Bragg Family South

Today has finally brought some relief from the heat, humidity, and yes, drought, of the past weeks...No matter what the calendar says about fall starting in the third week of September, it never feels like that this time of year in southern Arkansas!  Yes, we have a lot of the fall trappings, such as kids back in school and football (and tailgating) back in style...But the only leaves changing colors down here are those succumbing to drought.  As you can see in the picture above, Stephen and his fellow bandmates are still playing at halftime of these evening games in shorts...and our tailgating the other weekend at the UAM football game was a warm and sunny affair: I spent several days traveling parts of Arkansas for work recently, looking at old stands of timber...and some of the wildlife that lives there...Saw my first tarantulas in the wild while on the Ouachita National Forest on this trip...The one pictured below was actually being killed by a large wasp called a "tarantu...

Well, if you didn't already guess it, the picture above is not from Arkansas--it is sunset along the Lake Superior shoreline on the Keweenaw Peninsula, roughly an hour north of where Hope, I, and now Kenny went to university...but more on that later. Since our return from our July Northwoods trip, much of our remaining time was spent getting Beth ready for her next stage in life--her university time!  Below is a picture of us unpacking her into her dorm room: The image below is of the outside of her dormitory on the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville campus, Pomfret Hall: We'll have more pictures of her college life as this year unfolds; wasn't much to see with her unpacking and we had to immediately return to Monticello to get Stephen ready for his first day of 10th grade.  I also was leaving for another quick (week-long) trip to the Northwoods.  If you recall, earlier in the summer we lent my parents our old Toyota Sienna minivan while theirs was getting repaired....

Our summer 2023 Northwoods adventure to Michigan and Wisconsin would not be complete without a recap of what happened immediately before this trip...As you can see in the picture above, Hope is wearing a hospital bracelet.  For months, Hope had been experiencing increasingly bad lower back and leg issues due to a deteriorating disk pushing on one of her nerves.  We were finally able to schedule her a surgery for mid-June--the picture above was us taken at the Little Rock hospital early enough that morning that it is still quite dark outside (that is the window outside behind us).  Below, Hope hams it up for the camera just before being carted off to her outpatient surgery: Her procedure was pretty quick and seems to have helped a lot, but it hasn't fully healed even yet, and she's still got some discomfort.  However, shortly after this procedure (and still benefiting from the pain medicines she was given), we were able to go out and purchase a new (to us) used car--a...