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The long awaited general season rifle hunting season starts this week. It has been an important weekend for me ever since I was born into my parents’ outfitting business, and I have spent many years as a hunting camp cook, so I have always revered hunting guides. I love to listen to hunters’ tales of how their guide darn near killed them off dragging them to the top of every mountain but how it was worth it in the end to shoot an elk on a wilderness hunt. However after all those years of observation, I have come to the con...
As I come to the realization that I am playing in the fourth quarter, my perspective on life has become more retrospective. I am rather baffled by the speed at which I arrived in the fourth quarter, and I am determined not to sit it out on the bench. In fact, as a person who spent many years in the adventure vacation business, I loved the movie, The Bucket List. It was an inspiration to many of our older guests to get out of the recliner, climb mountains, ride horses, shoot elk, or go trout fishing, and we were happy that...
“Is your mom ok?” our Crazy Peak Boutique employee, Larissa, asked my daughter, Brooke, last Wednesday morning. “Define ok,” Brooke replied. In her defense, Brooke has lived almost 38 years of her life realizing that her mom is not exactly normal. “Why do you ask?” Brooke laughed. “Well, customers are asking about her and some incident that happened at the Family Dollar, and I am not sure how to answer. She was gone yesterday, so I don’t know if something happened to her,” Larissa continued. “Oh, she is fine, but that’s a...
With gas and diesel prices through the roof and inflation hitting our wallets month after month, there are many people who are having to get creative about providing food and shelter for their families. Urban camping is now a thing in places like Bozeman, Montana not just Seattle or Portland, and many families are resorting to multi-generational cohabitation. In fact, I have a whole lot more respect for the television family of the Waltons after living with three generations under one roof. I remember watching the Waltons...
Fall is an anxious time of year on ranches, because pre-conditioning, weaning, and shipping are the dreaded days of the year when ranchwives are called upon to sort a lot of cattle with their husbands. It is my hypothesis that there are many ranchers who go to bed at night this time of year without the benefit of having ingested a nice warm dinner. More likely they cooked themselves a frozen pizza or just had cereal. If you have not sorted a lot of cattle with your spouse, let me explain the dynamics of it. I know that when...
Many readers commiserated with me in my pack rat war that I recently recounted, but to be honest, the pack rat war was not the most fierce battle I ever fought as a camp cook. Now, hunting camp cooking is ordinarily a delightful experience!In fact, this week is the opening of the early season rifle, and I am homesick for the smell of wood smoke and kerosene lanterns and the bugle of bull elk. Hunting camp is a fine and pleasant misery where I get up at 3 a.m., try not to singe my bangs lighting the kerosene lamps, fire up...
Social media is changing our lives, and it just might have the power to change the course of history. Everything we do now is chronicled on social media. World leaders are offended by each other’s tweets. Perhaps Twitter and Facebook won’t alter the course of history, but I cannot help but think they would have changed the perception of historic events if they had existed back in the day. Let me hypothesize a few historical examples to prove my point. #1. Christoper Columbus posting on October 12, 1492: “Yo, ho, ho, Isabe...
“All creatures, including me, get grouchy as summer turns into fall. Perhaps it is because we know winter is coming. The yellow jackets, hornets, and even honey bees become aggressive. And then there are the rodents that seem to want to move in before winter. I despise mice and rattlesnakes; however, there is no creature on earth more irritating and detestable than a packrat. I believe it is because they mark everything, so they ooze as they move, and they build a huge nest called a midden, wherein you might find e...
Going back into the classroom has forced me to start going through the tubs of teaching materials that I have collected over 41 years in education. I have dusty tubs of outdated teaching materials that I could not possibly part with when I stopped teaching English and then again when I stopped teaching guidance and library. Seventeen years ago, my husband who has hauled those tubs around for 17 years, told me they should just go to the burn barrel, and he was definitely right. One summer I had to move and downsize my County...
“You are probably eligible for some kind of award from the Governor,” my husband commented one morning over coffee. After 41 years of marriage, I should have known better than to bite on that, but of course, I had to find out where this was going. “For what?” I asked even though I suspected the answer was not going to be a self esteem booster. “For being the oldest first year Home Ec teacher in the universe,” he answered smugly. “Well, it’s not Home Ec anymore. It is FCS, and you are right I should get some kind of award but...
I recently accompanied a friend to choose a swimsuit for a cruise she has booked. I do believe the economy must be in much worse shape than we have been told, because the swim suit mannequin was wearing a total of 20 square inches of fabric. Either that fabric was ridiculously expensive or Oakley Inc. must be manufacturing on a very tight budget. The other conclusion was that generations from now, some anthropologist will unearth this fragment of fabric and use it to conclude that global warming had to have been rampant in...
The cucumbers are coming on strong in the garden, so it seems like a good time to share some ideas for utilizing them. It is also pool and river floating season, so Tip #3 below is particularly timely. I absolutely love tips and hacks, so I try to pass them along without too much commentary, but sometimes I just can’t resist sharing comments about the actual practicality of those tips. Tip #1. Cucumbers contain Vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, Folic Acid, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc. F...
