Janice Williams Loves Austin

February 23, 2011

Yes, genealogy

Filed under: Family,Genealogy — Janice @ 10:59 pm

My mind focuses on genealogy about 90% of the time. While I’m working, driving, watching TV. Even when I’m on the computer and not really doing anything, I search out something. I just found something that I will want to go back and look at some more. I have a subscription to footnote.com because there was a special for members of the Austin Genealogy Society and I decided to take them up on it. I haven’t found it to be of great use because you might search for, say, “Janice Williams” and it will give you 6,000 newspaper articles that have Janice on the same page as Williams, though possibly not together (yes, even if you put quotes around them).

But just now I did an idle search for Moore in their Civil War records. My mother’s mother’s mother’s father was Grandpa Moore and he fought in the Civil War. I did come up with a document that sounds like it might be related to him. It is difficult because his name was William Joseph, but he went by Joe so I never know where to look. But under W.J. Moore and the Alabama troops I found a muster roll that says “Missing since battle of Gettysburg July 3, 1863.” That was the battle he was captured and taken as a prisoner of war. Of course I need to check the regiment and see if it really is him, but it sounds like a match. It gives me chills. Imagine your brother or your husband or your son having to fight a battle for your country and then getting word that he is missing after a battle.

What we do know from newspaper articles where he was interviewed in later years was that he was taken to Delaware and incarcerated along with thousands of other Confederate soldiers. Yes, he did survive the war, married, moved to Texas and had a long full life. But he was taken to Delaware first. The story he told was that he and a couple of other prisoners decided to try to flee. The latrine of the prison camp extended out over the Delaware River. The men dropped through the hole in the latrine and were carried off by the raging torrent of the river. Joe and a friend were separated from the other and he and the friend soon separated, too, for their own safety. Their clothes were torn off by the river, but they somehow managed to steal clothes from a line or find a sympathetic farmer. It is a harrowing story where he came close to Yankee camps and had to make the sounds of a wild pig so the Yankees would think the rustle they heard in the bushes was only a pig and not a spy. Eventually, he walked from Delaware back to Alabama. And that did not end his military career. He rejoined his forces and was there when Robert E. Lee signed the surrender.

Mother remembers he had a long beard. I have a picture of him with his brothers and sisters late in life and they look like Dickens characters with their long beards (well, just the men) and the glint in their eye. She also remembers that his life had many associations with water. First the water of the Delaware and then when he died in Gustine, Texas, the rains poured and his grave filled with water. His grave, along with wife Trissia “Mindy” Faulkner, is in the Newburg Cemetery that I love so much. There is no Moore family reunion like there is the Cunningham Reunion, but I put flowers on their grave every August and tell the story of his heroic escape from a Yankee hellhole prison.

It amazes me to find a document online from over 150 years ago that so succinctly tells about an event in his life. Missing since Gettysburg. I’m sure there were a lot of men on the muster rolls that were missing and were never heard from again. I don’t know how all these amazing things happened that had to have happened for me to be here. I don’t know what other amazing things would have happened if they had happened differently.

February 16, 2011

Concert Production

Filed under: Austin,Music — Janice @ 11:05 pm

I was in the concert production business for a very short while after I was forced out of radio. I worked with a friend who has years and years of experience doing it and learned a lot from her about how it is done. It has been on my mind a lot lately as I see people (possibly) do it all wrong.

First was the Prince concert that was canceled in Dallas a couple of nights before the Superbowl. I’m just guessing here, but I expect that promoter got in over his head. I don’t know him from Adam, but my brother-in-law saw him on the TV screen and said he was a local sports personality on the sports talk radio station. When he was interviewed on TV he said that it was not a matter of money, they had the money to pay Prince the 1.5 million dollars that he required, but he didn’t go on to explain what DID happen. Reports came out that Prince was there and was prepared to play and then it was canceled. From what I’ve learned in the business, I’ll give you what I bet happened. Again, this is just pure wild speculation. When a band is booked for a concert, they have a price. In Prince’s case, it costs $1.5 million to get him to play. On top of that you have to usually pay his travel expenses to get there and his hotel costs. Not just for him, but for his band and entourage. That is a LOT of money. When he signs on to do a show, he sends out a rider. A technical rider outlines exactly what the band has to have in terms of stage size, lighting, sound equipment, speakers, microphones, amplifiers, and many many MANY other things. These are long and involved and complicated for a show as big as Prince. In addition, there is a rider that spells out all the other things the artist needs in the way of a private dressing room, drinks, food, M&M’s, etc. I couldn’t find Prince’s rider, but here is Kanye West’s rider in case you’ve never seen one. The website The Smoking Gun has a whole section of famous people and their riders. Imagine all the costs involved in making sure everything is right for a star. And believe me, when you are dealing with a star like Prince, they have people that are there checking every detail and they have every right to cancel the show and still get paid if all the details aren’t right. That’s my assumption on the Dallas show.

