BOSTON — Man, I love writing that dateline, at long last, three years since we last stepped out of Logan Airport into temperatures 30 degrees lower than in Texas. We are here on the first day of summer, after enduring, like most of you reading this, a scorching end to spring that presages a torturous next three months. Heck, maybe four.
So here we are in our favorite city to visit, my mother’s birthplace, a place steeped in history and so familiar to us by now that it is like returning to an old friend. An expensive friend to be sure. Boston is not a cheap place to visit. After staying home...
Read more...
Looks like we’re going to have a bumper crop of dirt daubers this summer. They buzz around the shop and in the garage, building their vertical dirt mounds and acting indignant when I use a plastic paint scraper to knock down their nests. Luckily, you would have to step on a dirt dauber with bare feet to get stung. But they are rather annoying. They dive bomb my face while I’m rowing in our mini-CrossFit gym down in the shop. I guess they’re attracted to sweat, and there is plenty of that this summer.
Actually, it’s officially still spring as I write this. Sigh.
Dirt daubers are members...
Read more...
My brother-in-law Jim took a look at Pancho the Donkey’s legs last Saturday evening while visiting. “We need to trim his hooves,” he said and promised to return the next afternoon with his trimming equipment and some fence panels to build a temporary pen. We would have to hem Pancho up to perform this process. Neither a donkey nor a horse is going to just stand there and let someone mess with their hooves.
Pancho is on permanent loan from Jim, who knows about equine issues. He showed up with his trailer and toolbox with trimming tools. Using the three-sided shed that provides Pancho shelter...
Read more...
Mowing season has commenced here on the farm. Actually, it began on May 1 with a first mowing after most of the wildflowers had gone to seed. Clumps of skinny white flowers remained in bloom, so I practiced my zero-turn techniques by shearing circles of Bahia grass while leaving standing the flowers, exotically identified as Prairie Fleabane in the PlantSnap app. Further research indicates the Cherokee and Houma tribes boiled the roots to use as a diuretic, and as a healing aid for kidney ailments or gout. I tucked that factoid back in the memory bank should either ailment arise, and my doctor...
Read more...
AUSTIN — I am back in one of my happy places, doing research at the Lorenzo de Zavala State Archives and Library Building, located across the street from the state capitol. Busloads of school children wander around the verdant capitol grounds beneath the pecan and oak trees while squirrels chatter at them. A field trip to the capitol is a fine way to end the school year.
I first flip through the pages of an 1840 edition of the San Augustine Journal & Advertiser, a one-year run that appears to only be available in a print version at this library. Most of what I have researched has been...
Read more...
Olive, the dumpster-diving kitten rescued by daughter Abbie last summer after we finished eating at the Olive Garden — hence the name — has finally been allowed to venture into the Great Outdoors. She has been strictly an indoor kitty until this week and spent hours staring longingly out the picture windows into the backyard. My Beautiful Mystery Companion — aka the Cat Whisperer — and I were both leery at letting such a small creature out there where hawks, owls, coyotes and other predators abound. Olive watched with envy as Tater and Tot, her new older brothers, prowled the backyard....
Read more...
Several months ago, an arborist from the Texas A&M Forest Service came to look at one of the large water oaks in the front pasture, which had a deep crevice at its base and clearly contained decayed wood. He took a quick glance and said the tree was a goner. He said the good news is that if it fell, the water oak would fall away from the house. Patching the crevice with foam or concrete, as was common in decades past, would do no good at all. I decided to just leave it and let nature take its course.
Then in late March a fierce thunderstorm blew through, spawning a tornado that destroyed...
Read more...
I spent most of a recent afternoon talking on the phone to pleasant-sounding people with distinct French accents. We plan to take a trip to Canada in late June, to visit the villages of the Eastern Township, a picturesque region in Quebec just over the Vermont border. It is the setting for Louis Penny’s popular Inspector Gamache series, which both my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I are engrossed in reading. We are excited to take our first real vacation in nearly three years. And I’m looking forward to exploring the area where my mother’s family grew up, and which I visited as a child.
Crossing...
Read more...
For most of my life I have heard the expression, “Sure beats digging ditches.” It is used to compare a task, or job, to the alternative – shovel in hand, slinging dirt. I have used this well-worn phrase many times myself; for instance, when things got hectic or tense in a newsroom, as a hairy deadline loomed, the phrase helped remind me, or others, that there are worse jobs out there.
I often joke that a shovel handle simply doesn’t fit my hand. Shoveling remains one of my least favorite tasks, something I should have considered when we bought this timber-and-snake farm last summer....
Read more...
Thanks to a dear friend, my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I took a tour of the world’s largest sanctuary for chimpanzees last weekend and met – at a distance – Valentina Rose, the 10-year-old chimp our friend sponsored for my BMC’s birthday. She received an adorable chimp doll, a certificate, and a photo of her new “best friend.”
Chimp Haven is a nonprofit facility located on 200 acres inside the 1,200-acre Eddie D. Jones Nature Park in Keithville, Louisiana -- an unincorporated area about 20 miles south of Shreveport. It currently cares for 325 chimps formerly used in biomedical...
Read more...
