News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1422 - 1446 of 3221
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...
Does anybody remember Mighty Mouse? Is Mighty Mouse still alive? Evidently, I thought I’d swoop into my daughter’s life singing, “Here I am to save the day!” Boy, howdy, was I ever wrong! I totally ignored the part where I am in my 70s and my daughter is 50. Once a “Mighty Mom,” always a “Mighty Mom.” I also ignored other basic facts of her life, such a her husband, her teenaged daughter and 42-hundred family pets. Expectations trip me up every time and land me smack on my fac...
I’ve got a good friend, Ayo, who told me, “Don’t use your head to break a coconut.” As I wrote about in my memoir, “Blue Yarn,” I lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for almost four years, and I met Ayo there. Ayo is a very smart woman and a voracious reader and she is full of good advice. Ayo is what they describe in Nigeria as “a serious person.” A serious person in Nigeria is one you can trust, someone who can be relied upon. The advice Ayo generally gives, however, annoys me because it challenges the way I think. “Have you consi...
The entire state of Montana has only one member representing us in the United States House of Representatives. For most of our history we have had two. That changed in 1992 when the 1990 census resulted in Montana’s loss of a Congressional seat in the population-based House of Representatives. Our lone U.S. representative now represents more people than any other member of Congress. With over a million people, Montana’s congressional district is about 50 percent larger than the typical congressional district. Unf...
A principal in West Virginia has been disciplined for plagiarizing the speech he gave to his school’s graduating seniors. Now-graduated student Abby Smith listened to the speech Parkersburg High School Principal Kenny DeMoss gave to her graduating class and thought it sounded familiar. After she found the speech online and saw DeMoss had copied actor Ashton Kutcher’s 2013 Teen Choice Awards speech almost word-for-word, she did what modern teens know to do, she made a vid...
After a whirlwind trip around eastern Montana last week, I’ve settled in a room with no view but, more importantly, with private bath, at my daughter’s new home in Glendive. At times in our lives, circumstances dictate in unpleasant ways. Their last home was a mice-infested hovel with a black-cloud grimace. This home, also an older farmhouse, welcomes one with arms wide-open. It perches on the edge of Glendive with expansive field and yard surrounding it, spacious room for...
Father’s Day is a day to celebrate dads for all they do. It is also a great time for dads to remember the important role they play in influencing the choices their kids make regarding tobacco use. Tobacco use among men remains a serious problem. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one in six men currently smoke, more than 278,000 men die every year from smoking and 216,000 kids have already lost their dad to smoking. Dads who smoke can celebrate Father’s Day by quitting; and all dads — smokers and nonsmokers alik...
Spring came late and so, appropriately, did the annual deep cleaning of the refrigerator. A lot of stuff gets tucked into the refrigerator over the course of the winter. Obsolete condiments band together and take refuge deep in the corners. A thuggish-looking jar of jam wearing a cap of mold sidles up to an empty bottle of horseradish sauce and they both evade detection by skulking behind an oversized bag of sun-dried tomatoes. A stray stalk of celery becomes separated from the pack and is left alone to mummify. Unnoticed...
Scientific studies are great, but they often raise more questions than they answer, even if it’s just: “How much alcohol are we talkin’ here?” ABC4 News station WZTV, reported in April that a study by Penn State and University of Buffalo researchers found that people in jobs that require them to exaggerate positive emotions, or suppress negative ones, drink more alcohol after work than people who aren’t expected to be nice to others. The article gave food service workers,...
Bacon and eggs are common base ingredients, but we created a different kind of omelet at Char’s the other morning, a “Friend Omelet,” made of ingredients (ourselves), old friends and new. I had no idea whether we could pull it off. I conjured the germ of an idea shortly after I spontaneously decided to fly to Montana. My little girl needed me. She was born in ’66 — you do the math — but age is meaningless to a mother, and I wanted to see her new home. Dee’s family moved...