I was also reminded of the horrors of concert promotion when I saw a poster for an upcoming David Allen Coe show on a telephone pole downtown this week. It was in association with Texas Independence Day, which made me think of the great Sesquicentennial show I came to Austin to see in 1986. I came home and looked up this show, which is coming up on March 4, just after Texas Independence Day. It isn’t at Auditorium Shores, it is down on some “ranch” to the east of San Marcos. There are some bands I have never heard of also playing on this show. This is just a disaster waiting to happen. Willie can make a big concert happen out in the  middle of nowhere because his fans are just nuts and will put up with no facilities and no parking and no food or water, but who would do that for David Allen Coe? I have a feeling this is the same sort of thing. Someone thought about putting on a show and thought “How hard could it be?” Did they check to see how many times Coe has played in Austin recently? I know he was part of Willie’s picnic last summer. I think he’s been at Stubb’s within the last year, too. Was there a massive crowd rushing to get tickets to his show then? I don’t think so. There was another show near San Marcos a few years ago that sounded a lot like this one. I had that same sick feeling when I heard about it except it worried me more because I had heard about a lot of the bands on that bill and I worried about them getting paid. As it turns out, a lot of them didn’t. That show ran into weather problems and had staging blowing away along with the fact that NO ONE came. I foresee the same for DAC’s upcoming show.

I know I am always the pessimist and I admire the people that can see opportunity and take risks and, often, create amazing productions, sometimes without a clue how they are going to pull it off. My hats off to them if they can do it, but if you need a naysayer to keep you grounded, here I am.

February 14, 2011

Who Do You Think You Are?

Filed under: At home,Genealogy — Janice @ 11:03 pm

Who Do You Think You Are? is a TV series on Friday nights that is all about genealogy. They are 2 weeks into the second season right now.  I have only watched part of the Tim McGraw episode this season, but I saw several last season. This should really be a show I like a lot. It’s about genealogy, my favorite subject right? I keep trying to analyze why it is I don’t like it.

First, I think I secretly like having a hobby that is not really popular. It is sort of like me playing accordion. If I had taken up guitar, there would be thousands of guitar players better than me within a 2-mile radius in Austin. Taking up an accordion, I was among the top 25 female players in Travis County after 2 lessons. I like to give people the perception of being good at something they can’t really judge. If everyone starts taking up genealogy, they will quickly see that I am a terrible record-keeper and fact-checker.

Second, I hate that the show is just a big advertisement for ancestry.com.  I am not a “member” of ancestry.com (I don’t quite know why everything has to be a membership, it’s not a country club). I have several cousins that swear by it and think it is well worth the $12 to $15 a month that it costs. I expect there are thousands of records it has that I could use, but I also know there are thousands of records online for free that I could use that I haven’t taken advantage of yet. I don’t use their website (though they advertise EVERYWHERE and entice me all the time), but I do use their Family Tree Maker software and I frequently use their free website rootsweb.com.  The danger of selling someone their membership to ancestry.com before they’ve done any hands-on genealogy on their own is that they can easily connect and download full family trees and, literally within minutes, say that they have traced their family tree back to England or Germany or wherever. Taking someone’s list of ten generations without studying each person on that tree is not only bad genealogy, it is just sad to miss out on the experience of knowing each person, figuring up how old they were when they married and had children and died, finding out their occupation and hardships and migrations. That is what makes genealogy fun. Finding out that John Williams left England and came to America in 1782 and not understanding any more than that is boring and pointless.

