This bust of Santa Claus is the creation of my sister, Cathy Casey Berger. She sculpted the face in clay, then added a lamb’s wool beard, a toy bag over his shoulder and a hood trimmed in mink fur taken from an old shawl purchased in a used clothing store.  She also creates full bodied…

I first met Alice Trego (photo right) through Women Writing the West, an organization of women and men whose writing interest primarily focuses on the American West, both contemporary and historical. The first lap of Alice’s writing career had been in newspaper journalism. But, when her attention turned toward writing book-length fiction and nonfiction, she…

I suppose since Rome wasn’t built in a day, I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s taken me weeks to build a website. Had I known how complicated it was going to be, I’d have skipped that task, hired a professional and turned my attention to re-writing my next book. Still, I think the site is…

Heading down a super slab highway would be going nowhere much too fast. I don’t want to do that today. The roads I choose need to be what folks around here call back roads. They are connected by telephone poles or fence posts, not by the stripes down the middle. The ones that are bumpy…

The Llano River After days of cold, rainy, shut-in weather, the sun came up gleaming bright yellow bars through the windows. I scrambled an egg, washed my face and decided not to waste another minute. I locked up the cabin, tossed the kitchen garbage in a bin and headed out for populated environs. In the…

A reminder to those of you jumping onto my blog posts at this juncture: In early March, I drove to the far north reaches of the Highland Lakes area of Texas for a week of solitude and writing. I’ve been posting some of my journal entries here, on a loosely based schedule, since then. The…

Early this morning two men launched a small boat in a cove to the north. I watched through my binoculars to see if they planned to fish or hunt ducks. A glimpse of their struggles with rods and reels told me they were fishermen. Old Fools, I said to myself. A strong southwest wind had…

A frosty northwest wind blew all night. I nearly froze – would have – I’m convinced, had it not been for two small electric space heaters I found in a closet in the bathroom and a heating pad I’d thrown in my suitcase at the last minute. Actually you could say it was the heating…

During the Johnson Space Center’s hey day, I lived in Clear Lake City within shouting distance of NASA’s back gate. I’ve always felt fortunate to have experienced the nuts and bolts of space exploration right in my own neighborhood, though most of it was by osmosis. At the same time I found history fascinating and…

I read in a newspaper recently about a woman who travels twice a week from a town near the Canadian Border to the city where I live in South Central Texas to attend college classes. That’s over 1500 miles and involves a substantial road trip to the airport near where she lives, and then a…

Today I’m to meet with a few like-minded friends, writers interested in learning the nuts and bolts of setting up a blog. While I’m proud beyond words that I managed to set mine up, it’s still incomplete. I ran into snafoos adding photos, formatting my “home page” and finally threw up my hands thinking I…