The year’s Thanksgiving holiday was our time to celebrate Christmas, since the “kids” (Chele and Tom, and their son, our grandson Paul, who aren’t my kids, but in conversation are easier to call the kids) alternate which holiday they spend here and which they spend at home in Maryland. For our Thanksgiving/Christmas feast this time,…

For those who thought Abby and I were on vacation this week, which we planned to be, here is the news: we aren’t. Abby burst into fever Friday night, and just spent the last three days in the hospital. While she was there, she suffered a terrible fall in the middle of the night, landing…

Abby had nightmares and talked in her sleep all last night. This morning, her entire body was red and itchy, and her temperature was 102.3˚, so I decided to take her to the hospital. She was so weak, however, that I barely got her, through dragging and crawling, to the living room, where I called…

Abby’s recovery from her bout with MRSA continues at an achingly slow pace. I brought her a scrambled egg sandwich and coffee for breakfast. She had a rough night. Any time Abby has an infection, it flares her rheumatoid arthritis, so last night she was in a considerable amount of pain. We’re muddling through. I…

“Spare. Pithy. Lean. Concise.” ~Interiors Our first grandchild, Paul Thomas Reeves, was born January 16 to Abby’s daughter Chele and her husband Tom. Intense cold and snow envelope Oklahoma in February, including an all-time state record low of -31˚F in Nowata. In April, Robert Stinson and I travelled to Utah for a hiking and photography…

For the Christmas season it is our pleasure to entertain Abby’s daughter Chele, her husband Tom, and our grandson Paul. As many of my friends know, I have decided that my grandson should call me “that grimy chap with the ill-fitting trousers.” But since Paul is just an infant, we are simply working on getting…

Abby and I thought we heard a knock at the door. Three taps, not too loud. But we were in for the night, and here in the country we certainly never have company unannounced at eight at night. We supposed it could have been Dorothy with a recipe for thanksgiving, but actually we didn’t expect…

Welcome to Autumn 2011. It’s been a stunning year so far, both socially and weatherally. Weatherically? Climatologically! (Spell check says the last one is right.) 2011 is the year Abby and I became grandparents. Also this winter we had record-setting cold and snow. In April, Robert and I went to Utah for a hiking trip….

I’ve had a super-busy weekend, and I got tons of stuff done. Yet it seems like there is five times as much stuff remaining that I need to do. One of the tasks at hand was to get rid of the unusable spare mattresses in the storage shed, to make room for other unusable, spare…

One thing I have been trying to encourage my wife to do is walk the dogs with me at the track at Byng High School. We both have busy lives, and sometimes she is just too tired after work to do it. So I straddle the line between encouragement and nagging, and sometimes I am…

Dorothy, our de facto mother-in-law on the other end of the pasture, called tonight to say that Petey, her dog, was missing. Abby and I saw Petey yesterday evening when he came up to the yard and wanted to come in and play with our dogs, but he ran off. We didn’t think much of…

The past few days Abby and I have been attempting, in fits and starts, to install a new bed frame and rearrange our bed room. The trouble is that we have these giant days and come home exhausted, leaving us enough time and energy to care for more important affairs like mowing the acreage, which…

I have the day off today. I originally planned to get a whole lot of little things done today, and so far it’s coming along nicely. Mostly what I have accomplished is editing tons of images from our Utah trip two weeks ago. They have not left me wanting. I’m still a week or two…

“It’s empty now, no friendly face and nothing lives within, I look around and I find no trace to tell me what has been… “So far I’ve come to find there’s no one here, no life I fear, I came for nothing, they have gone… And nobody’s Home…” ~Kansas That’s how it has felt the last few…

Looking at a forecast, I decided that tonight was the night I needed to burn the brush pile next to the garden. Calm and cool, and following yesterday’s little bit of rain, the night was good for burning. By Thursday, the Weather Service expects fire danger to be high, and we are verging on a…

Abby and I originally planned to go to her hometown of Ryan, Oklahoma, today, but a migraine woke her up in the middle of the night. I gave her her Maxalt-MLT prescription, which cured her headache, but, as always, rendered her overwhelmingly drowsy for the entire remainder of the day. She slept in for a…