Mostly, I guess I hate how easy they make it look to do your family research. And how they frequently show very bad genealogy practice (should that be 2 separate things?). With every celebrity they have, they start with them asking their family members about their grandparents name or some piece of information they didn’t know. Then, wham, they go to a library, someone greets them at the door and says, “I have something very interesting to show you– Here’s your grandparents’ death certificate that has their parents names!” Then, of course, in their constant plugs for ancestry.com, they have the celebrity simply type in that great-grandparent’s name into the boxes and VOILA they have most of their family story. That’s where the bad genealogy comes in. Sure, that is great to have the info, but you have to find out how that information came to be there (on their site). Did someone go through painstaking courthouse research to find out each step up the line, or did someone copy from someone who copied from someone who copied and we don’t know where these first names came from? They simply could have come from someone writing down what their grandparent told them. Case in point — my grandmother had told me that my great-great-greatgrandmother was a Fannin (true) and was, therefore, a descendant of James Walker Fannin, the Texas hero who was executed by the Mexican army at Goliad. Now THAT “fact” is in several places on the Internet misleading people every day. No, I did not put that fact out on the Internet, but there’s no way of stopping it now. And, no, we are not descended from James Fanning, though it appears that he was my great-great-great-grandmother’s first cousin.

Also on Who Do You Think You Are?, the celebrity always finds one little piece of interesting information and then they jump in a plane or into the car and go across the world immediately. Sure, it makes for better visuals and it is great they walk in the front door of the Library of Congress and have someone pull out their ancestor’s slave trading history, but that isn’t the way it happens for most of us. And before we’d go off to a foreign country, we’d do a little more exploration on the web and in libraries and courthouses here so we’d know why we were going.

Another thing I dislike about the show (I’ve forgotten where I am on my numbering system) is that the commercials are misleading. As they were leading into this season they were teasing with all the things we discovered last season and they said, “And Sarah Jessica Parker discovered her ancestor was a Salem witch.” I watched that episode and, yes, it was very interesting that she found out that her ancestor was ACCUSED of being a Salem witch and, I guess in the broad sense, that IS what a Salem witch was since there were no true witches, but I thought that was misleading. Her ancestor was not found guilty of being a witch and was not executed for being a witch.

Above and beyond all that, the show is pretty boring. I am quite aware that genealogy is boring to other people. I’ve said before that it is like reading a really fascinating novel, but you can’t really express to other people how interesting the novel is, they have to read it for themselves. I am bored stiff when other people get off on their genealogy hunt (though I enjoy a good family story and old pictures, don’t get me wrong). Not only is the genealogy hunt pretty boring on this show, they have to tell you what is coming up and then they show you a bit of the search and then they recap what they’ve just shown you, tell you what is coming up, then come back from commercial and tell you what you saw before and tell you what is coming up again. You absolutely have to watch this show on tape so you can fast-forward through all the stuff that gets repetitive.

All in all, I don’t recommend this show. The best I can say about it is that it is better than another genealogy show that came on last year about the same time. I’ve forgotten the network or the name, but it was truly boring, more scattershot, and showed nothing of the research of how they got the information. Thumbs down to Who Do You Think You Are? and thumbs up to getting into genealogy on your own.

——

This post was written in a hurry. Too many CAPITAL letters and (too many parentheses). Forgive me.

February 10, 2011

Aunt Leta

Filed under: Family — Janice @ 9:04 am

Today is my beautiful Aunt Leta’s birthday. I think it is “a big one,” but she isn’t much for publicizing “the big ones” so we won’t go there. I remember when her daughter had a big surprise birthday party for her one year that we all made the trip to Austin for. She was dating a younger man at the time that wasn’t quite aware of their age difference since she didn’t talk about it. But the jig was up when all the celebration is about the age she had achieved.

Aunt Leta is Daddy’s only sibling and they were very close. One of my fondest memories was when I was about 7 or 8, I think, and her family came over to our house for Christmas Eve. Lots of people were in the house and Aunt Leta was standing under the place that we always hung mistletoe–the big arch between the living room and the dining room. She was just standing there without being aware of the mistletoe above her and my dad RAN across the dining room and slid on our linoleum floor and grabbed her and kissed her. It surprised everyone and there was a big laugh. I remember it because it was the first time I thought about kissing people other than your sweetheart under the mistletoe and it was the first time I realized that they had a brother-sister relationship that went back to her birth. I didn’t have a brother, so a brother-sister relationship was always interesting to me (still is!) and I got a glimpse then of their sibling affection.

