moving, Writing

Progress?

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It’s not The Dungeon, but it will have to do.

I haven’t written much about our time in Texas since our move. The first couple of weeks were overwhelming. Since then, we have become a little more settled, though we are far from being through with the move and set-up. Here are some bullet points.

  • We aren’t tripping over boxes. We still have many to unpack, but they are shoved against walls and out of the way, mostly in the dining room and the guest bedroom.
  • I’ve set up my office in the 3rd bedroom. No more Dungeon, I’m afraid. It’s nice to have everything on one level.
  • I’ve resumed writing work on a regular basis. This morning I finished the second editing pass through the last volume of my eight-volume Bible study series. One more quick read-through in a Kindle format then I publish. Then I need to decide on which of about five writing projects to do next. This week I replaced my ancient wireless keyboard, so typing should be easier.
  • Change of addresses are slowly being accomplished.
  • The refrigerator is slowly getting filled, as each shopping trip we buy an item or two that was left behind in the move. I haven’t felt much like cooking, but have prepared a few things.
  • Lynda and I have found time to walk a short way several days this past week. Maybe over time we can do more before summer heat and humidity move in.
  • We are slowly getting plugged in at church.
  • We’ve met three of the four neighbors that border our house. The fourth one always has vehicles in the driveway but never seems to be outside when we are.
  • I’ve been able to get in some good reading time, as well as resume correspondence.

That’s enough for now. I’ll give another update in a couple of weeks.

Bible study, book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: Genesis in Space and Time

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A good read, solid biblical scholarship. I’m glad I read it.

I’ll call this the Disappearing Book. I remembered having bought Francis A. Schaffer’s Genesis in Space and Time many years ago, sticking it on the shelf, and waiting for it to pop to the top of my reading list. It popped up a couple of years ago, and…I couldn’t find it.

I was sure we hadn’t gotten rid of it in a book purge, but it was nowhere on my Bible study shelf. Ah well, I thought. I picked another book that I had on the Biblical book of Genesis, read about half of it and gave up and donated the book. It appears I never reviewed it on the blog.

Ah, but then, when I was packing books to move to Texas, I found it! Right where I thought it should be. I put it at the top of the current reading pile. That was in early December. We got to Texas in February, and early this month I was ready to read it and…couldn’t find it! What was going on with this book? I knew where all the books were from our partial move in December, so I went through my bookshelves book by book. I finally found it, and realized the fact that the text on the spine not quite matching the book title was what threw me off this whole time.

I finished the book on Saturday. While it not being quite what I thought it would be, I have to say it was enjoyable and well worth reading. Schaffer didn’t get into a lot of details on items long debated by scholars, such as: old earth vs. young earth, were Adam and Eve real people, did the flood really happen, or the tower of Babel. He stated positions on these, summarized what we can know from secular scholarship, and didn’t get into the two sides of the debates.

If you’re looking for a book that will summarize the evidence for an old earth and compare that to why many Bible scholars believe in a young earth, this is not your book. Look elsewhere. But if you want a well-reasoned discussion of what Genesis stated in chapters 1-11, giving the implications of those chapters for humanity, by all means seek out this short book (160 paperback pages) and read it. Here’s an example of the type of discussion you’ll find in it.

As I said in regard to the use of the Hebrew word day in Genesis 1, it is not that we have to accept the concept of the long periods of time modern science postulates, but rather that there are really no clearly defined terms upon which at this time to base a final debate.

Thus, the answers to the questions I ask in each book review: I give this a solid 4-stars, with no temptation to go higher. It’s unlikely I will ever read it again. It is not a keeper, but will be donated after I pull a few more quotes from it.

poetry

Thinking About Lyrics

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I used to sing this song as I walked on my noon hours while still working, and worked on the changes in the lyrics as I walked and sang.

Quite a few years ago, I came to associate Roger Whittaker’s song “The Last Farewell” with the West Indies. Since my visit to St. Lucia last November, I’ve been associating it with my ancestors’ homeland.

Here’s a link to the song, after which I’ll paste in changes I made to the lyrics (which I not so humbly think are an improvement), along with a fourth verse that I wrote. I stumbled on the paper I wrote them on today. I hope the changes to the lyrics are enough that this doesn’t violate copyright. Unfortunately, WordPress is not letting get the spacing I want between stanzas.

