Organizing Chaos and Pushing on a Rope

Spring is coming to the high country. The snow is beginning to look like a child who playied in a
mud puddle, with hints of the pure white it once was. Some areas the snow has gone leaving last
year's grass laid over and matted down, if you move it aside there are hints of the new grass coming.
Its also the "rock rolling" season when the rocks, loosened by the frost leaving the ground, roll down
the hill sides.

Blue Jays, Blue Birds, Phoebes, and ...

Here we are, last of February, four inches of snow on the ground, temperature in hovering just above
zero (-15 for those who speak metric).

Things were good a month ago, put in a new micro-boiler and had adequate heat in the house for the
first time in two years, weathered the sub-zero cold spell (damned cold for you metric speakers) like
it was summer. Then last week we had four days where the weather was just about perfect.

Enter that Irish malcontent ...

Holiday's are done, revelry over and I made it back to South Dakota from the Alberta/Saskatchewan
border between storms (barely). Traveling in the winter is such fun, blowing snow, ice, wind chill, and
crazy drivers and that was just going across North Dakota.

This is also the time of year for things such as resolutions (I resolve to abstain from resolving), and to
look ahead to what the new year might bring. So, like the other pundits this is what I expect for the ...

I can't live in the city. I've tried a couple of times, hated it and got out as fast as I could. The last time was 19 years ago and I figured out what I hate about city life - you can't see the stars at night.

I grew up on a ranch where we had the run of about 30,000 acres of mountains, forest, meadows, and streams. Mind, we did not "own" all that land but who cared? As long as we were careful with fire, cleaned up our messes, and didn't tear things up we could do pretty ...

Almost from the beginning of white men in the Black Hills people took up mining claims, most
all of the were looking for a way to get rich fast. Most left the Hills disappointed, some stayed to
worked the fast track to hell in the deep hard rock mines, others homesteaded and took up ranching
or farming, One thing that remained up until Orland Kieffer sold his store at Rockerville in 1968 was the
use of "free gold" (gold panned from streams) as a medium of exchange. ...