly not till Wednesday.

It’s been an easy gig. The four kids were reasonably compliant with doing their chores on Saturday. Even little Elijah, 5 years old, was given two chores. He had his sister write out a to-do list for him, as she was doing for herself. Grandparents can usually ride herd on the kids in a way the parents can’t. At least, they seem to do somewhat better with us in some ways, being a little quicker to jump-to-it when we ask them to do something.

Sunday was church. I went early with the three oldest kids, Lynda and Sara and Elijah coming later. Richard, as pastor, was already there. I attended men’s class for Sunday school, then, during church, I found an unused room, connected by Zoom, and taught our class at our home church remotely. The attendance was good, and the class went well. Of course, that mean I didn’t sit through a church service yesterday. Hopefully I can do so today on the replays.

Elijah had fun cleaning his play area in the sunroom, then checking it off as a job done.

It was difficult to work on writing during this time, so I’ve done a lot of reading. As much as possible, to be an example for the grandkids, I’ve been reading in a print book. So far, no real indication that it’s doing much good. Except maybe for Elise, who is reading Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix in a print book—but she has been doing that for a while. I was able to review two chapters for critique group, which meets on Thursday. I guess on Friday I managed to spend on hour on the Bible study I’m writing. I don’t feel like I got very far with it.

We brought a surplus bookcase from our house to help organize theirs. Elijah’s other chore was to put books and toys on it, which he did with much help from Elise and guidance from Grandpa.

We have also had to care for Useless, Nitwit, and Nuisance, the three pets. Except, it’s now four pets. One grandchild was unhappy that he didn’t really have a pet, so they arranged for a rescue kitten to come join the menagerie. Except, the rescue kitten was in Oklahoma City. So we stopped there on the way here, met up with the rescue woman, and brought the new kitten here. The grandson named her Sapphire. While she is transitioning into the household with three pets there already (actually, more than that if you include the bearded dragon and the goldfish), she is needing a lot of attention. While I was wondering what nickname I could give the new kitten, Elise said it ought to be a name about a girl who needs a lot of attention. Obviously, I immediately named her Diva. Hopefully, with this pet the zoo is complete.

Diva is isolated from the two older cats, she being a female and them being not-yet-neutered males (kittens who are almost cats). I didn’t spend a lot of time with her—if you don’t count the 6 hours in the car between OKC and here.

My plan is to leave the zoo tomorrow. We’ll take their recyclables and drop them in OKC, then get home by a good time, though too late to join an on-line writing group.

One bit of writing I did accomplish (besides this blog post). While sitting on the front porch yesterday, reading for 30 minutes before the onslaught of 20 people from their small group at church for a Super Bowl party, before reading I set my mind to writing a short poem. Nothing major, just a cinqain (a five-line poem). I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s sitting there on my phone, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

So, I will see you all on Friday, back home, probably in The Dungeon, in old routines.

 

Bible study, family, miscellaneous, The Forest Throne, travel

Random Friday Thoughts

Leave a comment

Dateline: Jan. 20, 2022

Between leftovers and some takeout, I had to fix only one meal. Grandpa’s Mythical Sandwich was a hit, as always.

Yes, the dateline shows that I’m writing these Friday thoughts on Thursday. At least I’m beginning these thoughts then.

Yesterday (Wednesday), we drove back from West Texas from having babysat our four grandchildren last weekend and staying a few extra days. We might have come home on Tuesday, but Lynda had a stomach bug, so we delayed a day. Actually, we had been uncertain of which day to come home on.

But yesterday morning before we left, our son-in-law was sick, went for a covid test, and was positive. So we have been exposed. As it turns out we hadn’t been all that close to him in the house, so maybe we will be okay. But, let the quarantine begin. I guess 5 days. Except, I have prescriptions to pick up at Wal-Mart and a few after-trip groceries I must get. I’ll do that this morning.  I’ll have to miss the monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes, our critique group, Thursday night. I’ll send my piece to them by e-mail.

With The Forest Throne done and waiting on beta readers, and with the church Centennial book done and waiting on proof-readers, I’m about to spend time on my next writing project. As I said in my annual writing goals post earlier this month, it would be a Bible study. But which one? On Tuesday, I consolidated my various files from the Holy Week study I taught last Lenten season, on the Last Supper. Thursday morning, I found my hand-written teaching notes and will go through them over the next several days.  I have a feeling I will make this my next book rather than the study I did on 1 and 2 Timothy some years ago. But we shall see. I should know by early next week.

I’m in the process of contacting an artist about a cover for The Forest Throne. Hoping to make contact on Thursday. Also, the first beta reader of TFT is my granddaughter Elise, 8. She loved it. She also picked up on a number of subtle things I put in the book.