When I was little, Aunt Leta lived in a house next door to my grandparents out in the country between Amarillo and Canyon. It was a beautiful rambling ranch house and I loved it then and would love a house like it even today. They had a big barn-shaped barn, too. I specify barn-shaped because most barns in my world weren’t like you see in the coloring books, but theirs was, with a staircase up to the second level. I wanted the barn as much as the house. I remember going to her house after school one day. I think we even rode their school bus to the house, which was an adventure to get on a strange bus with a different driver and different kids on the bus. Aunt Leta made us sandwiches and we sat around the kitchen table eating and then worked on our homework. My cousin Mike was in high school, so he really had true homework. Mackie and Wyndy (a boy cousin, but that story can wait for another time) had homework for their 3rd or 4th grade classes. I was in first grade and I really had nothing. I think I needed magazines to find pictures and Aunt Leta set me up with a tractor catalog or something. I just remember wishing I had “real” homework to do. Oh, and the sandwiches. She made great sandwiches, but she put LETTUCE on my sandwich and that was not something I liked at the time. I remember hating every bite of that sandwich and wishing it didn’t have lettuce on it. Years later I told that to Aunt Leta and she felt so bad. “Well, honey, why didn’t you tell me you didn’t like lettuce? I would have made yours without it.” Of course she would have. Now as an aunt I realize you will cater everything to the desires of your neices/nephews.

Aunt Leta and her family moved to Austin in 1967 so we didn’t have the day-to-day contact anymore, which is a shame. But we had some great trips to Austin at that point and I got glimpses of this city I now live in and love. Eventually my grandmother moved here, too, and then me and Mark.

Despite living here where Aunt Leta lives, I don’t see her very much. She lives north of the river and I live south of the river and everyone that knows Austin knows that that is a big division in our world. She works even further north and puts in a full day every day. While most women her age have not only given up working, but have given up housekeeping and their own homes, she continues babysitting her grandchildren and having a full-time job and has her own business on the side, too. She’s a really good advertisement for staying active, and for activity keeping you looking and acting young and beautiful.

Happy Birthday Aunt Leta, there may be no drop-by visit to your house this year, but I’m thinking of you.

February 4, 2011

St. Blaise Day

Filed under: Austin,Spasmodic Dysphonia — Janice @ 12:46 am

For us non-Catholics, our list of identifiable Saint days on the calendar is probably limited to Saint Patrick and Saint Valentine. As for identifiable Saints that may or may not have days, we are all pretty clear on Saint Nicholas and we’ve heard a lot about Christopher, Jude, and Michael, though we might not be able to tell you much about them.

I’m doing my part to lift St. Blaise and his feast day, Feb. 3, up to the level of St. Patrick and St. Valentine. When Hallmark offers a Happy St. Blaise Day card, my job is done.

I only heard about St. Blaise when my throat difficulties first began in 2004 or 2005. I don’t know if my best friend Beth told me about it when I first started having troubles or later when I had the diagnosis of spasmodic dysphonia, but I do remember talking about my throat troubles and Beth casually either recommended I go to church on St. Blaise Day or mentioned that he was the saint that helps with throat issues. She grew up in a Catholic family and said that on St. Blaise Day the priest holds two candles to your throat and blesses it.

Even after the diagnosis, I still didn’t have a cure or good answer to my troubles, so when St. Blaise Day, Feb. 3, 2006, rolled around, I decided to check out St. Blaise. The weather was quite different that year from this year, because I walked from the radio station over to the church on the campus of St. Edward’s University, a Catholic school, and went to their noon mass. It was my first Catholic service outside of weddings and funerals. I liked the priest and the service and the message and he talked about St. Blaise and prayed for people with throat problems and colds and diseases, but there was no individual blessing with candles. I felt blessed, but I also felt cheated.

I chickened out in 2007 and thought about St. Blaise Day, but it was raining and it was a Saturday so I didn’t go.

In 2008 I was in Dallas for the weekend (maybe a Superbowl?) and it was a beautiful bright sunny day. I had decided to try the big Catholic church in Coppell, St. Ann’s, for St. Blaise Day. I thought maybe the blessing with the candles was something that got done more when the feast day was on a Sunday. My sister went with me and we sat with about 1000 others in a beautiful modern church through a lot of ceremony and sermonizing, but NO mention of St. Blaise (…that I heard, anyway. One of the priests was foreign and I might not have understood his accent if he mentioned him). We waited through all 1000 people taking communion, hoping for the blessing at the end of the service, but no luck.

Finally, in 2009, I had a good Catholic Austin friend in Denise. She regularly attends lots of the Catholic churches here and was very familiar with their services and told me that if I went to a St. Blaise Day service again and they didn’t bless the throats, I could ask a priest afterward and she was sure that they would do it for me individually. When St. Blaise Day arrived that year, we were working together downtown and she went with me to the beautiful St. Mary’s Cathedral downtown, the old, historic church. Finally, she’d led me to a service and a priest with the candles and the true blessing. She also taught me that, as a non-Catholic, I didn’t have to stay back and not go to the front of the church for Communion. I could go without taking communion, but still get the blessing by putting my arms crossed across my chest. So I was doubly blessed.

