We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
Sorted by date Results 352 - 376 of 378
If during August you want to walk on the wild side, why not visit our giant neighbor to the north, Canada and explore the Cypress Hills? These days you will need a passport to get across the border and back into Montana as well. You can get an inexpensive and faster passport that lets you just into Canada and Mexico. I don’t know that there are any true cypress trees in Cypress Park which would be your destination. Just like I know that there are no true maple trees in the town of Maple Creek. It seems that the lowly box elder tree is called a...
By the time you have read these words there will have been a Hall of Fame game played in the NFL and broadcast on ESPN. It was on last Sunday and even though our print deadline won’t let us tell you the score, it was Green Bay vs. Indianapolis. I imagine that Green Bay won it but if quarterback Luck is stinky enough, maybe Indianapolis won it. We had a report a couple of weeks ago that Quarterback Andrew Luck did not like to shower. After the Hall of Fame, the rest of August if filled with pre season games. You know it is that time of year b...
I cried in my beer a couple of times at least this week. First, I was sad that the East did not win the East/West Shrine game last weekend. It was a 45 to 14 rout with the west picking up an easy win. I guess the East has won a bunch of times but it is always good when the East can best the West in something. Or anything! This game has been going on a long time for a very good cause. I can remember when I was a teenager listening to it on the radio out in cabins on Clear Creek. And the Shrine continues to help children with proceeds of the...
With the Bear Paw Mountains so nice and green yet, there is no better time to pack a picnic lunch and take a summer drive somewhere or other just to see how great this land is that we call North Central Montana. The trip I am going to suggest is a little more rigorous than most and should be done in a SUV or a pickup or at least a car with high clearance. Take your lunch, your family, the dog and head to Harlem. At Harlem turn south and go to Hays. From Hays be looking to the right or west as there is a road that is marked to go to Cow Creek....
A friend was explaining some basic Christian ideas to a very new Christian. Up to now, the new learner of the faith would probably have checked “none” on a form asking for religious affiliation. Our friend quoted Psalm 111 to her, verse 10 of which says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I thought, well, yes, it is, but this might be a bit heavy for someone coming to faith a matter of a few weeks ago. Some fruitful ideas of what the fear of the Lord is can be found in some basic reference books, together with hundreds of refere...
I accidently tuned in to the ESPY awards on ABC television last Wednesday. It wasn’t the awards I will remember. But I will long remember the beginning of the program when LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade all came out dressed in very somber clothes and called for an end of the killings that are happening around the United States. Specifically they talked about Dallas, St. Paul and Baton Rouge. What they had to say was very moving. I think that when strong athletes like those four are, get up and talk, young people w...
Finally I can sit back in a lawn chair and really enjoy my garden. You see finally the cotton season from my older than dirt cottonwood tree has all gone away (most tracked in the house) and baring a July freeze, which is unlikely, or a hail storm, which is more likely, it is a time to watch my zinnias, dahlias and later perennial flowers just go great guns in the growing department. I have scores of blooms on my dahlias. That is really good to see because last year between a freeze and hail, I had few buds until it was ready to freeze in the...
It has been just over six years since President Obama signed his sweeping health care legislation into law, subjecting every American to federal mandates. How is it working out? Are your insurance premiums lower? Are your deductibles lower? Is it easier to get an appointment to see a physician? Were you able to keep your same physician? The legislation was passed in such a fashion as to strain the boundaries of the Constitution so severely that the Supreme Court had to decide if several of its components were legal, including whether the costs...
Not a lot of sports going on right now. NBC is broadcasting the most, with their Olympic Trails. The Olympics will be upon us soon and that will make for some great viewing in our living rooms as it is doubtful that many of us will be heading to Brazil where the nuts come from to once again use an old, old joke that wasn’t very funny sixty years ago. I prefer the winter Olympics. I think I have shared that with you readers before. It is just that I love to see snow events and be snuggled up in my living room with a brandy in my hand and a f...
I was saddened this week to hear that NFL defensive guru Buddy Ryan died at age 85. I was trying to think of where I watched him that I enjoyed his antics so much. It was like looking at the Bobby Knight of the football field. Maybe it was when he was running the defense for Chicago. Chicago Bears chairman George H. McCaskey said, “Buddy Ryan was the architect of the greatest defense our league has seen.” Buddy Ryan left a legacy of two children who have achieved greatness in the NFL. Son Rex is the head coach of the Buffalo Bills and to the...
A couple of weeks ago I was staying at a cabin in Apgar Village which is a part of Glacier National Park. From the cabin picture window I had a wonderful view looking up Lake McDonald to the northeast and the grand mountains that form part of Going-To-The-Sun Road. There is no more beautiful view in Glacier and maybe in North America than looking at those mountains that ring the upper McDonald valley. A few of them are Gunsight, Edwards, Brown, Cannon, Stanton, Vaught, McPartland, and the Garden Wall itself. While at that cabin I got to see...
Recently a mailing from a Christian mission agency arrived in the mail. In it was a short article about a large extended family who fled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and whom the mission agency has helped to resettle on the East Coast. Their mission caseworker is always ready to help them navigate their way through their new life, from learning their way around town to paying the rent. Of course the family had a few culture shocks. One of the young men said, “Everything is attached to a time of day—appointments to see the doc...
Q: I admit we never paid much attention to the television programs and films our children watched, but I’m beginning to wonder if we made a mistake. I guess we thought they’d learn how they ought to live by watching us, but now I’m not so sure. Have we missed something? A: aising our children is one of the most important responsibilities God gives us, and neglecting it or leaving it to others can be disastrous. The Bible says, “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it” (Proverbs...
