it's a bleak friday; i take no joy from shopping or going to town on lousy roads. i sit at my chair on this rainy, icy day (see below) and try to relax. it's not so bad, really. my wife is hobbled by pins in her hipbone and has trouble getting around, so i have more responsibility in going to the different buildings on our place and making sure the kids are ok. doing laundry, for example, and getting garbage out of here are two ongoing chores. she kind of wants to cook, and actually did, most of thanksgiving, but now we're both resting; most of it is put away, and dishes almost done.

so the rainstorm that came through, and is still coming through, is part of this pacific bomb cyclone event that dumped some snow in southern california and is in general making life miserable, up through colorado and into montana and idaho. the east will get it later, no doubt, and, way down here in southern new mexico, it's barely a shadow of what it is up there. we were prepared for it: we stocked up, got our supplies, came home and watched it snow about three inches. but it was supposed to be fifteen, and be followed by solid ice, or accompanied by it, and at this point, it has generously stayed above freezing for much of the time, and we're just getting lots of drizzly rain. We kind of like that out here, because rain is so rare and so little, as a general rule, that what we have is soaked up by the trees and everything just seems to be much healthier.

so the usual blazing new mexico sun, which can give you a sunburn even in winter, is muted, with an ongoing cloudy sky and drizzle which is easily confused with water dripping off the porch. we make a shopping list for the next time we go into town; we've run out of a few supplies. but the truck has a "check engine" light and that makes me nervous, fills me with a certain kind of dread, a fear of the ice and the cliffs and the frozen snow.

one night i was on my way to town to pick up kids that had come back from a basketball game. the car started simply not pullling itself. it was smelling bad, slowing down, and making funny sounds. the shoulder was icy and wasn't really a car wide, anywhere, and the road was solid ice, too. but worst of all, the two kids were waiting for me in town, and town was still about five or six miles up the steep icy hill. finally the car just started to choke up, not going anywhere. i tried to pull into a pullover on the left side of the road and the car didn't make it; it stopped in the middle of the oncoming lane.

a car came the other way, and then another, and graciously stopped with blinkers, to get out and help me. we pushed the car off the road even though it was kind of into a snow bank of snow maybe six or eight inches, which had been plowed off the road. it wasn't far off the road and when the policeman came we decided to get it a little further off the road. the people who had stopped offered to take me to get my truck, which was way out in the country where my wife had fallen off the horse, and i took them up on it. the policeman offered to tell the school to hold on to the kids.

i would have been more than an hour late picking up the kids, if someone hadn't offered to simply give them a ride home. the ranch where the truck was was out of the range of the snowstorm, totally dark, and it took me a while to find the keys and get it out of there. i was traumatized by the time it was all over.

i rest, still traumatized. the drizzle is kind of nice, as long as it doesn't freeze.

stressed out, mostly by roads. my life has a lot of driving now, sometimes four trips into town or halfway to town, today at two whole ones (20 mi. there, 20 back) and two half ones (~10 there, 10 back). the first half goes over a mountain and has about five miles of gravel. the gravel in some ways is not as bad as the paved, when the water starts freezing, as it's doing tonight. The mountain is worse, about four degrees colder than the valley, and wetter. the temp tonight is between 30 and 34.

so the trip is varied, and my last one is tonight at about eight. it has been snowing hard, and the problem with that is that the snow will cover up the ice. there are a lot of windy roads and sheer drop-off edges where, you make a mistake, you can go right off the side of the mountain. it will take a lot of concentration and alert driving. i've basically been resting and worrying all day.

but then, in the morning, get up at 4 30, and one boy has practice at 6. not sure if he'll have one tomorrow, because he had games today. but my guess is, yes. and after a long night, even if it doesn't rain, it freezes harder. wet spots on the road become icy patches. hairpin turns become treacherous.

i'm doing all my driving in an old subaru, bashed up a little, but 4-wheel-drive, and pretty stable on the roads. the one car we have is a little to delicate for the hard gravel, and it's got a tire blown out. the truck is still at the stable where my wife had it when she fell off the horse. but it's not so great on these roads. it's heavy, and bigger, which is good on the gravel generally, but if it hits ice or snow it's way too much weight on a couple of large tires, and i don't trust it as much as the sube. if the snow gets over a foot, the truck might be best. but if i'm dealing with ice and snow combination, i want to be low on the ground, and able to go slowly.

