Abby and I spent yesterday together, mostly cleaning on the house, then in the evening making the dreaded Wal Mart run, followed by dinner out. In the middle of the day, though, we took time out to shoot her new Walther PK-380, a pistol which might be the perfect handgun for my wife. She has…
Continue reading →I texted the word “Sunshine!” to three people yesterday, because the sun was out in a perfect blue sky, the temps were up in the 60s, and the snow was finally melting.
Continue reading →With the cold settling in around us, Abby and I make sure to put Abby’s home made sweaters on our dogs. Both dogs like the sweaters, since when we get the sweaters out, they come over to us and let us put them on. If they don’t like something, like Frontline, the oil we put…
Continue reading →I don’t normally play hooky on days when it’s snowy out, but with Abby’s office closed and absolutely everything canceled at my office, I decided to stay home. As always, like in the other three seasons, I went outside to make pictures. After the fierce blowing and drifting yesterday, today it was sunny and calm,…
Continue reading →Despite a nation-crippling winter storm roaring through overnight, Abby and I both went to work this morning. I shot some images for the daily, plus a bit of video for the paper’s web site. I spent the rest of the morning helping put out the paper on a skeleton crew, and shot a few more…
Continue reading →As my wife languishes in the piles of snow in Baltimore while she visits her daughter and son-in-law who had a new baby last week, I am taking advantage of the sunshine and 72º temps to catch up on yard work. Two days ago I fired up the chain saw to carve more out of…
Continue reading →September 29, 2012: This entry was updated to reflect new Google imagery since first publication. Here are most of the places I lived as viewed through Google Maps. I thought this might be one of those fun things that would catch fire on Facebook and everyone would do it, possibly to raise awareness by irrelevantly…
Continue reading →After a quiet day with my wife at home, I finally ventured out into the evening because when I opened the door, the light was beautiful. I took my Minolta (the DiMage 7i that has become my grab cam and my blog cam), and walked around the patch. I grabbed a handful of photinia branches…
Continue reading →Anyone who has ever lived in the country knows that it can be a little wild at times, and by wild I mean that the wildness of nature is always close. When Matthew and Michelle were on their way to visit this weekend, I warned them that a handsome green frog had appeared in my…
Continue reading →Our longtime friend Michelle Bullard and her new beau Matthew White came to see us from their home in Houston on a weekend whirlwind visit to Oklahoma. They arrived Friday afternoon in time for Matthew to hitch along with me to shoot my Friday night football, since he is, as I am, a news and…
Continue reading →Tonight I worked at a chore that I routinely put off because it is so unpleasant, and unpleasant on several levels. The chore was the removal of about 20 volunteer trees that had grown up in the middle of Abby’s Rose-of-Sharon bushes that line our driveway. I find this unpleasant because I have to kill…
Continue reading →As I rolled down the news feed on Facebook this afternoon, I came across a post by my longtime friend Pam, who spoke of the “magnificence and beauty” of watching nature on this late-summer afternoon. She is in northern Arkansas hill country, so the days and the scenery are a little different than my slice of…
Continue reading →…except without the tobacco. Abby and I went out for dinner tonight, to Abby’s favorite Mexican restaurant, Polo’s in downtown Ada. It’s always great to take my wife out, and in addition to a great meal, I bought her a margarita, which took the edge off a difficult week for her. Our conversation led hither…
Continue reading →Today started out most extraordinarily, and got better as it went along. The phone rang at 7:30 with my long-time photographer friend Robert Stinson telling me he was on his way down for the day. I hadn’t seen Robert since last year at Chele’s wedding. When he and I get together, creativity happens, usually at…
Continue reading →As many of my readers remember, three years ago I planted an orchard. A peach farmer told me that I needed to cull all the fruit from the trees for three years, which I have. Part of the reason I wanted to plant this small orchard was the fact that so many of the trees…
Continue reading →It is spring. In Oklahoma, spring can bring severe thunderstorms, warm periods, cold snaps, and wild wind. Today was something of a perfect spring day, and with Abby and her dog Sierra in Ryan visiting her folks, I took to the pasture, to chew on some overdue yard work. I mostly mowed, but I also…
Continue reading →Abby has been talking about wanting a small automatic of her own for some time now. She’s had a .38 Special for a long time, but ammunition is scarce and expensive, so she doesn’t shoot it much. She doesn’t love the grips on it, and it kicks quite a bit, so she wanted something new…
Continue reading →This afternoon as I drove to a photo assignment, I had my stereo turned up with a Third Eye Blind CD in it. The song “Misfits” played and I remembered that tonight Abby and I were having Wil and Marline Fry down from Seminole for dinner at our favorite restaurant, Papa Gjorgio’s. They are moving…
Continue reading →Here is a true story of something that happened on our patch in the spring of 2006… With an imminent frost, I walked down to Dorothy’s house to get some old flower pots. The plan was to turn them upside down and put them on top of the tomato plants in our garden to keep…
Continue reading →Tonight was the last night for the cantaloupe vines in the garden. The vines are actually only one plant, since I was occupied caring for Abby when the seedlings were germinating, and I was unable to thin them and fertilize. The result, however, was that the one plant ended up making a decent number of…
Continue reading →My global fans might remember that last year I power washed the front of our house and the propane pig. It was very effective, and I fully intended to do the whole house, but it got cold, then rainy, then winter came, then summer came, and before I knew it, a year had gone by….
Continue reading →Background information: Dorothy Milligan was Abby’s mother-in-law for 23 years while Abby was married to Paul Milligan, the youngest of three brothers. He died in 1992. In spite of the fact that Dorothy is not technically related to us biologically (except that Abby’s daughter Chele is Dorothy’s granddaughter), we still regard her as our mother-in-law,…
Continue reading →When I was outside today, I could feel it: September. The air was different. It was as if the sun were struggling to be hot, but failing. By now the spiders are big, the pond is low, the baby rabbits have all grown up. Summer is ending.
Continue reading →As Gustav slowly churns to our east, the weather here has been breezy, cloudy, occasionally rainy, and a little mysterious-looking. As evening fell, I walked around outside and watched the sky change. Low clouds streaked by from northeast to southwest, and high clouds caught the last light, as in this image of one of the…
Continue reading →The garden is in mid-summer mode, yielding lots of peppers and tomatoes, but fewer cucumbers, which don’t tolerate the heat as well. I had planted a patch of cantaloupe, but only one of the seedlings survived, since I was busy taking care of Abby when they were sprouting. The plant that survived ended up sending…
Continue reading →Tomorrow is the one day of the year during which I am the only person working at our newspaper. I work literally from dawn to dusk. It is one of my busiest days of the year. It starts with covering the Fireball Classic 5k and 10k runs, goes all day in Wintersmith Park with the…
Continue reading →After taking Abby to the doctor for a check-up, she and I had a fairly down afternoon. It was hot out, and Abby was off her feed, so we napped, and I burned a few DVDs. As evening approached, however, I started feeling the need to be useful, physically active, and outdoors. I grabbed the limb…
Continue reading →Our attempts to explain why my cucumber wouldn’t shatter under the explosive force of the legendary M-80 July 4 firework bomb have been fruitful, as shown in this simple graph…
Continue reading →I didn’t expect to get a crop from my fruit trees this year, since they are brand new trees. But I also didn’t expect to get a ripe peach in May, all by itself on the branch of one tree. But, there it was tonight. I ate it.
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