In the late 1980s they held a little parade in my hometown. Looking back now I wonder how they shutdown the only farm to market road through town to have it, but it was (and is) a small town. At one of those parades I saw a car that I immediately loved and wanted. There was no other place to drive this kind of vehicle other than the main highway or dirt roads and neither of those were going to do the car or the driver very much good. But, I kept wanting it, nonetheless.
Continue reading The Tale of The Count Car
Past Blog Regression
Today marks the thirteenth year since I first started throwing my thoughts, misspellings, and run-on sentences out into the digital world. I have to update several pieces of the “about me” section on here, but before I did that I wanted to take a look back on all the versions that have been on the various scrapes I began, and abandoned, before.
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A Dilly of a Birthday
A Whingdingdilly, anyway. I have been off the posts now for too long, with several that need to be written to conclude some chapters of life, but when I realized that today is the anniversary of my very first foray into blogging I ditched all of those self-reflective essays in favor of something more fun, and a far more important anniversary: today is Bill Peet’s birthday!
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The Circus Ship
Recently a friend of mine posted they had dropped in on their child’s first grade class as the guest reader for the day. He read The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen. He mentioned it was one of their favorites so I hopped over to some used book sites to see if we could pick one up.
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My Mentor; My Friend
I’ve been sitting on this for over a month. Well, not sitting, more cobbling together thoughts and experiences from over 15 years of knowing, learning from, and working with Dr. Jim Westgate.
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Reading For Pleasure
In an effort to make good on the plans I had last year to make this a more active place on the internet and somehow manage to create shorter, more frequent posts I am sitting here looking at the 47 things I have written down to write about. This is the oldest one and one that keeps coming back to annoy me. The phrase “reading for pleasure.”
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The Ax forgets but the tree remembers
There is an African proverb (Zimbabwean if I can believe what I found online) that says “The ax forgets, but the tree remembers.”
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Scratch the Head of Ranch Security
Back in March (2021) Texas Monthly published a feature article about John R. Erickson, the creator and ongoing author of Hank the Cowdog. Almost any schoolkid can tell you that Hank is the head of ranch security and Drover has a pain in his leg. But there is more to Hank’s (and Erickson’s) story. Much more.
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Live and Let Dry
My grandmother used to say “Nobody likes to do laundry, but everybody likes clean clothes.” I remember helping her wash and hang laundry when I stayed with them. These are just two reasons I loved Patric Richardson’s book Laundry Love (written with Karin B. Miller).
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Digital Robinson Crusoe
Two weeks ago, I unplugged. It wasn’t just zoom fatigue or general email nuisances but just an utter and complete doneness with screens. I also wanted to take stock of the amount of time I was wasting on social media too and the best way to break it is cold turkey. I took the social media apps off my phone, I took my email apps off my phone, and I took a week off of work.
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