The Last Farewell
A ship lies rigged and ready in the harbor
Tomorrow for old England she sails,
far away from you land of endless sunshine
to my homeland with its rainy skies and gales.
And I must be aboard that ship tomorrow,
though my heart breaks as we come to this farewell.
For you are beautiful
and I have loved you dearly
more dearly than the spoken word can tell.
[repeat refrain]
I hear that there’s a wicked war a blazing,
And the taste of war I know so very well.
Even now I see the foreign flags a-raising.
Our guns are aimed as we sail into hell.
I have no fear of death, it holds no sorrow,
yet how bitter do I find this last farewell.
For you are beautiful
and I have loved you dearly
more dearly than the spoken word can tell.
[repeat]
Though death and darkness gather all about me,
and my ship be torn apart upon the sea,
I shall smell again the fragrance of these islands
in the heaving wave that brought me once to thee.
Or should I return safe home again to England,
I’ll have memories undimmed by this farewell.
For you are beautiful
and I have loved you dearly
more dearly than the spoken word can tell.
[repeat]
My darling it’s been decades since we parted.
I pray the years have kept you safe and well.
I never could return to what we started
once my life became a clanging carousel.
But daily there are scenes that I still borrow
from a treasure buried deep at our farewell.
For you are beautiful
and I have loved you dearly
more dearly than the spoken word can tell.
[repeat]
Yes, you are beautiful,
and I still love you dearly,
more dearly than the spoken work can tell.
book reviews, C.S. Lewis, poetry

Book Review: “The Allegory of Love”

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Not sure I will finish this.

One of my goals is to read all of C.S. Lewis’s works: books, magazine articles, and misc. stuff. I’d like to do this more or less in order written, the same as I’m doing to the works of Thomas Carlyle. Except prior to deciding to read them in order, I read The Screwtape Letters back in 1975 when I hardly knew who he was. Then I read several of his later works.

Then I decided to start at the beginning of his adult writing career. Except I decide to skip his first two early poetry books, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926). That got me to Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), which I read a few years ago. Next in line is his 1936 academic treatise The Allegory of Love. Written while he was building his academic career as an Oxford don and tutor, it is considered a masterpiece.

I approached it with trepidation, however, since I am far from a scholar. Would Lewis be speaking to me at all? Would I understand him. Let me answer that by inserting a quote from the second chapter.

It is true, as I said before, that the Psychomachia is not a good poem: if it were indeed the result of some purely unpoetic purpose it could hardly be worse. But there are many ways in which poetry can go wrong and an impurity in the intention is only one of them. The Psychomachia fails, partly because Prudentius is naturally a lyrical and reflective poet—that is some fine, cloudy grandeur in the Hamartigenia—to whom the epic manner comes with difficulty, and partly for a deeper reason.

I have no idea who Prudentius is, never heard of him until reading this section, never heard of the two poems mentioned, so obviously can’t understand what Lewis is talking about.

At this point, 70 pages into this 360-page book, I don’t expect to finish this. I’d like to get 1/3 of the way in before I decide to quit. That will take me four or five days to get to that point at the rate I’m reading it.

My preliminary conclusion: unless you can get this book for 50¢ as I did at a garage sale/thrift store, or unless you are a dedicated C.S. Lewis scholar, don’t waste your money and time on this.

I’ll come back with final conclusions when I either finish or abandon it.

miscellaneous, moving

New Venue, Old Routines

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We are in our new house in Lake Jackson, TX. Many boxes are unpacked and broken down, but many more are pushed against walls, waiting their turn.  We haven’t found a few things, though every day, as a new box gets opened, we find something we’d been looking for and say, “Oh, that’s where that was.”

We still have no inside fridge, relying only on the old fridge we brought from Arkansas and set up in the garage. I had many other things to do so didn’t rush the refrigerator. But the estate sale at our house was last weekend netted what I hoped we would, so now we can go buy the fridge. Today I’ll visit a couple of places, and hopefully we will buy it and have it installed tomorrow.

Today is the first day for me to work in my office. It’s not fully set up, but it’s functional. I placed a few stock trades this morning and here I am writing a blog post. I’ll likely cut this short to see what more I can set up. It’s about time to take a look at income taxes, I have filing to do, and must find a few things yet.

So I’ll end this a little short. Time to get to my other work. Still thinking of a name for my office. “The Dungeon” won’t do anymore.

Decumulation, miscellaneous

Driving Tomorrow

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Edit on Feb 16. Well, I never got this done in a timely manner. I’ll post it now for what it’s worth.

I’m actually writing this Tuesday morning, February 3 and  scheduling it to  post on Friday Feb. 6th. On Friday I get the U-Hau; in the morning, the loaders load it in the afternoon, and on Saturday we drive. The following week, the estate sale people come in and whatever we leave behind will be sold the 13th-14th. The house should go on the market after that.

I’ll add an update on several days this week, at least until our internet is cut off, probably Thursday afternoon. I don’t yet have internet at the new house (investigating options), so I’m not sure when I’ll post again unless I write another one for posting during the dark time.

The Dungeon is all packed except for the modem, signal booster, and two mostly packed but not yet sealed boxes, waiting to see if I have any more small items to go in the top.

