The Witliff Collections of Southwestern Writers, Texas State U. at San Marcos, has done a display of contemporary western writers and have honored me with a prominent display concerning News of the World.  Those moccasins are northern Ojibway that I had made when I was up north, the doll was one Jim and I found under the old house we restored (she ended up in NOTW) the watch is my grandfathers hunting watch and then also I sent Steve a lot of manuscript pages.

Looks good!

It’s 102 today and it will hit 106 by Monday. Staying in the house most of the time, there’s about a three or four-hour margin in the early mornings when I can get outside and get some work done. Otherwise it’s cabin fever. It’s like being in some kind of storm. I like being outside but can’t do it much past noon. After noon I dart outside to shift hoses, carrying an umbrella, dart back in.

Ryan got the nice cedar fence done down at the Longhorn gate (because I have hung a metal cutout of a longhorn head on it) and stopped at noon and he was done for. I took him down a carton of cold coconut milk. With pineapple the best kind. Lots of potassium.

Working on Simon the Fiddler. Re-reading Tales of the Dying Earth and a book about the Mayflower and those books I have to read for a project I promised to take part in. Got a letter from the admirable Bonnie Rapp, who was my mother’s dear friend. She said she and Vivian Weston (my mother’s first cousin) liked News of the World very much, and said “I kept reading every night wondering what you were going to do to that girl and that old man and was so relieved at a happy ending.” This from Blackwater, Missouri, where my mother’s people come from.

The King Fisher Connection

Researching the old Vivian-Taylor House near Goliad, Texas (online). Jim’s first wife’s people were related to the Vivians. The house was built in the 1840’s by Lloyd Thacker Vivian, whose granddaughter Kitty Vivian was the grandmother of Bernice Hilburn, who was Jim’s first wife’s mother. Kitty Vivian’s sister Sarah (Sally) married King Fisher and is mentioned in Taming The Nueces Strip. “A pretty little Irish chit”. This was when McNelly went to near Espantosa Lake to arrest King Fisher and apparently Sally came out of the house and gave them down the country. We drove down there to take the grandkids to see the old stone house, it was after all their ancestor.

All I can think about at this point is having to wear those dresses and petticoats and corsets in 106 degree heat. I’d be short-tempered too, whether my husband was an outlaw or not.

Trying hard to find a new home for all five of these kittens. Mother cat showed up in my garage during the cold winter, only half-grown and desperate for food, so I took her in and she had five babies. I really don’t know what to do with them. They are darling. Nobody wants them.

Today!

More reviews of sci-fi shorts! This will shock you!

Before I review any I will note that in many instances although the CGI is terrific and there are great effects and exo-armor suits and currently fashionable multi-barreled weapons, the actors  in most of these shorts don’t really move all that well. Are not limber, are often clumsy. Like Van Diesel. It is often hard to notice because of all the whiz-bang and dazzle.

Terrific! Gets the Ta Dum! Prize!

‘Planet Unknown’. The two robo-planter Discovery-type units are splendid, They are friends, they are on a mission, they rescue each other. The interesting thing is all the verbiage that is presented when you look it up, explaining the background etc. but there is not one word of dialogue or narrative in the film. I watched it before I read anything about it and understood it with no trouble. No dialogue! Except the usual beep beep boop boop and various sounds indicating sadness, yelps of surprise. It is very short but the writers understood the basic concepts of storytelling and stuck to them.  1.) two friends have mission. 2.) Proceed on mission, repeated failures, shows friendly relationship between the units. 3.) Danger! External dangers fall upon them! 4.) Friends rescue each other from external dangers! 5.) Does mission succeed? Click on it friends.

‘The Nostalgist’ As a way of insulting our intelligence this short film tells us over and over and  over that a man in the future is paying much $$ to live in a virtual world. The virtual world thing is getting frayed around the edges. Jack Vance did it in the 60’s only he postulated sort of magical contact lenses. So there was no need to belabor the point and show illustrations over and over again of the contrast between the two worlds. The man character is all victimy. He has no plans not to be a victim. Massive amounts of unnecessary dialogue. Looooong reaction shots every time something happens, like when a chess piece gets moved. He has a little boy who in reality is a robot. Cruel policemen attack him. Boy robot gets BTFO’d. So never mind, I’m sorry I mentioned t.

‘the Oceanmaker’. This is great, many stars. It’s animated, terrific flight scenes. Again, not one word of dialogue but you understand he story with no trouble, it is all told visually. A very dry world —- oldish-tyle airplanes seed what clouds there are to get a little rain —they fight over clouds! Brave girl pilot holds out against evil menacing airplanes from somewhere else.

And so that’s it for today. The drought has become extreme — as bad as 2010. And it’s just this little part of Texas, everywhere else in Texas is getting a lot of rain. Unfair, unfair.

We had almost no rain all this spring, and it is hard on the deer especially. Found this day-old fawn in the middle of the road. Saw its mother run off into the brush and cedar, and when I decided I might try to pick it up to see if it was dead it finally got to its feet and ran off.

Fawns instinctively drop and become very still in the brush as the mother distracts the danger but this little creature tried it in the middle of my road. At any rate it was all right.

I am leaving out alfalfa for them; it’s better than leaving corn because then the wild hogs come and a wild hog will kill and eat a fawn. What a hard world to be born into just now — the terrible hard drought and heat.

The other night I shone my flash into the woods north of the house and saw three pairs of eyes glowing close to the ground, so I thought they were racoons or possums or…but then all the glowing eyes began to rise and I realized it was deer standing up from where they had bedded down close to the house. They had been laying there in a group, in the night, watching my house. It was a magical moment.

