Bible study, Christmas, home improvements, miscellaneous

A Quiet Christmas

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A blessed Christmas to everyone.

After having had a busy, family-full Thanksgiving week, it’s going to be a quiet Christmas at Blackberry Oaks. Lynda and I will be here alone.

That’s fine with both of us. If yesterday is any indication, we aren’t as able to do a lot as we used to be. I started my day at 6:00 a.m. after a great night’s sleep. I was in The Dungeon by 6:15. I edited the last two chapters of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. That was the only writing task I had for the day, so I moved on to other things, mainly looking for a lost box of letters. I looked for that yesterday so I could file one stray letter, but I couldn’t find it.

This morning I widened my search in the storeroom, and found it in a place I hadn’t looked yesterday. In that process, I saw four boxes labeled “travel items.” They were boxes of travel brochures we had picked up over the years and, rather than go through them and decide what to keep, what to discard, I just shoved everything into boxes to go through them in the future.

The future came yesterday. I went through the boxes, pulled out everything that wasn’t worth saving, and consolidated the rest into two boxes. That allowed me to do some rearranging of the shelves, including temporary repairs to one shelf. Then it was time for me to make the weekly grocery run. Then back to The Dungeon after lunch, for miscellaneous computer tasks, along with finishing the clean up from the morning’s work in the storeroom.

When I came upstairs around 3:00 p.m., I went straight to the sunroom with my last coffee of the day, hoping to read five to ten pages in The Confessions of Stain Augustine. Instead, I promptly fell asleep. I could read only two pages, as my mind and body conspired against reading retention.

We had planned to make lace cookies in the afternoon, but neither of us had the energy. Hopefully tomorrow.

But the day was productive. One editing pass done through a book finished last week. The clutter reduced a little more. The pantry and fridge adequately stocked. A good afternoon nap for both of us. We’ll get those cookies done tomorrow.

My next blogging day is Monday, Christmas day. I don’t expect many people to be tuning in then, so will say Merry Christmas now. May God bless you on the day we celebrate Jesus’s birth.

Bible study, self-publishing, Writing

Editing Shows The Problems

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Anxious to move forward with this, but initial editing suggests it’s not as far along as I thought it was.

On Thursday, I began the editing process on A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. On this editing pass, I’m doing this using Word’s Read Aloud feature. Thursday was the Introduction, Friday Chapter 1, and Saturday Chapter 2.

The more I use this feature, the more impressed I am with it. The computer-generated voice is pleasant, with few pronunciation errors. Wrong words really stand out. You can stop the reading, make the needed edit, and hop right back into the reading, all with just a few clicks. It probably takes a little more time than simply reading aloud myself, but I think it does better at catching the silly little errors we tend to read through without recognition. For example, in one sentence I meant to use “head” but instead typed “dead”. I’m not sure I would have caught that reading aloud, but did using my friendly editing lady.

Alas, what I found on Chapter 1, while listening to my computer read it, was that it seems to have a lot of repetition. I noticed the same thing in Chapter 2. In fact, Chapter 2 may be worse than Chapter 1 in the repetition department.

I say “alas” because, when I wrote these chapters back in October, they seemed really good to me. Now, not so much. Once I go through the whole book using the computer reader, I will have to go through again with slow, careful reading.

I suppose that’s to be expected. Something that goes down on paper (or pixels) fast is probably not all that good. I’m not sure what this does to my timeline for the book, but a delay to make it better is better than a rush to publish.

The first editing pass ought to be ready in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. At that time I ought to have a better idea of what my further editing and publishing schedule will be.

 

Bible study, Genealogy, miscellaneous

Two Tasks Done

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I asked my granddaughter to do a sketch for the covers for the Bible study series. This is her first cut at it.

My to-do list remains long. About every two weeks I start a new one, taking the one just done, transferring uncompleted tasks to the new list, and adding more. I suppose the habit is a continuation of my engineering career, and hard to break. Yet, I’m sure thinks would fall through the cracks if I didn’t organize the things I need to do. Like this morning, as I’m writing this in The Dungeon, I see on my computer desk a business card for the auto dealership where I have our vehicles serviced and realize I need to add calling them to have our minivan in for an oil change.

This week, I finished two tasks that I will today cross off the list. The first was writing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. It’s always good when I finish a book. As I work on a book, I will add it to my to-do list. The entry for this one would look something like:

  • write AWTHW   M   T   W   R   F   Sa

Each day I would then cross out the day as I did my writing work.  I may have a future blog post that says more about the specifics of how this book came about, how the writing went, etc. Suffice to say for now that it came together fairly quickly.

