News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1410 - 1434 of 3218
Many ancient and traditional medicinal recipes call for animal parts, but modern medicine has its share of animal ingredients, too, and I ain’t just talking about how grandma told you chicken soup would cure your cold. From bear gallbladders to tiger testicles, bird beaks to fish bladders and deer eyes to alligator skin, animal body parts in traditional medicines are believed to cure everything from acne to cancer, malaria to erectile dysfunction and phlegmy lungs to organ f...
Yesterday my computer went strange on me, would not let me make any of my usual connections. So after trying everything I knew (not much) I phoned my son for help. Ben was at work, so he said he’d call me to fix it when he got home. A few hours later, I thought to give it one more futile try. Obviously, the dang bugger heard me make the call to Ben, quaked in its reboots and fixed itself. My errant computer was a small glitch in my day. Even with the importance my computer h...
Nobody was using the old wren house. My grandfather built it. Grandpa started building birdhouses when he retired from milking cows and his second oldest son took over. That son, my mother’s brother, is now 87 and retired 20 years ago. It’s a pretty old birdhouse. “My dad never built fancy birdhouses,” my mother explained. Grandpa put on a tarpaper roof and, if you needed to clean it out, you had to unscrew the back. But they were sweet little birdhouses, painted bright...
When I was about 15 years old a friend of my family rode his 10-speed bicycle on a 330-mile road trip from Salmon, Idaho, to our home in northwest Montana and then home again — a 660-miles that took about a week each way, averaging something under 50 miles per day. He was 16 years old, and this was in the dark ages before cellphones and internet. He had to use quarters in pay phones and know how to fold paper maps. I remember admiring that he even conceived of doing such a t...
DNA and ancestry search sites are the latest greatest. I’m not sure I want unknown relatives crawling out of the woodwork. The relatives I know are scary enough. Of my background, I know I am predominately British American (English, Welsh, Scotch, Irish) with added German from Dad’s side and French (Brittany) and a secret on Mom’s side. That is to say, mongrel. Cousin Nancie and I have spent the last two weeks talking about our shared maternal family. Nancie and I did not m...
I’ve been having my husband, Peter, cut my hair. I’m not sure I would recommend this to everyone, but I have almost no hair. Actually, I have the usual number of hairs, but they are so fine that a hair that falls from my head into the sink is invisible to the naked eye. Peter cuts his own hair and kept insisting he could cut mine. I was waiting weeks to get an appointment with a stylist and, when I finally got in, pay an extraordinary amount per milligram of hair cut. The hai...
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” as true today as in Thomas Paine’s time. Each day our president trashes something important to the continuation of the longest functioning Democracy in the world. An independent judiciary, designed by our founders, is an essential element of checks and balances. For Trump it is simply an irritant, to be overcome by appointing as many extremist judges into lifetime positions as he can, regardless of their qualifications. He only praises a court if it affirms his position. He condemns...
I’ve met Montana Sen. Steve Daines a few times. I’m a constituent. Although I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues, he always seemed nice, professional and respectful. He was good to my son Cory, who has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Once, when Daines was still a congressman, my son and I visited his office in Washington D.C. to persuade him to support the renewal of the Muscular Dystrophy Care Act. He did, and even called Cory days later to personally tell him about it. He took Cory out onto the House floor, let him cast a...
The biggest problem with living a secluded lifestyle in the country is that you forget about the possibility of visitors, how to fit other living beings into the sum total of your day, or that you need to look in a mirror before opening the front door. At about 5 a.m. on July 5, I was awakened from a sound sleep by a sharp knock on the door. I’d stayed up late because fireworks and horses don’t really mix. I’d gotten the horses settled down soon after the first bangs, booms...
I was sitting on my front patio talking with my gardener, Leo, when a velvety brown bat fluttered between us and landed in a hollow metal rafter supporting the patio roof. Ah, I had wondered if bats might be moving in. This morning there were figs on the floor below the bat perch. (Figs in full, figs in processed form, but identifiable by seeds.) Several neighbors have false fig trees which drop a nasty fruit, not a true fig. Bats haul these fruits to their perches but drop...
It was my birthday this week. Those of you with summer birthdays know it’s a little different. In the middle of March, everyone says, “Wow! A birthday party!” You bring treats to school and everyone is happy for an excuse to celebrate. It’s different for the summer kids. Everyone is already busy with vacations and visitors and then, somewhere in the middle of all that, someone says, “Oh! It’s Carrie’s birthday, isn’t it?” My birthday was particularly unreliable becaus...
By nature and nurture, I like just enough drama to make a good story. That’s the hallmark of a life being lived correctly — whether it’s a win-event or a fail, it’s all OK as long as the story is worth telling. What I don’t like, and I think pretty much everyone will agree with me on this, is a story that is whiny. A story that, even in print, has the sound of a sleepy, petulant toddler explaining that she can’t eat her lunch and go take a nap because the noodles in her mac-n-...