British forces with captured Germans, D-Day June 6th 1944.

We made out to the NAN Ranch on the Mimbres in New Mexico, a ten-hour drive in one pickup with trailer and three horses. April drove all the way. We met at the Lonehollow Barn as early as we could and loaded up, an exhausting process and then started out. It was a beautiful place, near the Arizona border, the Mimbres Valley a long green oasis in the desert. I was worried about Buck’s health, still am. But he’s getting old! I’m old already! What can one expect, But April and June were great companions, hardworking and knowledgeable and funny. The ranch is mainly a guest ranch although they run some cattle up the valley — also up the valley was the archaeological site which we were not allowed on of course; spirits of pot-makers lingering around the ancient clay beds, listening to the sound of the only river for hundreds of miles.

When we pulled in the gate was locked — they had forgotten to tell “the boys” to leave it open for us, so we had to climb over it and walk to headquarters, only about a mile, over a suspension bridge over the Mimbres.

I would load more pictures but this site is taking forever to load every photo. I get up and go downstairs and feed the dog and lay out my work for the next morning, come back up — still not loaded, still circles going around and around — and for this I got a new high -powered computer? I feel like drawing on the screen with a wax pencil.

So back home and no more traveling, Memorial Day today, thinking of my dad and his memories of Iwo Jima, when he saw the flag go up on Mount Suribachi — as always — got my flag up this morning. Rodeo last night down at the arena and from my place here on the ridge I could hear the announcer and the cheering and later the music from the dance. Too hot and too crowded for me but was relieved not to hear any sirens or medivac helicopters like last year, everybody okay, men and animals wrestling around in the heat and the dust, takes a lot of determination and guts. Also, nice to have the honor and prize money. Maybe some pictures from others if I can get them.

Appearances are over — not taking any more invitations. Things get so far out of hand here at home that I have not even hauled off the old water trough, it’s just laying there in the pasture rusting. Finally got the intrusive salt cedar prayed. We are in a serious drought again and so hauling hoses around trying to water trees, write, clean and all those chores that pile up when you’re gone…

But April June and I are heading for New Mexico with the horses, next week, a trip for pleasure, mo obligations to speak or sig, which I enjoy actually but it is exhausting.

Catch-up pictures:

I love this picture. This is June and Evelyn in Close Canyon, Big Bend State Park. I didn’t go this year (this was in February). You have to walk the canyon, and people pile up rocks in the most creative way. The year I was there we made angel statues. A very mystical place, love it.

This is me after with basal cell carcinoma surgery, one week ago. Another reason I haven’t got things done. Very small but haven’t played with the group in front of people with this dressing on my face. I am now down to a Band-Aid. Back to the pennywhistle. Next song to learn, ‘The Lonesome Boatman’.

Home-grown fruit! Went to Fiesta with my stepson and daughter-in-law and granddaughter and her husband and grandson and in fact almost the entire Johnson family and affines, in San Antonio, where they had an orange tree in the front yard and sent me home with a sack full. We sat up most of the night and drank and talked. This is the civilized way to celebrate fiesta in San Antonio. Different from commercial — more rind, less pulp, sweeter. Then the neighbors here gave me homegrown peaches — sweetest fruit I have ever tasted. These are my neighbors down the road, He is a hunter on one of the big ranches and some people he took out to hunt turkey misfired and shot him in the face with #7 bird shot. He went in today to have the last of the pellets removed. I am sure the peaches will be consoling. A very nice guy. So I went down to take them some oranges and both he and I had big bandages on our faces. Something in the air.

Cowboy Bar Nocona Texas

But this really is the end of my traveling. At any rate, a trip to Indian River Florida was very good, an audience interested in the Captain and Johanna and they laughed at my jokes, what more could I ask for? Long walks on the Atlantic beaches, good people. Beautiful venue at the Orchid Island Yacht club.

Drove in from San Antonio airport and got home at 2:00 in the morning and then up the next morning to load for North Texas — June, April and I and the horses all headed for Nocona. We rode at the LBJ National Grasslands where there is no grass but forest. Fairly thick, too. We stayed with Dee and Clint at the Half-Circle Eleven ranch, June’s husband’s old family property. Then that Saturday night went into Nocona with Dee and Clint for ‘Nocona Nights’, good band, the most over-the-top cowboy bar I have ever seen. It was a great trip even if I was tired and not talkative. Worn out with talking in Florida. Do we live on talk? You wonder. I could go without talking for weeks on end.

Us in over-the-top wonderful cowboy bar in Nocona Texas.

Easter was great this year.

News from the community; an elderly lady here is the aunt of Tammie Jo Shults, who piloted the Southwest flight to safety when an engine blew out and a passenger was almost sucked out of a blown-out window. The men who tried to save her were a Texan oilfield worker and a firefighter. They did not save her life, unfortunately.  The elderly woman said that Tammie Jo told a reporter, ‘I felt the Lord was wrapped around me’. In answer how she was able to fly the plane to safety. I didn’t see this as I don’t have a television.

Tom the fiddler and I and Becky Gring worked hard on two Irish pieces ; Inisheer and Sheebag Sheemore, That was delightful, a great experience, complicated melody on Sheebag Sheemore, very fast, and Tom just tore into it and if I missed the first three notes I couldn’t catch up until the bridge, scrambling like crazy to get there at the same time he did. Also on Inisheer I used my big Low G whistle and had to switch to D for Sheebag Sheemore. (Properly spelled Si Bhaig Si Muir). We played for a fairly large audience. Pastor Chuck great on the mandolin as always.

Terrible dry windy weather, allergies ascendant.