06/21/2026 – J-Dub's Grin and Bear It

Yesterday was one of those unexpected life lesson days.

Our power went out sometime around 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning and for a while there was nothing to do but deal with what was directly in front of us. No planning three steps ahead. No worrying about next week. No scrolling. Just the next thing.

B suggested breakfast at Denny’s. I thought he was crazy. We ended up lingering over endless coffee refills and enjoying a slow morning. Later, I escaped to the library to cool off in what felt like an Arctic tundra compared to the Texas heat.

When I got home, B greeted me with a hug and announced that the power company had apparently decided I was too mean to deserve electricity. Walking into a house full of lights and spinning ceiling fans, I had to laugh because, honestly, I am a little mean.

It was almost 14 hours without electricity.

In that time, life stripped itself down to the essentials. There was no room for my usual mental inventory of MRIs, labs, specialists, osteoporosis injections, cysts, pain management appointments, thyroid questions, A1c numbers, and whatever new item gets added to the list next.

There was only: What needs doing right now?

Short answer?

Not much, except decide when to move food from the fridge and freezers into ice chests and wait for the power to return.

Yesterday reminded me how much I take for granted—electricity, air conditioning, coffee, and especially a dependable partner who knows when the answer is simply, “Well, what else are we going to do?”

Not a bad reminder.

As always, more to come.

I was four years old when my mother married the only daddy I ever knew, a wonderful man who loved me as his own, unconditionally. I know he held a soft spot for me, partly because he felt sympathy for me—a girl whose adoptive father died of lung cancer—but also because that was simply who he was. He loved his family. His job was to protect and support us. He taught us right from wrong and lived by example.

He wasn’t perfect. None of us were. There were struggles, and moments that showed his humanness in ways I could name if I needed to—but that is not what defines him, because what defines him is this: he was our father, and we were his most proud achievement.

Everyone who knows me has always understood that when I speak of my daddy, I mean him—the man who raised me, the man who showed up as love in action. And “How Sweet It Is” was his phrase for life, borrowed from Jackie Gleason but lived in him more than it was ever just said, a way of meeting the world with gratitude, humor, and presence.

He worked hard from the beginning, a farm boy life where nothing came easy, a restaurant and Navy cook, later a mechanic with grease under his nails, responsibility carried early and long, and through cancer scares and spousal loss, grief and all the ordinary weight of a working life, he still built something steady for us—private education, opportunity, a life he constructed with his own hands.

And still, the way he moved through the world stayed the same. He loved to dance. My mother didn’t. She sat at the table—cigarette burning steady—talking with whoever landed nearby, while he moved through the room with larger-than-life energy, not performing, not explaining, just dancing with whoever would dance with him, no agenda in it, just joy, just motion.

So when I hear Waltz Across Texas, I don’t just hear a song—I remember him.