Now the editing starts. I’ve been editing as I wrote, so I’m a little further along than I would typically be with most books at the first draft stage. Last night I emailed it to my beta reader, so things are truly in motion. My next to-do list will have this entry:

  • edit AWTHW  M   T   W   R   F   Sa

Before too long, I’ll have a to-do list with the following:

  • create publication files for AWTHW

As for the second task, that is to finish scanning a large notebook of genealogy papers, saving them to my electronic filing system, and discarding the files and the notebook. This is part of a larger project to reduce the amount of possessions we would have to move in a future downsizing—an event that is not on any to-do list and is unlikely to be for a couple of years. I’ve already done that to 15 or so notebooks before this one.

This notebook contained information on relatives in Lynda’s paternal like, the Cheney family. It was kind of a difficult task. My electronic filing system is really set up for ancestors, not relatives. Therefore, I found this notebook harder to deal with than the others.

But I figured out a way to get relatives in an ancestors filing system. I don’t remember when I started on this task. The notebook is (or rather, was) thick, with loose papers as well. It was probably two months ago that this item first appeared on my to-do list:

  • scan/save/discard Cheney relatives papers   M   T   W   R   F   Sa

I took several breaks when other tasks took precedence, such as when family was here over Thanksgiving. But my revised filing system worked, and slowly the notebook emptied out. I finished the last of the bound papers on Wednesday, leaving only the loose papers to go.

Alas, yesterday the scan-to-computer function quit working. I’m not a tech guy, but I was able, in about 20 to 30 minutes, do some diagnostics and get the scanner and computer recognizing each other’s existence and get back to scanning. I got a few more pages done, leaving only around ten loose papers for today. As I won’t be doing any book writing today, I should easily be able to get all those done and check this task off the list.

Of course, that will not be the end for these two over-arching tasks. My to-do list is upstairs. Next time I go up, I’ll find it and bring it down to The Dungeon. I have two new items to add to it.

  • edit AWTHW   F   Sa   M   T   W   R
  • begin scanning next genealogy notebook

So one task leads to another, and the to-do lists never end. Still, I’m feeling good about things. I’m slowly getting done what I need to do.

family

Living Vicariously—Not

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The loneliness of the long distance runner. Ephraim en-route to winning his 8th grade cross-country district meet.

Once upon a time, when I was young, my weight where it should be, my knees good, and I didn’t know I had an abnormal heart valve, I played football and ran track in high school. Not in junior high. The only team sports they had were basketball, baseball, and swimming. I was no good at those, so I didn’t play jr. high sports.

I did three years of football, two years of outdoor track, and one year of indoor track. Sophomore year I ran the mile. Junior year I dropped down to the half-mile. That was probably a mistake, and I wish the coach had advised me differently. I had endurance but not a lot of speed. If I was going to change distances, I would have been better in the two-mile. But that’s all in the past.

On a 1600 m run, freshman year.

My oldest grandson, Ephraim, is now running track. He does cross-country and outdoor track. In track, he runs the 1600 meter and 2400 meter. Well, that was in junior high. I imagine it’s the 1600 and 3200 in high school. He’s been running since seventh grade, slowly improving. We’ve been able to drive to see him run a few times, when they coincided with trips for other reasons.

When the family was here visiting over Thanksgiving, Ephraim said he wanted to run in the early mornings. I woke him the first day at 6:00 a.m., as he requested. We were outside the house by 6:15, and it was still dark, with some light showing in the east. I slowed him down, insisting he wait a little until there was enough light that cars could see him. He did about 1.5 miles that morning.

The sprint to the finish. Ephraim passed the kid on the right to take a higher finish in a cross-country meet.

The next day it was below 30° at wake-up time. I woke him, but recommended he run later. He decided he would do a time mile around 11 a.m. or so. I drove him into town, bought him some spikes, then we went to the public track. He warmed up and ran, with me calling out his lap splits. He finished the mile in 5:33, equaling his best time. Two days later, after Thanksgiving, we did it again. This time he did the mile in 5:27. I told him that my best time sophomore year was 5:15, so I still had him beat.

With his teammate from the girls’ team, after their boys-girls sweep of the cross-country district finals in 8th grade.

A couple of days ago, I got a text from Ephraim, saying he had just done a mile in 5:16 or 5:17. He then wrote, “I’m closing in on you time.” I told him he was actually ahead of me, because I did my 5:15 late in my sophomore outdoor track season, probably in May. So he did his time five months earlier than me, in the off season, in a practice run, not in competition. I said he would surely be well below my best this year. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were sub-5:00 for the mile before the season is over.

