Sgt. Mom’s Thanksgiving Bird

Fresh out of the oven – right alongside the other dishes for the feast! Behold, Sgt. Mom’s Thanksgiving bird!
Thanksgiving Bird - 2014 - Even Smaller

It is, in fact a Rock Cornish game hen, butterflied and baked on a small dish of Sgt. Mom’s rye bread and sausage stuffing. Not everything in Texas is bigger…

What – there are only the two of us, and the HEB was out of fresh turkey breasts. I am sorry, but a whole turkey for two people would have us eating leftovers until St. Patrick’s Day.
A most blessed Thanksgiving to you all – especially to those of us who were working today…

Another Long Saturday Drive

The fabled Swedish meatballs of Ikea

This one not as long as the trip to Brownsville on Monday/Tuesday, which was more in the interests of Watercress business rather than a book event but anyway, it was long enough; to the main library in Harker Heights, which seems to be a bedroom slipper to Killeen. We zipped up there in the wee hours of Saturday morning, with a tub of books and some freshly-printed postcards, on the promise of about eighteen other authors, and a very popular local event a book sale to benefit friends of the library. Alas for us the event was one of those which ask $1 for hardback books, .50 for paperback, and no one staggering away from the main event with a bulging bag of books and change from a $20 bill seemed inclined to pay full price for any of ours. But I handed out a lot of postcards about my books, and talked to other authors, and on the way back … we decided that we would stop in Round Rock and enjoy the Ikea experience.

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So It Begins…

… I think. My crystal ball is out for re-calibration so I cannot be absolutely certain, but I’ve been expecting a crisis or bundle of intersecting catastrophes for some time now. There have been murmurings for the last year regarding the probability of Ebola spreading out of Africa. And now it has happened a person sick with it has exposed lord only knows how many other people on his way back to Dallas from a visit to Africa. Which is horrific enough, but just getting started. Meanwhile, an enterovirus which attacks the respiratory tract and in some instances has an effect very like that of polio has been here for some months, sickening children especially those who have respiratory difficulties.

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Under the Radar

I guess it must matter to the elite class who seem to manage and report in our established American national main-line media that no one notice the very ugly and violent racial war which is breaking out. Unless, of course, it is a case of a white, or nearly white, or almost-sort-of white in a confrontation with a member of the black thug class; there, I said it the black thug class. This is a totally different class from the striving and generally hardworking and patriotic black middle and working class. And this I know very well, as a veteran, and through residence in a working-to-middle-class Texas suburb; a fellow military veteran once quoted to me something which one of his military comrades had said “There is black and there is white, and then there is just trash.” The comrade was black, and he was quoting his grandmother, a lady of certain years years sufficient to permit a degree of blunt honesty regarding matters racial. There is black, and there is white, and then there is trash.

The elite class appears to believe that anyone of Anglo pallor who points this out must therefore be a racist, especially if in reference to the unsavory, thuggish habits of the black variety of trash.

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History Friday: The Southern Belle Spy

(An archive post for Friday – I wrote this for the Unusual Historicals website last year.)

She was the very last person in the world whom anyone in Richmond, Virginia, would have suspected of being a spy … well, almost the last person, as her abolitionist sympathies were not a secret. But she was a genteel lady of certain years and a very Southern sense of gentlemanly chivalry ensured that her activities went unsuspected and unhampered all during the Civil War. Elizabeth van Lew, if not a classical Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode was pious, eccentrically addicted to doing good works, and from a wealthy and well-established old Richmond family. Of course she couldn’t possibly be up to anything more than visiting the captive Union officers held as prisoners of war in a comfortless converted tobacco warehouse, bearing genteel gifts of food, books, clothing and writing materials, or being a regular Lady Bountiful towards the families of Richmond’s freed slaves. Everyone knew of her families’ eccentricities her mother was a Quaker from Philadelphia, don’t-cha-know.

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