News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 989 - 1013 of 3210
Dax stared at me in disbelief. I am the Treat Lady, and I had no treats. It was inexplicable. Dax is one of my regular customers. He is a young black dog with a lot of energy. His sister, Zia, is a little older and has the uncanny ability to find me with or without her owner anywhere in the vicinity. On this particular day, Dax was with his owner on a run and he was beside himself to suddenly encounter the Treat Lady, without even the help of his resourceful sister. Dax was ov...
The Montana Budget & Policy Center is a nonprofit organization providing research and analysis on budget, tax, and economic issues. Imagine someone gave you a million dollars and told you to spend $1,000 every day and come back when you ran out of money. You would return in less than three years. If someone then gave you a billion dollars and you spent $1,000 each day, it would take you 2,740 years before it was gone. That’s how much money the 2021 Montana Legislature is already proposing to cut from the state budget to p...
With plenty of opportunities lately to participate in one of my favorite self-health activities — stress eating — I was prompted to do some research on one of my go-to stress foods — Oreo cookies — after reading an Associated Press article about how Oreos are going where no culinary adventurist has thought to take them before. Nor should they have thought of this: McDonald’s fast food restaurants in China have reinvented the hamburger by replacing the burger with two slice...
Bob T, a long-time friend from my past, used to compare life to a battery. In order for it to work, life must have both positive and negative poles. I, of course, wanted only the positive, the easy, the serene. Ha! Wantin’ ain’t gettin’. On my patio I have a vine that I potted some three years ago, a vine, but more branch than leaf. I don’t know why I’ve kept it; it is not a bit pretty, but rangy and the leaves fall off leaving naked brown stems. In the cold of this morning,...
My 2021 calendar is hanging from the closet door. Every year I’ve lived in this house, I’ve gotten a cloth calendar, hung from a dowel. My mother’s mother always had a cloth calendar hanging in the farmhouse kitchen. As soon as the year was over, the calendar would be conscripted into use, usually to cover cinnamon rolls as they rose, to keep them moist until they were large enough to put into the oven. Arriving at the farmhouse and seeing “1963” covering a pile of soon-to-b...
As any parent knows, time is more often measured by the milestones of our children than our own lives. When I first entered this office as Montana’s 24th governor, the sounds of young children laughing and playing rang through our household. While those sounds have since turned into silent eyerolls and embarrassment at my dad jokes as my children have turned into teenagers, they are still a constant reminder of the humbling privilege I’ve had to protect and advance the state that gave me the opportunity to go from del...
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a strange time, a time when every day feels like Sunday. This morning, I made a big mistake. I checked the temperature. At 10:00 it was 42! That means in the coldest hour of the early morning, it was near freezing. How can that be? It didn’t feel that cold when I walked out to my bodega. I wasn’t cold until I looked at the thermometer on the outer wall. My ceramic heater is swiveling back and forth, the setting on Hi. I’m n...
Now, after a year, the numbers have become numbing. We can’t blame the media, who were simply doing their job by reporting facts, but as thousands became hundreds of thousands it became impossible to maintain a sense of scale. What exactly do 300,000 dead Americans look like? For a few naïve months, rural Montana managed to convince itself that nothing about those horrific numbers applied to us. We were one of those enviable white spots on the map of the country that showed few if any COVID cases. Engaging in the same ki...
The annual build-up of anticipation for New Year’s Day is, I think, the clearest proof of mankind’s eternal, stalwart and irrational optimistic nature. How many times have we said it or heard it: “Ugh, 2020 has been the worst. I can’t wait until it’s over.” As if, at the stroke of midnight heralding in Jan. 1, 2021, we will pass through a portal into a modern realm that’s as happy as a nuclear family in a 1950s sitcom, or maybe we’ll skip-jump into a brighter timeline in the...
A fellow I know was grousing about the past year. His birthday was coming up and he felt, once again, that this year failed to meet his expectations. He was unhappy with the year, unhappy with himself, unhappy with the fact that he’d even allowed himself to hope that 2020, of all years, was going to be better than the previous ones. “My caring isn’t going to make any difference in how things work out,” he told me. “When I step back to accept that reality, maybe I’ll stop...
The phone rings. I grab my mask with one hand and the phone with the other. “Merry Christmas.” My new habit. Masking has become automatic. Before I leave the house I grab a mask, even if I’m going to the clothesline, expecting to see not one other person. I go masked. Just in case. I’m locked and loaded. In the holsters on the belt around my waist, a spray bottle of disinfectant rides on one hip and extra masks, gloves and a tape measure for distance — OK, the tape measure i...
Holidays are complicated. Have you ever tried to make one up on your own? Sure it’s easy to say “That (fill in the blank) is so awesome, everybody should celebrate it as a holiday.” Or “Every day is a holiday if you have the right attitude (insert three exclamation points here).” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a bonafide, paid day off, happy, happy, joyful day of celebration which every person on the planet can participate in wholeheartedly...
