Meador Manor

Closing Windows

Posted on July 23, 2026 by Granger Meador

After forty years, I have finally bidden farewell to Microsoft Windows. I had stopped using it at home in the spring of 2024, and my retirement at the end of June 2026 meant that I no longer used it at work. This is my Windows retrospective, starting in 1986 when I installed Windows 1.03 on my Tandy 2000 home computer.

Early Windoze was no GEM

Bill Gates with a Tandy 2000 running Windows 1

My Tandy 2000 was an advanced machine at the time, with the little-used 80186 microprocessor. That, along with high-resolution graphics and high-capacity floppy drives, meant that it was not fully IBM-compatible, but there were some major applications ported to it. I primarily used it for word processing and graphics for my undergraduate classes. I tried Multimate 3.2, WordStar, and Lotus Symphony, which all ran on MS-DOS 2.11, not Windows, and of those three, Multimate was the most tolerable.

By 1987, Digital Research had released its GEM 1.2 graphical operating system for the Tandy 2000, and its GEM Draw could be used to create graphics you could import into GEM Write. In the 1970s, Digital Research had produced the CP/M operating system that was used on many personal computers before the IBM PC was released. In 1987, I needed to create a document with a mix of text and graphics for an Instructional Design & Development class, so I used GEM Write. The mix of text and graphics also meant that I could not use my Radio Shack Daisy-Wheel II printer, but instead had to use my DMP-430 dot matrix one, which at least had an 18-wire print head offering higher resolution than most dot matrix printers, which had 9-wire heads.

GEM Write document from 1987 — A GEM Write document I created in 1987

GEM was much more polished than Windows, which was still clunky, ugly, and s..l..o..w.., hence my habit of calling it Windoze.

Windows OS — Back in the summer of 1986 I installed Windows 1.03 on my Tandy 2000 home computer

I tried Windows 1.03, but it used garish colors, was sluggish, and at the time had only tiled, not overlapping, windows. I skipped Windows 2.0 but later purchased Windows/286, which despite its name did not require an 80286 microprocessor and would still work on 8088 or 8086 microprocessors as well as the unusual 80186 in my Tandy 2000. However, none of those earlier processors could access the High Memory Area above 1 MB.

In 1988, I had tired of the compatibility limitations of the esoteric Tandy 2000. Recognizing that 80386 machines with VGA graphics had surpassed it, I bought a CompuAdd machine with a 16 MHz 80386 microprocessor that was fully IBM-compatible.

It came with MS-DOS and I tried Windows/386 on it, which offered protected mode allowing you to run multiple DOS apps. However, Quarterdeck’s DESQview and the QEMM386 memory manager were a superior way to run multiple DOS apps, and I encountered no compelling Windows applications.

DESQView was superior to Windows on my 80386 machine despite DOS apps remaining mostly text [Source]

Managing memory was a constant headache in those days, with various workarounds of the 640-kilobyte addressable RAM limits via expanded and extended memory. Be grateful if you never had to learn the difference.

WordPerfect for DOS vs. Windows

While working for Scholars Programs at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1980s, I learned to use WordPerfect 4.2, and I adopted that as my word processor of choice even though it was a text-based application running on the venerable Microsoft DOS. Thankfully, it was fully compatible with my Tandy 2000, and I continued to use it on my new 80386 machine as well.

Professors at the University of Oklahoma and teachers at Norman High School had created inquiry science curricula based on Piagetian theory, which were available as thick comb-bound books of originals printed with a low-resolution dot matrix printer. I had purchased a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II printer, so when I started teaching physics at Bartlesville High School in 1989, I used WordPerfect for DOS to create my own versions of each unit, printed in high-resolution with quality graphics.

Back then there was only one personal computer in the high school science department, an Apple IIc reserved for the chair. The pace of improvement was such that I considered that machine hopelessly outdated. My use of an 80386 home computer with WordPerfect and a laser printer was unusual enough that when I distributed my handouts to students and they noticed references specific to our classes, some asked me wonderingly, “Did you write this? This isn’t out of a book?”

That fall, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was released. It added a non-editable graphical preview, so I still didn’t need Windows. I switched to using it for my re-creation of the physics curriculum.

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS graphical preview — WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS text editing and graphical preview modes

WordPerfect for DOS did not have an editable what-you-see-is-what-you-get mode until 1993 with version 6, but they still had expanded to 60% of the word processing software market at that time. There was an unstable WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows in 1991, and in late 1992 they finally released a stable but clunky Windows version of WordPerfect, but I stuck with the DOS version since Windows 3.11 was slow going.

Early Networking

Bartlesville Public Schools had technology bond issues in 1993 and 1995 that failed. They all received over 50% approval from the voters, but Oklahoma has always crippled its public schools by requiring a 60% super-majority for school bond issues, while a simple majority is sufficient for other bond issues. So for the first decade of my teaching career, I had to rely on hand-me-downs, grants, and donations for all of the computer technology in my classroom.

I convinced the district technology department to give me seven IBM PS/2 Model 25 computers. They were only outfitted with floppy drives and had been abandoned by the business department. I was able to use Vernier Software’s Graphical Analysis for DOS program on them for students to create graphs of their laboratory data. However, I insisted on each student printing out his or her own copy of their lab group’s graphs, and I could only scrounge a handful of old, slow, and noisy dot matrix printers, not enough to have one per lab group.

