Woke up to the sound of thunder and rain on the windows last night as a big thunderstorm rolled through the Houston area. I’m in town for the first of what I hope are many annual checkups on my repaired abdominal aortic aneurysm. I’m staying with my oldest son, the same son who came up last week to my place to chunk on guitars, and we did it again last night just for a bit before bed. He helped me work out some kinks in one of my songs.

There was fire, with smoke and ash in the sky yesterday. The plume of smoke hovered over us all day as the fire grew from 400 acres to 8,000 while the wind blew hard with its load of west texas sand. Then at dusk, as though someone had turned a switch the wind dropped and the cool air came. This morning it’s 42 and the fire is 92 percent contained. We could still use the rain, but the cool nights are a blessing.

The front room this morning is a maze of cables, amps, pedals, and instruments. Music is being made. We’re missing the daughter and her bass, but the boys are back with keyboards and guitars. Someone starts a riff , or dad starts singing, and off we go. Covers, originals. It matters not. What’s the key? Boom. There’s a downbeat. We’re off.

Spent a great deal of time outside yesterday, and I believe I’m paying the coughing price this morning. The winds were up and so was the dust but I drove the ball well and we couldn’t quit our first round of golf this year for a little wind and dust. So, we plodded on and now my nose is stuffy and I’ve got a bit of a cough, plus I’m sore again, but I’ve decided that is simply the price of living past my best-used-by date, the other is attributed to the dust.

You can tell you’re getting old when you wake up sore and the only thing you did the previous day was take a long walk. I guess I need to take more long walks, although I thought I was doing fairly well in that regard. Afterall I just spent a week hiking various trails in Big Bend, and I almost always chose walking over driving in camp. Perhaps I overdid it, because there’s a line in a song I like, Old Folks Boogie, about my mind making promises my body can’t keep and I do tend to think I’m young and act like it, although looking in a mirror will draw me up short.

I caught a break yesterday, another in a long string of caught breaks that pretty much define my life. This time it was small, dental, but it was still a break that went my way. I had a cavity on a tooth with a crown. It could have required another crown, or a root canal, or even an implant. But all it required was for me to keep my mouth open while the dentist and his assistant worked. When they finished the cavity was filled and I was on my way. I’ll need a new crown at some point, but not today. And just like that I went from a big cost to a little cost.

Goodness. It’s cold outside. A nice reminder that February is still winter and even in Texas that means a chill air. Of course, as the temperature dropped yesterday, and I went to the store in a hoodie and a jacket, I still saw men and boys in shorts. And I’m still not sure how that’s comfortable and why men do it. It used to be that only boys wore short pants and men wore long. Now, short pants are ubiquitous, a symbol of freedom, I suppose. But in cold weather it’s a sartorial choice that makes me wonder.

I had a good post day yesterday. It resonated with quite a few people. And that’s good. Except now I have to try and do it again the next day, and that’s damn near impossible, because resonating insights aren’t just lying around for the picking. The best I can do today is say that I solved the NY Times mini crossword in 44 seconds and that puzzle had 17 clues. My puzzle solving friends will understand and everyone else will just go, so?

This might turn out to be a pretty good day. I just solved the NY Times mini crossword in 50 seconds. Probably a record for me. If I hadn’t mixed up Monet and Manet it would have been under 50 seconds. Of course, I’m betting there are multitudes who routinely best the puzzle in a lot less than that. Still, it gives me a little buzz.

Home again. Home again. It feels good. We pulled out of Red River, NM around 8 a.m. yesterday, and I put my head on my pillow at 12:45 this morning. Two cars, eight people. We stopped for breakfast in Taos, and from there it was gas station food all the way home. New Mexico in the daytime is pretty, Texas at night is no great shakes, it’s blackness and the blinking red lights of wind farms, until you hit the blessed Interstate 10 with its 75 and 80 mph speed limit.

We went for a ride yesterday. Headed east out of town toward Bobcat Pass and then down to the town of Eagle’s Nest. It was a lovely drive. One I’d never taken before because we always come in from the west from Quest. The scenery was lovely and I decided I’d love to see the place in summer when the river was running and everything was green.

I took my first bath and massage in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the first years of the 21st century. The idea of another person bathing and massaging me, was strange, but I persevered and found it comforting. Eventually, the massage became part of my health maintenance routine, and now my massage therapist is a vital weapon in my battle with age and despair. When my muscles knot, my head refuses to turn, or my back aches, she reaches inside and chases away the demons.

I’m still in my book with my quantum theories and now I'm in the multiverse phase which implies, almost in comic book fashion, that nothing happens until it's observed and all possible outcomes in all possible combinations exist in their own universes and there’s more to it than that from a physics standpoint because there’s something about a wave not collapsing that I don’t totally get.

As I’m reading my book, Six Impossible Things, by John Gribbin, a tidy little book dealing with subatomic particles and their mysterious duality as particles and waves, I am struck by something. Every physicist mentioned has performed a thought experiment, oftentimes because technology has not advanced to a stage that would let them perform a live experiment, but usually just to prove a point about the mysterious quantum world.

I just read a book, Six Impossible Things, by John Gribbin. It’s a tiny book which is fitting because it deals with the mystery of tiny things, subatomic particles. They can be in two places at once, and act as either a wave or a particle, and there are formulas to prove both. No one to date has successfully explained why the particles behave as they behave, although several have tried and that's the subject of the book.

Here we go. A new day. No turmoil to report. No angst. Only the realization that turning over your life to algorithms is probably a bad idea, unless you know how to make the algorithm work in your favor. I’ve figured it out on most platforms, and some I’ve left entirely. But I still find myself responding mindlessly to the screen, making someone money I’m sure.

Interesting. I started down a writing path this morning, got one paragraph in and decided it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, probably because it’s likely I’ve talked about it before although it’s difficult to imagine a personal topic I haven’t touched on in the ten years I’ve been writing this blog. Still, I stopped and started over. This is the result. It feels marginally better.

I’m home. And it feels good. Slept in my own bed. Walked out onto the porch this morning and looked at the pasture. Looked at the sky. Now for the rest of the day. I washed everything before I left my daughter’s home, so all I need to do is put things away, attach decals to guitar cases, and remember the good times.

In the first four Christmases after my wife’s death in 2020, I dressed myself and the house for a party in which one of the guests was gone. Children still came, friends still visited, but the missing soul was still missing. So, this year, when my daughter invited the family to her new home in Virginia, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to start anew, do something fresh and different. I made my plans and left town and the undecorated house.

In the early morning, on a fine summer day, just as the sun is rising there can be a moment when the beach is all mine except for the tide and the shore birds. It's a sight quite literally never to be seen again, and being there to see it, to be the one to see it, fills me with quiet pleasure. It’s been that way all my life. And that's how it feels this morning as I stare off into the first day of 2025.