Whatever you think about Christmas, I think you would have to agree we need one this year. Everyone I know seems determined to do as much Christmas as it is possible to do. My pastor announced at the beginning of Advent that we were going to have 26 consecutive Zoom Advent services. “We’re having 15 minutes of Advent reflections EVERY night!” she announced. “Surely she means every week,” most of the congregation thought. “EVERY night!” she repeated for clarification...
It was encouraging to hear that the Hill County Park Board is initiating a process to document a policy for trapping in our Beaver Creek Park. Hopefully this policy will address more than just lethal trapping of beavers and incorporate a whole park management perspective. It will be important to document a policy that is consistent with our vision for Beaver Creek Park while being workable and built on valid science, prudent natural resource management, specific infrastructure issues and sound business practices. Striking a...
I try to stay positive, but there’s just a whole lot of nope in the paper this week, and I hate to say that it’s affecting me, but here we are and I’m starting things off with chicken feathers as food. Nope. In fact, I would describe that as a “hard nope with a full stop.” I know what you’re thinking: I faked that news for dramatic affect, something punchy to open my column with. Sadly, I must inform you of another hard nope on that, too. A few sources, including Reuters, re...
I am a marked woman. Last week I announced to my little world that I am studying Spanish, obviously a language tagged as subversive. When next I arrive in Havre, I'm likely to be met on the train by armed Border Patrol, cuffed, and dragged into the slammer. Oh, woe is me. I followed the Havre news story (also in the international news, by the way) about the two young women apprehended for speaking Spanish in the convenience store. I know that Spanish-speaking women are...
“I’ve forgotten the funny name of the tree you helped us pick out,” my mother said. “Our tree this year is named Melinda.” The greenhouse where my parents get their Christmas tree every year has festive tags hanging from the trees with their names and prices. These are not inexpensive trees, so it’s fitting they are all individually christened. My mother likes to support this local business — and they do have nice trees. “Caleb. The tree I picked out with you was named Caleb...
In a position where my organization — the Montana State University-Northern Foundation — relies on the generosity of others, I have been wondering, is generosity an innate characteristic or is it learned? Is it part of our DNA to be a giving person or is it something we are taught? I recently googled these questions and discovered that many studies conclude that while it’s innate for humans to be reciprocal, it’s not in our DNA to be givers. Many of us are taught by our family, friends, or someone in a stewardship role, l...
Nearly nine months into a pandemic, COVID-19 has impacted Montanans in every corner of the state. Nearly 800 Montanans have lost their lives to the virus and many others have gotten sick and are experiencing long term impacts that we don’t yet understand. Others have experienced a job loss, a lack of pay while sick or in quarantine, or being forced out of the workforce to provide childcare. Businesses and schools are struggling to maintain staffing and continue providing services to their communities. It’s clear that eve...
The communities of Havre/Hill County are better than our current behavior reflect. I think an apt comparison to our current situation is to compare our response to the Bear Paw/Beaver Creek fires a couple of years ago. This was an emergency situation threatening our area. The response by the communities showed friends and neighbors doing whatever was necessary to save all from the inferno. Not all volunteers could drive a bulldozer or a firetruck, but everyone pitched in with food, drinks, equipment, water trucks, whatever....
In a time when American politics has been all about dueling realities, you’ll be happy — in a misery-loves-company kind of way — to know that it’s not just us. Nepal and China have been arguing since 2005 about the actual height of Mount Everest, which sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet, which is an autonomous region of China (basically, China’s Canada). Here’s the beef, the highest point of the of Mount Everest is the marker for the border between Nepal and Tibet,...
I’m a Sun Bunny. Sun worshipper. Sun seeker. For the past week if or when a tiny patch of sun parts the clouds, I rush out to sit, face raised toward the bounteous warmth, contented. Don’t for a minute think I’m “sun-bathing.” I’m basking in full winter gear, head and hands the only uncovered parts of me. This is winter, even here. It is cold. I live in a house with no heat source. I suspect it is difficult to grow up on a Montana farm and think baring one’s slathered bod...
It is a year of lower expectations. Every year, there is a chorus of folks urging us to lower our expectations for the holidays — buy less, consume less, worry less about having a picture-perfect holiday, and spend more time reflecting on what the holiday means to us. This year, it seems, we will finally get a chance to do that. I was recently asked what my childhood memories of the holidays were, and I had a couple of vivid ones. I saw myself sitting on the wooden stairway o...
I am sitting on a gold mine or, more specifically, I’m fixin’ to hatch me a gold mine. Those stinkin’ pigeons in my barn that I’ve been complaining about for years? They could be worth money, real money, like really real money, according to an article in Reuters. In November, a 2-year-old racing pigeon from Belgium sold at auction for — are you sitting down? You should be sitting down for this because the pigeon sold for $1.89 million. One point eight nine MILLION dollars. For...
Perception is all. I love the Big Sky Country. I like to picture it this way: I stand and slowly turn a whole circle. When I look downward, I see the earth. When I look outward and upward, the sky is a gigantic bowl, covering and visibly encompassing, caressing the earth. I love this new country of mine, the Big Earth Country. That's the wonderful thing about love. There is always room for more. Here I stand and turn a circle and all around me is the earthy world, the fields...
