Treasure Trove

This link will take you directly to IngramSpark, the printing/distribution company, where you will able to directly order the book Saving Arapahoe and save a few bucks. The book lists at $17.95 but you can buy it here for $11.95!
This sale is intended to promote the book. THE SALE WILL END ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2024. The book is family-friendly. (This series has been reviewed as a young man’s version of Little House on the Prairie.)

/https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?DPHVuxGUcup5L9XwiuIEFJoYZxpXYtgqCzuI8EAHF5H#

Background

My parents are still unpacking from their most recent move, which occurred about thirty-four years ago. Yet to be unpacked are a few storage bins containing notes, letters, geneaolgy, family histories, photos, and things of that nature. I asked Mom if I could look through one of the boxes. “Sure,” she said.

I was hoping for a Honus Wagner baseball card. I didn’t find one, but what I found thrilled me.

The bin was filled with the writings — notes, letters, memos to self — of John Stevens Jr., my great-grandfather (Mom’s mom’s dad). I never met him. He passed away four years before I was born. My great-grandfather spent the early years of childhood in Polk County, Iowa, but when he was four or five the family uprooted and traveled by covered wagon to homestead in western Nebraska, ending up in the Arapahoe area southwest of Lincoln. The wagons took twenty-three days to make the journey. It was cold — the trip was February, 1878. They had to get there by early spring if they expected to reap a harvest in the fall.

The trip was also dangerous; keep in mind that this was only a couple of years after Custer’s Last Stand (at the Battle of Little Big Horn). Hostilities between the white men and the Indian natives were at an all-time high.

The Stevens clan arrived in Arapahoe only to encounter the threats of attacks from a Cheyenne nation that is scurrying northward in defiance of a U.S. government proclamation, and the tension of the situation is thick.

How does this all turn out?

Sorry, you’ll have to read the books. The bin was full of good fodder for three historical fiction books about my great-grandfather, John Stevens Jr., or “Johnny.” I finished Saving Arapahoe, the third book of the Johnny Stevens Pioneer Adventures book series.

I want people to read it and tell others, so I’m offering this at a low price until September 30. Then it will resume normal pricing.

Try it!


It’s a Numbers Game

What If We Saw THIS the Day after Elections …

newsflash:
JS Apex, NC)
From Harrisburg, the new capital of what was formerly known as the United States, the newly-elected president of the now-named PRSS (Progressive Republic of Socialist States ) has declared that time units will be maximized (up to seconds), distance units (up to millimeters), and weight will be in tonnage (because in weight, smaller numbers make you feel better.
So, for example, suppose Aunt Ruth is 100 years old. Well, the formula for conversion from years to seconds would be:

100 years
X 52 weeks / year
X 7 days / week
X 24 hours / day
X 60 minutes / hour
X 60 seconds / minute
= 3,144,960,000 seconds
That is approximately 3.14 billion seconds.

The advantages of using seconds are plethora:

  1. People feel better about themselves.
    Example: I’m only 3.14 billion seconds old. Heck, a second is almost nothing, and 3.14 billion seconds of almost nothing is almost nothing (in calculus terms, the limit of n over infinity as n approaches zero is, of course, zero). And zero times 3.1 billion is zero. Add in 25 or 30, guestimating for statistical variance, and there you have it. Someone at 3.1 billion seconds could possibly be only 25 or 30 years old, mathematically.
  2. This involves higher math and will be educational. You’ve already seen higher math at work, for free.
  3. This involves both metric and English measurememts, thus being diverse and therefore an inherently Good Thing.
  4. These large numbers will make us more comfortable with the high numbers in the national debt: “Three billion seconds, ten trillion dollars, what’s the big deal?” The current national debt (at this moment) is:
    $35,282,174,659,741
    That’s 35+ trillion dollars. Wow. If we calculate that, in cents, we have 3,529,217,465,974,100 cents of national debt.
    That ‘s 3.5 QUADRILLION cents, folks! I used to think that quadrillion was some muscle that you work out on a fitness machine. Quadrillion is a unit that we now need to reckon with (sorry for the grammar slip there).
    Maybe the Treasury department should resume minting pennies. We’re going to need a lot of them.

