i had a good time with my father-in-law, who was here over the weekend. surprisingly the whole episode of yevgeny and vlad the impaler dominated the news and we ended up talking a lot about what might happen.

of course nobody has a clue what might happen. yevgeny prikoshin is unpredictable if anything and it would probably be in his best interests to hide. vlad the impaler is known to simply have all opponents killed. yevgeny can't be an opponent and hope to live. he also can't keep fighting under the present conditions. the russian army probably needed the support but too bad. they are mostly demoralized because the world is sick of their bullying, and by invading a country they've turned the world against them.

but why should anyone listen to me? i find myself often with a shallow view of current events if only because i'm so preoccupied with my own writing, that i quit reading current events relatively quickly in the morning on my way to doing my writing thing. today i finally went swimming; i have to watch it or i'll gain unacceptable weight hanging around talking to in-laws. but alarming developments in the ukraine are everyone's business.

. i've had some success with the new book of plays and i like checking my stats these days because every once in a while, there's a sale up there. i haven't really peddled to every corner of the quaker universe but i figure it's only a matter of time before people know.

kids are at camp. time to crank up the postcard-writing machine.

A book of Quaker plays doesn't come along every day, but this one just did.
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Quaker-Closet-Plays-discernment-ebook/dp/B0C7K3R6B5

my daughter, turning fifteen, decided that what she really wanted was to take her boyfriend halfway across iowa to adventureland and spend the day there. i being the father and all would drive. they were all grateful to me for doing it; actually i'm not even complaining. going halfway across iowa is fun for me. it triggers all kinds of memories, though.

about an hour into the state you come to iowa city/coralville, where i worked and lived for eleven years in the seventies and eighties. but in fact my history goes beyond that. when i was a young child of about four or five, my parents would bring me to iowa to visit grandparents - my dad's parents in des moines, and my mom's parents in ames. it would have been along this same road. i would have been in the back of a station wagon.

the day was beautiful, a somewhat cloudy day threatening to rain but never really raining except a couple of random sprinkles. in fact we were worried about it being rained out, but we weren't - everything went fine. the daughter and her boyfriend got to cuddle in the back seat for almost three hours while i, seemingly deaf and almost blind except for what i could see in the mirror while not watching the road, left them alone. the sights of iowa were enough for me. the rolling green fields, barns in a distance, corn almost knee-high already, exits that were more than familiar to me. the only problem was that it was much more crowded than it used to be. i had to pay attention to my speed and not getting too close behind trucks but going around.

my daughter is hispanic and since she's fifteen, i probably should have had an entire quincenaria (sp.) for her. but as you can tell, i can not even spell it reliably, much less know how to pull one off, and her friends aren't hispanic so it would be a wild shot in the dark if we were to even try it. her older sister, also hispanic by birth family, actually ran away on her fifteenth birthday, or near it, but she also wasn't even aware of what it was or what it should mean to her. no, this daughter was happy, and i was too, doing at least something for her birthday that would count in the great book of martyring fathers.

though it was the day after her birthday, it was actually my parents' anniversary; they had married on june tenth, nineteen fifty, seventy-three years ago. my mom was from ames; my dad des moines, so i was coming upon their old stomping grounds as adventureland is in altoona. at the amusement park, i had no end of people-watching, with everyone looking vaguely familiar, but iowa always seems that way, and this set was younger and pretty much out of the range of anyone i might really know. everyone was nice, though, and of course the kids had fun. it was all decorated up as a 'tourist' village - very painted and quaint. i kind of liked it, but mostly because i could just sit and watch people, and remember times past.

in one of those times, in the middle of winter, the road was slick and i had my young daughter (actually now the oldest of all of them) in the back, and the car slid on the ice until it was facing backwards on the interstate. luckily, there was no traffic and we very gingerly just turned around and got back going the right way. it just so happens that there's this very windy patch around newton somewhere, and this time, when driving through newton or somewhere near there, much to my surprise, i saw a whole field of windmills. but the biggest surprise was this: cruising along the interstate, with relatively crowded traffic (more, at least, than i remember from my times there), i saw a truck that was actually carrying a brand-new subway car, slick, modern, and the same width as an interstate lane. wild!

this is, after all, the new york to san francisco interstate. anything going from anywhere northeast usa to anywhere else, will inevitably go through here. and coming home we stopped in coralville, which always was just a huge strip mall, and re-experienced it. now it's a modern strip-mall, but still a strip-mall. they are widening the interstate around iowa city/coralville and the whole thing is one huge construction zone, where, while i'd rather look out for familiar old sites, like moss' dairy or j.j.'s trailer park, i have to concentrate on the road just to get through it alive. in coralville i resisted the impulse to say to my daughter, "i used to work there," or, "i used to have a job where i drove on this road every night in the middle of the night." we saw those places; i felt that, but it would be meaningless to her.

some of these memories, then, were more than sixty years old, while others were more like forty or fifty. i knew that it wouldn't be the same, not in every way anyway. i now have trouble reading the counties off the iowa license plate, because the letters are small and narrow and half the time they're covered up by license-plate holders.

the last thing one does, upon crossing the mississippi at the quad cities, is dip south for the final forty minutes of illinois before one gets to our town, galesburg. this little stretch of road is as beautiful as iowa, but the road is much quieter, gentler, and i've come to know it well. it is now strange to me that, for all those years, illinois was busy, crowded and dangerous, and iowa was green and quiet and peaceful, whereas nowadays it seems to have been reversed. nevertheless i still love them both, and was happy on both sides of the river, if only for different reasons.

my reading and writing is slogging a little; i write this story as a break. soon you will see about my new book though, a book of quaker plays. chau!

my wife is out of town; my stepdaughter had surgery, and she's down in brimfield takig care of the three step-granddaughters. throw my daughter in there, and the son-in-law, and the other family that just rolled back in town, and you know they will be busy and probably eating well. i've been eating ok too but mostly here at home by myself, with food for the teens upstairs gotten separately.

i did the blog count, but then got distracted and am only coming back to them now. that's partly because i now have eight books on my table. i woke up this morning, stats morning, and opened one i like and did only that one until i finished. okay, down to seven. with depleted time, i now haven't really finished a few of those. i try to get ten percent of each book each day. and a little more of at least one of them. some of them are quite good books, a little difficult to keep track of when there are six others.

it's gotten hot out. might want the aircon on a little more. we're into the groove of summer. june is speeding by.

i follow baseball as i read. the guardians are doing quite poorly, but i follow anyway. tonight they're tied. they're tied right as i'm watching them now.

ayubba, twins just got a one-out double.

there are lots of things i'm putting off, actually. my hope is that with the wife gone, i'll get to everything i was thinking of. i've had some things on my list for a long time, and yet, they're still on the list. it's partially laziness. with eight books on the table, the reading begs for me from the first thing in the morning right on through the day. i want to finish it, but it's a little beyond my capability.

twins got a double, now it's 2-1. but hang in there, it could be a long night.

one thing i want to do is water the garden. on a hot dry summer night, the flowers around the house will all appreciate that, and the few vegetables that i'm growing will grow. it's kind of nice to go outside on a summer evening and just blast away on the hose.

i won the writer-of-the-week on my favorite site, full of UK writers, best book editors, which will allow me some creative advertising starting tomorrow night. i've yet to make a coherent plan. so far, just mulling over the possibilities.

need some good pix, time to get this show jumping.