Turkey Day Approaches

23. November 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

I swear, I don’t know where the time goes. Here we are, closing in on Thanksgiving, and the Christmas decorations are already out everywhere – and next weekend it will be the Christmas Tree lighting in Bulverde. Since my daughter has decided that Bulverde is the place that she eventually wants to be in (mostly for the school district) we do take an interest in civic festivities going on there. Hope it is cold enough for the snow-making machinery this year. We plan to dress Wee Jamie in his elf costume again.

Anyway, Jamie’s preschool is out for the entire week. The staff held a pie social for kids in each class and their parents on Friday afternoon; we all went out to the landscaped playground and had pie, before taking the kids home for a week of shopping, feasting and general frivolity.

Saturday – we went around to a selection of our usual grocery stores for what we desperately hope will be the last time we need to run out to the grocery store before Thanksgiving. Every year we say this, and every year we wind up running out for something at the last minute …

Anyway, the turkey is already set. HEB had a coupon last week: buy one of their spiral sliced hams and get a frozen turkey of under 12 pounds for free! Yeah, can’t beat that deal with a stick. $24 for the ham – which got parted out, vacuum-sealed for the freezer for future meals and the bone consigned to a batch of ham and bean soup – and the turkey is thawing now in the refrigerator. We’ll mix up the brine tomorrow, and brine it for another three days.

Cosco first thing Saturday wasn’t too horrific – we escaped with a gargantuan tin of Walker’s Shortbread (the real stuff, imported from Scotland.) I think eventually the tin will contain either sewing stuff, or maybe odds and ends of hardware, screws and plate hangers in the garage. Nice cookie tins have an afterlife of centuries. There is an ornate tea tin knocking around our family which is going on a second hundred years, as it managed to survive the 2003 fire … and if it is still at my sisters’ house, the Eaton Canyon fire earlier this year.

My daughter also bought a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce at HEB which had a translated label which amused us no end. Apparently, it translates as “Salsa Inglesa”

As for Thanksgiving supper itself – all the customary dishes that we do like – the oven-roasted brussels sprouts with onion and kielbasa sausage, baked sweet potato streusel, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy, with pumpkin pie for dessert – this time made with the little pumpkin that Jamie painted at nursery school for their Halloween bash. The parents were asked to contribute small pumpkins – so, when it was brought home, I washed it off, cut it in half, cleaned out the seeds and baked it until it was soft and mushy. Then vacuum-sealed and frozen.

The only bafflement, grocery-wise this week was the total inability to find frozen artichoke hearts anywhere at all. It’s kind of an esoteric item, but HEB usually has them, and Trader Joe’s almost always … but still, nowhere to be found anywhere lately. I wonder if there was a bad harvest year for the artichoke crop that usually gets frozen for sale.

So that’s how it stands this weekend – a rainy one, as it turns out. I am working away on the Return to Flannel Romance, which I plan to release as a reader’s Christmas present – on Christmas Eve, I think. My daughter says she will laugh and laugh and laugh, if it turns out to be the most popular of all my books…

Houseware Style

06. November 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic

At some point late in the 1990s or early 2000s I was feeling economically flush. I decided that I would upgrade my kitchen pots and pans from the basic inexpensive lightweight stainless steel and copper-bottomed Revereware that I bought from the BX early on, and had carted from hither and yon ever since. I was working as an executive secretary for a small consulting firm which had some very good months which rewarded the handful of employees with some nice bonuses. The office I worked in was across the road from a very nice mall with a Williams – Sonoma outlet in it. This place enticed me, what with the nose-bleedingly upscale offerings in it, most of which I could never in a million years afford and was just too grounded to seriously consider anyway. But the opportunities to research quality kitchen items were available to me, through that store, and again on-line. After carefully reviewing that which was available at the Williams – Sonoma store and looking online – I decided on Chantal enamel-on-steel and in the cobalt blue colorway. Enamel because it was non-reactive to acidic things like tomato sauce, or sauces with wine or vinegar in it, and blue – because. Chantal then offered a full range of pots, pans, casseroles and bakeware in six or seven shades.  Blue, green, red, white, maybe orange? Besides plain steel and maybe copper … alas, they stopped offering the colors before too many more years passed. I guess there wasn’t all that much demand.

I think they had a warehouse in Houston, which was handy for my purposes. I bought a small frying pan, and a soup kettle, first, and was very pleased to see that the same lid fitted both. So the larger part of one of those bonus checks went to buying one of their larger sets, and I was so extatically happy with them that I picked up a few more individual pieces on sale: a saucier, a wok, and a stock-pot. The cooking pots and pans all turned out to be as advertised; readily-cleaned, heated evenly, the lids were borosilicate glass, and had a loop that fitted over the pot handle so that they could be hung together from my handing rack. I have only ever been able to break one lid, in all the time since, through dropping onto a concrete floor and landing straight on the loop.