My numbers

I’ve always liked big numbers. I’ve always had a thirst for statistics: How many hours of sleep am I getting (2.9 hours/night in the second semester of my sophomore year—big mistake. And I wasn’t even dating anyone that semester). I memorized pi to 90 places past the decimal point in college and remembered it to 40 places until just a couple of years ago.
I tried it just now and got:

3.14159265358979623846 (19 places past decimal)
I used to know baseball stats out the wazoo (whatever that means), especially Hank Aaron-related stats. Hank hit 44 home runs in 1957, leadng the Milwaukee Braves to a World Series championship over the Yankees. Pitcher Lew Burdette won 3 games in that series, which went 7 games. Hank hit 3 home runs, too, in that ‘57 series. He was MVP that season, which in fact was his only MVP in his career.
His teams won the world series only in that ‘57 year. They went back to the series in ‘58 but lost to the Yankees in 7 games. After the 1969 split when the National League split into East and West divisions (conferences) and Atlanta was placed in the West along with LA, SF, SD, Houston, and Cincy, the Braves never finished higher than third while Hank played with them.
They had a good shot at it in ‘73, when 3 of the Braves hit for 40 or more ….. if I remember right, Davey Johnson hit 43, Darrell Evans hit 41, and Hank hit 40. But they finished fifth. I was used to that … in the years I followed them, they were usually fourth or fifth. In their years after moving to Atlanta, they finished first in their division just once, in 1969 when they lost in the playoffs to the “Miracle Mets.” They finished third in 1971.
Hank went to Milwaukee in ‘75 and retired after the ‘76 season.
1974 was special, though. That’s the year Hank broke Babe’s 714 record. On April 8th, against Dodger pitcher Al Downing (who also wore #44), Hank hit is 715th home run. The Braves had an inspired summer and ended up in third place with a winning record.
In his career, Aaron became a member of the 30-30 club (30 home runs, 30 stolen bases) in 1963, and he was only the fourth person to have done that.
But you want more numbers? Numbers are fun. Let’s talk Nebraska football …. okay, I’ll save that for another day.

It’s fun watching Shohei Ohtani as he approaches an amazing 50-50 record. As of last night, he’s at 44 home runs and 43 stolen bases. He’s got most of September to play. I hope he can get there.

See ya.
(and Go Ohtani!)


Can’t Believe It’s That Time Again

College football begins in less than a month. Wow. I still haven’t been consoled or reconciled with the outcome of last season. We started the first more-than-half of the season at 5-3. Not bad. I had attended three of those games, once with my folks, once with my brother, and once with my wife. My college roommate and his wife and son joined us at two of the games. We had a great time (and a great view, sitting in the first row of a section. They try to put us folks who have trouble walking down the narrow aisles in the wider first row. This isn’t the lowest row in the stadium … I’m talking about the first row of a section, where a section could start halfway up the side of the stadium. Anyway, I’m belaboring the point … ).

We were 5-3. We were WITHIN ONE GAME of being bowl eligible. We ended up at 5-7. Yuck.

You know, I’ve counted the numbers. I’ve found the spreadsheets with all the data. In the first forty years of my life (1961 to 2001), we had the best record in college football — the most wins, the highest winning percentage, etc. And the years immediately following 2001 weren’t too bad … a few bowl games … but then we started having LOSING records.

We Nebraska folks are patient and can be tenaciously long-suffering. We still applaud the opponents as they leave the field. We can do that because we’ve already been to the top. The view is beautiful up there. We know what it’s like to reach perfection. For a time. Then it’s someone else’s turn (I never understood why we needed to take turns. 🙂

Eventually, after a fall from grace, the subject (I) want to get back on top. We’ve made a living off of losing one-score games. Three of our last four games last season were lost by a field goal. It’s time for a change.

