Terry and I wanted to get some mowing done yesterday and figured we would wait until the late afternoon or early evening to get started, when it had cooled down a bit. That’s the great thing about this time of year, it stays light longer. I figured that in the meantime I would do some writing, and I managed to get out another chapter in my new book. Part of writing a family saga I had not expected when I started the series is that as the children in the story grow up, they take on more active roles. It is interesting to see how their goals and dreams can be different from what their parents im ..read more

Yesterday was interesting in more than one way. Soon after we got up, I took Alli out in the front yard so I could stay in the shaded porch and throw her ball to her. I also gave her a couple of turkey necks, her favorite treat. While we were out there, a county pickup pulled in and David King from the property appraiser’s office got out. We first met him a while back when we went to file with our homestead exemption on our house. He came by to tell me that there was another form we could sign, something called a Continuous Use form for owners of seven acres or more, that could help reduce our ..read more

Terry has been putting off assembling the last three Vego raised planter beds she ordered a while back because she just has not been feeling up to it. But summertime is here no matter what the calendar says, and it’s only going to get hotter, so yesterday she decided it was time to get it done. In the early part of the day I made a quick trip to CVS and the post office, then did some more writing on my new Tinder Street book, and by late afternoon the sun was far enough to the West that the old deck behind our garage was in the shade, making it a good place to assemble the planter beds. We al ..read more

Note: Since I’ve spent most of my time writing lately, I don’t have anything new to blog about. So I thought I would repost a blog from 2018 about a small town museum where I learned some things abot my family that I never knew. We have always loved exploring small town museums and have spent many delightful hours doing so over the years. Maybe it’s some kind of voyeurism to be able to look into the lives of people you never knew, in a community you’ve never been to before. We always come away feeling like we know some of those people. But our visit to the small Ludlow Heritage Museum in Kentu ..read more

Here is another blog post from my days publishing small town newspapers. In last week’s Newspaper Days blog, titled Jaws, I mentioned that Westport, Washington, located on the southern opening of Grays Harbor, billed itself as the Salmon Capital of the World in the late 1970s and early 1980s, due to the many charter boats that operated from there, as well as commercial fishing boats. People came from all over the world to fish from the charter fleet, bringing back catches of trophy salmon. Quite a few of the charter boats advertised in my weekly newspaper, and I got to know many of their capta ..read more

The hardest part about writing the Tinder Street series is all the research that has to be done to get the historical events right. Actually, that’s not the hard part, that’s the fun part as far as I’m concerned. The hard part is that there are so many rabbit holes that I find myself going down in the course of the research. They are interesting and a lot of fun, too, but I have to drag myself back out of them and get back to work. That’s the hard part. The current book in the series, The War Years, covers America’s involvement in World War II. I’ve written before about being surprised to lear ..read more

You know that joke where the Amazon delivery driver knocks on your door to ask if you are okay, saying he’s worried because he hasn’t had a delivery for your house in two days? It’s kind of like that with the UPS man here. We actually have three different UPS delivery drivers, and when we first moved in, one of them was kind of standoffish, bordering on rude. But he comes by so much now that he says, “Hey, Nick, what’s happening” and stops to pet Alli. I don’t know if he feels like he’s part of the family now or he just knows that without us he might be out of a job. Yesterday the UPS man was ..read more

In a blog post titled Books And Bees 10 days ago, I wrote that we had mowed our lawns and most of the main pasture, leaving the area where Terry’s fruit trees are untouched because it was full of clover that the bees were happily enjoying. I also left the back pasture behind the barn untouched. It’s amazing how fast the grass grows here. All that grass we cut is already long again, and the yellow wildflowers and clover are coming back in the same areas. Meanwhile, the area where the fruit trees are was getting so overgrown that we had to do something about it, and the road across the back end ..read more

Yesterday was a busy day, and I actually managed to get quite a lot accomplished. The audiobook of A Changing World, the fifth book in my Tinder Street family saga, has been stuck in a bottleneck on Amazon for about a week now. They finally got that resolved, and it is now available to purchase. The famous tram 28 in Lisbon. During the morning my friend Scott Banks came over and we installed a 30/50 amp RV receptacle at the barn for when family or friends visit. I ordered it from Amazon and it has separate breakers for each outlet. It took a couple of hours to install, and that included figh ..read more

Here is another blog post from my days publishing small town newspapers. 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 Peninsula, the area is a sportsman’s paradise like no other on earth. The dense forests are home to elk, deer, black bear, mountain lions, and many believe the legendary Bigfoot lives there, too. The rivers off ..read more