Lorena made reservations and took me to Mesero’s in Clearfork, Fort Worth this afternoon for an early Father’s Day celebration. It is our favorite Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth (so far) and kind of our go-to place for special events. It is only a very pleasant thirty minute drive. We have decided we need to start doing this more often. I had the chicken enchiladas with Mole and Lorena had tacos de carne asada. The never get it wrong.
This post is just a marker to remember that Kelly and Christian have been gone from home, paying their own way and making their own lives, for ten years now. They both left at the same time at ages 18 and 20 with Bachelors degrees in hand, heading off to graduate school. We are wildly proud of them. They are both scientists at elite national university research laboratories, but more importantly, they still love and serve the God of all creation and Jesus, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
I have one brother named Doug. He has been an amazingly good brother. He was the first of five while I was the second. Doug turned 70 today. The shortness of life started to hit me when I was starting to finish my PhD and it is kind of a shock that we are now at a place that seemed such a long way off just not too long ago. I am very grateful for my brother. We have not always agreed on everything, but we have always gotten along fine. It is an unbelievable joy, now that we are old, to reconnect as we both move into retirement and realize that we have so much in common and enjoy talking through it all. We plan to work at getting together much more often. My hope is that I can get together with all my amazing siblings again at our house for my 70th birthday whether that be in Texas or Mexico.
We are trying to sell our current house. We have been here over three years now and I was thinking there were fewer memories and events of note that we lived in this house than previous ones. Now that we will need to move in a short amount of time, we are feeling some nostalgia. We have had Thanksgivings with the kids, Lorena has learned to grow flowers in Texas (see the spectacular one in the image on the left), we have enjoyed watching rabbits, huge hares and Golden Eagles, and birds learning to fly (see the image at the top of baby birds sitting and flying on and off a porch beam, long horns, burrows, many, many cows, fantastically beautiful fields of Indian Paintbrush and Bluebonnets, and much more. We will very much miss this place if we ever sell it.
There is nothing quite like the Oregon coast with its rugged terrain and spectacular ocean views. I took this panorama shot while Lorena and I were there, but it was not the best site to do that sort of thing. Still, it makes me nostalgic looking at it. This is what I remember from family trips as a small boy.
Lorena and I flew to Oregon to get together with all my siblings to celebrate my older brother, Doug’s, 70th birthday. We met together at a resort at Depoe Bay, Oregon. I am very, very grateful for my siblings. They hosted me at the hotel and at my sister Julia’s house when we returned to Portland. We spent the whole time eating and talking about psychology and God. Of course, we are coming from different places on stuff, but are in agreement on more than that on which we disagree. Most of all, we talked and listened to each other in good will. We have decided to get together like this every year or two. I hope we can do the next one in our house Texas or Mexico.
Lorena and I had quite an amazing Mother’s Day yesterday. Both the kids called and we had long, interesting talks with them about life, plans, frustrations, and ambitions. Maybe there is no better Mother’s Day present than to have confidence your kids are on the right track with God. Lorena decided she wanted a steak for dinner so we drove into Granbury, had some baked chicken for lunch, and bought a steak. The dinner was the real deal, evidenced by our post-meal torpidity. Lorena plans to drive back into Granbury sometime today to switch the city water and electrical services over from the previous owner to us. It seems like we have moved from a potential path to an actual path on our plan to build the house even though selling our current house is a pretty big hurdle.
This image above was captured at Depoe Bay, Oregon on Mother’s Day, May 9, 2004. This was just a short few weeks before I started this blog when Christian was 8 and Kelly was 10. I started writing as a tool to help prepare for their third and fifth grade school years, having decide to pull them from the truly horrific Albany, Oregon public schools and homeschool them ourselves. The image below was captured on the North Carolina State University campus when Christian and Kelly graduated from college on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2014. The kids had skipped high school and graduated from college when Christian was 18 and Kelly was 20, large due to the dedication and support of their mother. Seeing these picture and reflecting on those times and places were a good reminders of what a spectacular mother and wife is Lorena.And beautiful, too–then and now.
The fact that I am a senior citizen is something I am embracing more every day. I still think of Lorena as a young wife. I do not think I will ever think of the kids anything other than… kids. But in reality, they are adults and have been making their own way and paying their own way for ten years now. The thing that is most distracting to me as a senior citizen is something I have heard others describe and that is that you beginning to disappear to large swaths of society–even when you are in the room, you are not really in the room, if you know what I mean. Plus, the realization arrives that you are not really needed so much by the kids any more other than for moral support. That is a good thing, but hard to digest for us. Then, with retirement on the horizon, it is way more stressful than expected trying to figure out what to do when there is not full time job. It just makes me realize how thankful I am for wife and family.
We went all out yesterday for Easter. When I saw “we” went all out, I mean Lorena went all out and I helped, but mostly just got in the way. We cooked a ham–Lorena made an amazing glaze from scratch, she made scalloped potatoes, asparagus, croissants, and deviled eggs. It was truly a feast. We have decided we want to do this more often. Hopefully, we will be able to do this with Kelly, Christian, Grandma Conchita, and other friends again before too long. We do feel pretty isolated now, but plans art starting to form about what to do next. Of course, we have the Mexico projects and that is a big part of it, but we also have plans to get into a smaller house on a smaller lot closer to a town. It is hard to know where to go though. Mostly, we just want to be close to the kids.