And I think we have one coming. New QB — hot prospect whose father was an All-American player at Nebraska (Dominic Raiola, who played Center I believe). Dylan Raiola is his name. And from what I’ve heard, it’s a name that you’ll remember for years in the future. We’ve got a cadre of speedy receivers to accompany the QB, and we have good potential at RB.

This reminds me of when Tommie Frazier was coming up; this reminds me of when Eric Crouch took the reins; this reminds me of Turner Gill (with Mike Rozier, Roger Craig, Irving Fryar, and Tom Rathman. Wow what a team!).

So we’ll see. We’re starting off the season ranked 25th. What, are you kidding me? We haven’t proved that we’re a real team. Remember all the hype that surrounded Colorado last year with their “Prime” coach and coach’s kids. They did beat us (barely) but they ended up having a lousy season. We play them again this year. It’ll be fun to see how it turns out.

“Sons of Old Nebraska, if someone should ask ya, we’re the Scarlet and the Cream.”

Go Big Red!


North and South

Just got back from a couple weeks in Alaska, with three days in Seattle added for good measure.

I love Alaska. It’s beautiful, it’s low(er) stress than most of the lower 48, it’s got superb fishing and hunting, and folks are darn friendly.
My oldest daughter and her husband (who’s military) and their two kids (my first two grandkids!) live in Anchorage (on base). They’ve been there for four years. And they absolutely have embraced the state. They love it.

We did a lot in the almost two weeks we were there. Every two years the joint army / air-force base (JBER) has an air show called something like Arctic Thunder. The show runs on Saturday / Sunday, but they have a family day on Friday. We went. It wasn’t crowded. We had lawn chair seats right on the edge of the tarmac, and it was SO COOL!

We saw various types of planes flying in different formations; the two most interesting were the F-22s (Raptors) and F-16s (Fighting Falcons). I believe the F-16s were flown by the Thunderbirds. Not sure who was flying the F-22s. The day was very windy and it was hard to hear the sound system part of the time.

These planes (and pilots) were amazing. Planes zoomed down the runway, flying upside down, or sideways, or next to another plane only 18 inches away (their undersides near each other …. one flying upside down and one flying right side up. And they do barrel rolls together. And then there are four planes doing the same thing … and doing barrel rolls.

The F22 can change direction so fast it’s absurd. They can go from ~2000 mph horizontal to straight up vertical in an instant (nearly) and then switch back and head the other way in a mere heartbeat. I guess that’s why they wear suits to handle the G forces.

Hey, I’m not going to claim to be knowledgeable or even an expert in any of this, but it was impressive and was a heck of a lot of fun. My kid and grandkids enjoyed it, and so did this 63-year old dude.

We went down to Valdez for a couple of days. I had been there once before and really enjoyed it. It’s a lovely area. There’s a big salmon hatchery just oustide of Valdez, and tons of sea lions wait outside the gates each afternoon to get their fill of salmon. Those sea lions weighed in the 1500-2000 pound range.


Driving around the area, everywhere you turn you can see a postcard opportunity. It’s kind of like the Grand Tetons or Yellowstone, only there’s a bunch of them.

Denali national park is large (the size of Massachusetts) and its mountain (Denali) is the tallest (not the highest, but the tallest from bottom to top). Valdez is close to Wrangell – St. Elias national park, which is the largest of the national parks in the U.S. Don’t quote me on that, but I think it’s right.

Wrangell is larger than Connecticut. Wrangell is LARGER THAN SEVEN YELLOWSTONES. The largest glacier on Wrangell is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Wow.

Superlatives mean nothing in Alaska.

People say that everything is big in Texas. It’s bigger in Alaska.

And not nearly as crowded.

I’d move there in a heartbeat if I could get the kids and grandkids up there too!

That’s the news for now.
Cheers, y’all.


One Step

This past year, I’ve had three grandchildren born — one in July, one in December, and one in October. They are far enough apart in age that they are at different developmental states, and it’s really fun to watch them interact and grow/develop.

I recall watching my kids grow up and I loved being able to talk with them about real things. That goes fast though and their growth charts sky rocket up there. I also enjoy TODAY, communicating with the little ones. I can usually get them to smile and we (baby and I) mimic each other at the lunch table, copying each other’s movements and then laughing a big belly laugh.