Our county 4-H Fair is this week, and it brings back a flood of fond memories of my own 4-H years and those of my children and grandchildren. When I transitioned into the role of 4-H Grandma, it was way more fun and less work than the role of 4-H mom or 4-H exhibitor. I got to show up, watch, visit with everyone in the county, celebrate the thrill of victories, and of course dry the tears from the agony of defeat. One of my not so fond 4-H memories was my daughter Brooke’s 4-H cat project. As a first year 4-H’er she had alr...
The writers in Hollywood are all afraid of losing their jobs to Artificial Intelligence, so I decided I better try to find out if my writing jobs would be in future jeopardy. I researched how to use ChatGPT 4.0 and decided to have AI write something for me. Like most writers, ideas ferment in our brain--sometimes for a long time. I was always going to write a poem about forcing our youngest child to wear his sister’s hand-me-down boots even though they were red or pink or turquoise until he finally got old enough to rebel. I...
The Big Timber NRA Rodeo and the high school rodeo were successful as are all rodeos due to the planning, preparation, and just plain hard work that goes into putting on a rodeo. The Big Timber Rodeo has a rich history which began with Leo J. Cremer (1891-1953) and his family who built a rodeo legacy based out of Melville, Montana. He established the greatest string of bucking horses ever owned by a single person. After his death in 1953, his business became part of Gene...
Every time I hear a story about someone who has to be rescued from a mountain adventure by Search and Rescue, I think back to a few years back when we set out on a wilderness trek that was not well planned. It started out with the fateful words, “Let’s go to Blue Lake! I have never been to Blue Lake.” The whole family agreed it would be an adventure, and that turned out to be an understatement. My father was an outfitter for many years, and he tried to instill in us a need to be prepared for anything to happen in the mount...
One of the best things about social media is that it offers a platform to pay homage to our pets who pass over the rainbow bridge. Although often it is true that the dead become greater in death than they were in life, such was not the case when our adopted dog, Marvin, died. He became an international rock star on Facebook when within hours he received tributes from ranch vacation guests as far away as Germany, Norway, and Mongolia. We adopted Marvin rather unwillingly when my Uncle Shorty Roberts died. Two years earlier,...
With all of the discussion about artificial intelligence having the potential to run amuck and perhaps wipe out mankind, I have become more sensitive to my interactions with artificial intelligence--namely our Amazon Alexa. Technology has the potential to make everyone’s life better but apparently also the potential to put millions of people out of work and threaten our very existence if the algorithms go rogue. One career that will likely be among the last to become dominated by artificially intelligent bots is the horse p...
It has been raining every day for the last couple of weeks, and the best thing about the rain is that it has given me a little recliner time to read “A Bard in Boots” by Darrell Arnold. My friend, Mark Silverstein, who is a friend of Darrell’s, brought me a signed copy of this book of cowboy poems that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading. If Darrell’s name seems familiar, it is because he is a photojournalist who was the editor and publisher of Cowboy Magazine from 1990 to 2008. I have chosen to share Darrell’s poem that seems...
Parts of south-central Montana were pounded this past weekend by heavy rains, which have caused flooding that is painfully reminiscent of last year’s severe flooding. I just watched one tough cowgirl, Jonnie Jonckowski, weeping on the nightly news over the damage to her Angel Horse Rescue facility near Billings. My heart, prayers, and what I can donate go out to all affected by the flooding, and I know that helps a little because I have been there on a smaller scale in May 2011. I wrote this “Diary of a Flood” during that...
Youth rodeo season is in high gear right now, and moms like Jenny Proue Gilbert are pounding down the road with their families and their horses in a horse trailer with living quarters gaining points and making memories in towns from Cohagen to Harlowton and beyond. Some of my fondest memories happened in youth rodeo arenas, so I loved this poem by Jenny about rodeo moms that I have to share this week. Jenny and her husband, Denver, have two kids, Molly (16) and Brody (12). They run cattle on the Bar Diamond Ranch just north o...
Memorial Day, which originated as Decoration Day, originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. During World War I, the holiday evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars and expanded into a day of remembrance for loved ones and fallen soldiers. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees. The change went into effect in 1971. The same law also...
Another Mother’s Day has come and gone, and for those of us who have lost our mothers, it has become a day of remembrance. Losing my mother made me realize how time spent with her was more valuable than any other gift I could give or be given. My mother, Florence Roberts, has been gone for 17 years, but sadly Alzheimer’s Disease stole her from me several years before that. Every year on Mother’s Day, I tried to write a column that would help others understand that Alzheimer’s Disease is a family disease. Finally I found w...
After my last week’s column about branding ran, several people contacted me to ask me to run my branding etiquette column again...so here it is once more. An emergency room nurse once said to me, “Branding must be really dangerous, because we see a lot of people in the ER that have been hurt at a branding.” I suggested to her that one reason for that is that anymore many horsemen do not ride their horses enough to keep them highly trained. Many do not ride their horses often enough in the early spring, and then they hop o...
It is branding season, which is the season when it is fun to go to another ranch's brandings but not nearly as fun to host your own branding. As a veteran of many years of branding, I offer the following tips--especially for aging ranchers: #1. As you age, so do your friends, and older people are not the most desirable branding helpers. Cultivate friendships with young people who are good ropers or will make good wrestlers. You can still invite friends your age, but they will expect an easier job like vaccinating or more...
