I like going into my back lots at night and looking at the stars. It’s dark in the lots and we’re still country enough that light pollution is at a minimum. So, the night sky is starlit. I also like checking in on my little porch bird, huddled up at the top of its pole, sound asleep.

The pump house is coming along. It turns out I have more tin than I imagined. Plus, I’m making do with what I have so, old fence slats are filling in where needed.

It feels odd to be writing about small things when there’s a big thing happening right down the road, but this big thing isn’t a personal tale like my other big things. Those were peculiar to me but relatable, an illness in the family, a death, things we all suffer.

An only upside in failing to sleep through the night is being able to walk out onto my porch and look at the pasture behind my house in the light of a nearly full moon. It’s a bonus when the temperature is in the 40s and there’s no breeze.

It’s a cold crisp morning in the Hill Country. The air is clear, not a cloud in the sky. The presidential election didn’t go my way, but the sun has come up every morning since and gone down as well. I’m disappointed, but it isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last.

Spent the day yesterday helping friends provide music, sound, and food to a gathering of women at the Hotel Giles in Comfort, Texas.

I’m in the mood to say something pithy, but nothing pithy comes to mind. I’m facing one of those barren words deserts that occasionally plague writers.

On a chill morning like today, I enjoy standing outside, feeling the air on my skin, drinking my coffee and looking at the gray clouds attempting to fill the sky. It gives me hope that winter might be on the way.

The other day, my brother and I played a round of golf at a course we favor. As usual, being a twosome, they paired us with another twosome. Usually, this makes for a sometimes gruesome day of golf as you have to play with someone you’d usually ignore.

As a writer, I’ve always thought, as Hemingway said, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” But the truth these days is harder and harder to find because more and more it seems mostly to lie in the eye of the beholder.

 I am going to a friends 80^th birthday party today. I’m in charge of the music. It’s a playlist he and I began putting together back in the 80s when the medium of choice was cassette tapes, and I was planning a Mardi Gras party.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 am back from the badlands, from the black hills, from the wide waters of the Missouri. I stood at the spot where Lewis and Clark first raised a US flag in the newly bought Louisiana Purchase.