Flying home from California last week, I had the opportunity on the Alaska jet to make faces with two little kids on the flight. They had been crying and in both cases I was able to get them to stop crying and to look at me, wondering what I would do next. Would I cover my eyes and look around trying to find them? Would I smile? Would I frown? Would I screw up my face or twist it or wiggle my nose?

I don’t know why I’m talking about all this. I wasn’t trying to set up a platform for bragging.

Oh, I remember.

The Huskers. The Huskers? Yes, the Huskers.

Now, keep in mind that last season (2023) we finished at 5-7. At one point in the season, we were 5-3 and were a “sure bet” to make it to a bowl game. Not so fast, Guido.

According to what I read on alumni websites, the Huskers rank #4 or thereabouts for 2024 recruiting. That’s amazing. Or maybe we rank #4 among states that begin with “N” and end with “A.”: Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hamp-sha and New York-ah (okay, just kidding on the last two).

But if we really are 4th (or maybe it was 5th) then we have a pretty hot collection of talent. It appears that analysts and people who rate and rank and praise and condemn (so who judge, I guess) are saying that we (we means Nebraska) are ranked in the Top 25. It’s been a while.

We have a hot, new QB. In fact, I think we have 2 or 3 (or 4) hot QBs. You need backups. Remember 1994 when Frazier went out (leg clots), and then Berringer went out with a collapsed lung, and Matt Turman started against K-State? The Turmin-ator led us to victory on that memorable day. Yep, the third-stringer pulls it through for the team (and, that year, the championship).

Some top QB candidates have walked away, since “we’ve already got one.” … so thank you to those who have stayed. I hope you are blessed by it.

This whole portal thing is weird, though.

I remember, forty years ago when I was beginning my professional career in Computer Science, talking about company loyalty, both on the part of worker to the company and on the part of the company to the worker.

I worked for GE for three years. While I was there, Jack Welch got rid of two or three different products / departments / divisions and thousands of people lost jobs. I remember thinking, boy, those long term employees sure weren’t treated well.

Well, this has become the norm. IBM went years before having their first mass layoff, but it became a regular thing in the 90s and 2000s.

I left GE and went to DG (Data General) in RTP. On my first day of work (August 3) the company announced its first eve layoff, letting 950 people go. My necktie quickly disappeared. Welcome to the real world.

The Portal? Don’t players think about loyalty to the teams? The fans? The coaches? Don’t coaches think about loyalty to the fans or to their players?

It’s a rough, win-at-all-costs mentality . Winning is grand, but it’s not EVERY thing.

You know, Husker fans, I want to win as much as anybody. Between 1961 and 2000, we won more games than anybody and we had the highest winning percentage. We were at the top; we were at the pinnacle of success. We had five national championships, including 3 in 4 years. From 1993 through the 1996 bowl game, we were 60-3.

We know college football nirvana! We know college football heaven! Those feats have been accomplished and nobody can take that away from us. Gen-Z and Gen-Y (Millenials) won’t really remember the success the Huskers had in the last 40-50 years of the 20th century, but Boomers and Gen-X will surely remember it.

We are going to take a big step forward this season, I’m convinced. But we’ll see. We’ll get some victories. We don’t have to do it all at once, though. One sure step at a time. I’ve heard folks predicting “we’ll win our first seven games” … well, if you set those expectations and we don’t succeed, that can tamper with the motiovation/enthusiasm of the player (I would think). On the other hand, if you don’t expect a championship, you won’t get a championship.

So maybe I should just shut up. But it’s fun to talk about the Huskers and the glory days. And yeah, I’d love to see it happen again. GBR!

Maybe we’ll see some plays this season that takes us back to the great ones … The Punt Return (Johnny Rodgers in ’71), the Miracle Catch (Matt Davison in ’97), the 75-yard TD sprint (Tommie Frazier in ’96), and dozens of others. Remember Jordan Westerkamp and catching the Hail Mary against Northwestern? Or the Eric Crouch 105-yard scramble against Mizzou? Remember the John O’Leary fake punt against Mizzou sometime in the mid-70s? Or the Eric Crouch “pass and catch” trick play against OU in ’99? (or ’00?). Remember the Steinkuhler “fumble-rooski” that we ran (I think) against OU in ’83 and against Miami in the ’84 Orange Bowl?