I believe that for some period around that time, the Chantal enamel pots were also the set dressing of choice for the movies and TV, possibly for the distinctive colors and style: If you look closely at the scenes set in the Home Improvement kitchen, there are a couple of blue Chantal pots, and a tea kettle. In the kitchen set for the Home Alone movies, there are some red Chantal pots and pans on the kitchen island, or the stove.

Alas, it seems that just as I decided on a make of something for the household – pots, dishware, whatever, assuming that I will always be able to replace or augment my selection … they stop making it. It happened with the sturdy blue and white restaurant-style china plates, mugs, bowls and individual casserole dishes that I got from an outlet shop in San Marcos. Yep, as soon as I needed to restock due to breakage, that store vanished between one visit and the next. So it was with my Chantal blue – gone with the manufacturing wind. My daughter has managed to pick up a couple more useful pieces for me through randomly finding them at thrift stores, and I scan through eBay now and again, like for a replacement lid. The pieces are a bit more expensive on eBay – but I guess the brand was popular enough that at least they are available, and for a good bit less less than they were when new. They do last very well, although one of my favorite pieces got badly chipped along one side by the rotating arm of the dishwasher. That particular pot hasn’t shown up yet; I can only imagine that it was everyone elses’ favorite as well.

State of the Author – 2025

17. July 2025 · Comments Off on State of the Author – 2025 · Categories: Domestic, Luna City, Random Book and Media Musings

OK – a titch over halfway through the year, and it’s been shaping up very well for me personally, all things considered. I made the last payment on the 30-year mortgage for my personal Patch of Paradise and received all but the last 2,000$ or so of the insurance payout for the accident that destroyed poor little lamented Thing the Versa. (A certain amount held out by the law firm to cover the final invoice on the medical scan which verified that yes, I had some bone damage to go with the simply awesome collection of bruises. Which payment invoice is lagging and lagging … yes, Big Government Medical matters proceed at the stately pace of a drugged Galapagos tortoise.)

These developments ease the necessity for tight budgeting and even allow for some frivolous expenses – a thing which hasn’t happened since the year that I spent in Korea doing outside voice-work. Some of those frivolous expenditures include being able to pay for overnight accommodations for distant-from-home book events. Alas, one of the big local book and music celebrations which I liked participating in was the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene; and it seems that yearly event died the death during the Covidiocy. I can’t find any trace of it left at all in current social media, which was a pity, as I enjoyed getting there at least as much as I like participating. But the Giddings Word Wrangler is still a going concern, and I was invited to this fall. I hope to hear soon about Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, too.

With luck, I think I will have finished Hills of Gold, the sequel to West Towards the Sunset by the end of the year. I have projected this as a YA historical adventure series relating the sequential adventures of the Kettering tweens and teens during pre-Civil War days on the western frontier: California and Nevada mostly, during the various gold and silver rushes there. The second in the series, focusing on Jon Kettering (a small boy in West Towards the Sunset, which focuses on his older sister, Sally), is about two-thirds completed in draft. I also had a glorious inspiration for writing a further adventure concerning a younger sister in the Virginia City, Nevada silver rush. Oh, and Jon Kettering himself becomes a Pony Express rider, during the crisis year that the Pony Express was a going, yet ultimately economically crushing concern.

I also have the long-promised final volume of the contemporary Luna City chronicles about half-done, and several notions to round out the various plot threads/story arcs:  the wedding of Richard and Kate, the eventual disposition of the legendary Mills Treasure, what happened to Joe Vaughn at the end of Volume 11 … all sorts of little things in the Most Perfect Small Town in South Texas. In the Luna City time line we are also coming up on the start of the Covidiocy. Also a couple of real-life people who I based characters on have since passed away … so it just seems like a good place to wind up the story. Not for good, though – I still have half a mind to do another YA series, with Letty, Douglas, Stephen and their other friends as kids in the 1930s. I’m seeing it as sort of an Americanized Emil and the Detectives, with their little group helping Chief McGill and Sgt. Drury solve small rural mysteries. But that has to wait on me finishing the Kettering series, of course.

The Novel Way

26. June 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.

Anyway, the epistolary novel isn’t much done these days; the last mega-huge bestseller in that form that I remember reading of my own free will was 1965’s Up The Down Staircase – a chaotic year in the life of an idealistic young schoolteacher on her first year in an interestingly dysfunctional urban school. Dysfunction then meant smoking cigarettes out behind the trash cans and dropping cherry bombs in the boys’ lavatory toilets, which seems rather charmingly retro, in comparison to present-day open riot in the hallways and violent assault in the classroom. Staircase was also made into a movie starring Sandy Dennis.

