My heart is heavy with the news that my friend and fellow author George Wier has lost his battle with esophageal cancer. The world is a darker place without George’s sense of humor and many talents in it. Though we lived in different parts of the country, and most of our contact over the years […]
I mentioned a few days ago that I had done an interview with Jim and Chris Guld from the Geeks on Tour about self-publishing. It will air on their YouTube channel today at 2 PM Eastern time and you can watch it at this link. It was a fun interview and I think you might […]
I have mentioned before that I collect police badges, and I occasionally pick one up in our travels. A while back I got something from an elderly gentleman I know in Texas, and while I’m not sure if it is authentic or not, I like it and the story that went with it is very […]
Somebody once told me I could go to a stranger’s funeral and make friends with the guy in the box by the time the preaching was over. I’m not sure if that is 100% true, but I have always believed in the old saying that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met before. […]
We love getting off the interstate highways and taking the two-lane roads whenever we can. As I have said many times before, a Denny’s or a chain hotel at an interstate exit in Kansas is no different than one in Michigan or California. But the two-lane roads will take you to the real America. Small […]
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Wherever you are and whoever you are with, I hope you have a wonderful time today. And whether you are a religious person or not, I hope you take a moment or two to reflect on all the things that we have to be thankful for. Yes, there is a lot of […]
Well, it’s almost over with for another year. All that’s left is stuffing all the boxes and wrapping paper in the recycle bin, taking the decorations off the Christmas tree and hauling it out to the curb for the trash man to pick up, taking down the Christmas lights and any other decorations you had […]
Don’t you just hate telemarketers? You can be on every Do Not Call list in the world and it doesn’t matter to those creeps. They will still bother you. We got our cell phones years ago when we were in Elkhart, Indiana, which is area code 574. At least once a day we get a […]
Most of my time lately has been spent researching and writing, and I am just a little over 30,000 words into my newest book, Big Lake Snowdaze. And as so often happens when I’m working on a book, the story is going off in a direction I did not see coming. I think it’s going […]
According to the weatherman, the worst of the summer weather is behind us and we can expect to see a cooling trend in the next week or so. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be cool, it’s just going to be less hot. It will be down in the low to mid 80s until Wednesday […]
Most of yesterday was spent moving our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage motorhome out of the storage lot and over to our house, and getting it ready to show to a potential buyer who is supposed to come by on Sunday. I had unhooked all of the batteries when we parked it a few weeks ago to […]
With apologies to my author friends Billy Kring and George Wier, and all the other Texans I know, if I don’t see the Lone Star State again for a decade or so, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings one bit. The damn state just never ends! You drive and drive through hundreds of miles of mountains, […]
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. We all remember that little poem, and many of us think we know the macabre story behind it. But do we? On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were hacked […]
It seemed like every day for the last week or two the weatherman has been predicting rain for our area. And though there has been some rain come down around us, all we have had here is a brief shower or two that lasted for a couple of minutes. But that all changed yesterday. A […]
Note: This story first appeared in the September-October 2003 issue of the Gypsy Journal. When he was seven years old, young Jasper Newton Daniel, known to everybody as Jack, was hired out to work with a Lutheran minister in Tennessee. But the young boy’s duties were not to assist in collecting the offering at church […]
My doctor keeps telling me that I need to get in shape, and I keep telling her that round is a shape. Though in my heart I’m ten feet tall and bulletproof, in reality I have to shop the dwarf portly aisle when I’m looking for new clothes. And that’s not all bad. Being a […]
I have said many times that if you hang out at the Escapees Rainbows End RV Park in Livingston, Texas and at Elkhart Campground here in Indiana long enough you will meet every RVer in the world. Sooner or later they all come through. We have been coming to Elkhart Campground since our first year […]
Yesterday was a gray, rainy day and there wasn’t much going on at the RV park except for people walking their dogs. I have owned a dog most of my life and I love them, but every time I see people out in the rain with a dog sniffing every blade of grass deciding where […]
By working pretty much nonstop except to sleep, Terry finished proofing and editing Big Lake Brewpub yesterday afternoon. I was busy making corrections as she did, and had them finished and sent it off to my second proofreader yesterday evening. Now she’ll do her thing and get it back to me and I’ll make those […]
Okay, I’ve tried to be nice about it and just snivel and whine, but that hasn’t helped. The warmest it got was 50° yesterday, and it got down into the 20s last night here in Apache Junction. Just like it did the night before, and just like it’s supposed to do tonight. If I see […]