On the way home from the funeral today, we stopped by my old home in Arnold, MO. I remember my first day of school way back around 1968, waiting on the bus at the end of this very driveway. It reminded me of the first chapter of a book I've been working on, "Siriusly: a Lifetime Following the Dog Star"; below is an unedited excerpt: Chapter 1: Shep While there have been relatively short times…

Yo, Charlie... Yo, Dad! I'm glad you're home. Me, too, Charles; it was a wild one. If you had known things were going to turn out the way they did, would you still have taken Nama? Absolutely not, Charles; the cost vastly outweighed the outcome. Unfortunately, hypothetical questions seldom produce satisfactory answers, as there are just too many variables. Yep, that's why I took a break from (anti)social media while y'all were gone. Take this…

Tomorrow, we turn towards the east and home. Wait a minute; there is no "we". For the first time in recent memory, I will be riding solo, and it don't feel right. This has been one of the strangest weeks of my life. To have such a tragedy happen while on the road and far from home is one thing, but to have it happen at the very epicenter of such a special place as…

John Brown Canyon, Utah After a very bizarre day spent burying Nama and re-ordering my steps in Gateway, I decided that retreat is not a direction. I headed west up John Brown Canyon, over the LaSal mountains and down into Moab. As it hasn't been graded since last winter, it's a long, rough, remote road, but there is no way to get over it without just doing it. And there is no hurrying it either,…

Heavy storms rolled through Arkansas last night; while most of the potentially damaging weather skirted to the north the Casa, the loud thunder and heavy rain are just beginning to abate. The inmates are not especially affected by bad weather, but after a prolonged period, the constant barrage begins to wear on even Charlie's last nerve. Thunder claps that didn't affect her in the least early in the evening later found the usually indomitable girl…

It had been six months since I had been on the bicycle; it wasn't planned that way, the time just seemed to sneak up on me. It started with the passing of MacDuff, then fall morphed to an extended winter, and so it goes. But yesterday, I decided to get back on the bike; no special occasion, just figured it was time. I was quickly reminded of how much stamina I had lost when I…

"Get a cat", they said. "It will be good for the Casa", they said. Well, whoever "they" are, they lied. I have found out the a sassy adolescent kitty is merely the catalyst that speeds up the destructive chemical reaction that is two rowdy young dogs. There is evidently some law of physics of which I was previously unaware, where Bassa can somehow reduce Nama and Bilbo's combined mental capacity by half while somehow doubling…