So I used some “EZ Print” dongles that used RJ11 telephone cables and some manual switchboxes to allow multiple lab groups to share a printer. It was slow, but it worked and the software could do best-fit lines and curves instead of my students having to manually create a graph with a guess at a best-fit line. For graphs that might be parabolic, before computers they had to regraph the data by hand with a squared axis so they could then manually draw a best-fit line to estimate a quadratic equation. Computerized analysis was far superior, even with the technological limitations of limited and outdated hardware.

When we needed to use class data, I used “sneakernet” where I would gather up floppy disks with the lab groups’ graphs and manually load each one into my computer to then generate a class graph. You can imagine the headaches, but it still beat having students write data on the chalkboard for me to manually type into the computer given our limited classtime and board space back when I was teaching five or even six classes a day.

In late 1993, Microsoft released Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, which was the most successful version of Windows before Windows 95. It was still pretty ugly, but it did support networking, and as more applications included graphical interfaces, Windows became more useful.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 — Windows 3.1 was still pretty ugly [Source]

In 1997, my classroom at Bartlesville High School still had no network ports, but Windows 3.11 for Workgroups advertised its networking capabilities in its very name. So once I acquired seven hand-me-down 80486 desktop computers for my classroom’s lab stations to replace the floppy disk Model 25s, I wrote a state Advanced Placement program grant for a Gateway Destination computer with a big CRT monitor and a classroom laser printer.

10BASE2 coaxial cable ethernet — I set up a 10BASE2 coax network in my classroom

I also built a peer-to-peer network. I first bought a Networking for Dummies book and then went to a former TG&Y on Frank Phillips Boulevard in Bartlesville that Phillips Petroleum had turned into its Account Recovery Center for surplus equipment. There I scrounged 10BASE2 thin coaxial cables and early Ethernet cards, which had been the dominant 10 Mbit/s Ethernet standard until 1988, when Ethernet over twisted-pair cables was introduced. Technology that Phillips considered obsolete was cutting edge in our resource-scarce environment.

That coax network allowed me to connect all of the Windows 3.11 lab stations to the Gateway Destination system and a laptop running Windows 95, along with a laser printer hooked to an external JetDirect print server. That reduced the time to print graphs by 75% and let me remotely gather all of the student data at my teacher station. No more sneakernet!

My classroom wasn’t wired for internet access until I did it myself by leading a team on one of the NetDays in October 1997. In the morning, community volunteers helped me run twisted-pair cabling from a ground floor server room up into the upper floors of the annex, with a hub in my physics stockroom and another one floor below for the foreign language classrooms. That afternoon we climbed tall leaders to open up the suspended ceilings over 12 feet above the floors in the science labs so that we could thread twisted-pair cabling through cracks in the wall bricks from room to room, leading to panduit we ran down the walls in each lab to new ethernet port boxes.

However, the district’s technology department failed for a year to get the added ports working. Our NetDay wiring sat unused, and when I added a Windows 98 laptop to my own little peer-to-peer 10BASE2 network, at first it couldn’t print due to a software conflict. I resolved that, but I had added some Vernier data probes to the COM2 ports on the lab station computers, and that created an interrupt conflict that made the computers wink in and out of existence on my 10BASE2 network until I figured out what was going on and changed all of the network cards to use a different IRQ. Managing the random access memory and interrupts on old personal computers was quite frustrating.

Twisted Pair

It wasn’t until 2000 that the district was able to pass a bond issue that brought a networked computer to every classroom, and I replaced the 10BASE2 network in my lab with twisted-pair cabling thanks to a new set of hand-me-down computers that came with 8P8C Ethernet cards.

I made sure the 2003 Science Wing had good networking

In 2001, another bond issue funded a new science wing, which opened in 2003. I ensured we had network ports on the demonstration desks, each wall, and at each lab station.

Thankfully, the new wing also provided much larger lab stations, which was particularly helpful in that era of deep cathode-ray-tube monitors.

After that, every few years I would receive a new set of seven hand-me-down desktop computers, usually retired from a business lab, for my physics lab stations. Eventually that included a set of thin LCD monitors.

The physics lab stations in the 1958 annex were very cramped compared to the new ones in the 2003 wing

With each update, I would go through the gyrations of getting everything working with a new version of Windows, and we were still using later versions of the Vernier Graphical Analysis for Windows software and their Logger Pro software up through my leaving teaching in 2017, although by then the computers were using the Windows 7 operating system.

When I was teaching, when I wanted each AP Physics student to do a full formal lab report, I refused to sacrifice precious additional instructional time shifting from the physics lab, where they collected and graphed their data, to a non-dedicated computer lab for them to do their write-ups. So I scrounged a bunch of old Windows laptops, which was a royal pain given that they always needed a bunch of security updates and could have trouble printing in my lab. I also spent hours at the start of each academic year installing updates on the Windows desktop computers at the lab stations.

Final Years at Work

It wasn’t until I had left the classroom for administration that every student had his or her own Chromebook that automatically connected with the district Wi-Fi and received routine automatic updates, and all of the work could be provided, completed, submitted, and graded electronically within the Canvas Learning Management System. These days, only the teacher station has a computer running Windows.

I continued using Windows on my administrative desktop and laptop computers, although I generally relied on a Chromebook for meetings. During my administrative tenure, the district made the transitions from Windows 7 to 10 to 11. I first used Windows 11 on a laptop computer in 2024, and in May 2025 my Windows 10 desktop computer at the office was replaced with one running Windows 11 Pro.

