I own a disproportionate number of war movies. Furthermore, I watch them more than any other genre. I love war movies, and the more realistic and historically accurate they are, the more I like them. I guess my dad’s love of war movies played an important part in imparting this preference. When I was growing…
Continue reading →Both Chihuahuas, Max and Sierra, have tenderness at their injection sites from yesterday’s rabies and DHLP-P vaccinations, and Max has been running a bit of a fever. As a result, he is very lethargic, and hurts all over. It does not, however, make him less cute, as this image of him cowering under one of…
Continue reading →This item replaces several entries made during my wife Abby’s life-threatening battle with pneumonia. May 11, 2008: Abby is Seriously Ill Update, Sunday night: Abby is still seriously ill, but she is better. They are bombarding her with a phalanx of medications and treatments. There is no timetable as of yet, but I am okay letting…
Continue reading →* Brady Bunch father Mike Brady’s late wife and Carol Brady’s late husband killed each other in a bar fight. * Happy Days older brother Chuck Cunningham never made it back from Vietnam. * JR and JFK were shot by the same assassin. * “Skipper” Jonas Grumby and Willy Gilligan had a suspicious relationship on…
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.
Continue reading →I know this sounds strange to everyone around me who has been married, but I still find it amazing that I have a wife. Even writing it right now sounds strange. I spent so many years waiting and wishing, trying and failing, wanting to find someone to love. That she is an amazing woman is…
Continue reading →2005 and 2006 were drought years here, and the 12 acres where we and Dorothy live suffered in that time. The grass and trees thinned, the pond dried up, the garden became despondent and morose. But the last two years have seen wonderful spring and summer rains, and the property is as green as we…
Continue reading →While watching “Training Day” this week, I kept trying to figure out of whom one of the actors, Ethan Hawke, reminded me. When I saw Wil C. Fry at the state softball tournament in Oklahoma City Wednesday, it dawned on me that it was him, and that I had been trying to figure out of…
Continue reading →When I was growing up, my mom worked for oral surgeon C. W. Littlefield. In the summer, he hired me to mop the floor, sterilize the instruments, take out the trash, develop x-rays, etc. At the same time, he kept an eye on what was going on inside my mouth, and even did some extractions…
Continue reading →In my journal, 1995 was the year of quotations. I was reading a lot of philosophy, and it was an important influence on my life. At the time I was flying a lot, too, which was the other influence. “No one is better than you, but you are no better than anyone else until you…
Continue reading →My NASA flight controller friend Michelle sent me some pictures of herself, since I asked her to, since her hair is totally a different color now than what it was when she and I were close in 1997. Knowing that she is a flight controller, and that this image was made while she was actually…
Continue reading →Despite taking precautions against frost damage, it appears that Sunday night’s temperatures in an isolated area of the state, here in southeast Oklahoma, dove into hard freeze, killing the tomatoes and bell peppers I planted last week. Such are the fates. I bought new, more mature plants today and put them into the garden right…
Continue reading →In the process of cleaning the old house in Ryan, then hauling home some of the relics, Abby and I are now suffering from congestion in our throats and sinuses. Initially I was attributing it to mowing after we got home yesterday, since I drove the riding mower through some areas of last year’s poison…
Continue reading →Abby and I went to Abby’s hometown of Ryan, Oklahoma this weekend, to help clean and prepare her father’s house for sale in three weeks. Abby literally grew up in this house, in a town where everyone knows everyone else. She didn’t even have to cross a street to walk to school in the morning…
Continue reading →As athletic as some of my adventures tend to be (like hiking and snow skiing, for example), I am a notoriously poor competitive athlete. I don’t have champion hand/eye/foot coordination, I’m not very strong in the upper body, and I am dripping in nurdness. Despite this, I have tried to play sports all my life,…
