Welcome to my Blog:
This is a repository of my random thoughts and philosophy, my ramblings. You are welcome to peruse the site and agree or not. I try to stay positive as that is how I have always tried to live my life. Sometimes it isn’t particularly easy, but we try. I have accumulated quite a few unpublished posts over the past year and a half or so and I’ll be posting them along in no particular order. So, bear with me and we’ll see how this goes.
Why blog this stuff? Why not? It gives me something to do and if someone along the way finds entertainment, something to ponder, or if it triggers a familiar memory in someone to revisit, so much the better.
By the way, if you are looking for my Seabee affiliation sites they’re right here: Seabees of North Central Oklahoma and Seabees of Collin County, Texas.
Posted 13 Nov 2025 © All Rights Reserved
Just Ramblin’ – Thinking Back
Sometimes I get to thinking
About how it would be
To be young and
Know-it-all again,
With all of life ahead.
And then I remember
The time in between
When it was work, work,
Work, with hardly a Let-up.
And then I settle
Back down in appreciation
Of just being an ignorant
Old man with few cares
Because of all those
Years of work.
And now I
Just enjoy existing
And appreciating my
Beautiful wife and
This restful life we’ve
Earned together.
Posted 6 March 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – 40 Day Walkabout
The Gospel and service today was about Jesus’ 40 days in the desert or wilderness. It occurred to me that He was on walkabout. Australia’s first people had already been going walkabout for some 48,000 years. Perhaps Jesus learned how to survive in the desert from Cousin John the Baptist who apparently spent much of his life on the fringes. But it seems Jesus spent his entire short life on walkabout, as an itinerate teacher. He didn’t teach from the Torah, although he apparently had been so schooled. He taught from His heart and soul, and suffered for it. But His teachings of love, equity, and inclusion live on with those of us with courage to manifest it in our lives.
Posted 22 Feb 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – Learning to Drive
My earliest memory of driving was sitting in my dad’s lap on the seat of my granddad’s B-Farmall row crop tractor. I don’t know the year make it was, but I have a photo of granddad holding me as a baby with that tractor in the background and I was born in 1944. I might have been 6 or 7 when I first rode it on dad’s lap. By my early teens my folks would allow me to drive it a mile or so down the road and back solo or with my older cousin.
About the time I turned 13 the family needed a second car. Dad had put in a self-serve laundry while he still had full-time employment as the manager of the Western Union office. Dad needed a car to drive to the office while mom could drive to take care of the laundry and taxi my brother and me as needed. So, Dad bought a 1947 Chevy, we named Sputnik, that had been painted red on the body and white on top with a paint brush. In this, Dad would take me out occasionally on a country road and allowed me to drive.
We owned the laundry that was in an old cinder block building painted white with a gravel drive and parking that extended down the south side and around back. When I wasn’t needed to help inside I would drive Sputnik, or the other family car, a 1951 Ford, around behind the laundry and practice backing between fence posts at the edge of the property.
In the summer of 1960 I took driver’s education at the high school. The car was a 1950 Chevrolet with standard shift. The shifting wasn’t a problem for me. But the first time out it was raining and there were five of us in the car. Back then the windshield wipers were powered by vacuum from the carburetor and when you accelerated the wipers would slow down or stop altogether, depending upon the condition of the vacuum lines. In addition, there was no air conditioning. With the hesitating wipers and fogged up windshield that the defroster wouldn’t touch, I was driving us out the narrow and curvy lake road of wet blacktop when I let the right wheels drop off on the shoulder just missing a mailbox.
Now I liked Mr. Hodges, our instructor, but he didn’t have any kind words for me as the mailbox passed his window. I don’t recall how much farther I drove that day, but we all survived and eventually finished the course. On my driving test I got docked four points for parallel parking to far from the curb. These sixty-four years later I have been helping my grandson learn to drive, and the last time we parallel parked he did a better job than I did. Just as well. One of these days soon he will be driving me around everywhere. I’ll have to practice so I can do a better job with my granddaughter.
Posted 7 Feb 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – Twenty Years
When we were kids twenty years seemed like a lifetime.
And for too many of our friends and loved ones, it was.
But, now at eighty plus years, twenty seems like no time at all.
And now it most definitely is, a lifetime.
Posted 4 Feb 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – On Today’s Sermon (1 Feb 2026)
My understanding of today’s sermon by visiting Fr. Chuck Treadwell at St. Peters, McKinney, TX is this. Fr. Treadwell commented that, “Lives are not transformed with imperatives,” e.g. the Ten Commandments. My takeaway is that Jesus didn’t affirm the Ten Commandments at the Sermon on the Mount, but invited us to His Kingdom by listing conditions, actions and character traits that would earn us His blessings and ultimate reward with the Beatitudes.
