With a nice three-day Memorial Day weekend ahead of me, I was feeling very ambitious about working on the house this morning, continuing my project of cleaning and organizing. I wanted to make beans, but the kitchen was filthy. As I cleaned the kitchen, I knocked down once of the lights under the cabinets, which…
Continue reading →I had lunch in Ardmore yesterday with Abby’s daughter Chele and her husband Tom, who were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to look for a house, as they are moving there from Baltimore in July. It was great seeing them, and we all hope their move puts them on the north side of the metro…
Continue reading →“Don’t have strong opinions about things you don’t understand.” ~Bumper sticker “War isn’t about who’s right, but about who’s left.” ~Variously ascribed
Continue reading →Yes, I am still going through stuff, stuff and more stuff as I clean out the house. There certainly is a lot of scrap paper, everything from canceled checks from when my late wife Abby and her first husband ran Stuckey’s Restaurants in the 1970s, to spiral notebooks intended for a class or a project…
Continue reading →“I would rather have questions I can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~Richard Feynman “He who fears he will suffer already suffers because he fears.” ~Michele de Montaigne “The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.” ~Lao Tsu “Strive not to be a success, but to be of value.” ~Albert…
Continue reading →Sitting together on the floor… Me: What’s it like where you are? Abby: I like it. Me: Are you happy? Abby: I will be when you get here. It seems like only minutes until then.
Continue reading →Still Here by ATB I never knew life could be this way Life without you I never knew life could be this strange Like a sky that isn’t blue I know you’re still here I know you still care I know you follow me to places Only you and I would share You know…
Continue reading →In a season that seems covered in complexity, uncertainty, and sadness, I got a small piece of good news this week: the last freeze of the year apparently did not reach as far south as Byng, and my peach and plum trees appear to have abundant fruit on them.
Continue reading →Now is the time for Team Blackout to start planning for two solar eclipse events. An annular eclipse will pass across the United States October 14, 2023, and a total eclipse will pass across the United State on April 8, 2024 just two years from today. I plan to be in the path of both…
Continue reading →Abby’s daughter Chele left yesterday morning after spending much of the week helping me with the “great clean-out.” Abby was a collector, and collected a lot of stuff. Chele and I made a big dent in it, but there remains much to do. Today, for example, I bagged up and carted down to the next…
Continue reading →The Gunsmith’s Daughter, a poem in memory of Abby Shoffner Milligan Barron by Robert Stinson. The gunsmith’s daughter is gone. How and what we know of him by her love remains witness. By her we see the skilled days. By her we know a fixed bolt, a straight fence, a neighbor done right. We see…
Continue reading →Today would have been my wife Abby’s 72nd birthday. Since she died just ten days ago, I’ve had a ton of stuff to do, and another ton of stuff on my mind. I shared my thoughts about her birthday on Facebook, saying, “I promise I won’t be that guy who gets all nostalgic with every…
Continue reading →I’m sorry to report that my wife Abby is being transferred from nursing care to hospice care. For those not familiar with hospice care, it is a level of medical care intended to make the dying comfortable. As I tell friends and relatives this news, many seem shocked or surprised, but since I have witnessed…
Continue reading →Most of the people I’ve known over the years have had the habit of having a television on from the moment they get up or the moment they get home from work. My wife always does, but when asked why, she only ever said, “It’s background noise.” I find the chatter of television utterly distracting…
Continue reading →I spent the evening with my wife Abby at Ballard Nursing Center watching Super Bowl LVI. She and I have shared every Super Bowl since we’ve known each other. This one wasn’t very good, and the pageantry surrounding it was even worse. We turned to conversation. “I lost one of my travel rings Friday,” I…
Continue reading →“So you’re having to learn to live alone all over again.” ~Friend and Byng firefighter Kenny Vogt, December 2021. Yes, I am. After 17 glowing years of happy marriage, Abby and I find ourselves separated by her health, which restricts her to life in a nursing home. I see Abby every day (unless circumstance prevents…
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I had my first successful nap in 10 days. Despite being tired and needing to rest, when I had the Rona, lying down often resulted in a shift in my head and chest mucus, prompting yet another coughing fit, so napping was impossible, and sleeping at night was tough. Today, though, I balled up in…
Continue reading →Day 10, Monday, Jan. 24, 2022, final report: This is my last entry about this illness. Although I am still experiencing residual symptoms, especially nasal and chest congestion, I believe I am through it. It’s been days since I had any fever. I had a worse case than many of those around me, and there…
Continue reading →I read just today that Arches National Park will implement a temporary, pilot timed entry system “to help manage traffic and improve visitor experiences, from April 3 to October 3, 2022.” I wrote about this issue once before (link), but today I want to be a little more thoughtful. The National Park system is under…
Continue reading →I am a fan of several movies about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now and its companion piece Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, and even The Post. There are also some not-so-great movies about the Vietnam War: Born on the Fourth of July,…
Continue reading →“I’ve been downhearted, baby, ever since the day we met.” The song Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand is an excellent example of one of the dirtiest tricks the record industry played on us music-hungry fans: find an artist with a quirky, catchy song, have him or her record it…
Continue reading →Last year my wife Abby, at the urging of a friend, asked me to pick up some tuna steaks. I did, and placed them in the freezer, where they have been since then. Two nights ago I spotted them, and thawed a couple, then read about how to prepare them. Between the web and my…
Continue reading →I made time today to shoot a few of our firearms, including the NRA Special Edition Ruger Mark III 22/45 Lite I bought Abby for our 12th anniversary, my Ruger Mark III 22/45 Target pistol, and the Walther P22 I bought Abby for Christmas in 2009. I put about 140 rounds downrange, all .22LR, both…
Continue reading →Updated in December 2021 to include a review of Creep by Radiohead Around the dinner table with my Norman, Oklahoma friends (a group known at the time by several names, such as The Thirty Something Group [despite the fact that they weren’t 30-something any more], The Breadmaker Group, and The Bohemian Continuum) in 2009, I…
Continue reading →Soundgarden has a bit more polish than it’s contemporaries. It is more densely layered than Nirvana and Pearl Jam. In Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, I am reminded of Alice in Chains: driving, deep, super-masculine vocals, harmonic, dynamic instruments, and a song structure that narrates and navigates us through the story. The lyrics are brilliant. If…
Continue reading →As I have noted in a couple of previous movie reviews, futurism – the fictional depiction of how the future might look for humanity – is notoriously inaccurate. But what about fiction that is set in the present, but accidentally depicts – with alarming accuracy – actual events that come to pass? Contagion is just…
Continue reading →Ballard Nursing Center called me this afternoon to say that Abby was having trouble breathing and, between her and the nursing staff, decided to go to the emergency room. I caught up with her there, where we saw a doctor, who ordered the usual tests. Abby seemed to be breathing easier, and was feisty and…
Continue reading →40 years ago, I was a freshman college student at the University of Oklahoma. I had yet to buy my first Nikon camera. I lived in Adams Center, the older of the “tower” dorms at OU. My roommate was Jeff, who had switched rooms, without being invited or even asking, with the kid I was…
Continue reading →Dan most recently challenged me to review Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam. Dan’s really getting into 1990s grunge/garage recently, and I approve of this message. It took me a while to get down to listening, but I am now, and I like it. It’s got that “I don’t care what the record producers says, let’s jam”…
Continue reading →In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Diane Keaton plays a neurotic New Yorker named Mary Wilke. On the night Mary and Woody’s character meet, she and her date discuss the “Academy of the Overrated,” an imaginary collection of musicians, intellectuals and entertainers whose work isn’t nearly as great as they are generally regarded. Musician Sting, the former…
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