I made a habit of setting everything up for an evening board meeting first thing in the morning to ensure I could finish whatever lengthy updates the Windows 11 laptop computer might need, which often took over a half-hour to download and install. For my final board meeting, the laptop took 25 minutes to download and install the Windows and firmware updates before it asked about restarting, and then it took 15 minutes to cycle through a handful of restarts and firmware updates. Altogether, that month’s update process took 40 minutes to complete!

The updates I had to install on my Windows laptop before one of the last board meetings; it could take over 30 minutes for those monthly software updates to download and install

The glacial process of updating Windows 11 computers, even on fast systems with solid state drives, reminded me of the painfully slow and irritating update process for old versions of Windoze over a decade earlier, back in the days of slow spinning hard drives. Microsoft’s software bloat and the endless security fixes still manage to make startups and updates quite slow despite tremendous hardware improvements.

In April 2026, Microsoft executives acknowledged that Windows 11 needed more emphasis on “performance, reliability, and craft” having met resistance regarding plans to further integrate its Copilot AI into the operating system along with complaints of its lag and quality issues.

Windows at Home

At home, although I installed and tried out Windows for years, it did not replace DOS as my primary operating system until Windows 95, and I would go on to use Windows 98, 2000, XP, 7, and 10 at home through early 2024.

However, the initial installation of Windows 95 was rough. WordPerfect ran too slow, my bitmapped fonts were obsolete, and I could not print and use my ZIP drive simultaneously in Windows like I could with MS-DOS 6.2.

So I reverted back to DOS 6.22 while I invested more funds in my system hardware, replacing my 1993 Gateway 2000 desktop’s 66 MHz 80486DX microprocessor with an 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive chip, and increasing from 16 to 40 MB of RAM. That was enough to make Windows 95 tolerable, and in 1997 I finally switched from WordPerfect for DOS to WordPerfect 8 for Windows 95. I would continue to use WordPerfect until 2016, all the way through WordPerfect Suite X7, or version 17.

Two Thousand Windows

By late 1999, my 1993 desktop was inadequate to run WordPerfect 2000, Netscape 4.7 was taking to long to load, and Java was too slow. So I bought a Dell desktop with a 733 MHz Pentium III microprocessor, 128 MB of RAM, and Windows 98. That May, my former student Kyle Machulis was doing a summer internship with Microsoft in Redmond, WA and visited me, giving me a copy of Office 2000 Premium Edition and Windows 2000 Professional. I spent over 10 hours installing Windows 2000 on my home computer, and I was mightily impressed with Windows 2000. It was MUCH more stable than Windows 98.

However, after months of customer service snafus in 2001, I finally got broadband at home via Southwestern Bell’s DSL service. Their software didn’t work properly with Windows 2000, failing to properly report the dynamic IP address. My fellow teacher John Baird found some public domain software to fix that issue, and the DSL line worked for awhile but eventually was replaced by a cable modem after the local cable system upgraded from analog to digital signals.

Windows 3.1, 95, 2000, XP — Windows Versions [Source]

The Windows eXPerience

Windows XP was released in 2001 as the successor to Windows 2000 and the hideous Windows ME. I once helped a friend with her Windows ME system, and I was so grateful that I had dodged that bullet. XP came from “eXPerience”, and I certainly eXPerienced plenty of crashes with XP; Windows 2000 had been far more stable.

I updated my desktop computer to dual-boot Windows XP or Windows 98, and in 2004 I updated to a computer that already had XP on it: another Dell system with a Pentium 4 3.6 GHz microprocessor, 2 GB of RAM, and a series of ever-larger hard drives in different RAID configurations.

Windows 7 and XP — I liked Windows 7 better than XP

Windows Vista was released in 2007, but the reviews I read of it were negative, and I did not adopt it. In 2008, I bought a tiny Asus Eee PC netbook, which came with Windows XP Home. After Windows 7 was released in 2009 to good reviews, I purchased a Velocity Micro desktop with that operating system, running on an i7-920 microprocessor with multiple cores. Thanks to Windows 7 being a 64-bit operating system, I could access 8 GB of RAM. Repeated upgrades allowed me to keep that system until 2017.

I liked Windows 7 so much that I made the effort to update my ASUS netbook from XP to 7.

Tasting the Apple

By 2010, I had never had much luck with Windows laptop computers. I purchased ones in 1997 and 2005 and the netbook in 2008, and none of them provided sufficient bang for the buck. However, I greatly enjoyed my new iPhone in 2008, and when the iPad was announced in early 2010, at first I was put off by its price of over $900, but I eventually decided to get one.

Having just bought a new Windows desktop, I was short on cash. So I embarked on a digital downsizing of my collections of books, DVDs, and my audio CDs. I sold off 110 books for $260, four audiobooks for $45, 33 DVDs for $78, and 350 CDs for $631. That $942 paid for a top-of-the-line iPad, which I greatly enjoyed. I bought six more iPads over the next 14 years, ensuring I am never without one.

I was so pleased with the iPad, and frustrated by the Windows netbook’s shortcomings for photo and video editing, that later in 2010 I bought my first Mac. The MacBook Air was stunningly thin when it was announced, and it lived up to the hype. The size, weight, and build quality were superb, and I steadily updated it from OS X Snow Leopard to Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan.

However, I was still using Windows desktop computers at work and at home, and the Mac had too many incompatibilities for me to use it for more than blogging and editing photos and videos.