Last year again we went to St. Mary’s downtown (I think anyway, I looked in old diaries and they are sketchy on some of these details).

With this week’s cold weather, I probably would have ditched on St. Blaise if Denise weren’t there to go with me. This time we met at St. Ignatius in South Austin because they have good parking. It is another beautiful church and I liked that their priest had a microphone so you could hear him clearly and he seemed aware that many of us were there on our lunch hour. I didn’t even have to wait in suspense to know if I would get my throat blessing. There were the crossed candles waiting at the front. And the priest early on said he would do the throat blessing first thing in case someone came for that. So I got my throat blessed and then stayed for the rest of the short mass.

What they do, for you non-St. Blaise blessees, is they have a couple of lines coming up to the priest and an assistant priest. You step up and they have two big white candles that are tied together in the middle, forming a cross. They place them to your throat and say a blessing. Before I had no idea what they were saying. This year, I had plenty of time to hear them each several times as the line moved forward. They said it slowly and clearly. Interestingly, they were saying slightly different things. I assumed it was a standard blessing that priests learned, but maybe there is some leeway. The older priest said something about “maladies” in his and the younger one (that blessed me) had diseases and illnesses in his, but no maladies. Either way, they asked for St. Blaise’s intercession to protect my throat. I also went down for the communion blessing (without taking communion). A woman was the Eucharist with the wafers and the wine, but when she saw my crossed arms she dropped the wafer and did a very sweet “Bless you my dear.” It was very comforting. And I like women having roles like that in a church, I must say.

My friend Beth (who started this whole thing) made a comment today about “cafeteria Catholics.” I’m not Catholic so I can’t be accused of that, right? But as I pick and choose the pieces of different religions I observe, I like St. Blaise Day and I like having a Saint watching over my throat.

February 2, 2011

Dad’s Birthday

Filed under: At home,Family — Janice @ 11:31 pm

I can’t let Groundhog Day get past without remembering that it is also my Dad’s birthday. He would have been 83 today. He died December 15, 2006. Some random memories:

One time we ordered a cake for him that said “Happy Birthday Groundhog” to go along with the usual Groundhog Day theme. We went to pick it up and it said “Happy Birthday Grandpa.” No, this was long before he would have been happy to be a Grandpa, so we had to have them scrape it off and do it over.

Daddy worked as a surveyor in the natural gas industry. I remember when we lived in Colorado and he turn 41 or 42 (who knew he was so young at that time?). Mom gave him one of those funny wife cards that had several panels and said, “You may not have gold. You may not have oil. You may not have cash.  But you are all I need.” (something like that)  Daddy read it through and then said, “Well, I may not have those things, but I have gas.”  We all fell on the floor giggling (being surrounded by girls, he was used to that). He backed up and tried to “fix” what he said by saying, “I mean NATURAL gas!” Lots more laughing.

I remember Daddy often taking a big chip full of hot sauce in a restaurant and then turning read and having steam come out of his ears and be watering at the eyes and fanning his mouth and grabbing for the tea and then, finally coming through the full bite, saying, “That’s good!”

I’ve thought about Daddy today with this cold cold weather. I don’t know how he worked in conditions like this. He was a surveyor and civil engineer for a gas company, so he and his crew would survey and choose and mark where the pipelines were going to be laid. He worked in a lot of Amarillo cold conditions and also in Kansas and Oklahoma and Colorado while we lived in the Texas Panhandle. Then we moved to Colorado and he did most of his work in Wyoming in the snow and the cold. I don’t know how he stood it.

I could tell a lot of stories about Daddy, but I’ll stop with a picture on a warm day so it will warm us up on this cold night. This is Daddy with our good horse Shawnee. I think she was an Appaloosa, but I’m so far removed from horses now, I can’t even remember what their characteristics are.  This was in our backyard in 1975. That little conifer in the background is now massively huge.

My Reading Efforts

Filed under: Reading — Janice @ 1:12 am

I grew up with parents that were in a mixed marriage. Mom was a reader, Daddy wasn’t.

Mother read voraciously and subscribed to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books so that there were always books to be read. I vividly remember visits to the Bookmobile in Amarillo when it would stop in the parking lot on Bell by the good Belmar Bakery and we would troop through gathering as many books as they would let us have and then they would put the card with the little metal tag on it into the machine and clunk-clunk, push the cards down into the machine to have it mark the due date magically on it. It left enough smear of ink on the metal of the card you could sometimes stamp your number on your hand.