Tuesday, Feb 3. I woke at 3:45 a.m. and never got back to sleep. I read in the recliner for a while, in the last of the magazines I want to read and put in recycling before we leave. Then I tried to sleep, but couldn’t relax due to the massive amount of work yet to do. So I went out to the garage and worked on that. I had already packed my tools, but the box was too big. I got them re-packed in a properly sized box, boxed up the small amount of hardware I’m taking, pulled some shelf units out to the middle of the garage that I hope will fit in the truck, then went back in the house. I decided I won’t bring my drill, only the drill bits. I don’t know whether I’ll have to do any drilling. If I do, I will get a modern, cordless, chuck-less drill and let someone buy this old one.

Only three days left to pack a lot of stuff.

books, Decumulation, family

A Week and a Day

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The view this morning from my computer desk in The Dungeon. The rest of the house looks more or less the same, probably a little worse.

That’s all we have left at our current home. Just a week and a day. Then we move to Texas.

The whole house is discombobulated now, with packed boxes, half-packed boxes, packing materials, sorted and unsorted stuff strewn everywhere. If you’ve moved anytime recently, you get it. We haven’t moved since 2002. If you’ve downsized, you get it. We up-sized in 2002 and remained in accumulation mode, rather than decumulation.

Ah, well, decumulation began in 2020, when I decided I’d had my dad’s old tools for 22 years, had done nothing with them, and that other people needed them more than I did. I found lots of buyers on Facebook Marketplace. Before long, my garage looked better. With a little help from our son on one of his trips here, we even got to the point where we could get one car in.

Then I tackled the books, and between selling and donating them, we got rid of a couple of thousand. Before long, I moved on to paper items, digitizing my genealogy files and recycling the paper. Then on to writing files, making sure I had digital copies and back-ups, and again recycling the paper. All told, I was able to get rid of about 200 3-ring binders. The last 50 will go in our estate sale, each with a few tab dividers and sheet protectors in it.

I’m not sure whether I’ll get to post again from this side of the Red River, though I’ll try. If not, I’ll be back at it at some point. Y’all be good in the meantime.

 

family, letters

One Special Project Completed

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The box of Wayne’s letters written during World War 2.

My sleeping rhythms have been off lately. If I wake up at or near 3 a.m., I can’t get back to sleep. I’m restless lying in bed. After a half hour of lying there awake, I generally get up and try to sleep sitting in my easy chair. That will work maybe one day out of three. Sometimes I read for an hour then am tired enough to sleep for an hour. Other times I just recline, maybe dozing a little but mostly trying to still my racing mind.

Monday-Tuesday night and Tuesday-Wednesday night was different. Oh, the waking up at an importune time for getting back to sleep happened. But after an hour or so passed, putting me in the 4 o’clock a.m. hour, I decided why the heck am I trying. I got up, got dressed, took my computer to The Dungeon and decided to begin my day. I worked on the letters, and in those two days was able to finish the transcribing work. I also was able to go back and correct one letter I realized I hadn’t completed.

The rest of the work consists of putting the letters into one document file, formatting it, sorting through photos of that era and adding them to the file, then computing publishing tasks. Proofreading will be included at some point.

Unfortunately, all that will have to wait until our move from Arkansas to Texas, plus finding the energy to set up the new house. When I get the book done—perhaps I should say IF I ever get it done—we’ll have to see.

 

family, moving

The Time Is Getting Closer

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The mess is real. Oh dear me.

We move from NW Arkansas to Lake Jackson, TX either Jan 31 or Feb 7. Or maybe a day either side of that.

Where there once was a little organization there is now chaos. Where there was once order that is now…something, I suppose disorder is a good enough word.

But where there used to be areas jammed with stuff, there is now much less stuff. It may all be in disarray, but a lot of stuff is gone. Some was taken on to Lake Jackson before Christmas. So has been tossed out. Paper and cardboard has been recycled. One refrigerator was emptied and moved, the other is much reduced in contents at we consume what was in it. I wonder why we ever bought a 3-lb bag of frozen blueberries. They will be fully consumed by tomorrow. I took a package of what I can only call mystery meat out of the freezer last night. We’ll see shortly if its thawed enough to know what it is, and if we’ll be having it for supper tonight. The pantry is bordering on empty now, although there’s enough canned goods left to give us some interesting meals the rest of the way.

I’m not sure whether I’ll find the time to post again this side of the move, but maybe next Monday.

Bible study, expatriate life, family, Genealogy, self-publishing, The Forest Throne

Writing Hopes for 2026

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Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.

Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.

But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.

  • Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
  • Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
  • Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal  with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
  • The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
  • At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
  • One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.

There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.

Author | Engineer