Christian was given one of the coolest challenge coins ever for some of the research he has accomplished in his job. He got one from his professor when he was getting his PhD, but this seems like a much bigger deal. They gave it to him after and invited talk he gave on that research. He is scheduled to give and even more important talk in a few months. It really is amazing to see him performing at this level.
Aunt Julia is the absolute best person. She promised to send me something from Grandpa and Grandma Jenkins house and, yesterday, it arrived in the mail. It is the Cottage Grove High School Yearbook for 1948, the year Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah graduated when Milo was Student Body President and Sarah was Honor Society President. My plan is to scan it in and send it out to all the siblings, cousins, and anyone else who wants to see it. The note says:
Hi Ken,
I promised to get you something from Grandma J’s house and came across this that day we all went to C.G. to see all the things Ann had collected.
Love,
Julia
Lorena and I have been living according to an ad hoc schedule since when I finished my degree back in December. We have been at loose ends trying to figure out what to do next. We have finished almost all we set out to accomplish since we arrived in Texas almost three years ago. The only thing left is the thing that is, mostly, keeping us in Texas–that is the finishing of the house on the hill to the point where we can live in it well. We are still six or so months away from that. By that time, we will be close to the end of the year and time to receive family for the holidays, so we are thinking it does not make sense to do something else until early 2025. The election will have occurred by then and either Trump will be president or it will have been stolen again. Either way, that will be at least a little bit of an indicator about what we might want to do and where we might want to live.
I said all that to say that we have decided to try to start living a more ordered life again. To that end, we went out today after our worship meeting and bought fixing for a fine Sunday dinner of pork loin and vegetables. That is one of the little things we hope to continue to do through this period of uncertainty. We want to add other regularities like that to our lives.
Lorena is having a great time in Monterrey hanging out with her mom, her brothers and their families, neighbors, and other friends. Last night they went out for cabrito. After church they all got together at Grandma Conchita’s house to eat barbacoa. When they finish and Rigo arrives from the other side of town, everyone is going to drive over to San Pedro to see the current state of the apartment building and the house up on the hill. I am really sad I am not with them. These are the very best of times. Lauro did some practice sketches of my graduation picture and is planning to do both a portrait and an etching to go along with his semi-famous “El Científico” etching. I cannot wait to see the final product. I told him we want to put an etching of this and of El Científico together in a prominent location in the house on the hill.
Tío Lauro took Lorena and Grandma Conchita to visit his atelier in Loma Prieta yesterday. They are having entirely too good of a time for me to not be there with them. The image on the left is side of the atelier that used to be a complete mess, but honestly looks amazing. With the recent rains, the nearby (one block from the atelier) is beautiful and the Río Ramos runs clear. The inset image is of an enchilada plate from a recent Lorena had never previously visited in the town of Santiago.
My wonderful bride is headed off down to Mexico to visit her mother who is having some medical issues. She and her brother Lynn are going to go over all aspects of their construction business, investigate plans for their next project, and most importantly, figure out how long it is going to take for Lynn’s crew to get our house on the hill in good enough shape so that we can go start spending a bunch more time down there. Lorena and I went to DQ for lunch to celebrate Valentine’s Day before she left. Notice she dressed all in red for the occasion and I wore my red Nebraska ball cap.
Lorena is taking a framed copy of the picture in this post down to Grandma Conchita. We would like to say it is for worthy reasons, but the reality is that it she has more things to brag about. She is totally sin vergüenza when it comes to her family and I am wildly grateful that I get to be counted in that august number. She currently has my dissertation on a little stand in a cabinet in the living room and are hoping for a prime location for the portrait alongside the dissertation. She drags anyone who comes into her house over to look at her shrine in the cabinet which include pictures of Kelly and Christian. I know I will never arrive to the high level of appreciation as her grandchildren, but it is kind of nice to at least be featured on a shelf on level lower.
This is a nice view of the Huasteca from our house on the hill. The new Tesla plant is being built toward the left side of this photo and the large buildings right in front of the Huasteca, off in the distance, is the center of Santa Catarina. With the passing away of our next door neighbor and the funeral we attended this weekend, Lorena and I have been giving a lot of thought to what we are doing living so far away from family right now. Our idea is that we want to make the house in Mexico our primary residence while we still have Grandma Conchita and, maybe, while we are there start figuring out how to downsize. We have to figure out where to go before we can do any downsizing, but it is definitely on our mind.
I took my beautiful bride for birthday lunch at an exceptional restaurant in downtown Fort Worth named Istanbul just a block or two away from the building the exploded there a couple of weeks ago. Lorena, our buddy, Ralph, and I stopped in there for a drink over Thanksgiving and we have been wanting to back there for dinner ever since. It was well worth it and cannot wait to take the kids there. Tomorrow is Lorena’s actual birth date and we were planning to wait until then, but the temperature is expected to go from a high 63 today to a high of 22 tomorrow with an even bigger dip on Monday. We made the executive decision that today might be a better time to drive into Fort Worth than today.
It is supposed to be very cold on Sunday and Monday, but we have a full birthday weekend planned. We went to Chick-fil-A for lunch and stopped at McDonald’s for decaf and pie for dessert! Tomorrow is much bigger and will be in Fort Worth, but we plan to buy some ribeye, build a fire and hang out at the house during the cold days.
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