But the epistolary form was once overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 18th century. What has been accepted as the first-ever novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or Virtue Rewarded established the form. That novel began as a series of template letters, newly-literate, newly-well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, for the use of, only Richardson wished to incorporate moral lessons in the template letters and so created a narrative and characters to hang the letters upon. Pamela turned out to be so wildly popular on that merit that Richardson followed it with another such, even longer and more operatic: Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady. This featured a young woman of imperishable virtue and her moral victory over a scheming vile seducer, who was not above kidnapping, drugging and rape of the heroine. This was also made into a miniseries in 1991, with Sean Bean as the vile seducer. He dies in the end, as is his customary habit in most (not all) movies and miniseries episodes in which he appears.

There are advantages to telling a story thusly; it is outright fun for a writer to basically create a character monolog and put on another voice and style, for however long or short – and sometimes very short. I’ve done a partial-epistolary in My Dear Cousin, and incorporated letters from characters in some of my other books. (Truckee, The Adelsverein Trilogy, That Fateful Lightning.) It’s also an excellent means of incorporating a necessary info-dump or inserting a shorter account of what would be a tediously lengthy scene or account of a necessary sequence if done in full narration. There is scope for a modern version, with emails, memos-for-record, messages and blog posts, so the format is not exhausted by any means.

There are some disadvantages to writing a completely epistolary novel; it is all a sequence of monologues, and with a good writer, the character voice of every letter-writing character ought to be distinctive, differentiated from each other on the page. Given that not many scribblers of letters are given to write like a reporter, descriptions and conversations are … often sketchy, and more implied than actually included verbatim. I suspect that totally epistolary novels must be carefully planned and plotted in advance so as to be certain of including every necessary detail. The other disadvantage shows up more clearly in novels like Richardson’s Clarissa, wherein a five-minute long incident or conversation becomes the basis for a pages-long letter describing it in exhaustive detail. A brief sliver of action is measured off in yards, and yards and yards of verbiage which would have taken hours to write, giving one to wonder if these characters really did anything without a ream of paper in one hand, and an inkpot and pen in the other to memorialize the moment, rather like 18th century verbal selfie.
Discuss as you will – what other interesting epistolary or semi-epistolary novels are out there today?

Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cow

05. June 2025 · Comments Off on Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cow · Categories: Domestic

Wee Jamie, the wonder grandson, has a whole room full of toys – and most of them have not been purchased by an indulgent grandparent, but rather his mother, who revels in thrift stores and invariably emerges from the premises, triumphantly bearing a rather choice item that she got for a relative pittance. Such as the collections of originally high-end Coach or Dooney & Burke handbags which she bought here and there for $5-25 dollars which are valued on EBay for about four times that, or more. Seriously, I think the guy at the local luggage, shoe and handbag repair place wants to follow her into one of these emporiums, just to get a handle on how she manages to spot the good stuff. This is the woman who picked up a pair of earrings out of the 1$ bin of costume jewelry at a booth at the Blanco monthly market and had them turn out to be real emeralds and 18 carat gold.

Anyway, she buys Fisher-Price Little People sets for Wee Jamie, and the one which he currently loves the most – or which he plays with the most often – is the jungle adventure set. There are a number of buttons on it, which elicit a chirpy voice telling the kids about how neato wild animals are, and suggesting short, happy, and helpful encounters with the jungle critters: one suggests that a hippo will helpfully carry you across the river, and the  other that a chimpanzee will share bananas with you if you are hungry. Talk about fantasies … in real-no-kidding jungle wilderness, hippos are horribly dangerous (being large, nearsighted and hostile) and chimpanzees are vicious and murderous primates several times stronger than the average male of our species.

And in fact, bears are not cuddly, friendly creatures either, so WHY do we give children stuffed bears to play with and give them the notion that a thousand-pound brown bear is Christopher Robin’s silly friend Pooh? I know – fantasy, and story-telling, which is all very nice in it’s place, but it would be nice if at some point we got more realistic about wildlife to our offspring generally. Look, it’s not just Australia where all the wildlife is planning to kill humans. The larger mammals in the rest of the world are, especially the big carnivorous ones with lots of claws and sharp teeth. We are tasty and made of meat, and even the larger herbivores can be hazardous to humans, as every park ranger working our popular wilderness parks can attest. The rank stupidity of park visitors who have to be warned against trying to pet the buffalo or park their children close to the wandering bear to get that perfect photo shot has not been exaggerated. There is a reason such people are dubbed “tourons.”

Thus endeth the lessen for today. I wonder if the jungle adventure Little People toy can be reprogrammed to say something like “The hippo is huge, stupid and dangerous – build yourself a canoe” and “The chimpanzee will not share – he’s rip your face off, so pick your own banana.”

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