Here in this high plateau valley surrounded by mountains, in the rainy season, roughly mid-June through mid-October, the sky bursts with pyrotechnic activity nearly every night. I like storms. I like the beauty of lightning skittering across night sky. I like the rumble of thunder. Storms do not scare me. I admit, there are times I’ve nearly jumped out of my skin at a sudden clap of thunder directly overhead but that is simply a startle reflex. Rain pounding on the roof c...
I’m having fun singing. I started singing lessons a few weeks ago. My teacher lives out of town, but every other week she teaches in her parents’ house — the house she grew up in — just a few minutes away. So, I drive to a little house in the suburbs, meet her parents’ two friendly little dogs, (“More people! So exciting!”) and take an hour-long voice lesson in my teacher’s childhood bedroom. I stand next to an auxiliary refrigerator, put my purse on a storage cabinet, and fa...
The summer is on and going quickly. Having all four kids home for our oldest grandson’s graduation was great. J.R., the graduate, had served as page at the Legislature this year. We shared some stories about that and had an opportunity to all float the Marias River. The float included 10 of the 11 grandkids, the four kids, some of the spouses, and lots of family friends. I have been going to some informational meetings, including MACo — Montana Association of Counties. Montana Gas, Oil, Coal Counties had their annual mee...
“Your dad and my dad were friends,” said long-time family friend Connie Cox. I’ve known Connie Cox all of my life. I remember the day he landed in the field just south of our house and treated my brother and me to our first airplane ride. Our family friendship was reunited a few years ago when I happened to run into him and asked, “So what have you been up to Connie?” “Oh, just looking for some pasture for some horses,” he answered. Well, I know a good deal when I see one so I answered, “We’ve got the pasture. Bring ou...
Caldwell, Idaho, Mayor Garret Nancolas received a written request Wednesday from a national animal rights organization urging him to rename his county’s Chicken Dinner Road to the kinder, gentler, simpler Chicken Road. Boring. “PETA is asking Mayor Nancolas to change this road’s name to one that celebrates chickens as individuals, not as beings to kill, chop up, and label as ‘dinner,’” said People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman in her letter. KTVB News 7 reported that the road ga...
Jim picked me up at the airport in Guadalajara. Once we exited the labyrinth of parking and hit the straightaway, I requested, “Tell me all the news.” “There is no news,” Jim responded. “Everything is the same as when you left.” I’d been gone a month, so I treated his statement with skepticism. And over the course of the trip home learned much. Among several small rains, two devastating storms hit our town. Trees and branches down all around. We had driven a mere five kilometers down the road when the sky opened. At ti...
We are making progress, but we are still trying to figure it out decades later. Twenty years ago, in June 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Olmstead v. LC that unjustified segregation of people with disabilities violated their rights guaranteed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA, which was signed into law nine years earlier on July 26, 1990, established the civil rights of people with disabilities and helped them be more included at work and in the community. The Olmstead decision sent a clear message...
This past week, my parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary and I stood in front of the greeting card rack for a very long time. Whenever I try to buy a card for my mom or dad, I have a heck of a hard time. I almost bought a “blank inside” card because there wasn’t anything that even came close to telling them what I was thinking on the occasion of this milestone anniversary. My parents have the kind of marriage that used to intimidate me. Other kids’ parents fought....
For reasons that still seem sound because we all made it home safe — which I’m happy to state at the outset for people who can’t handle suspense — two friends and I hauled horses to Power, Montana, and back home yesterday despite ill-weather predictions. To be fair, when the appointment was arranged, the forecast was for 70 percent chance of rain and thundershowers. The little storm icon only had clouds and rain that was depicted falling straight down from the clouds to the...
I boarded the Empire Builder #7 in Wolf Point. I quickly kissed my daughter goodbye, the door clanged shut, I found my seat and the train rolled west. I cried all the way to Glasgow; the sky, November Gray in June, mirrored my sorrow. My daughter Dee Dee and I had managed to steal time from her busy schedule to talk, to laugh a lot and to argue the inconsequential. We had three weeks together, family times, good times. I wanted to go home and I wanted to stay. Human nature,...
The film industry produces something different every day. Movies and TV shows represent all varieties of genres and styles. Some may be three-hour epics, while others may be only a few minutes. They’re distributed through different methods, from major theater releases to YouTube uploads. Regardless of the differences, one thing you’ll always see is a sequence to credit the people, and indeed the places, responsible for the production. Credit sequences are determined by contracts, unions and tradition. As a result of fin...
I started The Postscript exactly one year ago. I am more than a little superstitious when it comes to numbers. When I wrote the first draft of my memoir, “Blue Yarn,” I had an even number of chapters in all three sections. This was probably tidier than necessary, but maybe not terribly unusual. But then I made sure that every chapter had exactly 5,000 words. This pleased me to no end — even as I realized my mania for symmetry was tipping over the edge. When my agent sent...
I respectfully submit this column to my current employer as a tentative notice of my possible eminent resignation should my application for a job in Denmark as a happiness investigator pan out. Ikea, the assemble-it-yourself furniture and other-home-stuff company based in northern Europe, is working on a promotions gig in its Denmark branch. Specifically, they want to fill the full-time, temporary position of “happiness hunter.” It’s a two-week, all-travel-expense-paid trip...
