I'm on the air right now but I'm sure if I wait until I get home to write I'll find other things I need to do.

What a pretty day. I slept late. Very late. When Mark got up I thought I'd sleep just a big longer. Two hours later he's letting me know there is coffee and I might want to get up before the day is gone. For a change, he really wanted to do something with me today so I jumped up to get dressed and take advantage of that mood.

We drove out past Dripping Springs to finally find the grave of my great-great-great-grandfather. This g'dad was a pioneer of Texas, moving here in the 1840s from Missouri, settling near Fort Worth and then moving down to Hays County. He died in 1868 but I knew from cousins that his grave was still there and the gravestone still intact.

From cousins, I had seen a picture of the gravestone and had heard generally where it was. They had also told me it was on private property and you needed permission to get to it. From one particularly obnoxious cousin I received no instruction on how to get there but he happily would have gone with me to find the grave, the last thing I wanted to do. I try to avoid the thought that this cousin and I descend from the same gene pool.

A couple of months ago I was looking through my genealogy and realized that I actually had the name of the cemetery in my records. I didn't realize I had a name for it. I looked on the internet and easily found the location of the cemetery. Finally today we had the time and inclination to go out and find it.

The grave and cemetery were on private property but there are laws in Texas that you cannot restrict access to a cemetery. That probably means that the owner has to allow you on to his property, it probably doesn't mean that we are allowed to crawl under a fence, but that is what we did.

We had to ask directions from some neighbors to find the property and, interestingly, we also found where former Texas governor Mark White lives now. He lives next door to the cemetery. He was not home so we didn't access the cemetery through his property, we climbed through the next fence.

It took quite a bit of walking and searching to find it. I'm awfully glad we had asked for some directions because otherwise we would not have found it.

The cemetery was bigger than I expected it, with maybe 25 graves. Many were simply marked by rocks now and now tombstones. But the grave I was looking for had a big headstone and a footstone and was still quite readable.

Mark just got a digital camera so we took lots of pictures with both it and the traditional camera (since we don't quite trust the new one yet). I with I had worn a different shirt. My shirt proclaiming "Friends Don't Let Friends Go Country" didn't seem right in pictures at a cemetery.

On the way home we ate at the Nutty Brown Cafe. We've always made fun of its name and shied away from eating there but it was wonderful. The outdoor patio was perfect on a day like this and the food was great. Four stars! Thumbs up!

Now I'm at work and enjoying this short shift. I even got a call from an old Amarillo friend that is in Austin for the weekend. That is what I really like about being on the air live.

Better concentrate on work now...