Terry’s Seeds And Sarah’s Oil

I spent much of yesterday talking to bank loan officers, trying to get a handle on the best way to pay down the loan on our house once we get the proceeds from the sale of our house in Alabama. I thought I could recast the loan, which we did with the house in Alabama, paying the mortgage off in two years. But the loan on this house is through the VA, and they do not allow you to recast. So I am looking into refinance options.

Between phone calls and trying to get some straight answers, which seems to be hard to do, I also wrote another 3,500 words in my new Big Lake book. It’s rolling right along, and so far the characters haven’t thrown a monkey wrench into the works, as they often do.

While I was doing that, Terry was working in the greenhouse, planting seeds in starter pots, including golden watermelon, a couple of varieties of tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, poblano peppers, brussels sprouts, basil, and cilantro.

Later on, we had leftover homemade pizza for dinner from the day before, and it was just as good as it was the first time around.

After dinner, we watched an excellent movie called Sarah’s Oil on Amazon Prime. Set in the early 1900s, it’s based on the true story of eleven-year-old Sarah Rector, an African American girl who was granted an allotment of 160 acres of supposedly worthless land in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. This was in the days of the oil boom, and Sarah was convinced that her land held a large oil deposit. No one believed her at first, but she was able to convince a couple of Texas wildcatters to help her. Before long, greedy speculators were closing in, trying to get control of her land and the oil beneath it. This was in the days when African Americans and Indians had no rights to speak of, and some Indian children were murdered to get their land. It almost happened with Sarah, but she managed to survive and wound up becoming the first child millionaire in the United States. It’s a movie definitely worth watching.

In last week’s Author Spotlight, I profiled Jason Deas, another one of my favorite authors. If you’d like to get a taste for Jason’s writing skills, he’s got a couple of freebies going on for the next two or three days. You can download the e-book of Birdsongs, the first book in his Benny James mystery series for free on Amazon. Better yet, you can also download a box set of the first three e-books in the series, Birdsongs, Pushed, and Brushed Away for free also. Trust me, my friends, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of these free offers and give Jason’s books a read.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – Don’t marry anybody you couldn’t sit next to for 10 hours on a road trip.