I’ve been brainstorming the concept of individualism, having posted on that before and wanting to do a follow-up or two, possibly even write and publish an essay on that. I have come to the conclusion that the opposite of individualism is collectivism. I even found a quote by Dr. M.L. King that agrees with that, but I can’t trace it back to the actual speech or document, so hate to use it. I don’t know that this essay will ever happen, or if it does it will be anything more than serialized blog posts.

The drive home from W. Texas was pleasant. I was worried about road conditions near the end, in our own county, as the forecast was for a wintry mix that afternoon. As I looked at radar that morning, frozen precip was showing over Oklahoma City, where we were making a brief stop to drop recyclables from our daughter’s accumulation. But after driving an hour and a half, and checking the predicted radar again, it showed the OKC precip abating by the time we would get there, and that what would fall toward the end of our trip would be minor at most. So on we drove. We stopped about 45 minutes from home and made a couple of phone calls, learned the roads were fine, and so we continued on home.

I’m in the midst of reading three different books (well, four if you include the one I read 3 or 4 pages of on my phone a day—no, five if you include the book I’m reading for Life Group teaching), two of which are books about writing. I took those two with me to Texas, and made good progress in them. One I should finish in three days or so; the other will likely take over two weeks. It’s interviews with 20 writers, and I’m just reading one interview a day.

That’s enough random thoughts. I hope to head to the sunroom later, with my handwritten notes, and get to work on the Bible study. See you all on Monday, when I hope to get back to something on my list of upcoming blog posts.

Documenting America, family, travel

Milestones and Breakthroughs

Leave a comment

Dateline 14 Oct 2021, Big Spring, Texas

Elijah enjoyed the bowling and wouldn’t use the launching rack.

The wife and I have been on grandparent duty for the last week. The parents have been around. We had relatively few times where we had to babysit. We came to celebrate birthdays. Youngest grandchild Elijah turned 5 on Oct 3, and his dad, Richard, had a birthday on the 6th. The celebrations were delayed due to a conflict with church activities last weekend. On Saturday they did a bowling party for Elijah. I guess 5 years old is a milestone if not a breakthrough.

Ezra is in the middle of the photo, in scout shirt with hands in pockets.

On Monday I did parent duty at Ezra’s cub scout pack meeting. He had missed the week before so didn’t have his toolbox put together. The cubmaster told him to have it next week. Grandpa remedied that with him this afternoon at Ace Hardware. I only got him  only the box and a few tools, telling him I had some surplus tools at home which, had I known he needed them, I would have brought them. At the pack meeting they learned a little about car maintenance. Checking the tire air pressure (and where to find the right pressure) and checking oil level are now part of the scouts’ knowledge base. And we got to use his tools this afternoon on a home repair.

Ephraim approaching the finish line. The boy is second can just be seen in the trees over Ephraim’s left shoulder.

Tuesday, oldest grandson Ephraim ran his final cross-country race of the year, the District finals. It was held in Big Spring, where they live. That may have given the Big Spring kids a bit of home course advantage. Ephraim had missed the last race, as he was recovering from an ingrown toenail and the coach rested him. Last year, in 7th grade, he finished 13th, which wasn’t too bad for his first year. Now in 8th grade, he is best on his team (a small team at this particular race). How would he do? His female counterpart won the girls race by a big margin. Then came the boys race. At the first viewing place, right after the start, Ephraim was 2nd or 3rd in a bunch. At the second viewing point he was 2nd but was passed and in 3rd as they went out of sight and started to spread out. Two minutes later, at a very brief view, it looked as if he was 4th, but they were far away and it was hard to tell.

Big Spring took 1st place in both girls and boys races.

Then came the viewing place on a good straightaway, and he was in 1st! And seeming like he was pulling away. He went up the hill and looked strong. At the final straightway leading to the finish line, he was still first with no one else in view. He cross the line a full 25 or 30 seconds ahead of the nearest competitor. I consider this a breakthrough because now he knows he can win, and how hard he has to race in order to win.

Useless and Nitwit are allowed on the kitchen table to escape the torments of Nuisance.

The week has been made a little more exciting because of the three new pets in the household, a kitten who is almost a cat, a full blown kitten, and a rambunctious lab-mix puppy. They are new to the household after older pets expired earlier this year. Their names are Nuisance, Useless, and Worthless, though the latter name was replaced by Nitwit while we were there. No, that’s not their real names; that’s just what Grandpa calls them. Nuisance (the dog) is very powerful. I walked her 1 3/4 miles almost every day, and she had as much energy at the end as at the beginning. I won’t say that I will miss them when we go, though Useless was starting to cuddle up with me the last few days.

You can tell when I started to advertise it.