It’s been good to follow Ephraim’s progress as a runner. He’s obviously better than I was. I want to make sure, however, that I support him, not push him. If he wants to get better, I want to support him. If he were to say track wasn’t his thing and quit it, I would support him. I’m here to encourage and motivate him to be the best he can be, in whatever he does.

So I’m not here to live vicariously through him, but it’s a pleasure watching him develop as a runner.

Christmas, expatriate life

Christmas Memories: Saudi Arabia 1981

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I’ve always liked to display blue lights at Christmas, but this red lights display up on the next street is very nice. We had nothing like this in Saudi Arabia—but we found a substitute.

Every year around Christmas, I try to make at least one Christmas post. You can find past ones at this link. Many of those are memories from my childhood. It’s getting to the point where I can’t remember what memories I’ve posted. I know I made at least one duplicate post.

I looked back over posts in December of each year since I started the blog, and couldn’t find any about this. 1981 was our first Christmas  in Saudi Arabia. I had arrived there in June, Lynda and the children in September. Sometime around November, one of the Saudi Arabian government ministries sent a notice out to all companies, or perhaps those that were heavy in expatriate employees. The notice said that celebrations of Christmas in the workplace were not allowed. No decorations, no parties. The notice further stated that expatriates better not make any Christmas displays at their residences that can be seen from outside. It promised to be a very blah Christmas for us.

But at that time, two things happened to help cheer things up. In the souks, usually in the shops way towards the back, we found lots of Christmas decorations for sale. Strings of lights, nativity sets, even artificial Christmas trees. One shop off by itself, on a main street but not in the shopping district, was run by the American wife of a Saudi. She had lots of Christmas stuff. We were able to buy everything we needed. We didn’t put lights in our apartment windows, but inside, you knew it was Christmastime.

The other thing that happened, in late November if I remember correctly, King Khalid announced an official visit to our town, Al Khobar, to take place fairly soon, maybe just after the first of the year. The native population immediately set to work preparing for the royal visit. Every company erected archways over city streets and decorated them with much Arabic writing and…lights! They put strings of light all over these arches, wound them around the upright members and across the top. Drive down any main street in Al Khobar and you would pass lit up arches every hundred feet.

[Added 10 Dec 2023] Seems like I never finished writing this before I posted it.

So in early December, with no Christmas lights allowed, local businesses began erecting archways of lights over city streets to welcome the king. It was a golden opportunity for us. We drove the streets of Al Khobar and told the kids to look at all the Christmas lights. No, they didn’t look quite like they would at home, but Charles and Sara were young enough they didn’t know the difference. In fact, they probably don’t remember it.

So there it is, a Christmas memory. Making do in a foreign land where Christmas could not be celebrated openly. I wish I had a photo of that Christmas season. I might, but if so it’s buried deep in a box somewhere in the mess of this building we call a home.

book reviews, letters

Book Review: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

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Abelard and Heloise, publishers may think your letters are interesting enough to publish, but I’m not going to waste any more time on them.

Given my love of reading letters, it should surprise none of my readers to know that I picked up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise for my reading enjoyment. I bought it used for 75¢. Good thing, too, given how the book turned out.

I had never heard of these two. Peter Abelard, b. around 1079, was a French philosopher. Schooled in the liberal arts, he fell in love with Heloise. She was from Paris. Somehow they met and had an intimate relationship. Surviving letters suggest he wanted to marry her, but she refused. Believing that marriage amounted to legal slavery or the wife, or that the wife was essentially nothing more than a gold digger, she wrote to Abelard:

God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.

That’s quite a statement to put in print, but that’s how she felt. His reward for her being his mistress was castration by a mob employed by her uncle. Before that, they had a child together. After his mutilation, he became a monk and she a nun. For the rest of their lives they lived apart. Abelard established a convent and put Heloise in charge of it. They rarely met after their going into religious orders, but exchanged a number of letters. These have been passed down to us.

My copy of this book, a Penguin Classic, includes a lengthy introduction, which was good to read, but was about twice as long as I would have liked.  Before the letters was an item Abelard wrote about his trials and tribulations. That item wore me out. The English translation from the original Latin was okay, but I didn’t find the story engaging.

