Bragg Family South

Instead of showing y'all the first few pictures on my camera from the last blog posting (which were of an unpleasantry with a sewer pipe buried shallow in our front yard), I'm going to jump right into our trip to Helena, Arkansas.  The picture above shows Kenny and Stephen standing next to a grave marker for General Cleburne, who is one of several Confederate generals buried in the historic graveyard in Helena.  There are also anonymous markers for a number of other Confederate soldiers in this cemetery: Helena sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and was the scene of considerable military action during the Civil War.  The major battle fought here was overshadowed by a couple of larger engagements that were happening at the same time (you may have heard of them--Gettysburg and Vicksburg), but it was still a major action and like the other two battles, a Union victory.  The monuments in the Helena cemetery, like the one pictured below, were erect...

If you remembered in the last Bragg Family South blog, Beth posed with our state trooper neighbor Liz and her Powerpuff Derby car...well, she won her class!  Pictured above is a proud little girl and her trophy!  We've been working on our front and side yards as of late.  Our current big project is the repair and extension of our driveway.  In the pictures below you can see the sad shape it has gotten near the culverts, which have been crushed over the years: We have also had a fair amount of the concrete on this edge erode away, making for a sharp drop off.  So, I dug out this area for new concrete, opened up the old culvert (in part by cutting away the crushed section), and inserted a smaller but capable plastic pipe: The culvert repair was followed by the addition of quite a bit of new concrete (about 30 bags) and the extension of the sod/lawn, resulting in the triangular repair/extension you see below: This extension will help vehicles usin...

Before I digress into our spring break action, first an update from something before...  Kenny is shown above with the poster he assembled from an experiment he (and with careful supervision of Mom) conducted looking at what effects carbon dioxide (CO2) and the lack of oxygen (O2) have on fire--basically, he added vinegar to baking soda and watched how the chemical reaction that ensued extinguished a small tea candle.  His work earned him a second place trophy at the school's science fair, which made him (and his parents) very proud.  We spent a good chunk of our spring break this week at another archeological dig--this time at a location in southwestern Arkansas called Dooley's Ferry: Dooley's Ferry operated on the Red River near Texarkana, Arkansas, from before the Civil War until the 1930s or so, and was a key location on the old Southwestern Trail that led into Texas.  Nowadays, there is almost nothing visible on the site to indicate it's important histor...