This reminds me also that, when asked “What is the most important commandment,” in Mark 12:29, He said “The most important one,” …, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” Jesus avoided the negatives, the imperatives, of the Ten Commandments that have our evangelical neighbors so enraptured. Perhaps if we all gave the Beatitudes more emphasis we would all get along much better.
Posted 1 Feb 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – Bedtime
Sitting up, putting
Off going to bed
Because I’m so
Darn comfortable.
And finally going
To bed snuggling
Down saying, “This
Is so nice. Why
Didn’t I do this
Hours ago?”
Posted 1 Feb 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – Apologetic
To my grandkids, I must apologize for the mess of a country we are leaving you. Our supposedly well-meaning citizens have voted into the Presidency a mentally deficient and self-serving individual who with his multitude of supporters and a weak-willed congress are destroying our civil society. A society that I and millions of others have worked, and countless thousands have died, to maintain since established two hundred and fifty years ago. It turns out that there are many more people than we ever imagined who do not value a civil and safe society in the USA enough to support its cost. Too many are wanting freedom to do anything they want in order to enhance their own lives and egos on the backs of the rest of society. We had a society where hard work and sacrifice paid off in the form of a better life, a little time off, adequate healthcare, and a promise of an adequate retirement. Those days seem to be gone now unless there is a sea change at the next election. Even so, it may take decades to return the country to a more polite and caring society.
I don’t think anyone ever said maintaining and growing a democracy would be easy, but few people I know realized just how fragile it was. At this time, we are experiencing what is known as an autocracy, displacing our democratic republic, and I have little hope of a recovery any time soon.
We have lived honest lives, paid our taxes, served honorably in the military, worked a lifetime, voted, and it seems to have gained us little as a country. If called to serve in today’s military, I would decline; and I would not encourage you to enlist either under the current regime. Britain has a good democracy with, I think, a more flexible government. I would not hesitate to live in Canada, England, Australia, or New Zealand where they have gun control laws and a parliamentary system that allows them to get rid of their prime minister and change their government forthwith. But our USA will need citizens who are able and willing to sacrifice to rebuild.
I’m sorry that our generation couldn’t have made a better country for you in which to launch your careers, and I’m sorry to say our country is in the clutches of a government that has lost its compass. You will be challenged, but I have confidence that you both will find your way to happy and prosperous lives, whether here or elsewhere in this big world of ours. Just stay true to yourselves and to your family’s values that nurtured you. Work hard, take care of yourselves and your families, and support, as you are able, efforts to help those who have less through no fault of their own.
Posted 26 January 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
Just Ramblin’ – Think Black in a Kayak
Kayak fishing a lake is something like wading without the constraints of the shoreline. Imagine a still lake. “Think black.” That’s the title of a chapter in Richard Bach’s book A Gift of Wings. He writes about sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet at night while flying in formation. I thought of this one night while on the lake sitting in the cockpit of my kayak. It was a dark, think black, and cool night with no breeze. I had launched from the east side boat ramp and normally the street light in the parking lot near the ramp guides me back.
When I bought my kayak for fishing, I anticipated such an event and bought a little compass to mount in front of the cockpit. Day paddling isn’t an issue on this lake because it is relatively small. At night, normally the distant city lights are a help and the ramp light is a guide-on. The compass has been used often to navigate the lake in order to confirm my headings and develop confidence in it so when landmarks aren’t there it can be trusted.
I have been a pilot and learned the limitations of a magnetic compass and how to use it to navigate if the gyroscopic compass failed. I have experienced that first-hand during a flight in instrument conditions with ice to add to the stress. It was about 7 P.M. when I launched this night. Now it was after 10 and time to paddle back to the ramp unaware the ramp light was out. This night I was disoriented and the distant city lights weren’t where I thought they should be. The earlier breeze had died down and the lake was a flat calm such that the stars were reflected on its surface. It didn’t worry me because I just turned to a compass heading that I thought would get me back to the ramp. The fly in the ointment was a long island to navigate around to get to the ramp area. I paddled and paddled in the general direction of the island going north. After a long while working my way north I was confused that I hadn’t seen the ramp light. Shortly I reached an embankment that I first thought was the southwest side of the island. So, I started following back around the south end of the “island,” but it wasn’t the island. Eventually I determined that I had by-passed the island reached the north shore of the lake. Using my compass, I took up a southeasterly heading and eventually found myself between the island and the east bank. When I reached the southern-most end of the island, I knew that the ramp was due east and took up that heading arriving at the ramp in short order. I sold the kayak a few years later when my health dictated that I no longer should be on the lake by myself and I let the little compass go to the new owner with and explanation how it saved my bacon late one night. I hope they enjoy that little kayak. I sure did,
Posted 8 January 2026 © All Rights Reserved Return to top
End
Seabees of NCO 