Then I got to the letters. One from Heloise was first, the one with the quote above. Abelard responded, the Heloise to him—all long letters—and by that time my mind couldn’t take any more of it. I rarely give up on a book, but I did this one. I quit on page 139 of 295.

I’m not going to hang onto this book in hopes I’ll read it in the future. I have too many books, and too few years left, to keep reading books that don’t hold my interest. 2-stars for this one.

America, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, miscellaneous, Short Stories, The Forest Throne, Uncategorized

November Progress, December Goals

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Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day. 
  • Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
  • Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
  • Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
  • Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
  • Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.

Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.
Carlyle, family, holidays, home improvements, The Forest Throne

This Piece of the Universe, This Section of Eternity

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Games were on the schedule over Thanksgiving week.

Oops! I didn’t make a post on Friday, the first time in a long time to totally miss a day. I’ve been late a few times, but I didn’t even think of the blog.

What captured my attention? Family. Our daughter, son-in-law, and their four children came in Monday evening and left on Saturday. Our son and his husband came in on Wednesday, delayed a day due to airplane troubles. We had the normal Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, followed by a 1.6 mile hike on a trail loop near us (part of the route is on city streets).

I call this puzzling behavior.

Some of us put together a 1,000 piece puzzle. Some played games. We had other meals and conversation. Once I got up early to get grandson #1, Ephraim, out on his run on our semi-rural streets. Two other times I drove him to a track in Bentonville, where he ran timed miles. The first time he equaled his personal best. The second time he beat that by about 7 seconds, setting a new personal best.

The 2009 photo.

With #2 grandson, Ezra, I drove to the airport on Wednesday to pick up our son and his husband. That gave us some time to talk. He also helped me work in the yard on Tuesday. He and a friend of mine about his age, Liam, helped me move some large logs, both cut and deadfall, and cut out some wild thorn bushes that encroach on the blackberries. He earned his money. I also had him doing some leaf blowing, which he seemed to enjoy.

The 2019 photo.

With granddaughter, Elise, I had a lot of conversation. We worked together on the plot of the next book in The Forest Throne series. This will feature the one daughter in the Wagner family, Elizabeth. Elise and I worked out a prologue and discussed various plot lines. Tomorrow I will put some of those into a word document, filed away for writing a couple of books from now.

The 2023 photo, perhaps never to be done again.

With my youngest grandson, Elijah, I had a good time with a little roughhousing. We read together, and I gave him his first word exercise, now that he’s in 1st grade. He’s still a lot of fun, and wanted to work in the yard like others did. Almost all the baby toys we had for the kids are too young for him (and obviously the others), so I’ll be getting rid of them.

In the late evenings, after the games, puzzles, or whatever, we watched back episodes of Shark Tank. The three youngest kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, as did some of the adults. Mornings started with 30 minutes of reading. Ezra chose The Fellowship of the Ring, which is certainly a challenge for anyone, let alone a 12-year-old.

Saturday morning, as our daughter’s family were soon to leave, I remembered we had not yet recreated the photo from 2019 of me and all four kids. We shot that photo because at that time, a popular Facebook activity was to post photo comparisons from 2009 and 2019, ten years later. In 2009, I was on the floor reading to Ephraim, who was our only grandchild at the time. So we did a posed shot of me and the four grandkids on the floor. We wanted to do that again, and we just did fit it in before the trip was over. This is likely the last time we will ever get to do that shot.

Saturday, once our daughter’s family was gone, we had a quiet day with our son (his husband having left on Friday for business). We watched a couple of movies, ate leftovers for lunch, read, and went out for a simple dinner. An early morning airport run on roads we expected to have some frozen stuff on them turned out to be easy. Came home, rested, went to church to an excellent worship service.

Yesterday. I got back into reading Thomas Carlyle’s letters. He was visiting places in his native Scotland. In a letter he named the place he was at and said that this place was a piece of the universe and the time of his visit was a section of eternity. The place and time, “is very beautiful; doubly beautiful to me whose head has long simmered half-mad with brick wildernesses, dust, smoke, and loud-roaring confusion that meant little.”

That’s kind of how I feel. The last week, Thanksgiving, was doubly beautiful for taking me out of my routines. Today I’ll be back at it: writing in the Bible study in progress, trading stocks, doing housework. But last week will always be doubly beautiful, and I will think about it for a long time.

Bible study, books, critique group, family, home improvements, Magazines

Getting Rid of Some Books

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This was an okay book, not great. Not sure of its truth. Will never read it again, so it’s gone, today added to the sale/donation pile.

