More stuff happening in Walnut Shade.

Billy and Dorothy in New York

Check out the latest from Walnut Shade here http://walnutshadenews.com/2018/08/11/chapter-39-our-buddha-in-a-bathtub

Learn about the happenings in Walnut Shade and about a competition that eventually hit the right notes.

http://walnutshadenews.com/2018/08/09/chapter-38-the-no-bell-prize

Here’s Chapter 37 of All the News from Walnut Shade. Beans, telephones and a round square are discussed. Among other things.

Posted Chapter 34 in All the News from Walnut Shade. Here’s the link: https://walnutshadenews.com

Lots of things going on with the Walnut Shadians, plus a bit of history: when Mark Twain and Winston Churchill visited the Opera House.

After a short hiatus, the correspondent is back bringing you the news from Walnut Shade. In this week’s edition, we learn about Jim and Melody’s wedding, reminiscences about Marshall Green’s great-uncle who played for the 1924 National Champion Notre Dame football team, anticipate K-State’s Cotton Bowl game against Arkansas.

It was a buy week in Walnut Shade. Read all about it here:

http://www.walnutshadenews.com

A couple of months ago, I published a book on Amazon entitled “The Permanent Collection.” It’s a kitchen-sink of poems, short stories, photographs, paintings, notebook entries and recipes that I’ve created over the last six or seven years. I put it together mainly so I’d have a lot of those things all in one place. You know how stuff gets scattered around the house? Well, the same thing happens with bits and pieces that are residing on CDs, DVDs, hard disks, and the cloud. I figure at some point, my six-year-old Macbook is going to die and I’ll have to go through the agony of trying to recover the files that may or may not be recoverable, so having an honest-to-goodness physical copy might be useful.

As I said, in case you missed it, here’s a shot of the front and back covers. It’s on Amazon, but because it’s printed in full color, the price is outrageous. If you decide you want one, let me know and I might be able to get it for you at a discount.

To whet your appetite, here’s a poem, included in the book, that I published on this blog quite some time ago. It seems to have contemporary relevance (and, I might add, before a certain person became a presidential candidate).

Art appreciation 101

is it possible that Donald Trump
and Rod Blagojevich are really
the same person?

could there be
another toupee
at large as bad as that one
ready to pounce
on unsuspecting children?
or can there be
two personalities roaming around the universe
so abrasive or outrageous?

but I’m stating the obvious
like: people who prefer buffets
tend to buy a Thomas Kinkade more often
than a Picasso

October, 2009

When my grandmother died thirty years or so ago, one of the things I inherited was an old lawn chair that I remember my grandfather sitting in after a day of tending his garden. He used to grow lots of vegetables on about a quarter-acre patch of ground in addition to hundreds of irises. I dug up a few of the irises and have moved them from house to house. Right now, some of them are being “fostered” by friends in Leawood until the day I can transplant them to our new house in Manhattan, Kansas.

But, back to the lawn chair. I’ve moved that thing around from house to house, like the irises, always intending to repaint it. Needless to say, the six layers of paint have peeled and rust, as it does, attacked it. This is what it looked like until about a week ago:

Here is what it looks like today:

I found a company here in town that does powder coating, so I took the chair apart and they stripped it and coated it in a K-State purple. That’s also a Monett High School purple, since my grandfather and grandmother lived in Monett, Missouri, and I graduated from MHS. Suzanne, being a K-State grad, likes the purple and I like having my grandfather’s chair ready for summer.

Open this PDF to learn about our recent adventures in and around the Big Easy.

Lost in NOLA