Once we moved to the country, we seemed to use the church library as our primary book source. It wasn’t just “church” books. I know Mackie read every Nancy Drew mystery there was checked out from that library. I was a little young for the Nancy Drew books at that time so I didn’t read as many.

In Colorado, we again had a Bookmobile and we sometimes walked all the way to the parking lot at the Palmer Park and Academy shopping center to get books. When we would walk home we would trade our stacks of books as we went because a new load always seemed like a lighter load and it made the walk go faster.

I don’t know Mom’s other sources of books. Her sisters and friends, I guess. She always had a book going and would always go to bed in order to read a while before she slept. When Daddy was out of town (which was often in his job), Mother and Mackie and I would read and read. We sometimes slept on a mattress on her bedroom floor when Daddy was gone and we three would lay there and read a long time before sleeping. We would also read at the supper table– not allowed when the whole family was together and Daddy was home.

Daddy, on the other hand, was not a reader. He got that from his father. I have heard my aunt tell about hiding in a barn loft in order to read without being derided for such a wasteful pasttime. Daddy certainly wasn’t that bad, but I vividly remember him ranting on in the mid-1980s about “Show me a man that has time to read and I’ll show you a man who doesn’t accomplish nothing!” I folded my arms and said my brother-in-law’s name. Theo hadn’t been in the family very long, but it was obvious that he was a reader. He always had a book in his hand and while the rest of us might be watching a football game on TV, he would be watching, but reading at the same time. And as for accomplishment, we were all proud of his self-built diamond business and his success in anything he put his hand to. That shut my dad up that time, I know.

Later, Daddy became more of a reader himself. I think he was just not raised with it and, as a man with a more-then-40-hour-a-week job and a farm on top of that, he didn’t have time to enjoy reading. Once he retired, he took up reading and read a lot, particularly Louis L’Amour westerns and biographies.

When I met Mark, he said he didn’t read books, only magazines. He didn’t know what he was talking about because it wasn’t long before he was plowing through nonfiction books as fast as he could get his hands on them. He finds time to read during lunch most days, though he never has picked up the reading-before-bed habit.

So that gets me to me and my poor reading habits! I am appalled at how little I read these days. I love books. I love words. I love a well-crafted book that compels me to read it. Those seem to be few and far between these days.

What brought this all to my attention today was two posts I saw on the web. Yes, I read a LOT on the Internet (including books on Google books, though that doesn’t seem to count in my mind). First,  a friend posted on Facebook her brother’s list of his favorite books that he had read this year. Autumn (my friend) is an incredibly talented singer and songwriter and her brother apparently has a way with words as well. Here is his list of the books he liked most of the 45 or so that he read in 2010. Forty-five? I didn’t count, but I bet I didn’t read 12. I read 2 of the 3 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books and I read The Help. The Help was probably my favorite. If I dug through the giant stack of books by my bed there are probably more that I read and liked, but maybe less memorable.

After reading Autumn’s brother’s list and thinking I needed to read more, I found out that Art Garfunkel keeps a long list of ALL the books he’s read for the last 40+ years on his website. It’s a pretty amazing list of great variety. I would be lucky to read just his favorites in the next 40 years.

So all that has made me wish I would make time to read more. It’s not that I don’t have the time, I just don’t make the time. I spend too much time sitting here at the computer (not this, not writing in the blog, but the other stuff) when I could be reading. I do almost always read before I go to bed, but usually a chapter (if that) is as far as I get before I am too sleepy to continue or it is too late to go further.

I am currently reading two really good books, so I hope that is a good start to the year. One is the memoir from singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell, called Chinaberry Sidewalks. It is about his childhood and his parents and is very well written and interesting. I’m also reading a book by Bill Bryson about traveling around the U.S., but it is in my purse and, as so often happens with a book in my purse, I carry it more than read it and I’ve only read one chapter and that was last night while sitting at a Sonic.

Reading is a lot like writing in this blog. It is something I really enjoy and once I get going and get it more into a habit, it gets easier and is something that I can’t go without. I hope I get back to that point with my reading soon. Maybe once the football season ends Sunday I can commit to at least filling a tenth of the time I would have spent watching football each week to reading a book. And I mean a tenth of the time of a good year of football, not like this year. I will try and report back soon.

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