Our efforts at dis-accumulating continue. Perhaps not as fast as needed to do a downsizing in this decade, but we make a little progress. The last month has seen the old postcard collection acquired in the mid-1980s, having been left behind in the house we bought, for $115. But the buyer wanted me to ship it to Houston and so didn’t want the small, steel cabinet. I was able to sell that for an extra $10.

Then Lynda decided she was willing to part with the Gulf War memorabilia she brought back from Kuwait in 1991. They were supposedly Iraqi items. I listed them on Facebook Marketplace, not being sure they would sell. After one price reduction, a mom contacted me. She wanted them for her son (maybe a teenager), who loves military stuff. We were able to arrange a transfer that was convenient to both of us.

But really, the big thing we need to part with is books. For a bookiphile, that’s like cutting your wrist. But we have to do it. Despite the number of books we’ve gotten rid of, we still have at least 2,000 books in the house. I gave one away at writer’s critique group last week.

One book obviously isn’t much; we need to do more. In our living room is a built-in bookcase.  We are going to have to dismantle this to repair some water damage that appears to be from improperly installed flashing around the chimney. We have already removed some books from the lower shelves and piled them, to prevent them from being damaged and allow the bookcase to dry from a little moisture found.

As Lynda and I discussed it, she suggested that we get rid of a series of Bible study books that are shelved on that built-in. We went through one of those books together, and started a second. They aren’t bad books. I learned something from them. But when you have 2,000 books, and need to unload at least a thousand, I agreed with her to put those in the sale/donation pile.

I then suggested we also get rid of two books from the built-ins, the two books in The Bible Code series. We read these aloud together. They are an easy read because the books are not long, are well-written, and have lots of illustrations of where the Bible may have a code in the books of Moses. I say “may have” because, while the writer makes a good case, I’m not fully convinced it’s true.

At first Lynda balked. She was more accepting of the Bible code than I was and thought more of the books than I did. But then she agreed with me that we read the books, got something from them, and with all the other books in the house we were unlikely to read them ever again. So she agreed to get rid of them. I’ll move them out tomorrow.

I also have a fairly large set of magazines about World War 2 that I got from my dad. I had intended to read them, but it looks as if I never will. I have them listed on Marketplace and lowered the price twice. I think I’ll do so again and see if they will sell. Also on the getting-rid-of-block is my collection of WW2 history books. They are all good. If I had a shortage of books I would probably read all of them again. But, with a book surplus and a shortage of years ahead, I think they will also go up for sale.

Six Bible studies, two Bible codes are a long way from 1,000 books. A good sized box of magazines, and perhaps ten war books are not much. But it’s a start. I’m hoping over Thanksgiving, when our children are here, we will be able to take some time to go through a few things and, with their encouragement, get rid of some things we haven’t done anything with since the 1970s through 1990s.

And that will be a good start.

Bible study, construction, critique group, family, home improvements

Grinding, Part 2

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In my last post, I wrote about how I was grinding through a bunch of tasks, and, to keep them all straight, I needed a to-do list.  I’m in The Dungeon right now, writing this, and I don’t my current to-do list with me, so I’m starting a new one.

I do these on a long, narrow note pad that we’ve had for years. I found this pad in the desk in The Dungeon, something that isn’t used too much. I was given to us when we bought our house in Bentonville in 1991. Time to use it up I would say. It’s perfect for to-do lists.

As far as what got done from the last to-do list:

  • Flu shots.
  • Heard back from two contractors. One gave me a little more information on his schedule, moving the work out some. The other apologized for not getting me an estimate yet and established a date when he would. I would have to say, I feel a little better about contractors today.
  • Got my hair cut.
  • Continued to write in my current work-in-progress, A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I should finish a chapter today, putting me at 70 percent finished with the first draft. That puts me a little behind where I hoped to be by this time, but I’m not unhappy with my progress.
  • Got some filing done, though I have much more of that to do.
  • Attended my writers’ critique group last night. A good meeting; I might blog about it next.
  • Have started getting things together for Thanksgiving.

And Thanksgiving will dominate my next to-do list, which I started by interrupting writing this. Lots to do in terms of cleaning and organizing. Also buying in some groceries. I’m trying to plan our meals so that we get to Monday night’s supper, the last we will have alone, finishing the last prepared item.

It will be a good Thanksgiving, with both of our children, their spouses, and all our grandchildren here. It may also be the last family gathering at our house for a while, as henceforth we might shift these to our daughter’s house.

So carry on, everyone. My wishes to out to you, a bit early, for a happy Thanksgiving.

Author | Engineer