the heater is erratic, but the sube has a butt-warmer that is wonderful.

so today, going down to the bus stop, which was halfway, there was a wide variety of weather. only raining, way out here, wet and muddy. but on the mountain rain turned to snow. down at the bus stop, next valley over, it was snowing hard, like rain, but the roads were clear. going back up the mountain the hard snow was sticking and over an inch already, still snowing hard. but back down in my own valley, where i expected it to be wetter but warmer, puddles on the road had turned to ice. treacherous! a truck in front of me slowed way down, and i did too. it was something to see - a huge sheet of ice.

i actually had some time off today. a kid was sick at school and i brought her home - a young one, one who i should stay with, not go out, not go get the truck or fix the tires. i stayed put. i tried to work - finishing my leverett book, and making a couple of webpages which i'll show. limited success. i was too frazzled to really think about anything, and putting old webpages onto new blogs involved some coding that was just too hard. i was involved in this thick html that was beyond me - and finally i just gave it up. i play a lot of online boggle these days - oddly relaxing - and mostly just checked the weather. at the 4 00 ride we went down and picked up the highschooler at the corner. it was snowing cats and dogs. i got worried, but we made it ok.

now it's dinner. trying to come up with something acceptable.

darkness is settling in; my wife fell off a horse, and i'm alone. oh yes there are kids around, too many in fact, but that will take care of itself; i will take those home who aren't ours, and try to take care of those who are. it's unusually silent. i took out my hearing aids, because the puppy was yipping at the cows.

the puppy was the first to know things were not right. the kids heard the news, and kind of retreated into their own worlds, but the puppy stood at the front window, waiting for her to return. when the cows came he got very upset. he figures maybe the cows are keeping her from coming home.

no, she probably has a broken hip. i'm not sure how this will play out.

to some degree i figure it's just the price you pay. she was riding every day, and under a lot of stress, and using the horses to alleviate the stress. but horses are stress too. one of them, probably the one that threw her, was a wild apache horse which was never quite tamed from its wild days, and probably it was her idea that he would grow to love her and they could have this wild experience out in the back country out by walker canyon. me, i stay home and try to build stuff; i did finish putting walls on the shed, and then, at her request, got started on a deck which i otherwise might have put off until spring. it's not all that hard and chances are good that i can finish it quick before the really bad weather comes. now, darkness is falling on my project, and i'm not sure if i'll even get back to it in a while.

i don't want to sit around feeling sorry for myself, but at the moment, i'm just hanging by the phone, not cooking, watching darkness fall, doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself. four kids, and i'm kind of a single father. it will all work out, i hope, as i'm sure she needed a break (so to speak) to some degree anyway. she was losing too much weight and suffering from over-stress.

my little empire here will compress. i need to get the truck back (from the ranch), get her back, take care of her, and somehow keep kids going to and from school and practice. it will be a busy time. for one thing, one practice is at 6 am, the other is after school, 3 40 to 5. so there's a possibility of four trips to town, unless i do something to keep that number down. my strategy here will be to ship them out if possible, keep the unnecessary driving down, that kind of thing. all this will start tuesday. tomorrow i have a day to adjust to the new reality.

actually today was my day to do that. here i sit, watching the sun go down, doing just that.

tll

Tobias Lane Leverett
born Nov. 11, 2019
to Justin Leverett and Marion Edgemeyer
Congratulations!
(in respect for the parents' wishes, I have removed the picture)

My family:

When I was 23 (1978), I had my first child,
(1) Josephine Chandler, with Linda Chandler. She is now married to Derek Andre, and has two children, Layla and Landon.

Then (in 1986) I married Elizabeth Herman, and had two sons:
(5) Justin Leverett, who married Marion Edgemeyer, and had a son Tobias.
(6) Noah Leverett

In 2001 I married Jennifer Dunn and became stepfather to her three children:
(2) Natalie Metz Zeman, who married Ethan Zeman and had three children, Kenna, Maya, and Nori;
(3) Eric Metz, who married Jenn; and
(4) Kylie Metz Brewer, who married Josh Brewer, and had two children, Bayleigh and Madison