My Last Home Windows Systems

In 2017, I wasted a lot of money on one last Windows laptop: a top-of-the-line Microsoft Surface Book with a detachable screen that cost a whopping $2,600. I thought I might need that for meetings in my new role of leading the district’s technology and communications. However, I found that a Chromebook worked fine for my portable computing needs. So the Surface Book, which ran Windows 10 Professional, went mostly unused except during the first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic when I used it in a room at home for many remote meetings. I later used it for a few weeks when the power supply on my desktop computer failed.

By 2017, I was using Windows 10 at work and that led me to finally replace my 8-year-old home desktop computer, which couldn’t handle Windows 10. After overspending on the last Windows laptop, I spent only $676 on a Dell desktop running Windows 10 on an i7-6700 microprocessor and 16 GB of RAM.

Its power supply failed in 2022, so I replaced that, but Microsoft refused to support the microprocessor on that computer for Windows 11, dooming it to obsolescence in October 2025 when Windows 10 systems would no longer receive security updates.

Unable to travel over the 2020-2021 winter break due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I bought a Mac Mini with a M1 microprocessor to explore if its integrations with the Apple ecosystem and ability to run some iOS apps would link it so well with my iPhone and iPad that it might become my primary home system. I had become increasingly annoyed at the kludges involved in getting photos off my Apple iPhone onto my Windows desktop, now that the iPhone’s camera was good enough to displace my use of handheld superzoom cameras.

My technological environment at work had shifted radically, thanks to my role in leading a 1:1 Chromebooks initiative that the pandemic expanded from secondary students to all students. I had started using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Draw for almost everything instead of WordPerfect, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Corel Presentations. To me, it was time to “eat your own dog food” — if I expected staff members to use Google apps to better integrate their desktops with their new Chromebooks, I should do the same.

Mac Minis — A Mac Mini M4 Pro atop an M1 Mac Mini

So in the spring of 2024, my shift away from Windows software made it feasible to try using my 2020 Mac Mini as my primary machine at home, retiring my Windows desktop and documenting my shift to the Mac in a series of blog posts. Happily, I found MacOS met all of my home computing needs, even with its own quirks, so I invested in a Mac Mini M4 Pro in late 2024.

The end of support for Windows 10 allowed me to get rid of my mother’s Windows desktop computer, replacing it with a Chromebox that suited her minimal needs of receiving email and playing an online version of Mahjong. However, my wife still uses Windows on her home computer, so it still exists at Meador Manor, although I don’t use it.

Little did I know back in 1986 that I would end up using Windows until I retired 40 years later. It was fine for work, but I’m glad to be done with it. Having many services in the cloud allows me to rely on the integrated services of my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and I’ve closed my Windows once and for all.

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Final Outings with Carlton Keith

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Granger Meador

The autumn of 2020 featured pandemic travel restrictions, and one of my responses was to collect from around the world each of the six adult mysteries authored by Carlton Keith, a pseudonym for Keith Robertson, who used his real name for his successful children’s books, many of them featuring the character Henry Reed.

Tomes came via post from used bookstores in Illinois, Ohio, New York, Tennessee, and New Zealand. By the summer of 2026, I had read four of them:

The Diamond-Studded Typewriter (1958) — Also published under the title A Gem of a Murder
Missing, Presumed Dead (1961)
Rich Uncle (1963)
The Hiding Place (1965)

I had liked Rich Uncle the most, the third outing with document expert / amateur detective Jeff Green, although The Hiding Place had its own naive charm, reading like a Nancy Drew mystery for adults and being the only one of the Carlton Keith novels to not center around the red-headed Jeff Green.

That left two final novels: The Crayfish Dinner of 1966 [Internet archive scan] and A Taste of Sangria from 1968. The earlier book was published in the United Kingdom as The Elusive Epicure. None of those titles would attract my interest, but I’m no foodie.

The Crayfish Dinner

My copy of The Crayfish Dinner was a 1983 reprint from Garland Publishing’s book series Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1950-1975, reflecting selections by respected mystery critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor. They reportedly had identified volumes they considered of literary and historical significance based on their plots, characterization, and adherence to “fair play” detection. Garland was founded in 1969 and endured until the end of the 20th century, and they also published 45 titles in a Garland Library of Science Fiction, with those selections made by Lester del Rey, although the sci-fi series has been criticized as having some weak selections and inferior unedited versions of its titles.

The Garland reprint had an ugly plain green hardcover with no dust jacket, but the 181 pages were of “acid-free, 250-year-life paper” with comfortable spacing and have held up well after 43 years. In contrast, my mass-market paperback reprint by Curtis Books of A Taste of Sangria has stiff yellowed pages with tight spacing to squeeze it into 143 pages.

Comparison of physical copies of The Crayfish Dinner and A Taste of Sangria

The Garland reprint did have a noticeable flaw in its preface, falsely asserting that Jeff Green had appeared in only three of the six Carlton Keith mysteries. I borrowed the Internet Archive’s copy of A Catalogue of Crime by Barzun and Taylor, and found the listing for The Crayfish Dinner, in which the critics wrote, “The several persons in the environment are well marked off and everything is credible, including the denouement and the reason for the crayfish dinner.”

Their catalogue also listed The Diamond-Studded Typewriter, The Hiding Place, and A Taste of Sangria. To their credit, they pointed out flaws in each of those works, so I gathered that they considered The Crayfish Dinner the best of the group. I was interested to see how it compared to Rich Uncle, my favorite Jeff Green tale thus far.

