Except for a pretty stiff breeze, yesterday was very nice here in west-central Alabama. There was lots of blue sky and the temperature was somewhere in the mid-60s. And if we can believe the weatherman, we won’t have any more precipitation until the weekend. Hopefully things will dry out a little bit between now and then. While I had Alli out in the yard yesterday I noticed that several of the rose bushes along the front of our porch are budding out and a few are already blooming. I was able to get a picture of the first rose of the year. We have a lot of work to do to get Terry’s other raise ..read more

Since I’m a bit of a clown myself, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my dog is also the class clown. When she’s not chasing a ball or waiting for us to throw one for her, Alli is either playing with Mae Lin, one of Terry’s cats, or out in the backyard trying to catch a bee or wasp as it flies by. I keep telling her she’ll regret it if she ever does snatch one of those little critters out of the air. She’ll think she caught a flying habanero. She has a dog bed on the floor beside our bed. Occasionally she curls up in it like a normal dog, but more often than not, I’ll get up in the night and f ..read more

Yesterday I uploaded the audiobook of The Hard Years, the fourth book in my Tinder Street family saga, and it is now available on Amazon and audible.com. That leaves just one more audiobook in the Tinder Street series to be formatted and uploaded, A Changing World, at least for the time being. The famous tram 28 in Lisbon. Somebody asked if I will be creating audiobooks for the rest of the books in the Big Lake and John Lee Quarrels series. I plan to as time allows, assuming Amazon continues with their AI narration program. In yesterday’s blog, I told you I had uploaded the print edition of ..read more

Yesterday I uploaded the audiobook of Boom And Bust, the third book in my Tinder Street family saga, and it is now available on Amazon and audible.com. I hope to get the fourth and fifth books in the series uploaded in the next few days. I also uploaded the print edition of Big Lake Accident to Amazon, but as of Thursday night as I write this blog, it hasn’t gone live yet. Hopefully by the time you get the blog it will be, but if not, I’m sure sometime by the end of the day it should be available to purchase. Besides those projects, I also wrote another chapter in The War Years, the next book ..read more

For the last three weeks or so, we have been commenting on how high the grass is getting in our front and side yards, and in the pasture. It was definitely time to mow the grass, however there is so much clover out there feeding the bees that we kept putting it off. We finally decided that something had to be done or the place would turn into a jungle. So, we decided to mow a lot of grass but still save quite a bit of untouched clover for the local bee population. It seemed like the best compromise. Our Husqvarna riding lawnmower had not been started since last year, and it had to turn over a ..read more

After reading yesterday’s blog, regarding the day my daughter Tiffany was born, several folks wanted to know what made it so hectic. So here’s the story. In April of 1982, I was running several small town newspapers on the Pacific Northwest coast, with our headquarters in Aberdeen, Washington. Tiffany’s mother had gone to the hospital the day before with the plan to have a cesarean section at 10 the next morning. But Tiffany was too impatient for all that nonsense, and at 7:30 A.M. her mother called me to say that she was in labor and the baby was coming fast. I told her I would be there as qu ..read more

This is a special day for our family because it’s our daughter-in-law Geli’s birthday. This amazing woman works hard keeping others alive as a nurse, and when she’s not saving lives and comforting those who are ill, you can find her helping our son Travis with their chickens, gardens, beehives, and caning and baking. And she does it all with a smile. We love you very much Geli. Happy birthday on your special day. It was a lovely, warm day here in west central Alabama yesterday, with the thermometer peaking at 80° and a lot of blue sky and sunshine overhead. Not that I got to enjoy a lot of it ..read more

Having animals is a fulltime job. To be honest, I don’t know if we have pets or if they have people, but I’m beginning to suspect the latter might be the case. Don’t get me wrong, we love our critters, and they each have their own distinct personalities. Alli loves us and wants to be beside me 24/7. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to go to the bathroom alone. But more than anything, Alli loves her toy. She goes to sleep with it and when we wake up every morning she is beside the bed and will stand there giving us those sad puppy dog eyes until we throw it for her. That goes on all day, nonstop ..read more

In yesterday’s blog I said that I had released the audiobook of Tinder Street, the first book in my family saga series of the same name, using Amazon’s new artificial intelligence narration. Since then, I’ve heard from several readers who either purchased the book or downloaded the sample and the reports have all been good. One person said they noticed there were some pauses in the narration, and I found this to be true at the start of each chapter, after they announce the chapter name and before the story actually picks up. The pause is short in duration, but noticeable. I think, based on the ..read more

I’ve got a lot of exciting book news to share with you today, and I think it’s going to make some of my readers very happy. At least I hope so. A week ago I said in the blog that Amazon had asked me to take part in a program to create audiobooks using artificial intelligence narrators. As I said at the time, I have not been thrilled with a lot of AI technology that I have seen, but I decided to experiment with it and see what they have come up with. I have to say that I’m impressed. This could be a game changer. Yesterday I released my first audiobook using the new technology. I went with Tind ..read more