Visit will Bill


Bill arrived at Little Rock National Airport on Thursday, June 1 for a week-long visit. Hope and the kids picked him up (I was returning from a meeting in Texas that day). After an uneventful flight, we immediately saturated Bill will the antics of two small kids and summer in the South. On Friday, Bill and I traveled to the White River National Wildlife Refuge about an hour and a half from Monticello with Bob Scott, a UAM station archeologist, where we assisted on an archeological dig for the rest of the morning. We help excavate a test pit and sifted dirt for artifacts, finding a number of chert flakes, pieces of broken pottery, animal bones, etc. Unfortunately, my camera died that day, so I didn't get any pictures (Bill tooks some). In the afternoon, we then went to a small town north of there called Des Arc to attend a festival. There wasn't much to do, as they were still getting set-up, so we went back to Monticello.

The next day we went back up to Little Rock and I bought a new digital camera. Afterwards, we went to the local baseball stadium and attended a minor league game (for the first few innings). As we were leaving, a batter knocked a foul ball over the stands and into the parking lot next to where Kenny was--and Kenny got to get his first official Texas League foul ball! We took it easy the next few days. On Wednesday, we drove down to Povery Point in northern Louisiana. Poverty Point is an ancient Indian mound site (the picture is of Kenny and Bill on top of the biggest of the mounds). We got a nice little tour on a shuttle bus system and saw a lot of interesting artifacts.

Thursday finally came, and lil' Kenny was heartbroken when we had to drop Uncle Bill off at the airport. After his tearful goodbye, Kenny pouted for a bit before falling asleep on the ride home. We were just finishing supper when the phone rang--the caller ID showed it was from an Arkansas-based pay phone. Bill's plane had mechanical problems, and wasn't going to leave until it was too late for him to make his connection. Rather than having Bill stay in Little Rock, I drove back up to the airport and picked Bill up to take him back to Monticello. The kids were asleep when we got back to the house, but they had a pleasant surprise when they woke up the next day. Hope and the kids returned Bill the next day, and he finally made it back to Wisconsin a day late...

We look forward to seeing as many of you as we can when we get back up north over the next couple of weeks!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Late fall activities

Image
Well, I better get this blog post out before too long--hard to believe it is already December and the holiday season is upon us!  The picture above is from a visit earlier this fall by Beth--and her introduction to our new female tabby kitten "Charlie".  Charlie got her name from the neighbor boy who thought she was a he when this small stray kitten showed up in our neighborhood.  We believe someone dumped her when she was old enough to be on her own--she was definitely very friendly from the very beginning!  The neighbors "found" her first, but as they have cat allergies, were not going to take her in...Since our Bella had died earlier this year, we determined that we were going to wait until early 2024 to find a replacement cat...but as they say, you don't find cats, they find you...  So now we have Charlie! This has been a fairly conventional if very busy fall for us...Halloween came and went remarkably quick, with our traditional pumpkin carving (above) and ...
Read more

A new fence, a load, and a birthday boy

Image
Hope is standing next to the beginning of our latest (and now completed) project--the construction of a stretch of cedar fence along our backyard.  We decided to build this fence to give us some more privacy, and cedar pickets seemed cheap enough, so after constructing a wooden framework out of pressure treated pine lumber, we started putting up the pickets.  As you can see below, even Kenny pitched in: This wasn't a long stretch, only about 70 feet or so, and it went up quickly.  Below, you can see how it runs behind our shed: In addition to being pretty and smelling great, the cedar should be more decay resistant than untreated pine, and it provides a nice screen for the neighbors... We also went to a special fundraiser held every year for Arkansas Children's Hospital called "Log A Load For Kids".  This fundraiser is run largely by the timber industry, and all the proceeds are donated to the children's hospital in Little Rock.  Below are some...
Read more

June is for berry picking!

Image
  Well, at least June is for berry picking in Arkansas!  We were able to do a bunch of picking of blueberries, blackberries, and peaches following the completion of the 2022 summer dig (see last Bragg Family South blog post on that...).  Since I had the new Juneteenth federal holiday off, I took Beth and Stephen to a pick-your-own place about an hour from where we live.  Their plants were just loaded with fresh goodies, such as the blueberries shown above...and I think I picked my biggest individual blueberry ever: This picture isn't photoshopped--that is really how big it was!  We also picked a bunch of large blackberries that this fruit farm offered: I'm not sure what point Beth was making in the picture above--perhaps she was just observing how abundant and large the blackberries were, and how easy it was to fill our buckets: It took us only a few minutes to get pounds of these berries...and we were equally successful in scoring a bunch of nicely ripe peaches...
Read more