The story had some similarities to The Hiding Place, with an isolated old house with secrets, and Jeff Green was his usual brash self, unafraid of laying traps and confronting miscreants, and getting the usual stunning blow to the head. He and the Hardy Boys would have had concussions and traumatic brain injuries from their various adventures.

This had a bit of the whodunit to it, but it was more a story of figuring out what happened to a man with a crooked character. It was a pleasant read, but not as atmospheric as the previous Carlton Keith outings, and I still considered Rich Uncle my favorite Jeff Green book. However, there was still one left unread. I had not the heart to read that immediately after my repast of crayfish, so I interjected a handful of other books first. I finally packed the mass market paperback in my carry-on to read on airplane flights from Tulsa to Seattle.

A Taste of Sangria

Barzun and Taylor’s take on A Taste of Sangria was, “Possibly a trifle too smooth and easygoing, but the plot (finding a missing man who may have made off with money which he was supposed to deposit to the Swiss account of a bastard) is good, all the characters except one well portrayed, the local color delightful (Zurich and Segovia), and the end satisfying.”

I enjoyed the book, and presume that the reviewers took exception with the character of Mr. Grundy, a sepulchral hit man of plodding gait. I visualized him as a thin version of Solomon Grundy from the Superman comic books of my childhood. His relentless pursuit of his victims made him a threatening if not entirely believable presence. The plot kept most of the precise killings at a remove and Jeff Green was capable as usual, making use of his brains over his brawn except in one instance. In that case, which seemed unnecessary, he at least delivered, rather than received, a knockout blow.

One part I got a kick out of was this:

Jeff called Lou Ford when he got back to the office Wednesday morning. Lou dropped by a short while later.

“I’m back on this man Hanscomb,” Jeff told him. “It appears that there’s a little more to it than I first thought. I have an informant who tells me that he is mixed up in the drug trade, gambling, and I don’t know what all. Maybe prostitution, too.”

“In my opinion, that’s a dying business,” Lou said gravely. “Technological change. The automobile comes along and puts all the carriage people out of business and now the pill comes along and will put most of the madams out of business. Too much amateur competition.”

Let’s see…the paperback came out at the start of 1968. The FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960, but such contraceptives were not available to married women in all states until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, by which time one in four married women under 45 were already using them. They were not routinely available to unmarried women in all states until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972.

I wondered if Robertson’s prediction had any merit. The internet responded that it did not, with prostitution primarily driven by economic disparity, substance abuse, and structural vulnerabilities rather than the availability of oral contraception.

Anyway, I was sad to have exhausted the adult mysteries by Keith Robertson under his Carlton Keith pen name. I still rank Rich Uncle [Open Library link] as my favorite. I’m not finished with mysteries by Keith Robertson, however. Between reading his final Carlton Keith works, I read the first of his four Carson Street Detective Agency books for older boys, and I plan to read the rest of those, relying on the Internet Archive since they are long out of print. If you enjoy Keith Robertson’s books, check out Fans of author KEITH ROBERTSON on Facebook.

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Escaping to Scotland with Mary Stewart

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Granger Meador

Mary Stewart’s second novel, Wildfire at Midnight, is set on the coast of the Isle of Skye off the northwest coast of Scotland.

The first of her suspense romances I had read was her seventh, The Moon-Spinners of 1962, which was set on sunny and dry Crete. Liking it, I then backtracked to her first, Madam, Will You Talk? of 1955, which was set in the south of France.

In this outing, Stewart again displayed her splendid ability to transport you to a particular location, quickly establishing a mood evoked through its physical geography.

And, locked in the great arms of the mountains, the water lay quiet as a burnished shield, reflecting in deeper blue and deeper gold the pageantry of hill and sky. One thin gleaming line, bright as a rapier, quivered between the world of reality and the water-world below. Our boat edged its way, with drowsily purring engine, along the near shore of the loch. Water lipped softly under the bows and whispered along her sides. The tide was at half-ebb, its gentle washes dwindling, one after one, among the sea-tangle at its edge. The sea-weeds, black and rose-red and olive-green, rocked as the salt swell took them, and the smell of the sea drifted up, sharp and exciting. The shore slid past; scree and heather, overhung with summer clouds of birch, flowed by us, and our wake arrowed the silk-smooth water into ripples of copper and indigo.

And now ahead of us, in the centre of the mountain-crescent, I could see the dip of a bay, where a green valley cut through the hills to the sea’s edge. Higher up this valley, as I knew, was a loch, where the hills crowded in and cradled the water into a deep and narrow basin. Out of this the river flowed; I could see the gleam of it, and just discernible at that distance, a white building set among a mist of birch trees where the glittering shallows fanned out to meet the sea. The boat throbbed steadily closer. Now I could see the smoke from the hotel chimneys, a faint pencilling against the darker blue of the hills. Then the glitter of water vanished as the sun slipped lower, and the enormous shadow of the Cuillin strode across the little valley. One arrogant wing of rock, thrusting itself across the sun, flung a diagonal of shadow over half the bay.

Camasunary Bay, © Julian Paren via a Creative Commons license

However, this book is an outlier in some ways, as she experimented with a whodunit set in an isolated hotel with various suspects. A prior grisly murder was merely described as a past event, but Stewart did in a couple more folks and threatened others in this fast-paced adventure.

