Your Community Builder
Your Community Builder
Sorted by date Results 126 - 140 of 140
Hello, If you haven’t noticed, there is a severe drought taking place across much of the Dakotas. It extends into Montana as far west as Miles City. Maybe further now. I haven’t been to Wyoming. But I just figure it is always dry there. You see people haying some pretty poor stuff. Road ditches that make a bale or two to the mile. Side hills that normally are left alone. Crops that are too poor to combine but may make a bale an acre. Hay is scarce. In North Dakota we have only two seasons. “Putting up hay season” and “feedin...
Hello, This is the time of the year for outdoor cooking. I don’t care if you are going to the lake, a rodeo, or just an evening at home. A lot of people will pack a grill and groceries when they go on vacation. They will go on vacation and cook! I guess the women in our family are a bit different. Carm said if they go on vacation she is ordering out. She is not going on vacation to cook. The last time they went on a 4-H trip all the other families brought grills and salads. She brought pop tarts and licorice. Shirley was like...
Hello, Haying season gets kind of hectic. First, you have to be smarter than the hay. You have to know when it is too wet. You have to know when it is too dry. You have to know when the leafy spurge is hiding in the alfalfa and grass so you can cut around it. You have to know where the hen pheasant has her nest or chicks hidden. It is important to keep them alive so someone else can kill them in the fall. I never have really figured that out. In order to do all of these things right, you sometimes are forced to bale at...
Hello, Remember the scene in the great “Indiana Jones” movie, when Harrison Ford says, “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes. I hate snakes.” Shirley is a lot that way. I’ve mentioned it to you before. About the time she wanted me to fix the screen door, and I put it off. Until one morning there was a horse in the living room and a rattlesnake in the office. I tell you what, there was no procrastinating after that. I fixed that door! This time of the year is great for snakes. Or bad for snakes. I guess you could define it a...
Hello, I mean Good Morning. Or whatever. Oh, well, whatever will be, will be. Or something like that. Sorry I missed some of the papers last week. Not sorry for you, but for me. Cause if I don’t write, they don’t pay me. And if they don’t pay me, I can’t buy pretty things for my wife and necessities for myself. Like…. You know what I like. Some things really disgust me. Eating moldy bread. Two headed dogs. Cows that won’t take their calf. People who pick boogers out of their nose and eat them. Don’t you just hate that? I...
Hello, Today, I’m going to talk about health care. It’s talked about on the news every day. It is in every paper you pick up. It’s cause riots and sit ins. It causes elections to be won or lost. But, honestly, many of us take health care pretty much for granted. Unless, of course, you are a pig. Pigs have problems with health care. Oh, if you are a pig in a hog house, I guess pig care is pretty important. But if you are a pig in the human health care system, it’s kind of rough. I just learned this a week or so ago. One of...
Hello, I’m a good eater. Meaning I eat a lot. I know, I know, looking at me you wouldn’t guess that. Or, maybe you would. I’ve eaten a lot of things in a lot of places. I ate tacos on the streets in Mexico City. Even after our hosts warned us that eating on the streets of The City would cause you to become diseased and die. I’ve eaten goat in a little village in the Mexican mountains and shared a little tequila with a peasant while sitting around a campfire. Ate shark steaks in San Diego and clam chowder on the harbor...
Hello, The third weekend in May brings the Preakness. The second leg of horse racings Triple Crown And it also brings the bucking horse sale. If you live on the northern plains, you’ve probably been through, or in, Miles City. To ranchers and cowboys and rodeo guys, in the spring, Miles City is the Mecca of the North. The “World Famous Miles City Bucking Horse Sale” is held every year in May. Has been for over fifty years. And it brings out people from all over. Our family has been involved in the bucking horse business since...
Hello, It’s been several years since I have been to a horse sale. Unless, of course, you count bucking horse sales. I’ve been to Oklahoma City, Miles City, Kearney, Mesquite, Grassy Butte, Bismarck, and maybe some others for bucking horse and bull sales. I’ve been to cow and bull sales weekly for more years than I care to relate. I’ve been to production horse sales and for years we held one of our own. Where, coincidentally, the finest horses in the world were sold. But it’s been quite awhile since I’ve attended a horse con...
Hello, Sometimes I worry about Shirley. Well, I’ve always worried about her. Do you remember about fifteen years ago when the bull nearly got her? She walked into a pen very nonchalantly, like the Queen she really is. And this bad bull took after her. It chased her up a fence and she got her coveralls hooked on a nail. The bull had her. I mean he had her nailed to the fence. And he must have realized who she was. That bull just stood there pawing and bellering and blowing snot on her south end! I shouldn’t have laughed. The...
Hello, You know I always wanted to be a cowboy. Sometimes I feel like I made it, and sometimes I feel like I never could be one. This weekend was one for the cowboys. And the cowgirls. The North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame announced the new inductees into the hall. The ceremony will take place in June. I have friends and neighbors that will be inducted. And my Grandpa, Herb Birdsall, will be honored as one of the early ranchers in North Dakota. Damn, I miss him. The hall also honored Brenda Lee Pickett and Ashley Alderson....
Hello, I’m sure most of you have seen the Chevy Chase movies about their family vacations. We were talking about rodeo trips the other night and I recalled our “vacation” with the kids in the mid seventies. Our nephew, Tom, was in the National High School Rodeo Finals in Helena, Montana. That is a long way northwest of here. He was a calf-roping finalist. This is before he became heavy. A lot of you won’t remember this skinny young kid. Anyway, we went with Shirley’s sister and her husband Lynn. I’ve told you about him b...
Hello, I hope you enjoyed Easter weekend. Our Grandkids love Easter, what with the Easter Bunny and such. So for years, I have tried to persuade them that there really is no Easter Bunny. It is, in fact, an Easter Pig. Evan was pretty disgusted with this. He was quite confident that it was a bunny. When I questioned how he knew that, when no one had ever seen the Easter Bunny, that it wasn’t a pig. He informed me that he had seen the bunny. Once. In a movie! So I guess it must be. Gracy, our oldest and wisest grandchild l...
Hello, If you get tired of reading about my problems during calving, this would be a good time to go to the sports page of the paper. Because once again I have to share my problems with you. You will often hear a rancher refer to a dark night as “being darker than the inside of a cow”. And only a rancher who has tried to straighten out a calf that is coming the wrong way knows how dark this is. Yesterday we had a heifer having problems. With Shirley’s help, I got her in and reached in her. No feet. No nose. And a calf is su...
Hello, I’m here to talk about a problem I’ve had. No, not that one. My weight. I’ve always had a problem with my weight. It goes back to when I was a jockey. Really. I was a jockey. We used to racehorses at Kenmare. It was a little three-eights mile dirt track. I race our saddle horses and Dad or Grandpa would race chariots. I was pretty young so I was designated jockey for a neighbors horses and ours. But I was growing. It was a problem. My next problem was I was underweight. I was a lineman for the Bombers. At six-t...