And, the last breakthrough, again more of a milestone, was me posting my 1000th book sale. Actually, as of 10 p.m. today (Thursday), I’m still at 999 sales. I should have another sale soon, perhaps by the time we get back home on Friday. While it’s a milestone, it’s still less than 30 sales per item for sale. I still work, publish, and sell in obscurity. Maybe someday I’ll be able to report sales that are more of a breakthrough rather than a milestone.

family, travel, Writing

Grandpa, You’re Boring

9 Comments
Our only reason for going to Universal was the Harry Potter exhibit. We didn’t see much of this. We went on the Hogwarts ride and, while it made me a little sick, I managed not to puke.

On May 20, about noon, Lynda and I pulled out of our driveway and began a three-day drive to Orlando, Florida. We had much preparation for this trip, though the decision to make it took a long time. We were to meet our daughter and her family there. They had saved up for a long time for a big family vacation, and this was it. They had invited us to go along, and we were providing the accommodation through a timeshare exchange.

We weren’t sure we were going to go, what with covid and then the gas shortage. But things seemed to be falling into place, and a few days before the time, we made the decision to go. We told our son in a phone call but forgot to tell our daughter. The first night in the motel we let her know via Messenger and she replied, “Oh, I didn’t know you had decided to go.” She wasn’t upset; we just had forgotten to tell her. That meant that she wasn’t able to make suggestions about things we could bring with us that they would need but couldn’t take on the plane.

You go to Florida you expect to see an alligator in the wild, right? We had two in our resort ponds.

Fast forward to Orlando. Our daughter, her husband, and their four kids had four days planned for theme parks: three at Disney and one at Universal. Then they added a second day at Universal. We bought tickets to go to Universal the same day they did. The other days we planned to just stay in the resort (which was very nice), doing the usual things we did at home, plus maybe a little walking, a little shopping, a little sight-seeing. In truth, we did less than that. Other than preparation of meals for everyone, or taking everyone out to eat, we just had a restful time. Oh, yeah, I played chauffer to reduce parking costs.

What’s a vacation without a little trauma? In this case, a foot gashed on barnacle-encrusted rocks at a Gulf beach, requiring 4 stitches.

We had great interaction with all the grandkids. I had several good conversations with Ephraim, the oldest. He and I are sort of planning a book together. I think I’ve mentioned it before in these posts. Tentatively titled, The Forest Throne, it will be a time-travel sort of book. I’m brainstorming it now, trying to figure out how to make it unique, not just a run-of-the-mill time travel story. I talked to Ephraim that I was concerned that I’m too far removed from being a 12-year-old and how to make the book suitable for kids that age. He said not to worry. I should write the book and he’ll make adjustments to make it suitable for kids his age.

The lines and noise level at Universal made the experience less that satisfactory for us boring, old folks.

The day we went to Universal I had problems getting Lynda and me into the park, something about our e-tickets wasn’t right. So the rest went on. Later we all met up. Then Lynda and I got in line to do the Hogwarts Castle ride. That was an hour, maybe more. From there we went to the Three Broomsticks for lunch. That was over an hour wait, most of it in the sun. Lynda was tired, I wasn’t tolerating the noise level very well, the heat bothered both of us, and the walk to find a quicker place to eat took us all the way back to near the park entrance. So we left, getting some ice cream near the entrance.

A big city has a variety of foods. One evening of a down day I sprung for Indian food, which made the day worthwhile.

It was a couple of days later that I was talking again with Ephraim. I don’t remember exactly what it was we were talking about, but probably about my not enjoying amusement parts because of lines, noise, and not liking any rides that are high, fast, or quick turning (which is all of them). Ephraim said, “Grandpa, you’re boring.” I replied, “I try to be.”

He didn’t mean it in a bad way, but I’m very happy to be described as boring. Maybe it isn’t quite true that I’m boring. As I look back on my life, I’ve done a fair amount of risk taking and exciting things. But no more. I’m happy to sit at home, write my books, trade my stocks, walk the streets and trails for exercise or on the elliptical. Let others have their amusement parks. I’ll take boring any and every day of the week.

Masks and wands at the ready is how you do theme park at the end of a global pandemic.

We were with the kids from Saturday May 22 through Tuesday June 1. They left for the airport and a couple of hours later we hit the road. We made it home in two days this time, as we were in a mind to travel and, except for one major slowdown on I-40 in western Arkansas, the roads were clear. Now having been home for five days, I can say, “It was good to be with the kids, and it’s good to be back to our boring existence at home.”

What’s going to happen with The Forest Throne? If I don’t make it my next book, Ephraim may be too old by the time I get to it for him to help with it. My brainstorming is causing all the parts to come together. I’ve figured out an angle to make the time travel different. I’ve figured out two stories of this unique time travel. The last piece will be how to finish it all, for it won’t be a series that goes on forever. I’m brainstorming that now.