My 87 year old Mom has Macular Degeneration. She's slowly loosing her eyesight. She has good days and bad days as far as sight. It's strange that she can see leaves on trees going down the road, but has a hard time reading. She uses a tablet to stay in touch with family. To read it she uses a magnifying glass.

• Once a year I take her to her optometrist about an hour away. We got to town early, so drove around a bit. We drove through the park where my aunt's nephew has done some chainsaw art. (Chillicothe, MO)

She couldn't see very well after the visit due to the dilating eye drops they put in her eyes. We passed on the Golden Corral in that town and started driving home. We stopped for a Chinese buffet at the next town. It was great and no more than we would have spent for a good burger at a fast food place. The honey chicken was like eating candy! I also had some fried rice, crab rangoons, crab cheese bake, seafood stir fry, cantaloupe, watermelon, chicken wings, BBQ chicken on a stick, cottage cheese, beef onion and broccoli stir fry and some cheesecake. It was a bit late for lunch, so, yes, all I needed for supper was a piece of watermelon and a banana. haha

We drove by the cemetery. My Grandpa & Grandma (her Mom & Dad), Uncle Dale (her brother), Aunt Virginia (her sister) and cousin Larry (her nephew) are buried there. Also quite a few of her Aunts, Uncles, cousins and people she knew over the years. The church there was a Methodist church. That's where she went growing up. Larry's wife put a solar powered cross by his headstone. My cousin Bill was haying in the field next to it one evening. He said it was a bit spooky! haha

• Then we drove by what we call Burt's. It's 80 acres that Grandpa used to own. Uncle Dale and Aunt Erma lived there for a few years. Now my cousin Larry's boy Toby has built a house there. He has a beautiful view of the river bottom. I should have snapped a pic of the view. I'll do that someday. It's over a couple of miles from the farm where I live now and where she grew up. She used to walk to Burt's for school. There was a 1 room schoolhouse that set out by the road. They called it the Wooderson school. My Grandma was a Wooderson and she had a lot of family around here. It was for Kindergarten to 8th grade. She told about the snow being drifted as high as the fence a lot of times. They moved the old school to Mt. Moriah and added it on to the Methodist church she went to for a few years. The church was finally tore down, but the school house still stands. Here's a pic of it I took later in the day.
  
  • The school marm lived about a mile away on a house on the river bottom. Sometimes it would flood and the men would have to go get her by boat. We drove on down there and her house has finally been bulldozed in. It's now planted in soy beans. Across what used to be a dirt road was 58 acres of bottom land Grandpa used to own. When he passed Mom and Uncle Dale split it. He had the north half and she had the south half. It was all planted in corn this year.
    • Then we drove on down to the river. We passed the 30 some acres he used to have that cousin Larry's brother Gerald now owns. There used to be a bridge across the river, but it fell in decades ago and they never rebuilt it.
• Then we made our way back to the farm. We drove around the pasture a bit, back to the lake. I took her down back where the old house was bulldozed to. She hadn't seen the front deck yet, so we stopped at the house for a bit.
  • This farm is 150 acres. The neighbor rents it to run cows on and hay. Some of it is in CRP, which is a program where the government pays her to not farm it. He also had what we called Lettie's that was about a 40 acre pasture. One of his nieces I think had a house there. He ended up getting Priscilla's which was a pasture next to Lettie's. Priscilla was also a Hamilton like him, but I'm not exactly sure how they were related. Those 2 pieces of ground got lost due to something about a deal gone bad with my Uncle Dale. I'm not sure the whole story on that...
    • He was born in 1900.
      Obviously lived through the depression.
      Only had a 4th grade education.
      I'm pretty proud and amazed at the land he was able to acquire over the years.His theory was get a piece of land, work it and pay it off. Use equity from it to get the next piece of land. There is no way a person could start with nothing today and acquire that much land today. You have to be big to make it farming nowadays.
• Then I took Mom up to Mt. to see the new trailer cafe someone has opened and the old school house I mentioned above.

This whole time she's telling me story after story about growing up and grown up. She lived out here growing up. Then moved in to help Grandpa when his health started going downhill. Then stayed here after he passed. She had my niece and nephew here for a few years. But I see I made it past 1000 words and it's getting late...

What else is up in my life?

I rebooted my computer tonight. That's actually a very rare thing, since I run Linux instead of WinDoze. I'm running the alpha Manjaro KDE release and there have been many upgrades since my fresh install, so on a whim I decided to reboot. Quite different than my work computer running WinDoze 10. I have to reboot it every couple of days. And back when I was running hmm WinDoze 3.1 maybe working here at the farm in the old house as a webmaster, I would have to reboot at least once a day and sometimes 3 or 4 times!

• When I opened up my browser, I had to laugh. Here's what I saw...
  
  Do you see what I saw?
  Every single shortcut Google gave me is for Steemit! haha

Another bit of awesome news!!!

@dkid14 read my latest post about turning my free account into 150+ SP and decided to delegate me Steem Power to get me to 500 SP!

• Wow! I can't put into words how great a gesture this was! It definitely gets me past the dust vote and gave me the slider when voting. @glenalbrethsen and others I'm holding off upvoting you, as a thank you for all your support, until I get my Voting Power back up closer to 100%. Due to a couple of curation trails I had been following and some autovotes I have set up, it has been running in the low 80's... Tomorrow I should be good...

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Their byline is Turning Minnows into Whales.

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Perhaps HUGE would be a better forecast!!!

WizarDave said that today July 18th, 2018

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