The nursery rhyme goes; Barber, barber, shave a pig! How many hairs will make a wig? Four-and twenty, that’s enough. Give the barber a pinch of snuff. I’m guessing that this nonsense is three or four hundred years old; that’s when rich people wore wigs. I also guess that there never was a time when any one pig could furnish enough hair or hairs for even one wig. But when did nursery rhymes have to be factual? As promised last week, a hog, or pig if you prefer, met its end yesterday. I had pictured this creature as Mr. Porker, a generic swine...
The Denver Bronco Football Team went a calling at the White House last week. It is customary for winners of last season’s Super Bowl to come a calling. While there President Obama made a funny so to speak. It was a funny that must have crushed the ego of one large ego, Peyton Manning. All the while the team was at the White House and President Obama was bragging them up, he avoided any mention at all of Peyton Manning. He also reminded the Broncos that he is a large Chicago Bears fan. The only thing not reported was whether Montana quarterback...
If you are a Presbyterian the minister’s house is a manse. If you are an Episcopalian, the residence is the Rectory. If you are a Methodist like me, your minister’s house is called the Parsonage. It was in discussing our parsonage that I found that most of my church is not marching to the same drummer as I am. First, with an elderly and shrinking congregation, the large question that looms on my mind is whether we can afford to provide a residence for our minister. Would we be better off to provide him or her more money and let him or her fin...
We don’t run out of these terms of which we might think there are only a few, but they crop up all the time. A few months ago, on my way to farthingale, I came upon fascet. It’s pronounced the same as facet yet is nothing like it. With the c, it means a tool for carrying glass bottles to the annealing furnace, a process in glass making. Without the c, it is a facet, a plane (flat) surface cut in a diamond to make it sparkle. Gambol and gamble look so much alike that it is a surprise to see the dictionary distinguish them from one other. The...
Ah Jonah, Jonah, Jonah...God had given him the mission to go to Nineveh to deliver a prophetic warning, “In forty days Nineveh [will be] annihilated!” But Jonah, in an effort to outrun God’s will, left immediately for Joppa in order to set sail from there to Tarshish, which was 2,000+ miles away from Nineveh. Jonah, having failed to outrun the will of God, earned a three-day ‘time out’ in the belly of an enormous fish/whale, during which Jonah repented of his disobedience. He was then vomited onto dry land and, as requested, finally delivered...
This weekend is Memorial Day. What memories that brings back. First, my family would all visit the graveyard and I noticed that the amount of graves we decorated on what used to be called Decoration Day gets larger each year. What started out as putting flowers on Grandpa Lucke’s grave and mother’s little brother Bobby has now grown into around ten graves to decorate with something or other. It used to be a simple matter. I used to put geraniums on the graves, then go and get them after Memorial Day and plant them in a planter right next to...
A good game one can play with oneself is to look at new words that crop up here and there and try to figure out what they mean, before consulting the dictionary.. A “tool kit” of basic Greek and Latin roots will take you a long way along the path of making friends with oddities such as acromegaly and vadose. How about proscenium? When I first ran into this utterly mysterious word in high school, I could not imagine what it might mean, nor that any normal person could pronounce it or understand it, still less ever find a use for it. The dictiona...
Mother’s Day has just passed us by. I remember Mother’s Day of my childhood very well. When we went to church on Mother’s Day, and we did go to church, most of the congregation wore carnations on them somewhere. Red if your mother was living and white if your mother was dead. That tradition died out, like so many more, for some reason unknown to me. I was blessed with having two mothers and two grandmothers and for a time even a great grandmother, Augusta Behrends. Although great grandmother Behrends did much to make me frightened to this...
Almost as I am writing these words on a May Saturday afternoon, the Kentucky Derby is being run. It has attracted the rich, the poor, Royalty and most everyone else through the years. It is the reason I started writing this sports column. Many of you remember the writings of Doris Johnson (aka FlazT) did in “The Journal” Well, FlazT loved horses and she loved writing about them. Once in a column I wrote I referred to a horse as a nag. That really offended FlazT and she wrote a column in retaliation. As I got to know FlazT better, I found out...
By Kay Russo Alice and Weston arrived at Grandpa and Grandma’s house at lunch time. After some food, Grandpa took them out for a walk to enjoy the perfect spring weather. Grandma had a deadline and stayed home to do some desk work. Back in the house, a stack of board games left over from their parents’ time caught the children’s attention. “Herd Your Horses,” “Top Dog,” and “Mastermind” had to be lifted down from a high shelf and examined. Neither Alice nor Weston is even close to reading, so the main charm of the games seems to be throwing th...
This is going to sound like a whine column but I can see why people no longer answer their telephones. It used to be that when the phone rang you answered it. Now days I call someone and I get an answering machine 90 percent of the time. I asked a good friend why he didn’t answer the phone and he said there were too many crazy people calling him. I answer my phone and he is right. I think I get a scam call at least once EVERY day! Of late it has been a man with a far Eastern accent who tells me that there is something wrong with my Windows o...
Several years ago, the Blaine County Library withdrew from circulation a thick book titled Gestures. I found this book on the cart in the library entryway. Never before having seen anything on this topic, I gave the librarian my 25 cents and took the book home. How could I guess what to expect? The book was a surprise in more ways than one. Four scholars from Oxford University in England had made a detailed, in fact, minute, scholarly study in a branch of anthropology seldom explored. Let me quote the first sentences of the Preface: “The i...
