It was 1970 or maybe 71. Fresh out of the Navy, newly married, I was attending the University of Houston on the GI Bill. I was majoring in literature for no other reason than I’d always wanted to go to college and study it. Literature. Books.

Talk about changes. The other day I watched the season finale of a series I like on Netflix, The Umbrella Academy. The only person I know with whom I can talk about it is my daughter.

The gullible, the malicious, the uninformed have always been with us. Like viruses or bacteria, they lived among us.

Here we are. The first day of another era in the history of my blog I write each day in the morning light, or dark depending on the time of the year. I should probably give it more thought, take more time, but this is what I’ve done for the last ten years.

Unsettled. That’s the best way to describe my recent feelings. About life, about writing, about everything. I’m unsure when it started. Maybe it was when I looked at my readership analytics and saw the size of my audience. Small. Tiny even.

It feels nice when the air of the day you greet is sweet and cool as it is this morning. It gives you hope that softer weather is on the way.

All the old swallow nests are down. Seven. I spent more time on a tall ladder than my doctor would approve. But I was careful. And isn’t that what everyone says after they fall off a ladder.

I took down most of the old swallow nests yesterday. Washed the wall. Swept away the debris. Today I’ll do the back porch. I’m done with swallows. Next season they’ll need to find a new home.

Pete Rose and Kris Kristofferson died and for some reason I thought I’d write about them, one or the other. But I started down the Rose rabbit hole and finally decided that I didn’t really have much to say.

As I’ve started studying the geology of the lands I hike, I’ve really come to love the size and the scope of the story I see.

I’ve started sleeping with a stuffed animal. It’s a miniature dachshund with the words Be Mine embroidered on it’s side. I have no idea who bought it for whom. Me for my late wife or her for me.

When the waters come, mountains bow down before it. When the waters come, shorelines turn their back and recede.

I have vanquished the darkness. New lights are in my ceiling. They are flush to the sheet rock rather than dangling down. I have them on at the moment just to see how I like them although I’m not really sure they serve any purpose.

Two lights fell out of the ceiling yesterday. I brought in the ladders and figured out why. The junction boxes failed. The plastic crumbled. I guess fifteen years of hanging around in my ceiling was just too much for them.

Things are easing up. My sore hip and leg, tweaked during a week in the Black Hills and Badlands, are recovering. A massage on Monday and a visit to my doctor on Tuesday seem to have done the trick.

I like it that I can step into my back lots, look up, and see the stars. Maybe not as many as I might see at Big Bend Bend or the Guadalupe Mountains, but still stars in the night sky with the Milky Way clearly visible.

Things are changing. You might recall in 2023, after climbing to the top of Guadalupe peak and returning, I felt my life was entering a new period. I called it my Guadalupian Period, being as I’m a newborn fan of geology. And I was right.

I usually refer to my Barbados Cherry in the singular. But it is time to admit there is now more than one. In fact, I find it hard to really put a number on the number of plants that now comprise what I should rightly call my Barbados Cherry grove.

On my recent trip to South Dakota, I visited Wall Drugs and the Corn Palace. I expected kitsch. I got art and history. Nice surprises in both cases.

I remember when my daughter first went to visit Maine with her new husband. It was summer and Maine was beautiful, and she opined that they could live there. And her husband said, no, because of winter.