Oh the memories!

Go Big Red!


He Has Not Rejected Me

Psalm 65 & 66 (parts thereof):

God will be praised when all who owe him vows (that’s ‘all of us, deep down trying to live a sinless life; we all fail at that) come to Him and repent with remorse. NIV says (65:3): “When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave our transgressions.”

How God Shows that He Loves Us

Romans 5:8 (NIV) But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

How Does This Apply to Me

Romans 3:22-23 tells us that we’re all accountable because we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

God Offers Us a Gift

Scripture informs us that the cost of our sins — the “wages of sin” — is death. Romans 6:21 says (NIV) that “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

How Do I Get This Gift?

How to receive that gift?

Romans 10:9-10: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you wil be saved.”

Some say that this is all confusing. And I agree that it can be confusing, because there’s some stuff that I still don’t understand. But I do know the following, which can be backed up by Scripture. I’ll fill in the references at some point in time.

What I Know:

  1. The Bible is Truth (“all Scripture is God-breathed”). That is, the breath of God (the “Holy Spirit”) gave the writers (around 40 authors, including Moses, Samuel, Paul and some of the other apostles, and a couple or more unknowns) the words (or The Word). See John 1. Whether this is metaphor or literal, it’s The Truth. Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life.
  2. No one gets to God without going through The Truth, The Way. That’s Jesus.
  3. The Old Testament is about man’s relationship with God. God created the universe and everything in it, including man (Adam and Eve). [ the following is metaphor … I don’t know how it really works, but it’s my way of thinking about it). Adam’s and Eve’s sin turned on the SIN gene in each of them and therefore all their offspring (which is all of us) are marked with SIN too. If we STAY marked with SIN through our lives, and then we die, that SIN marker is still on.
  4. Unless … it’s not on.
  5. But … how does one go about turning the SIN marker off? [this marker is metaphor; it’s just a way to think about how we’re marked; we’re not clean but unclean.
  6. In the Old Testament, sacrifices were used to atone for the sins of the people. Sacrificing is hard because it involves death or something you love and/or have worked hard to develop. When Israel would honor the sacrifices, it demonstrated to God that they were sincere in their repentance. They felt actual remorse, vowing to never sin again.
  7. Each year (at Passover) a perfect lamb would be sacrificed for the people (well, to God, to save the people).
  8. The perfect lamb that we see on the throne in heaven in Revelation is Jesus Christ.
  9. He was perfect (he never succumbed to the temptations that Satan threw at him).
  10. He didn’t deserve to die, but he accepted the call from God to fulfill the requirement of sacrifice.
  11. He died on the cross for all of us, including you and me.
  12. Jesus arose from that grave. He was resurrected! That demonstrates his power over death, his victory over Satan, and the eternal life is a very real thing.
  13. If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, then you are saved.

Okay

That’s not simple, but I think it’s straight forward.

Just remember this: God Loves You. And He Wants You to Love Others (where Others means Everybody).

Show somebody some love today.


Mousing Around

Shaky situation

So thusly I say (thee unto thou) that I don’t have much of a tremor, and even that is only an active tremor, usually when whatever arm muscles are tired from exertion. I also have a slight dyskinesia — well, it’s enough that it affects how I work, specifically my hands. I click the mouse when I didn’t intend to click the mouse; I double-click the mouse when I meant only one click. I click the second button, not intending to have clicked anything, which generally opens a list of options or commands associated with whatever thing I’m doing at the time, and it selects the option/command over which it (the mouse) is hovering at the time. It might run the option/command with the item currently selected.Often that is not a good thing. More than once I’ve somehow typed in the sequence:

<ctrl-A> <DEL>

That is: Select Everything in my, uh, Realm … and then DELETE it.