Continue reading →It was a stressful day for all of us, but for me it went easier because I spent much of the afternoon working outdoors. By the end of the day, with Abby and me home from work, I spent a few minutes unwinding by prowling around the patch, finding kibble to throw to the goats,…
Continue reading →As my readers know, I got Abby a lava lamp as one of her “smaller” birthday gifts (the larger being a heated, massaging recliner that is back-ordered, pun intended.) There were several bonus items associated with this gift… Unlike the lava lamps in the time of Pink Floyd (when I was a kid), this one…
Continue reading →I got tagged by someone to post eight things about himself that no one, or at least very few people, knew about him. One of his was that he witnessed the murder of a police officer, which is tragic and wicked cool at the same time. So, here are eight things you might not know…
Continue reading →A very good friend of mine at my office was fired yesterday, and in his swirling miasma of rage and hurt, he lashed out at me, in the form of a nasty voicemail on my cell phone. In the middle of listening to it, he dropped the F bomb, and I deleted it at that…
Continue reading →Abby and Dorothy (our defacto Mother-in-law) are in Baltimore this week with Abby’s daughter Chele, who in Baltimore is known by her actual first name of Dawna. (Pay attention now – this will be on the test.) While they are gone, I am increasing my chore slate by about five fold, since I can tear…
Continue reading →For reasons that are not at all clear to me, I was singing Isaac Hayes’ brilliant Theme from Shaft as I was preparing lunch in my kitchen just now. I was belting it out… “Who’s the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft!) You’re damn right.” “Who is the man…
Continue reading →When R.E. and I were in college, he and I drove to Oklahoma City so I could buy cheap tires for my 1973 VW Beetle. While we waited, we walked up the snowy street to grab a bite, and on the walk back, Robert photographed a rusty spring sitting in the snow. The next day…
Continue reading →Someone came into my office today to get away from the spitstorm into which an office environment can devolve. My office, which was once the darkroom at my newspaper, is mine alone, and if I want, I can close three steel fire doors between me and the newsroom. He came in and looked at all…
Continue reading →This project got pushed back a couple of weeks by miserable weather or job conflicts, but today I finally got to town in the truck and bought fruit trees! I got two Early Elberta peaches and two regular Elberta peaches, two dwarf Santa Rosa plums, two Early Golden apricots, two Bing cherries (I had to,…
Continue reading →In my head and in my iTunes I am composing a new playlist, one I hope will end up being a successful road CD. I have to admit, as much as I loved making tapes when I was 28, it has become exponentially harder to make a really good road CD. If I may quote…
Continue reading →Abby worked late, and has been asleep since I got home from working basketball. She looks really pretty asleep in her recliner, covered by a lap full of Chihuahuas. I read on Wil Fry’s blog the phrase “just another random blog,” and I felt that I wanted to reiterate that “blog” isn’t a word at…
Continue reading →I got all frisky with the chores today. My first task was taking the power strips that were on the floor behind my computer desk and mounting them on the back of the desk itself. It sounded like a pretty straightforward chore, but it can-of-wormed on me pretty quickly. I decided, for example, that while…
Continue reading →For those of you who thought my burritos looked like someone had just thrown up on them, here is a lunch that does not mimic the appearance of yak, blown chow, puke, bark, hack, chuck, ralph, hurl, gut squirt, bleck, pavement pizza, spew, sack flak, chum, meal plop, blevis, gack, gurf, shaq-fu, or other types…
Continue reading →Years ago one of our friends had tennis elbow, which in medical terms is called lateral epicondylitis. His doctor gave him an injection of cortisone, a long-acting glucocorticoid. Afterwards, he urgently and repeatedly told me, “Richard, don’t ever let them to that to you.” He said it was very painful and didn’t do any good….
Continue reading →I swear to you, I am not making this up. When my sister and I were teenagers, about 1978, we lived in Lawton, Oklahoma. She and I kept a notebook, which we just called “The Book,” full of all the funny stuff we thought up, all the gossip we heard, all the complaints we had…
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