Horse Manure Park

In memory of my father this Memorial Day. I visited his grave for the first time in several years yesterday. It was good to say hello.

Please forgive me. It has been two months since my last blog. I have no idea where that time went. I suppose it went to that place where all the other time goes. I was kind of surprised to get an email from someone who asked me if I had given up blogging. It made me feel kind of good that someone checks in to read now and then. Believe me, I think about writing all the time but "thinking" and "doing" are two different things. Actually, I have written a couple of posts over the last 60 days, mostly on rainy days (which has been 55 of the last 60 days), but I decided the posts got too political. There's nothing worse than somebody rambling on about their political/moral beliefs. Especially when you run the risk of upsetting others and when you don't really know what you're talking about. I confess I usually don't know what I'm talking about. So here I am sitting on my unstained deck, typing away. The neighborhood is alive with the sound of...

I'm a bit sporadic at updating my little space in cyberland here.  That's what happens with kids and a job.  Thankfully, you haven't missed much if you don't visit here often. I opened an account on a new site called This Life , which is maintained by Shutterfly, and I'm really liking it.  It sort of works like Drop Box; all of our photos on our devices automatically upload to our This Life account and all of the pictures on our lap top automatically upload to the site as well. But what I really like about This Life, as compared to Drop Box, is the site magically organizes your photos by date and it has a facial recognition program which organizes your photos by people as well.  It is kind of cool and creepy all at the same time.  It's bizarre how it can recognize the Boy as a baby and as a five year old. I don't know how it works, but it works.  Yet it makes me wonder what kind of technology is out there that we don't know about?  It's probabl...

Home today with the Boy, who has been home sick for the last two days.  Running a fever, throwing up.  Who knows where this came from?  The winter maladies continue.  The good news is he's on the mend, watching Looney Tunes right now and just announced that he was "bored," which is an excellent indicator that it is definitely back to school tomorrow. My brothers and sister-in-laws visited this weekend.  It was great to see them again.  We had a good talk, ate some great food and my oldest brother brought a box full of old photos.  I've been going through them, archiving many on the computer; I'm planning to make a hard cover photo book to preserve family history. In the meantime, I've been doing considerable research on the family tree, although I'm finding the more I look, the more questions I have.  Indeed, much more research is warranted. The puzzle continues. I've been posting quite a few old pictures on my Facebook feed, but I've real...

When I was a kid, I remember looking through an old photo album that my parents used to have.  The pictures inside were black and white, full of unfamiliar faces.  One picture in particular always stood out to me and I often wondered who in the world that distinguished looking man was. The picture was obviously taken in a professional studio.  The man didn't have the rugged looks of a laborer or a farmer.  He had a thick mustache and heavy eyebrows under a nearly entirely bald head. He appeared comfortable in a suit.  He looked, for lack of a better word, wealthy . All I knew was his name.  Written below the picture, in neat but unfamiliar handwriting, was "Samuel Gray." Samuel Gray I remember asking Mom if I was named after him, but she said no, I wasn't.  She knew this was a relative on Dad's side of the family and the picture was very old, and my dad really never said much about the picture. Well, thanks to some rather relentle...

It's back to work tomorrow.  I am getting the itch to make myself useful again.  I can only be off work for so long and I need to do something.  I could not stay at home all day every day.  It's not for me. So today, since I had the day completely to myself, the task at hand was to do laundry.  And do laundry I did.  As I write this, every article of clothing in the house is clean, folded (mostly) and put away (kind of). My job here is done. While completing the menial task of washing clothes, I had the television on as a distraction.  As usual, since it's not football season, I dialed up Turner Classic Movies. The Singing Nun , starring Debbie Reynolds and Ricardo Montalban, was on, so I casually watched it while waiting for clothes to dry.  Aside from being a nauseating mellow drama, I knew enough about my 1960s music history to know it was based on a true story.  Yes, there really was a singing nun. In fact, we used to have a re...

The last couple times around the sun, this has been an unpleasant time of year. Last year at this time, we were preparing to go to the funeral of my mother's sister, Bev.   This year, we've just returned from the funeral of my wife's grandmother, celebrating 93 years of a life well-lived. Luckily, the weather was fine (you never know this time of year in North Dakota).  We spent good time with family, but it's always nice to come home.  As the Boy said last night, "I missed my house." At the funeral, my father-in-law delivered a very thoughtful, eloquent eulogy to his mother.  His words about the Greatest Generation were especially meaningful to me because my parents were of the same generation as his mom (my father was born in 1915, my mother in 1928).   Interestingly enough, I have been doing a great deal of research on my family tree over the past several weeks.  I've been receiving help from my cousins when I encounter sticking poin...