Jennifer Dunn and I had four children:
(7) Elias
(8) Corey
(9) Sierra
(10) Ava

Here are some family pictures
Corey, Sierra and Ava
family from whence I came
Layla and Landon
Justin & Marion's wedding  

a cold evening and the smell of skunk permeates outside. he might be mad that i cleared out his little territory under a deck that i was going to build. i took out most of the lumber from under there, and spread it out a little ways from the place, thus leaving that little place kind of exposed. i couldn't quite finish - there were long pieces under there that it was beginning to get to me to go after. so i gave myself a break. i spent much of the day moving lumber around.

in the evening i went to the volunteer fire thanksgiving. they had a big bird, and stuffing, and gravy, the whole works. it was good - as turkey is always good, to me anyway - and afterward there was apple pie and some kind of chocolate pecan. it was about as good as it gets.

the guy i sat next to was one of the two people who discovered the hale-bopp comet. apparently this happened in the house next to me. it's a big house, and his ex-wife still lives in it, and it has a kind of skylight facing south where i figure, he could have seen about anything if he wanted. this is apparently where he saw it - right next door.

but apparently there was a tragedy associated with it, because it was a big media event, and some cult in san diego, 39 people, all decided to die so that the comet would take them with it as it came close to earth. i only barely remember this, although it was in like 1995 or something, I guess maybe i was going through a nasty divorce and wasn't much following the news. but in any case, with 39 people dead, that kind of marred the joy of his discovery.

he's a prominent astronomer, and a neighbor - he still lives just on the other side of us from his ex-wife, more or less, and he's about to spring an astronomy educational program on the web. he's always been kind of international, web-oriented, into educating about astronomy, and very knowledgeable about the universe.

one of the things he was telling me tonight was that saturn has this moon, titan, that is actually very interesting. it has an atmosphere, and has water, though it's all in ice form, because it's way out there. basically i was asking him about the expulsion of pluto from the family of planets, and he said, it doesn't really matter where you draw the line. you could call titan a planet, and that would be very cool, because it's so much like earh, and so interesting, and has that possibility of life, if it has water, that none of the others have. another one like that is europa, which is apparently a moon of mercury or something. much closer to earth in temperature, but its water is hidden beneath the rocks, so we don't pay much attention to it. to him if you study this stuff you want to know more about the ones where life is actually possible - the ones we should study more. Labeling certain useless ones as "planets" doesn't help at all.

My two kids enjoyed the turkey and stuff, but dreaded the adult meeting afterward, so they walked home. it was about a mile and a half, along a paved road, in total darkness. they said they saw one deer, but my guess is, there were a few more out there. once it's dark, out they come, and they don't care if it's hunting season or not, or maybe i should take that back. they care a lot, but, i'm not sure if they'll more likely be jumping around out there in the dark, in hunting season, as any other time. i've always had a theory that they went to town during hunting season, or that they somehow knew it was hunting season, but i have no proof that they know. just like i have no proof about the wave.

so this is my story about the wave. this astronomer has family in australia, maybe a son, though he's in adelaide, nowhere near where the place is burning up. but i told him, a few years ago, there was a big sporting event in sydney, and the claim was made that in australia, people do the wave counterclockwise. now i thought that was a pretty wild idea, but of course i have no way of proving it, short of going there and going to a sporting event. so i asked this astronomer, and he said, he thought it was a pretty slim chance that that could be true, but he had no real idea, not being into sports, or having even thought about it before.

the thing about the wave is, it's a social phenomenon, it just happens, but people have to do it in communication with each other, so, they have to go either one way or the other. and it could be, they go this way most of the time, but that wasy sometimes, and it's kind of random, but the idea that some kind of primal earth-based force on them could have something to do with it, was interesting, and i couldn't discount the theory altogether.

and to top it off, baby lynette is going there, as we speak. her mother is my daughters' dance teacher, and she is a cutie-pie, but i'm sure she has no idea what the wave is, and, chances are pretty good her parents will be too busy watching her to go to a sporting event. that's what you have to do, i think, take some time out of your day, and just go to a rugby match or something.

wrote this without glasses, and it's late, so, i'm going to bed. sorry about typos.

i have an impulse to put things in order on this blog - family pictures. it's a huge blog, and the pictures aren't very good quality, but they can show people the way the family is, if there is any order whatsoever. after doing genealogy for a while, i've come to realize how difficult my own situation is, and i want to make it accessible to people who come here. actually the family itself would be the main customers in that regard, but, if someone says, who are the wallaces anyway? i can just point to this site (post below) and it should clear things up a little. not that it will tell the story; that will come later.

i have a cousin who is fighting in court to see her grandchildren. you will see them, below, somewhere as well although i'm pretty private about who they are. after watching google images operate for a while i have finally devised a system where the names are now separate from the pictures. you can click on the name and see the picture, but google images will not call it up because the picture is alone by itself, in a post that has no name. this to me keeps the whole thing off google images, though i realize to some degree that is probably futile.

there is some kind of immortality associated with this blog. it doesn't appear to be going anywhere. i make sure these pictures are backed up, but, in the end, this is probably going to be my best stand at making it clear - where i came from, my immediate family, etc.

