Every year at Christmas for the last 20 years, Mom and Dad, and later Mom, had a big sandwich, called a Ring Leader, made for us by Publix deli, which would be our staple diet when there was no meal, like Christmas dinner, planned. We always got a big kick out of having the big…

Now that Mom and Dad are both gone, it seems very likely that Nicole and I will not be returning to Florida. We have nothing against it, really; it’s just that this state, and particularly this part of the state, doesn’t mesh with our styles. Originally developed by ITT Community Development Corporation, Palm Coast was…

Please join me in celebrating the life of our mother, Sarah Jo Barron, who died early this afternoon at a hospice facility in Palm Coast, Florida. She was 74. The Episcopal religious experience was very significant to Sarah Jo, as it was to Joe, her husband who died in 2005, so Nicole suggested the title…

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…

Okay, when Amber created “Fugly Photo Friday,” the alliteration made sense. But I have a few really ugly photos of myself, and it’s Saturday today, so we’ll all have to accept that it’s Sugly Soto Saturday. Nn-K? Anyway, here is the first photo, made during the heyday of the polyester revolution, about 1975 or so….

Life is inherently risky, and you can’t live without enduring some risk, no matter how careful you are. I tend to be fairly fearless about my adventures, since I am a believer in the maxim, “Go out on a limb; that’s where the fruit is.” But once in a while, I go too far, as…

Albert  Camus was the perfect mixture of the CROW and the COW —>  CAW-MOO! What soars yet feeds on hay? Who troops across Algeria within black feathers … behooved … behorned? A beak, a swishing tail… Udder drips milk continuously  on those walking below, but we young are actually fed directly, beak to beak. It’s…

The Spot by PIKESPEAK I have a flying feeling a turn a phrase a constant, unsettling sense of rolling, as if I have done something terribly wrong with my stick. Inside a spiral, a fat man awaits he strokes a cat, yet it does not purr it simply glares at me as if I had…

I was once watching a news story about a train that had derailed and dumped some its product, benzene, into a local river. The spill had prompted an evacuation, and the media, eager to garner ratings and feel self-important instead of informative, was interviewing not scientists or public health officials, but a housewife. She had…

For many years now I, like a lot of liberals, have recognized the importance of changing America’s energy policy, particularly with respect to weening ourselves from the teet of corrupt, greedy, dangerous nations that sell us oil, like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. In the last few years there had been a surge in American ethanol…

At the party yesterday, Ann and her long-time best friend Mary shared a great story about me and Mary’s daughter Julie. At the time this took place, in about 2002, July was a somewhat naive teenager. I had been talking about my vegetarianism. Julie: “How do you know if you’re a vegetarian?” Me: “There’s a…

We’ve all got people around us who we feel are special, and one of them is Ann Kelley, who I have known since 1997. Abby and I feel that she is one of our favorite friends, and today we were privileged to spend the day with her and hers. She lives in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with…

This weekend was Abby’s father Hershel’s 86th birthday. The family had a party for him at the home of Abby’s sister Gail in Ryan, Oklahoma, and everyone had fun. Gail’s family has two horses, Abe and Frank, and many of the guests took turns riding them. Just as Abby got aboard and started around the…

I saw a billboard today with a picture of an insanely hot but obviously unhappy teenage girl on it. Under her there was a phone number and this phrase: “You had plans. A baby wasn’t one of them.” I have news for them: her plans were to wish she was still in high school, fart…

I don’t know if any of my readers are NFL fans. I don’t watch much professional football these days, mostly because I see so much sports in my daily work life. But when I was growing up, dad had the TV set to CBS Sports most Sundays, and sometimes we saw the Minnesota Vikings play,…

We are saddened to learn this afternoon that my sister Nicole’s Beagledor, Griffin, has passed away. He was a great dog who we all liked, and we will all miss him.

Most of you know that my wife Abby and her co-workers in the cash reports section at Pre-Paid Legal Services here in Ada had for some time now been working in a converted supply closet, since the Sarbanes-Oxley statute required the sensitive documents they handled to remain in a secure area. Recently, however, their department…

When I was a kid, we had to use our imaginations. I know. What? How? But we did, and one of the things we did was play “Star Trek.” Rusty Cook from across the street and I loved the original Star Trek, and we got together to play it all the time. Sometimes we would…

Sub-heading: Blinkered Philistine Pig Ignorance When I was about 13, I was trying to show off by convincing the kids around me (I won’t call them friends, since when I was 13 I had only about three friends) that I was an intellectual powerhouse. (As the tests of time have revealed, even if I had…