My trips to Big Bend are always humbling and rewarding. First, it’s a big, relatively empty place, with lots of space between its mountains, and there are mountains galore. Humanity, despite its best efforts, has managed only the tiniest of footprints, and even those feel slightly tenuous, and are nothing compared to the memory of the dinosaurs that once roamed the landscape.

So far, I’ve mostly enjoyed living in the information age. One big upside is the ability to find out information on obscure parts I need when repairing things. At the moment, I’m putting a new pull rope on my line trimmer and the mechanism needs a little clip to hold it all together. Turns out it’s called a circlip 9X1, and a local power tool company just down the road has not one but four of them in stock. I even have the part number.

Another road trip is in the books, and I’m back at home. There’s a twist this time. The son who was living with me has found his own place. By the river. Nice. But… The emptiness was palpable when I walked into the yard and then the house. That will take some getting used to. Fortunately, he’s just down the road and lots of his gear is still here, and this may or may not be a long-term venture.

I disappeared yesterday. I was with a group of people. They were talking about plans. And poof I was gone. Of course, although I might have felt invisible, I was probably still there in body, but nevertheless, I felt gone, disconnected. It’s not a new feeling for me, and I’m pretty sure, unlike Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, I’m not actually traveling in time or anything. But the feeling of profound solitude and aloneness is real, even in a crowd.

I’m in Marathon. Texas. For a songwriting festival. This is my fifth year. Five years since my wife passed away in the same month in 2020. I came in the first year because friends put the wind of kind words in my sails and recommended it. The drive of five hours felt like I was going to the ends of the earth, but my faith was repaid with the inestimable gifts of music and friendship. We listened to music, we played music, we talked.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the second bomb falling on Nagasaki. Nearly a month later, September 2, Japan surrendered. It took close to a month for that decision to be made. In retrospect, given the ferocity of the violence of those two bombs, the surrender seems a long time coming. 

Yesterday I was driving 70 down a road north of Fredericksburg, and I wondered why I was driving 70 down a road north of Fredericksburg. It’s a road with pretty scenery, courtesy of the Llano uplift, and trying to see it while driving 70, even if it is the posted speed limit, is a great way to get yourself killed. I don’t know about other people, but I tend to drift when I start looking at things along the road. So, I slowed down.

I live in a town that’s on the way to everywhere. The Highland Lakes are to the north and the wine country to the west. Two major metros are close at hand: Austin to the east, and San Antonio to the south. Those metros are growing. Highway 290 on the west side of Austin is expanding, widening, and lengthening, as is Highway 281 on the north side of San Antone. They’re daggers pointed right at the heart of the Hill Country.

I’m playing with AI. It’s fun, and useful. For the last several weeks, I’ve used AI to check this blog for “grammar, spelling, and usage.” It’s great at catching spelling errors, and is liberal with the use of commas. It has an odd affinity for the em dash, however, the sort of pause that I let a comma handle. After review, I’m presented with edited copy and a list of changes. I accept or reject the proposed changes, and we’re off. It’s a nice backup.

I love the internet in so many ways, but hate it at the same time for so many others. Chiefly, I moan the loss of human contact in the area of giving and receiving instructions. At the moment, I am wrestling with a website trying to fulfill their requirements for them to stop charging me sales tax on goods I’m buying from them to resell. It seems obvious. They’re a print on demand company and the orders are coming from my website.

There was a banging in the fireplace yesterday. It’s too early for Christmas and Santa Claus, so I thought it might be an animal of some sort. Once upon a time, we had a fireplace where chimney swifts lived, and they made a raucous noise. But this was the heavier knocking of a much larger beast. So, I went outside to look and see what I could see.

Typically, I don’t pay much attention to who’s eating at what plants in my gardens. But I have several stands of mistflowers, and the Queen butterflies (Danaus gilippus) so heavily populated the bunch in the new garden along the north fence that I had to stand and look yesterday. It’s a striking butterfly and compares favorably to the Monarch, and there were a lot of them on the plants. To anyone inclined to further study, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has a page dedicated to how to tell the two members of the Danaus subfamily apart.

Played a song yesterday for friends of longstanding at the celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. There was a smallish crowd of close friends and family, so I got to play totally acoustic, sitting among the guests. As usual, I remember only the mistakes I made, but most everyone seemed happy with the result. So, I’m happy. And now I’m part of another good memory of dear friends, and that feels good, too.

Well, the prize went to the early morning riser today in my neck of the woods. There’s a nice cloud cover with just enough space for the morning sun to peek out beneath it and light things up. Golds, purples, reds, blues. You name ’em. The colors were there on the clouds, shifting and changing as the morning progressed, and I got tired of taking pictures.

At some point in my life, I became nearly obsessed with knowing what I see. I suspect it started with birds, and I can pinpoint that date to 1983. Then it was plants. Followed by rocks and mountains, much later in life. That semi-obsession accounts for my bird, plant, and geology books. I’m no ornithologist, botanist, or geologist by any stretch, but I’ve got just enough info banging around in my head that I stand a fairly good chance these days of knowing what I see.

We all like a story, and that’s why we make up so many of them. And we particularly like stories that make sense of seemingly inexplicable things. The big one for me, recently, was how did a county like Kerr, with a river running through it, manage to miss what happened to another county, Hays, which experienced a catastrophic flood in 2015 with its river? The latter, Hays, installed a warning system. The former, Kerr, didn’t.

I was speaking with a friend recently about the flooding in Kerr County along the Guadalupe, specifically about the county's inability to get an early warning system installed and why. My story was answered with, "I didn't know that." It stopped the discussion and got me thinking about how we get our news these days.