If you’re in a folder and you’ve selected a file, the sequence above will delete all the files in that folder. Of course, often these disasters can be undone. But, if you’re like me, you continue merrily typing along the way until you finish. At some point you’ll notice all your files are missing.

//

It occurred to me the other day — something that should have occurred to me long ago — that I should seek some help in eliminating this particular issue. Now, it’s not a typing issue. I can type almost as fast as I used to, which was pretty darn fast. That’s on the old standard large size keyboards. On my laptop keyboard, I have to edit each word, one word at a time. The keys are simply too close together for my fingers to fit.

Anyway, I thought, “Okay, we’ll invent something to do this for us.” At least, that’s how we used to approach it in the old days. Well, thinking about it more … I suppose that upper management wanted to share technologies (or purchase other companies) instead of developing EVERY thing because buying can be a whole lot more efficient. It also is incentive to continue driving technology forward. In a Utopian world, the company would be transparent to the technology. Well, maybe. One could argue that the more transparent you are (in public, anyway), the less flavor / spice / value you add. And If you take it to the extreme, then the State takes over and Socialism / Communism / Progressive Liberalism wins. No free thought. No hope to advance one’s self. No opportunity to (drum roll please) make a difference for your employer, your world.

But that’s neither here nor there, whatever that means.

Anyway , back to software development … As a developer and/or line manager it’s a whole lot more exciting at the end of the day to be able to say, “I was part of this product on our machines,” than it is to say, “Hey , I was working on product X, but we decided to buy product X from another company because theirs is better.”
“Why is theirs better?”
“They support the -dsj option and we won’t.”
“What is the -dsj option?”
“Their product dices, slices, and does julienne fries.”

“But only ours can be used as a fishing lure.”


On Birthdays

I love birthdays, not because of the attention and praise that it brings, but maybe because it feels like a fresh start, like a clean whiteboard where all the black and red and blue and green marks have been erased, promising new tasks, new projects, new lists, and maybe new adventures.

May is the birthday month for many friends and relatives, including a son, a brother, a grandmother, a grandfather, and a great grandfather. Oh, and mine too. I know several people, inlcuding a couple of baseball stars, who have birthdays on my birthday. And the organist in the church where I grew up, in Onawa, Iowa, shares that day.

My son, grandma, grandpa, and I share our four birthdays within a five day span.

I’ve heard that, statistically, there’s some number of people for whom the likelihood of finding someone in the room, and with the same birthdate, is very high.

Google AI says that there’s something called “The birthday paradox,” demonstrated by this graph:

showing that there is a 50% chance that, in a group of 23 people, 2 will have the same birthday. This is because there are 253 possible pairs of people to compare birthdays, which is more than half of the days in a year.”

It makes sense when you stop to think about it, but it still amazes (no, surprises? Amuses? Yeah maybe amuses) me.

May is also a cool month (cool as in Miles Davis cool, not cool as in temperature, at least in NC) with the Kentucky Derby, for starters, and Memorial Day weekend, for enders.

So Happy Birthday to all you birthday in May folks. May is my favorite month.


What Happens

In between blog posts, a day or two or three goes by and I find myself thinking of all kinds of things to write about … and when I go and sit down to write it, it’s gone. What happened to the facts that were in my mental cache? I think, though, that as I write some of those inner thoughts are extracted and retrieved from whatever dead ends they’ve run into up in my brain. Dunno.

My wife expects me to figure out (by looking on the wall calendar) what events are coming up for the next day or two, but when I (inevitably) forget to check, she will remind me that there’s something coming up that I need to do … take this class, attend that meeting, have breakfast with so-and-so, etc. She’s also the motivator … when it’s 90 degrees outside, she says, “I’m going gardening.” She says nothing else, but I know that I’ll be treated much better the rest of the day if I agree to go out too … sometimes I can help, sometimes I probably do more damage than good. If she didn’t go outside, I’d probably stay inside and write all day. I do try to stretch and exercise frequently.