The blogger Danielle once shared: “In the article ‘Teller of Tales’ (The Writer, Volume 83, No. 5, May 1970), Mary Stewart said, ‘Wildfire at Midnight was an attempt at something different [from her previous writings], the classic closed-room detective story with restricted action, a biggish cast, and a closely circular plot. It taught me technically a great deal, but mainly that the detective story, with its emphasis on plot rather than people, is not for me. What mattered to me was not the mystery, but the choice the heroine faces between personal and larger loyalties.'”

Danielle went on to write: “One can always rely on Mary Stewart’s descriptive genius to create a setting so breathtakingly real that it seems to be a memory of one’s own rather than an imagined place. This is perhaps particularly the case with northern England and Scotland; born in Durham and educated there and in Yorkshire, Stewart later settled in Scotland. Wildfire At Midnight also borrows specialist knowledge from her husband, noted Scottish geologist Sir Frederick Stewart, and draws upon the couple’s travels: ‘[…] the one background I owe entirely to him is the Scottish one for Wildfire At Midnight. We travelled every inch of Scotland together.’ (Interview in Counterpoint, edited by Roy Newquist, published by Rand McNally & Company, 1964, page 564.) The rain-lashed island setting with its suddenly descending fogs, perilous mountains, treacherous bogs, and toasty peat fires by which to warm oneself with a glass of sherry, is a character in its own right. It is neither filler nor a device to create suspenseful moodiness (although suspenseful and moody are the resulting atmosphere), but is actually even more integral to the plot than usual with Stewart, who always takes care to match her stories believably to the chosen location.”

This was the third book to have a significant chase, so that appears to be standard in Stewart’s suspense romances. This one came late in the book shrouded in a dense mist, but I was gratified when she chose to have it abruptly end with a literal ascent into sunshine, only to place the heroine in even greater danger. When Stewart uses what are now cliches, she at least does so effectively.

Her prose can elevate the work above mere genre writing. Consider her opening in Chapter 5:

At half-past nine on a summer’s evening in the Hebrides, the twilight has scarcely begun. There is, perhaps, with the slackening of the day’s brilliance, a sombre note overlying the clear colours of sand and grass and rock, but this is no more than the drawing of the first thin blue veil. Indeed, night itself is only a faint dusting-over of the day, a wash of silver through the still-warm gold of the afternoon.

Her deftness extends to the characters as well. When the heroine unexpectedly runs into her ex-husband, there is a quick verbal exchange, and then Stewart wrote, “It was over, the awkward moment, the dreaded moment, sliding past in a ripple of commonplaces, the easy mechanical politenesses that are so much more than empty convention; they are the greaves and cuirasses that arm the naked nerve.”

The book maintained Stewart’s reputation for a quick pace, although its sensibilities are now quite dated. I was not impressed with the heroine’s paramour, but at least Stewart threaded explanations throughout the story for her choices. I will certainly read more of Stewart’s suspense romances, with Thunder on the Right from 1957 promising a return to France. But it would be a mistake to binge on her works; instead, I use her confections as splendid palate cleansers in between longer courses in other genres.

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PNW 2026, Days 9 & 10: South Lake Union

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Granger Meador

We returned from Canada to Seattle on Independence Day, our nation’s 250th birthday. Knowing that Seattle traditionally had a big fireworks show on Lake Union, I had booked us a room at the Silver Cloud Hotel there with a view over the lake.

The Victoria Clipper V docked around 8 p.m. and we hauled our luggage towards the Bell Street Pier Garage. An Amtrak train pulled up and blocked us from crossing at Wall Street, so I led us back to Vine to get around it. We loaded into the rental car, and I drove 2.5 miles to the hotel, grateful for my Apple CarPlay and my TomTom GO app’s help in navigating the unfamiliar streets. At one point, we were driving under the old World’s Fair monorail that still connects a downtown shopping mall to Seattle Center. The only time I rode it was back in 2005.

The South Lake Union neighborhood is the global headquarters for Amazon, and its housing is mostly modern luxury mid-rise apartments and open-concept condominiums. A one-bedroom condo there costs about two or three times as much as our three-bedroom home on a quarter-acre lot in Bartlesville.

The streets near the lake were flanked by parallel-parked cars, with the lake full of boats awaiting the fireworks.

Our fifth floor suite had both a bedroom and a living room, the latter having a French door with railing providing a view of the lake beyond Fairview Avenue and the marinas. I was relieved that we could see the central barge the fireworks would be launched from.

It was a marvelous climax for our anniversary trip. Below is a view of the show from Gasworks Park across the lake from our hotel, on the other side of the barge.

View from Gasworks Park — Original photography by Dixon Yan [source]

I shot video during the first minutes of the fireworks, but then Wendy and I set aside our phones to just enjoy the show with each other.

The show looked pretty amazing up close, but was also quite impressive miles away in West Seattle.

View from West Seattle — Photograph by Annette Stiers Jones [source]

The barge was often lost in smoke.

Here’s a final shot I found in a Seattle newspaper.

After the show ended, we enjoyed listening to the observers’ celebrations.

Fireworks Slideshow

Knowing we would be up late for the fireworks, I had kept us in the Lake Union hotel for two nights. Thankfully it offered a good free breakfast, as the area was not as walkable as Belltown. For lunch on Day 10, I drove us to the South Lake Union branch of the Cactus restaurant chain, parking for free in their building’s garage. For dinner, we just drove to a QFC grocery store for sandwiches. It offered free parking in its underground garage.

Seattle, unlike downtown Tulsa, is not a parking desert with oodles of surface lots. We used six different parking garages for our rental car during our stays there, even with us walking to Pike Place Market and Seattle Center.

