Special Blue Plate broken today

I had two of these and two bowls of the same material, given to me in 1996 by Deborah when I lived on Hopkins Street in San Marcos.  I only have one of the bowls remaining now.*  Before I found this plate broken like this while I was washing dishes in the kitchen sink today, it had acquired a small chip along the rim that caused it to spark in the microwave, making me think at first my microwave had gone bad.  But I figured out what the problem was before I replaced the 9 year old microwave, not pictured here.  The plate is sitting on a GE toaster oven. I'm standing on the counter next to the sink.  There is a large chipped off part of the formica in the counter visible, not my doing.  It was there when I moved in.

The other blue plate I had was actually warped slightly.  When my friend Pat Calkins visited me in Austin in the spring of 1998, we used the blue plates and he commented on the warped one.  I said, "yeh, they're from Walmart," but he liked the artistic nature of the warped plate.  This is one reason we were friends: he was thoughtful about stuff like that.  The photo of Pat and me I posted after he died in 2016 is from his visit in 1998.  He lived in Fayetteville, AR at the time.  He would have been interested in the way this blue plate broke cleanly into three pieces with the center part having a little protrusion, which actually should be pointed toward the bottom of the photo where one of the breaks occurred.

*24 July 2018 update: the blue bowl got broken today when I dropped it while washing dishes. Shattered in many pieces.

Molly the beagle in Dermott, Arkansas

Small animal footprints seen at farm recently

Don't know what kind of animal, but searching for similar prints identified online leads me to guess the hand-like prints are from a skunk.

DT drumming in the Guest House, 1971

Lots of scratches, spots, blotches, and a weird gold crown-like pattern on my chest, all due to age and lack of care of the photo, which I guess was taken by my dad.  It shows the Peanuts characters behind me but not the Jefferson Airplane poster that was just above the harvest table on the left  right.  Check out the poster on this Pinterest site, where it's the first one shown.

Old oak tree at farm in fog

Taken a year ago on this day.

Molly and me

Taken this month by Rita Henry with the new type of Polaroid instant camera.  I scanned the photo printed by the camera, as opposed to using the digital version directly. 

Lynne Trulock Ravellette, 20 Sept. 1952 -- 17 Aug. 2017

 

Lynne was my only first cousin. My mother had no siblings and my dad had only one, my Uncle Leo. Leo married Suzanne Dickens from Texarkana after meeting her when they were both students at Hendrix College.  Lynne was  their first child.  Three others were  born, but they either died very soon after birth or were stillborn. Now comes a further sadness due to a death in the family, as of about 7:30 this morning.  Lynne was fighting metastatic breast cancer (it began as inflammatory breast cancer) for going on four years.

My mother took this picture in 1990.  She was having some event at our house honoring Lynne. After the picture was framed (see info below), it sat in the area behind Lynne's left shoulder in the photo. The book on the marble coffee table is a local book of oral histories compiled by Pat Rhine Brown about her father, T. E. Rhine, M. D., a country doctor in the area around Rison and Kingsland (Cleveland county, just southwest of Pine Bluff) during the early part of the 20th century.