Writing is a process/art that used to be a forte’ of mine (at least, if I ever had a forte’). I still feel creative; I still feel I’m a decent writer. My wife may have a different opinion on that point. I can get good stuff down on paper …. but organizing thoughts and trying to have it make sense is hard. In the beginning, I list the major events of a story, e.g.,

  • George has miraculous ability
  • Spunky discovers Geoge’s miraculous ability
  • Nobody else knows
  • Where did this ability come from?
  • How else is ability used (what is driving this).
  • The World is safe and happy.

The Expansion

I didn’t use formal outline form here … but the main point is that new information and/or additional, more detailed, information should be recorded somewhere, just to help keep track of what’s what.

  • George and Spunky go further and further back in time (why?).
  • How does time travel work?
  • Rules of time travel — can go back instantly, forward only in real time(?)
  • You can change the future but you’re supposed to try to minimalize the damage.
  • The Future cannot be any further than your current day. That is, I can go back two hundred years and then return to today, or yesterday, but not tomorrow or beyond.
  • Thinking now that travel to future needs to also be instant, not real time. Otherwise, if Person A goes back in time X years, and Person B doesn’t, they won’t meet up again because it’ll take X years for A to get back to now.
  • Whom do they meet? (I created a list of twenty or so people across generations.) This special ability that George has comes from some object in his possession … and it was handed to him by somebody who received it from somebody else … down through time. The birth/death dates overlap. Note interesting things …. Shakespeare and Galileo were born the same year (1564) … Beethoven’s (who died in 1821) and Abe Lincoln’s (born in 1809) lives overlapped on the timeline. Thus, Beethoven could have given Lincoln this object (or vice versa) in some way.
  • Spunky meets Beethoven — and in fact, Spunky helps Beethoven finish his Ninth Symphony.
  • Spunky meets Shakespeare. There’s a lot we can do with this.
  • Meanwhile, bad guys are trying to capture this object. They keep getting foiled, but they try.
  • George is assigned the task of getting rid of the Black Plague, which is complex enough on its own, but when you consider implications …. and how to find where it started …
  • There’s a surprise ending that I won’t include here. Stay tuned. I’m maybe over-optimistic that it will be done by Christmas. Naw, I don’t have an artist yet (unless I draw them) for the pictures. I’ll have to ponder that. And we have a ridiculously busy summer coming up.

Most of what I write these days is BLECH, but fortunately I can no longer read my own hand-writing so I don’t realize how bad it is.

But I still have some gems that occasionally pop up.


Artful Dodgers

So call me a “your grass is greener” kind of guy, that’s fine. Truth is, I’ve always liked the Dodgers except when they were playing (my favorite) the Braves. But that was more back when Hank Aaron was playing. Hank was The Man. Kansas City has rated highly with me, too. I grew up just four hours north of Kansas City, and we went to several KC games. Good stuff.

When Shohei Ohtani came over from Japan in …. 2017, I think …. I was intrigued with him. This guy who’s both a blazingly fast pitcher, a guy who can hit with POWER, and a guy who’s FAST on the base paths.
Plus, and maybe most important, he ENJOYS playing the game. He’s appreciative of his opportunity. HE’s living the dream that nearly every kid in America yearns for …. playing major league ball.

Shohei has done very well for himself … two MVPs so far, I’m sure more to come. His HR count is down this year, a little (5 so far, I think the leader has 8), but his batting average is sky-rocketing and that’s a really good thing to see. Long term, I think batting average is more important than homer count, all things considered. Mookie Betts is batting ahead of Shohei, and if Mookie can get on base (which he frequently does) then Shohei can drive him in. And Freddy Freeman, another great hitter, is right behind Shohei. That’s a fierce threesome.

The frustrating thing is that I’ve seen several times this season, already, where Mookie, Shohei, and Freddy will get on base — bases loaded — and nobody lower in the lineup can drive them in. I guess that’ll take care of itself as things balance out.

On paper I think the Dodgers have the best team in baseball. With Shohei on the team, they’re the team I’m rooting for now. We’ll see how it goes. Either way, I hope Shohei has another stellar year. Something tells me he will.


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