Today Ada Sunrise Rotary presented the 2023-24 President appreciation plaque to me, which was an honor to receive. And while I did serve as Sunrise Rotary’s President for a year, it was fun and productive, and, for anyone familiar with civic clubs, another chapter of, as the Rotary International motto says, “Service Above Self.” I…
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I visited a friend on the local college campus recently. When we stepped out into the cool late-morning air, I was struck by the memories it summoned. Many college memories center around the start of college, the start of semesters, the start of the school year. Those are often associated with the excitement of the…
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I just finished watching both parts of the newest motion picture iteration of Dune, and I had fun. I got to thinking about the spice melange, what it was and how it worked. Sidebar: if you read the Frank Herberts Dune books in high school, please go somewhere else. I’m not up for a “but…
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There is a song by This Mortal Coil called A Single Wish. The lyrics to it are difficult to hear, and neither the liner notes nor the internet seem willing to define them. So I decided to write them down as I hear them. I wonder, alone here The sound The living now The…
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Sometimes flying on a Saturday is the most fun you can have, and sometimes factors as fickle as the wind and the weather bring that all to a halt. Today was one of those Saturdays. I was invited by General Aviation Modifications Inc. President and fellow pilot Tim Roehl to be the photographer for a…
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In 1996, at a meeting of the local chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association, a fellow pilot, one of the guys I learned to fly with, told us he departed Guthrie, Oklahoma to fly to Ada under low ceilings and visibility, without any charts. He tried to “scud run” under the clouds until he passed…
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Readers probably know now that tornadoes struck across Oklahoma Saturday night into Sunday morning. I listened to non-stop amateur radio and public safety communications, and when tornado warnings were issued for my location, I brought Hawken, my Irish wolfhound, inside, and sheltered in the center of the house with him and my Chihuahua, Summer. Those…
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As we all wind down from the excitement of Monday’s total solar eclipse, I thought I would weigh in on what worked, what didn’t, and what was fun and what wasn’t. For more than a year, Tulsa photographer Robert Stinson and I planned to travel to the Moon. The drive from Ada to Moon, Oklahoma,…
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I just returned from a trip to Arkansas, the central purpose of which was to attend a memorial dinner for Pam Hudspeth, a fellow journalist and one-time girlfriend who died in November at age 58. I will have much more to say about her, especially the things she wrote, later. I made a few notes…
Continue reading →I recently wanted to switch off, tune out, and relax, so I picked one of the least threatening movies in my DVD collection, Airport. As it happens, I own the “Terminal Pack” of airplane disaster movies, a box set of four of these films that also includes Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde… Airport ’79,…
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My wife Abby and I had only been married a couple of months when, for Christmas 2004, her daughter Chele bought us a subscription to Netflix. At the time, the Netflix model was to send you three movies on DVD to watch at your leisure, then each time you returned a movie in the prepaid…
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I got my pilot’s license Saturday, May 1, 1993. Every pilot remembers seminal moments in their flying careers, like their first solo, their first long cross-country, or the first time they carried passengers. The day of my check ride was no different. Fellow student Dub and I were both getting our check rides that day….
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Mackenzee Crosby invited me to have lunch with her at The Red Cup, a vegan coffee house and restaurant in Oklahoma City. She is hoping to move to New York soon, and despite her repeated invitations, I’d never managed to make it up there, so this was her last chance to share the experience with…
Continue reading →Seven Social Sins is a list by Frederick Lewis Donaldson that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi published in his weekly newspaper Young India on October 22, 1925. Later he gave this same list to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, written on a piece of paper on their final day together shortly before his assassination. The Seven Sins are:…
Continue reading →Engines: most science fiction depicts spacecraft with their engines running the entire time they are shown on-screen; Prometheus, The Martian, Star Wars, Star Trek, and on and on. This is probably because the graphic designers were in love with the deep blue glow they created in the engine exhaust. Why this is a problem: aside…
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Unsafe by Richard R. Barron What do you keep from me to spare me? The countless ways to say goodbye? The action that is filled with light and darkness? My selfish little tragedies? The moment of darkness between us? Remorse? Chaos? Vulgarity? Clarity? Rage? A beautiful moment of tenderness that I ruined by merely witnessing…
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Chris Eckler, Ada City School’s STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) educator, invited me to fly with him in the Cessna 172 we both rent, the one that lives at our home airport in Ada, to Weatherford, Oklahoma, to deliver some Christmas gifts for children in need, and pick up some for kids back…
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Pamela Michelle Young Hudspeth has died. She was 58. I was unmarried and lonely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In May 1992, I started dating Pam, and, quite honestly, she was incredibly beautiful. She was so beautiful, in fact, that it blinded me to more realistic considerations, such as the fact that she…
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“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil How am I happy? It’s an interesting puzzle, isn’t it? I am a happy person, and I expect I will…
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Here are a few images of my life this week on this patch of green in Byng, Oklahoma.
Continue reading →My sister reported watching and hating Reds, maybe my all-time favorite movie. It got me thinking about the best movies I have seen, and the movies I have seen that were highly touted, yet I didn’t like. Here are some the Academy Awards for Best Picture, ones that I have seen, and ones I thought…
Continue reading →Here my vision for my service as 2023-24 Ada Sunrise Rotary President. This year’s Rotary International theme is “Create Hope in the World.” My keyword: fun. My first goal for Rotary is to make it more popular and appealing to those who might not have considered joining. Rotary is a lot of fun, and many…
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Many of my readers will recall that I have been writing in a journal for most of my life, since September 1978. As I thought about this, I began to think about breaking it up into various periods, a kind of lifelong chronology of my writing. 1978 really was a different time. No internet. No…
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I recognize that I have never experienced grieving the death of a spouse before. My wife Abby died 18 months ago, and I am finding my second year of grieving her death to be harder than the first. I miss her more than ever. Losing her wasn’t as hard as watching her lose the fight….
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There is a joke I used to tell. Robert Oppenheimer and Erico Fermi are in the bunker at the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945. After the bomb goes off, they turn to each other, high-five, and Oppenheimer says, “fission accomplished!” I stopped telling that joke because so few people got it or…
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I was digging through a journal recently, and if I am completely honest, it was to find out when I had sex with someone that year. I didn’t find that, but I came across some extraordinary notes. May 11, 1998… “I’m tied of ice chest boyfriends.” ~Lisa, who was hitting on me at the time….
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Summer, my Chihuahua, has been off her feed for a few days. I was really worried for a while, since she wasn’t eating, and had a bad bout of diarrhea that required shampooing the carpet in my home office. The day I decided I would take her to the vet when I got home from…
Continue reading →Readers might recall that the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma, was hit by a severe thunderstorm in the predawn hours of July 11. We were fortunate that very few structures were damaged, but a huge number of trees, including some of the trees on the patch where I live, were damaged. The neighborhood is…
Continue reading →Readers of my newspaper and my social media friends know that Tuesday, July 11, 2023, a severe thunderstorm struck the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma. I don’t know if the storm was straight-line winds or a tornado, but it made a lot of noise, and did a fair amount of tree damage. Fortunately, only…
Continue reading →I am living in an uncomfortable paradox, and I am sure I am not alone. The issue: spiders, and more specifically, the paradox that spiders in my yard and garden are more than welcome, yet spiders in the house instantaneously and intensely trigger my fear response. I shared this with a neighbor, who said his…
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