About three books ago, something happened that I can’t explain. For some reason, some of the quotation marks were two straight lines and others were curly. I tried to post examples to show you what I’m talking about in the blog, but here they all come out curly. I’ve gone through the manuscripts and changed […]
Thank you to everybody who posted comments on Facebook and the blog or sent e-mail messages from the blog wishing us a happy anniversary. You all make us feel so loved. In spite of yesterday being our anniversary, it was kind of a frustrating day because somehow during the transfer of the blog domain away […]
I didn’t get any writing done Wednesday because Terry had an appointment with her eye doctor down in Titusville to replace the plugs that they do every four months or so for her dry eyes. She’s been having more and more of a problem with it, and even expensive eyedrops haven’t helped, so he gave […]
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 […]
You know that filter we’re all supposed to have that keeps us from saying what we’re really thinking sometimes? Yeah, well, I don’t have one of those. Not having that filter comes in handy when you’re a small-town newspaper publisher and you aren’t afraid of stepping on toes. Of course, it makes you some enemies […]
Right on schedule, the truck from Edgewater Yard Shop arrived at 1:30 yesterday afternoon with two yards of fill dirt that we needed to replace what was lost when we took out the big dead tree and the parasitic Palmetto that was surrounding it. I originally thought that we would need about 1½ yards, and […]
After endless months of hot, humid weather, a cold front came through Central Florida yesterday and dropped the temperature down into the mid-70s. Boy, were we glad to see that! Terry and I had doctors’ appointments in New Smyrna Beach in the early afternoon, and when we finished up with that we drove a mile […]
Eighteen years ago today we were at the Escapees RV Club’s Raccoon Valley Campground, just north of Knoxville, Tennessee, when my daughter Tiffany, back in Arizona, went into labor with her first child. We didn’t have a cell phone and it was during the evening, and the only pay telephone available was in the campground’s […]
Back in late 2016, Terry and I both bought Moto Z Play smartphones. At the time, Terry was reluctant to give up her old flip phone and didn’t think she needed or wanted a smartphone. But it didn’t take her long to realize the benefits of the newer technology. As for me, I had already […]
I’m back with more questions from blog readers about RVing, what’s happening in our lives since we hung up the keys, and all kinds of other things. While I try to answer all questions individually, I also share some here occasionally. Q. Our house is sold, we finally retired, and we are getting ready to […]
I lived in Arizona for many years, both down in the desert and up in the White Mountains. I remember people in the desert saying, “Sure, it’s 112°, but at least there’s no humidity.” My response was always that there is no humidity in an oven, either, but I don’t want to spend the day […]
You might think that a small town newspaper publisher’s world pretty much ended at the city limits, or no further than the county. And for the most part, you would be right. And I was always content with that. As one of my mentors in the business told me when I was first starting out, […]
I thought it would take me several more days but I got at it hard yesterday and by dinnertime, exactly a month and a week after I started, the first book in my Tinder Street family saga series is finished. Before edits, it came in at 105K words. But as I said in yesterday’s blog, […]
I started my first newspaper when I was in my mid-20s, in Grays Harbor, Washington. The harbor is the largest natural deepwater port on the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco, and has been an important shipping center since the days of the earliest settlement. Located at the base of the wild and beautiful Olympic […]
We resisted as long as we could, but yesterday we finally had to don our masks and leave the house for the first time in a couple of weeks. I had to stop at the post office to mail a couple of items off, then we went to Publix for groceries. And just like every […]
Yesterday was another good writing day for me. I cranked out 6,300 words and finished my newest Big Lake book. It came in at 83,265 words and took me three weeks and three days from start to finish. And I wasn’t writing every day. I will spend today and maybe tomorrow reading through it and […]
Note: I have always been a bit of a prankster, and I do believe this one tops them all, spanning several years. There was a time when Arizona had cactus cops, whose duty was to enforce laws protecting native-plants, especially saguaro cacti, which could be worth thousands of dollars to landscapers. Cactus rustling was a […]
Terry’s mom, Bess, turned 88 on February 2nd and her dad, Pete, turned 90 on the 11th. When you live that long you accumulate a lot of relatives, so family from as far away as England, New York, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida (us) came to Arizona to help them celebrate the occasion. In the last […]
Several blog readers have asked questions about our trip across the border to purchase medicines in Mexico, so I thought I would answer their questions here. Q. The other day you talked about going to Mexico to buy medications. When you do that, do you drive across the border, and if so what kind of […]
Here is the last installment of our trip from Florida to Arizona. As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, we were looking forward to spending time with our friends Tom and Diane Owens while we were in Deming, New Mexico. However, I suspect that after two days, they were more than ready to see us hit […]