While we had a marvelous Independence Day, that same night Bartlesville’s fireworks show was cancelled as it was hit with 80-mph winds that damaged many trees and buildings, blocked roads, and knocked out power and other services. Our home cameras were still working in its immediate aftermath, and we couldn’t see any major damage on them. Sparklight’s internet then went down for about a day, probably due to a power failure, while Meador Manor itself remained powered, as Arrowhead Acres has underground wiring.

We flew back to Tulsa on July 6, arriving home around 10 p.m. I spent several hours the next day, in sweltering heat and humidity, cleaning up some minor debris from trees in other yards that had blown in, trimming the greenery, mowing the lawn, and edging. It was a brutal reminder that we had left behind the mild weather of the Pacific Northwest.

I told Wendy during this vacation that I intended for it to be our last visit to Seattle or Victoria. While I do plan on us returning to the Pacific Northwest to escape some future Joklahoma summer, I expect that we will instead return to Oregon, avoiding Portland by flying into Eugene, North Bend, or Medford, with us renting a car to enjoy the public access along the coast. Meanwhile, I’m sure some future summer breaks will find us returning to the higher altitude and drier air of Santa Fe, New Mexico and southwest Colorado.

I was so used to summer breaks, until going into administration in 2017, that I don’t feel retired yet, and I expect my new reality won’t become fully apparent until Wendy goes back to work in about a month. It was fun to kick off my retirement, and celebrate a decade of marriage, in the cool and lovely Pacific Northwest.

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PNW 2026, Days 5-8: Victoria

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Granger Meador

My only ventures beyond the United States have been to Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. I visited them in 1999 and returned to Victoria in 2005 and 2008. Wendy and I traveled to Victoria from the Olympic Peninsula for our honeymoon in 2016, taking a rental car with us on the Black Ball Ferry Line’s M.V. Coho from Port Angeles, Washington.

The Coho was built in 1959 and has transported more than 26 million passengers and over 7 million vehicles. But for this return to Victoria, I opted to switch over to the passenger-only Victoria Clipper V, which provides direct service between Victoria and Seattle. I didn’t feel like driving to the north end of the Olympic Peninsula for the Coho, which rocked enough to make Wendy queasy on our honeymoon. In past years, I had ridden the MV Victoria Clipper I, a high-speed catamaran that launched in 1986, and I figured that would be a nice change from how we’d travelled to Victoria a decade earlier.

The 296-passenger Clipper I transported over eight million passengers over its 30 years of service, but in 2018 it was replaced by the larger and more fuel efficient Clipper V, which can haul up to 525 passengers. I reserved seats in the upper deck’s Vista class, ensuring Wendy would have an unobstructed view of the horizon.

The crossings went fine, but in retrospect I wish I had planned things differently for this part of the trip. On our honeymoon, having a car made it simple to drive to Butchart Gardens and get around town. This time we were mostly confined to downtown, and we had already seen Butchart Gardens, Beacon Hill Park, Craigdarroch Castle, and the Royal British Columbia Museum on our honeymoon, so there were fewer novelties left for Wendy to enjoy.

Some tourists enjoy riding in seaplanes and going whale watching, but neither interested us. I’d been treated to a flight on an old De Havilland seaplane for my birthday in 1999, which was memorable but quite loud and cramped. In hindsight, we would have been satisfied with two instead of four nights in Victoria.

Upon arrival, we checked our bags at the ferry building until our hotel room would be ready in the afternoon. I then set course overland for The Old Spaghetti Factory, a Canadian chain that inspired the now-defunct Spaghetti Warehouses in the USA. I loved enjoying good spaghetti and salad with delicious sourdough bread, almost a decade after the Spaghetti Warehouse in Tulsa shut down.

I was thankful that Wendy discovered their Cranberry Spinach Salad, hold the Goat Cheese, as that meant she was willing to return two additional times to indulge my desire to have as much of that delicious food as possible, given that I am unlikely to ever return to Victoria.

After filling up at the Factory we walked over to Thunderbird Park, where totem poles were erected in 1940 to preserve some of the region’s deteriorating Aboriginal art. Carvers have maintained and replaced the poles ever since.

During Fall Break in 2023, I had taken Wendy to the Doll Cradle in Shawnee, Kansas, where she purchased a Northwest Coast Native American Barbie from 1999. The doll’s outfit reminded her of the native art we had seen in Victoria on our honeymoon. She spent a couple of weeks painstakingly re-rooting that vintage doll’s hair, dealing with a split in the head and oozing glue that had to be remediated. Wendy brought that favorite Barbie with us to Victoria for our tenth anniversary.

We walked up to Government Street for some shopping, and we browsed Munro’s Books, which since 1984 has occupied a neoclassical 1909 building designed by Thomas Hooper for the Royal Bank of Canada.

Its 24 foot high coffered ceiling resembles that of the porch of the library of Ephesus built by the Romans in the 100s CE.

I purchased a paperback copy of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English there, which had won several awards and been selected as a Best Book of 2022 by several publications. However, I found it a first novel that was needlessly disjointed and confusing, and I abandoned it before we left Canada.

We walked around The Empress Hotel, where Wendy had admired roses on our honeymoon. There were some roses again this time, but not at their peak. However, the plantings were still quite beautiful. I was glad to see that Surfacing is still being maintained. It is a four-by-six meter garden sculpture of a mother and baby orca formed from almost 10,000 Alternanthera, Santolina, and Fistula plants.

