Yesterday was a great day because the weather forecasters were wrong. We drove to Midland to attend the Fall Gathering sponsored by the Haley Museum to see Bob Green receive the Foy Proctor award given to great ranchers. This was the sixth year of these awards. We got involved about 5 years ago when Lou was invited to be on the program as a story teller. The program has story telling from 3 to 6:30 a chuck wagon bbq meal and then the presentation of the awards. This year the story tellers were all old ranchers, including Bob Green, with great stories. I was impressed by Bob telling about his family meeting Will Rogers in Breckenridge who invited them to visit him in California. At a doctor's recommendation his father took a vacation with his family to CA. After a couple of weeks on the beach they drove up to Will Rogers place. The gate was locked but his father told the kids to walk along the fence looking under rocks until they found a key. They did, went in and were looking at the horses in the barn when Will came in. He invited them to a polo game he was playing in the next day.

I had feared the rain and cold weather would prevent Lou from participating, but we drove through a little drizzle on the way out. It didn't rain all doing the gathering and only rained a little during the night. Lou was in good spirits and enjoyed visiting with the Brown family as well as a new family we met at our table. Jean Lee runs the HAT ranch between Alamogordo and El Paso. Her son, his wife and a son and daughter were there to celebrate 3 New Mexico rancher neighbors who were receiving awards. They have never visited Abilene. We were invited to visit them in NM. She drives 70 miles to get postal mail so we had a conversation about email. She appreciates that and I suggested she get a satellite highspeed connection.

For the book part of this blog, I might mention that Bob Green was one of our CP Meet the Authors with his book OKINAWA ODYSSEY, the story of his service in WWII as a tank commander for the entire battle of Okinawa. It was a riveting book for me and a good remembrance of the savagery of the Japanese. We are looking forward to Johnny Boggs coming in Tuesday for Meet the Authors.

When we got home we found that the promised 2 to 4 inches of rain at this point has been zero. We are still praying for rain and hoping more will fall.