I am in Florida. I originally came intending to help our mother, Sarah Jo Barron, in her recovery from vascular surgery last week. However, over the weekend, she apparently had a serious vascular episode, and it is now likely she will die, probably quite soon. She is resting comfortably sedated in hospice care, and is…

Wil and Marline Fry came to Byng for dinner tonight. As many of you might remember, Wil and I encountered each other frequently at sporting events that both our newspapers sent us to cover, and we frequently comment on each other’s blogs. Marline recently got a job in a faraway city, and Abby and I…

In the process of shopping around for a car loan this week, I had to break out my one and only loan officer joke. A frog goes into a bank wanting a loan. He approaches a loan officer named Patty Whack, and explains to that he has a trinket in his possession that he wants…

I shot another gopher tonight. I shot it with our very old bolt-action .22. Two years ago I shot one in this same fashion, and not long after that I stabbed one to death in the closest thing to hand-to-hand combat I have experienced. Tonight I was mowing the north pasture on the big John…

  We spent yesterday and today working like mules at Abby’s dad’s place in the country outside of Ryan, Oklahoma, trimming the yard with the weed whacker, cutting down dead branches from the trees, and hauling yard and other debris down to the brush pile. As I made one trip after another on the four-wheeler…

A couple of entries ago, Tom commented that he liked this image of Abby. I shot it early in our dating, in the spring of 2003, with my Nikon/Kodak DCS 720x, which rendered her green wool blazer as blue. She “doesn’t do blue,” so I fixed it with the “replace color” function in Photoshop. For…

For the several years that I have been gardening, I am always reminded of my father when I tend my tomato plants. He wasn’t a very good gardener, but in the first summer when I was raising tomatoes, 1996, he shared with me a tip: the little sprig of leaves that grows out of the…

The other day on the radio I heard a car dealer telling congress that his “constitutional rights” were being violated because the bankrupt car company whose cars he sold had terminated his franchise. Obviously this was another American hillbilly who has never read the constitution, but also consider this: every single time I have bought…

I won’t bore you with the insanely detailed minutia of my dream last night, but I will bore you with the high points: Charlie Sheen escaped in a Piper Navajo (the airplane). Michael Douglas and I decided to find him in his Gulfstream (the airplane). To take off, we flew clockwise circles in the grass….

After getting up and making coffee for Abby and myself, I sat here at my computer and waited for inspiration. What was I wanting to look up? Hmm. Oh, I remember: what does philharmonic mean? Is it a guy named Phil with a harmonica? Not really; when I was 12, I actually wanted to be…

“Tonight’s top story: Mars invades the world. But first, a word from our sponsor.” These words, spoken by me when I was 15, are at the start of one of the funniest tapes my friends, sister and I made as we grew up. It is the intro to “Invasion of the Polka-Dot People,” just one…