My beloved Red Sox and the nearly-as-beloved-but-not-quite Houston Astros are locked in a tight series for the American League pennant, with Game Six coming up tonight. The Astros whacked the Red Sox in the last two games at Fenway. We had hoped to be at Minute Maid Park along with son-in-law Matt and daughter Mere, who are leaving for Germany for a year or so in a few weeks on a work-related project. Alas, a sick kitty waylaid those plans, so once again I’ll listen to the game through satellite radio and magically streamed through my hearing aids. I don’t have access through television, since...
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I began my first woodworking project in several years this week, while enjoying a rare weekday off from both the library and teaching a photography class. I am building a toybox for Mollie the Maltese, who has quite the collection of dog toys and seems to enjoy every one of them. Like an ambulatory toddler, she leaves them scattered throughout the house. One of my jobs is to pick up after her and stuff them into the dog bed she no longer uses, now that she has discovered the joys of sleeping on a couch.
We enjoy watching her prance over to the toy pile, stick her nose into it, and pull out one to run about...
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“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
— The late Sen. Patrick Daniel Moynihan
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Facts are under attack from many quarters these days. This was brought home to me personally when I called a gentleman who wanted to talk about something in Capital Highlights, the weekly column I write for Texas Press Association. It runs in about 100 papers across the state, mostly in weeklies and twice-weeklies still bringing the news to their small-town readers. In Capital Highlights, I aggregate news out of Austin by culling from state agency email newsletters,...
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The fog rolled in not long after sunrise, enveloping the trees, floating lightly above the front pasture. The air was cool, though not for long. Soon the sun would burn off the fog, and summer lingers in the afternoon. It feels like autumn in the mornings, temperatures close but not quite to sweater weather when I first step outside. It’s coming, though. This year, for the first time I can recall, it actually felt like autumn on the first official day, at least that morning.
I was outside on this early morning because a convoy of trucks and tractors had pulled in behind our house, parking...
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Until Sunday night, I had gone my entire life — 66 years and one month — without killing any type of creature with a firearm. I half-heartedly took a few shots during a quail hunt about 20 years ago, joined by three other fellows all firing away at a lone quail darting about the Deep East Texas sky. The quail escaped unharmed. We decided to start shooting skeet instead, with largely similar results. Most the clay pigeons broke upon hitting the ground, not as a result of our shotgun blasts.
Back in the 1980s, I took my little brother Gregg deer hunting on some acreage we were leasing in San Augustine....
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We assembled at the Olive Garden to celebrate Colton’s birthday. He’s our daughter Abbie’s boyfriend, a hard worker and good guy. Since it was his birthday, he got to choose the restaurant, so the Olive Garden it was. As we were diving into the famous endless salad, my Beautiful Mystery Companion noticed a tiger-striped kitten outside our window amidst the shrubbery. It was clearly a stray, a tiny thing with big ears and white-mitten paws.
She gave me that look. Oh boy, I thought. Here we go. Another rescue animal in her sights. Sure enough, after the leftovers were packed and the bill...
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The first day of autumn arrives on Sept. 22, just a dozen days from now. In East Texas, that doesn’t mean much, since temperatures still hover in the 90s and will continue to do so for days ahead, according to the weather app on my phone. The dog days linger, while we search for a sign – any sign – of a break in the heat. It does feel a bit cooler in the morning lately, perhaps a harbinger of autumn.
Our daughter Abbie for the second year decorated her apartment with fall-themed items in late August, in the vain hope this would spur up arrival of the actual season. It hasn’t worked yet,...
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The damage in our front yard was immediately apparent Monday morning: several yards of grass trampled and rooted through, leaving a mess. It was along the drainage ditch by the driveway, which is still too wet to mow. I’m beginning to think there is a spring that has sprung back to life because of the spring rains.
At first, I thought the damage was caused by armadillos, but it was too much. I had just mowed the previous afternoon, so I knew the damage was fresh. Feral hogs apparently weren’t content to hang out in the woods near Glade and Wicher creeks, which run through the south and east...
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I have yet to see the barred owl that lives in the woods behind the barn/shop. Not a barn owl, but a barred owl. My Beautiful Mystery Companion has seen the owl twice and says it has an impressive wingspan. The other night, while I was working in the library, she said the barred owl perched for several minutes on the roof of the shop, perusing the terrain below for dinner: field mice, snakes, small dogs…
That is why at night when we let our two small dogs out — Rosie and Mollie — we stay outside there with them, even with the backyard newly fenced. Rosie weighs about 15 pounds, Mollie...
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Despite giving away more than two dozen bank boxes of books to daughter Mere and the Estes Library at LeTourneau University, where I began working in person again this week, the collection I kept filled all the shelves in the new home, as well as the bookcases we brought here. As I said previously, building a barrister bookcase remains high on the woodworking to-do list. Buying books is a habit I do not intend to break.
Putting up books is always a pleasure, this ritual of renewing acquaintances with old friends. I took my time, trying to better organize them, keeping multiple books by authors...
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