We walked to the Bay Centre mall on another day. It is always interesting to see how malls are faring these days. Oklahoma City’s Penn Square and Tulsa’s Woodland Hills malls are still thriving, while Bartlesville’s Washington Park has a smattering of local vendors and no remaining anchor stores that connect with its interior, and many other malls have been abandoned or demolished.

I figured Bay Centre might be struggling, given that it opened in 1989 with an Eaton’s that later became a Sears Canada, and finally The Bay. The Bay was the last gasp of the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670 and until its liquidation in 2025 the oldest company in North America. It fell victim to changing times and all-too-typical private equity financial shenanigans.

The mall was still open, although the multi-level space along Government Street that was once The Bay was empty. The food court was unappealing, while there were local stores in a couple of the larger spaces.

We were again staying at the Magnolia Hotel, where I had ensured we would have a view of the Parliament building on the Inner Harbour.

Our view of Parliament lawn on Canada Day

On July 1, we could see the crowds for Canada Day on the lawn for local musical performances, with various food booths and trucks lined up along Belleville Street.

Closer look at the Canada Day celebration

We could hear the music from our hotel room, although we didn’t care for much of it. I did enjoy the version of La Roux’s Bulletproof by Covers in a Dangerous Time, and I also liked a remix by GAMPER & DADONI. However, bear in mind that I’m attracted by the music and oblivious to the lyrics, unlike Wendy, who can recite lyrics to countless songs, quote verbatim from her favorite movies, etc.

We browsed the food offerings along Belleville Street, but we ended up back at The Old Spaghetti Factory. Our hopes of seeing the Canada Day fireworks from our hotel room were for naught, as they were set off farther north. We could only see diffuse blooms of reflected light on a nearby tall building.

Another day we walked down to the dock at The Empress hotel to ride one of the Victoria Harbour Ferry pickle boats to Point Ellice House. The Hobbis family initiated the ferry service in 1990 with two boats, and it now has 15 passenger vessels offering water taxi hops about the Inner Harbour and Gorge. Captain Kato made an excellent approach to pick us up.

Wendy shot a video of the interior of the pickle boat as we prepared to set off north.

I knew it was the simplest way for us to travel to Point Ellice House, with us passing under the Johnson Street bascule bridge into the Upper Harbour, which is far more industrial than the touristy Inner Harbour.

Kato told us how the Inner Harbour was once quite industrial as well, and we passed a Ralmax barge which transports cement components from Vancouver to Victoria. He explained its operation and how Ralmax bought a majority stake in the Victoria Harbour Ferry in 2020, so its owner now gets to watch his fleet of tiny ferries zipping around the harbour along with his lumbering barges; Barry Hobbis retired from running the ferry in 2022.

We passed under the Bay Street Bridge, which is particularly sturdy, as it replaced the Point Ellice Bridge that collapsed in 1896 under the weight of an overloaded streetcar. 55 people died in that accident, one of the worst transit disasters in British Columbia.

The old house with its beautiful grounds is a little oasis, with large trees screening it from the noisy industrial areas around it. You walk up from the dock to cross a beautiful back lawn.

Back in 1999, I had enjoyed tea on that lawn with delicious cucumber sandwiches, but they no longer offer that amenity. The home was constructed in 1861-1862 for Catherine and Charles Wallace. Peter and Caroline O’Reilly took it over in 1867, and they added a wing in the late 1800s. The family lived there until 1975 when it was sold to the province of British Columbia.

The house is like a time capsule with thousands of original items, but the province has struggled to keep it running. Various organizations have operated it on its behalf, and in January 2024 the Métis Nation British Columbia took over management. The ferry folks weren’t even sure the house would be open, but I had confirmed that we could access it.

As we began our self-guided tour, Wendy and I were unaware that the Métis Nation had taken it over, but we noticed how the signage tastefully acknowledged the colonial history of the home and its owners, with Peter O’Reilly having been an Indian Reserve Commissioner who largely shirked his duties and avoided meeting with First Nations leaders. As I had expected, Wendy enjoyed the grounds more than the house itself.

After touring the house and grounds and browsing the gift shop in the old carriage house, we walked down to the dock at the Selkirk Water. I called the ferry company on my cell phone, and while we waited to be picked up, a rental hot tub boat floated by.

The bows of those boats have onboard stoves heated by compressed logs.

One of the ferries transported us back to The Empress, passing another pickle boat on the way.

Some summers the company has a choreographed Water Ballet of the cute little craft.

On our way back to the Inner Harbour, we also saw folks on stand up paddleboards and passed seaplanes. A few days later, we’d see and hear seaplanes taking off on Lake Union in Seattle.

We tried the hotel’s room service breakfast on Day 5, but on Day 6 we had breakfast at Frankie’s Modern Diner, where we had enjoyed a dinner. On Day 7 we breakfasted at a local branch of Cora’s, where I ordered the 1990’s Harvest with a cinnamon bun dipped in French toast batter, a scrambled egg, bacon, and an impressive amount of fresh fruit. We enjoyed Cora’s enough to dine there again on our final day in Victoria.

We woke up on July 4, 2026, our nation’s semiquincentennial, in another country, but the Victoria Clipper V would remedy that. However, it didn’t depart for Seattle until 5 p.m., so after checking our bags at the ferry building we walked to the public library to relax and read. Then we boarded the clipper so that we could celebrate our country’s 250th birthday with a tremendous fireworks show at Lake Union, which I’ll share in the next and final post from our anniversary trip.