At last, all the power tools are tuned up in the woodshop and ready to make some noise. The bandsaw hums along nicely without the blade flying off the wheel. That required painstakingly adjusting the top wheel and aligning other pieces as well. It was trial and error, frequently consulting the owner’s manual. Now it stays on track.
The bandsaw, for me, is the scariest Machine That Can Cut Your Fingers Off in my shop. I am always conscious with any of these machines of where both my hands are, at all times. I would prefer not learning how to type with nine fingers.
The jointer-planer needed...
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My Sunday morning routine rarely varies. After getting caffeinated, I sit down to finish the Capital Highlights column I write for subscribers through the Texas Press Association. About 100 newspapers, mainly weeklies and twice-weeklies in small towns across the state, publish the column. Throughout the week, I check more than three dozen state agencies and elected officials to whom I have subscribed to get their news releases, comb the state’s metro newspaper websites, as well as several nonprofit news sites, looking for items that might be of interest to readers. I save the links to those stories...
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As I have mentioned previously, I am working on a book about the San Augustine Red-Lander and the interesting characters that ran that paper during the Republic of Texas years and into the first years of Texas joining the union as a state. I hope to bring that fascinating period alive through the thousands of pages of newspapers I have perused and transcribed over the past two years. Whether I succeed or not will be up to the readers, of course.
The prominent editor of the Red-Lander, for seven of its nine years in existence, was Alanson Wyllys Canfield, who emigrated to Texas from his native...
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My Beautiful Mystery Companion is the Pied Piper of pets. Three cats and two dogs live inside our house, usually scattered about on couches and beds like throw cushions. As she gets ready to go to work in the morning, most of them dutifully follow her around the house, all of them looking up at her with eyes of love. Or maybe they’re hungry. It’s hard to tell.
Mollie the Maltese and Olive the New Kitty are especially devoted. When my BMC retreats into the bathroom and closes the door, they semi-patiently wait outside. Mollie will scrunch down, attempting to see beneath the door, uttering...
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As I drove to work earlier this week, I spied a familiar if discouraging sight. Perched on top of a step ladder that was listing dangerously to the left, a landscape worker brandished some shears with which he was mutilating a crape myrtle tree. He lopped off the previous year’s growth to leave an amputated tree topped with knobs, from which spindly branches will eventually emerge, often not strong enough to hold their heads up in a summer rain.
If it’s January in East Texas, it is time to send landscapers out across residential lawns and businesses to murder myrtles (it’s not strictly...
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It is moving day. Actually, it has been moving day for a few weeks, but by the time you read this (fingers tightly crossed), we should be beginning the process of unpacking and getting used to our new abode, a few miles north of Longview, on 57 acres. The tract is mainly hardwood timber, but there is plenty of grass to mow. The grass will eventually provide sustenance to a hobby farm’s worth of critters. We might even buy a buffalo, because, well, we like looking at them. No horses, though. I still recall what a North Texas horse breeder told us while giving a tour of beautiful, high-dollar horse...
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Suddenly it is Christmas. In this strangest of years, we celebrate the birth of Christ in the midst of a pandemic that shows no signs of abating. Families face hard choices, especially those who are out of work. For some families, there will be an empty chair at the dinner table — if they choose to get together at all today. For front-line health care workers and first responders, today could be just another day trying to save lives in hospitals filled with patients who have contracted COVID-19. My prayers are with both the patients and the workers — who no doubt are exhausted after 10 long...
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Since going into stay-at-home mode last March, I have spent many hours transcribing articles from newspapers published in the 1830s through the 1850s, for a history book project. In the 35 years since I originally did research for a master’s thesis at UT-Austin, millions of newspaper pages have been digitized and are searchable. Now I can type in the keywords, and articles pop up that can be saved as pdfs and later transcribed. To date, I have compiled about 150,000 words’ worth of articles on everything from tariffs to slave-trading, the Regulator-Moderator War in Shelby County, and Sam Houston’s...
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The Made-Rite Co. here in Longview recently announced it is selling its longtime Dr Pepper distribution franchise back to the soft drink’s parent company and will concentrate on selling “high-growth, premium products,” such as energy drinks and fancy water. The company began bottling soft drinks in Marshall in 1925, and at one point had more than a dozen bottling plants in several states.
The Longview plant opened in 1963. Ten years later, I was working at Made-Rite full-time while finishing my sketchy high school career by correspondence course. I worked there for two years, through...
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The sale of chess sets has boomed this Christmas season, thanks to a Netflix mini-series called The Queen’s Gambit, which we watched recently. Goliath Games, a toy company that sells several types of chess sets, told NPR that sales are up more than 1,000 percent compared to last year. Other companies have similar stories. Chess has become the sourdough bread starter in the latter months of 2020, after the series debuted in late October. The Queen’s Gambit features an orphaned girl of 9 who is taught chess by the janitor hiding in the basement, who hides down there replaying famous chess games...
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