Wallace family

James Jackson Wallace and Margo Irving Wallace

Elizabeth Wallace Wells m. Ray Wells
 - Craig Wells, m. Lynda ?
 - Jay Wells

Emmy Wallace Reynolds m. Joe Reynolds
 - Steve Reynolds
 - Doug Reynolds, m. Sharon ?
 - Stu Reynolds, m. Pam Baker
      Stu had one child, Sierra Soleil

Margret Wallace Leverett m. James R. Leverett Jr.
  -Bruce Leverett, m. Nancy Byers (fam. picture)(picture)
      They had two children: Alison and Ryan
  - Tom Leverett m. Elizabeth Herman, m. Jen Dunn
      my family is here
  - Margot Leverett
 - Bill Leverett, m. Lisa Hopkinson
     they had one child, Lydia Bea

James (Bones) Wallace m. Paula, m. Micky
  - Pam Wallace Hu m. Phil Hu
     they had two children
  - James Wallace m. Cara
     they had one child, Keri
  - Carrie Wallace
     she had three children, Cara, Erin, and Lindsey

Pictures
all Wallace cousins
Wallace boys with Grandpa
Craig and Sharon
Tom, Bruce, Bill, Margot
Grandpa, Bruce and Tom   

Note: When you get to the pictures, they will be unlabeled. That's because I don't want them appearing in Google images labeled. This is true of most of my family pictures, many of which are on this blog somewhere. When you get there, if you click on the picture itself, you should get a larger version. 

sometimes i wonder if i'm anything but a mediocre writer, but, i do very little to find out, because i have such thin skin. sure i could go out and ask people, but, since i might not like what they have to say, i generally don't, and just live with whatever i produce, checked over several times by myself, with lots of errors that i just simply didn't catch.

i'm actually not so concerned about the typos, as i've had a few in each of my books, and just couldn't seem to eliminate them entirely without spending hundreds on a professional editor. it's like, i go back through my book for the thousandth time, and all i can read into it is the work i've done, and the work i could still yet do. so i miss a few details. i'm more concerned that, for not getting more intensely into the style itself, i'm simply not getting better, or getting to where i want to be.

but fortunately, i've been taken over by a new obsession: my heritage, the leverett family. in this regard my descendants will probably be my main audience, and they are likely to be more forgiving, and grateful that i've simply done the work. as it is, it's an intense mystery involving people for whom only a shadow of a trace remains, and i'm totally absorbed in it; one reason is that google, and google books, have made a lot more information available in a lot of new places. i'm lucky, in a sense, that these circumstances have made a lot more information come to the surface right at the time i'm looking for it, and i don't have to travel to boston, or maine, or illinois, to get it. it's a kind of ongoing discovery, because, naturally, i started googling the names i knew, and then, i googled the new ones i'd learned, and then finally, i figured out creative ways to use those in combination with other things, such that i might get at some information that i'd learned.

and, with each google search, it goes back in pages and pages, pages which are usually mismatches of some kind or another, but which are also capable of turning up some gem, some book from the 1700's that google printed and put up on the web somehow. all this stuff is out there, and mine for the taking, and puts me in a different class than some genealogists of, say, 1963, who simply couldn't go to androscoggin county maine to find stuff, and maybe couldn't even imagine paying the postage to ask.

my last point is that i've done it all from my chair, and done it for free; my last threshold is actually ancestry-dot-com, which is much bigger than the rest, but costs something like fifteen a month and gives you access to all these wild documents. of course i want it. but it's almost a matter of principle not to pay that kind of money for this kind of stuff, and i haven't done it yet. i gave them my e-mail address and got a free trial, and that's bad enough, since now they'll dun me for years until i get them out of my inbox. but they, apparently, are the last word in this kind of stuff, so i have to figure out a way to get in.

enough of that for now. back to the 1700's.

cbnl

jrc