My Rotten Kids

Every parent wants to raise children who become adults they can be proud of. Adults that they can look at and say to themselves with a smile of self-satisfaction, “Yeah, that’s my kid!” Unfortunately, I don’t do that. As much as it hurts me to admit it, I raised two rotten, selfish kids.

My son Travis, the older of the two, lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and among his many talents, which includes folding origami and being an amazing photographer, he also has a green thumb. He can grow anything. I think if you gave him a handful of seeds and a garden hose with a sprinkler head and turned him loose in an asphalt parking lot, a week later, he would have a crop of corn, tomatoes, and squash growing. He’s always sending us pictures of his produce, picked fresh from the garden.

My daughter Tiffany, who lives in our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona, also has a garden at her place, and she’s even got chickens. And while she might not be as prolific a gardener as her brother is, she also sends us pictures of eggs and the things that she has grown.

Now, here’s their mom. Can you believe that? While they are eating fresh vegetables right from the garden, Miss Terry is forced to buy her veggies at the supermarket. Yeah, I know. It breaks my heart, too.

But what can you do? You try to raise them right, and then you send them out into the world, and they become what they are. I mean, really, how hard would be for either one of them to uproot their lives and move here to plant their gardens and bring their mom fresh veggies every day or two? Is that too much ask?

By the way, I was only joking. I kind of like my rotten kids. Not a whole lot, but a little bit.

I said in yesterday’s blog that I needed to replace the battery in my Ford pickup and install a battery disconnect. With my bad back, I wasn’t looking forward to lifting it out of the truck, but Chris Fisher, one of my neighbors who is a great guy, saw me with the hood up and came over and disconnected the old battery and took it out of the truck and put it in the back of the Explorer for me. I picked up the new battery and the battery disconnect at O’Reilly Auto Parts yesterday afternoon, and back at home Jesse Bolton another neighbor and a great guy came over and installed it all for me. Thanks again, guys. It’s good to have nice neighbors, even if I do have rotten kids.

There is a little drainage canal that runs alongside our property, and there was a doublewide manufactured home on the other side of it that got torn up when Hurricane Matthew hit our area a few years ago. Yesterday they moved in a new doublewide to replace it, and Terry told me to come and look at how they were doing things. They were using a little tractor to move the two halves into position on the lot, and the cool thing was there was nobody driving it. It was all done by remote control by a man standing there with a joystick. He said he could get within inches of where it needed to be, and then it was a simple case of sliding it on some special wheels to match the two halves and connecting it all together and setting it on the foundation. How cool is that? Isn’t technology amazing?

My last proofreader finished Tinder Street yesterday but ran into difficulty when she was trying to send it back to me. For some reason, there was a problem on her end, and instead of being a Microsoft Word DOCX file, which it said it was when I tried to open it, all I got was some kind of a scrambled hodgepodge of letters, numbers, and symbols. It took us a while to get it right, but after a few attempts, eventually, something clicked and it came through okay. But by then, it was late in the day. So I will start making the corrections this morning before we have to run into Port Orange for Terry to get a couple of ultrasounds in the afternoon. If I push hard enough and don’t run into any difficulties, I still think I’ll have it uploaded to Amazon this weekend. And don’t worry, as soon as I do, I’ll be telling the world all about it

Be sure to enter our latest  Free Drawing. This week’s prize is an audiobook of Big Lake Blizzard, the fourth book in my Big Lake mystery series. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening.

Thought For The Day – Enthusiasm changes attitudes and becomes the fuel for change.