I bought myself a present just before coming to Kansas, a Nikon digital SLR camera and a couple of lenses, plus a nice flash. I emptied the Domke camera bag that I’ve lugged around for 30 years of its battered Nikon film bodies, grabbed one of the old lenses that will work in manual mode with the digital, and am back taking photos with an SLR instead of a point-and-shoot digital.
What a relief. I never got used to using a camera that one peered into a LCD screen from several inches away, and then had to wait a few seconds before the image was captured with a fake click of the shutter. I’m...
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My brother Gregg called to let me know Peppy Blount had died. The news wasn’t surprising but sad. Peppy has been in failing health for a few years, though each time he called me his voice was strong as ever.
Peppy was one of those larger-than-life Texas characters that the state would have created out of whole cloth just to keep its reputation intact — if folks like him didn’t exist. Born in 1926 in West Texas, he flew B-25 bombers in World War II and then came home to attend the University of Texas and play football. Peppy, who gained his nickname in childhood because he couldn’t pronounce...
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One of my earliest memories of my late father is watching him work behind an easel in the barn that served as his artist’s studio behind our house in Allenstown, New Hampshire. A Ben Franklin stove roared nearby, providing the only heat in this un-insulated building that we called a barn. It was really just a large outbuilding with an abandoned chicken coop tacked on to the end. One winter I jumped off the roof. Snow hid the dangers that lurked on the ground. I ended up with a nail in my foot.
That occasioned a tetanus shot, despite my howling resistance to injections. An apocryphal story...
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Thank goodness the growing season for vegetables starts later in northeast Kansas. With moving and all from Texas, I was running behind getting my crop in the ground. Back there, my son-in-law in Houston is already picking tomatoes off his plants. Matt is an engineer and very precise in these matters. He has apparently put in a plot large enough to see on Google Earth, in the backyard of the house that he and Mere, my middle daughter, bought last year just off the freeway heading into downtown.
I am decidedly not an engineer and have already endured the dubious joys of trying to raise a large...
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I began my study of Kansas entomology on a recent weekend as I attacked an area below my house with the weed whacker. The house I have leased sits on a lovely piece of land, heavily wooded with much of the front yard planted in ground cover and ivy. The basin below the house became overrun with weeds. I pay a fellow to mow the grass, since there is a bunch of it, but opted to do the trimming and weeding. There are a lot of flowers and lovely vegetation that might get beheaded by accident.
I enjoy getting out there and sweating, running the weed whacker and blower. It took most of the afternoon...
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My parents married on Memorial Day in 1953, which occurred then always on May 30. I have their marriage license in my files. As the oldest of three sons, I’m the keeper of the records, the family photographs and all things that prove they were on this planet — apart from the collective memory of those of us who know them, of course.
Or knew them, in my dad’s case. He died in February of last year. I figure most of you reading this have lost a parent, sibling or someone close to you. I miss him every day — but especially on days like this — what would have been their 57th anniversary.
Mom...
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I have unpacked after my migration from Texas, except for setting up the woodshop, which is this weekend’s planned activity — along with yard work and other domestic chores to make this place feel as if it belongs like home on the outside. It already feels that way inside, with great help from my fiancé, aka the Beautiful Mystery Companion, who alas won’t be arriving here for some months to come. Thanks to her the household was unpacked quickly.
I admit to OCD tendencies on most matters. Unpacking brings out the worst of them. My mover — a gentle, semi-retired rodeo cowboy from Gladewater,...
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Greetings from Junction City, Kansas.
I have taken up residence and work here as editor and publisher of the Daily Union, as well as publisher of the weekly Wamego Smoke Signal — with responsibility for a printing plant to boot.
I’m happy there is a printing press, and that the papers aren’t printed elsewhere. I love being able to walk to the back of the building and hear that press running, though mostly that occurs at night — and with luck I mainly work days. But there is something about a press on site that is reassuring to me. We really do buy our ink by the barrel and newsprint...
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This is my last week as a resident of Texas, at least for the foreseeable future. Nearly everything I own — save my car, a suitcase and the laptop on which I’m typing this — now are ensconced in a house in northeast Kansas, which is where I take up shop next week. I’m purposely being vague about my next gig so as not to scoop the newspaper for which I’m going to work, which will make the official announcement next weekend.
The past few weeks have flown by in a haze of activity. I managed to finish building a desk in the shop before the movers came, of knock-down trestle construction...
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More than 20 months ago I put my house up for sale when the owners of the newspaper did the same. I didn’t have a great feeling about my job prospects if and when the paper sold, which turned out to be prescient. There were personal reasons as well, such as wanting a larger house for my fiancé and her daughter, since this lovely old house has doodly squat for closet space. I had no idea it would take this long to sell a house. The fact the market crashed the next month should have told me something. My house sat on the market with few lookers and no offers, month after month.
When I was unceremoniously...
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