Marking Time

Aladdin Ranchers moving a herd 20 miles south to begin calving. Ten miles a day is the goal. Many of the cows are mothers by now..

April Fool's Day is right around the corner. I don't enjoy the thought of it as much as I did when I was a child, or when my own offspring were children. Now it simply marks time and will be my 73rd April Fool's Day.

April 1st. The beginning of yard waste pick-up by the city for those tree trimmings and fall leaves that didn't get bagged before the service ended last fall.

I see sump pumps in the pool lowering the water level for that yearly patching. Both the back and front yard get an April soaking, with or without rain.

April is a month to convert a winter yard to one ready to greet warm weather with green things emerging from the earth and tips of branches. The robins are back and the noisy blackbirds are eyeing the trees for nesting spots. Even a chick-a-dee or two have come to the feeders. We had such an abundance of them before West Nile disease hit them hard. I think it might have gotten our owl family in the back corner, as well.

It is time to see if the squirrels have left a few tulip bulbs to bloom. I planted a couple of planters of them last fall and I have seen busy bushytails digging in them over the last few weeks. If they got them, I will switch to daffodils next fall.

The son that moved in a couple of months ago has obtained employment and is moving into a rented place closer to his work at Mid America Energy across the Missouri in Iowa. He will be teaching OSHA and environmental rules and regulations to 500 new contractors coming in to begin an expansion of the facility.

Splendid Spring Visions

Sandhill Cranes along the Platte River in Nebraska. 300,000 stop on their way north, spending a month to gain about a third of their total body weight to fortify the flight for some as far as Siberia. They are simply magnificent.


This herd or mares were in the corner of a pasture in Kieth County, Nebraska.

Their friendly demeanor drew me in and as I stood by the fence with my camera one came over to inspect her city visitor.



No, this is no camera trick. She put her nose over the fence and tolerated a friendly pat or two, and filled the view finder of the camera.

This baby was only minutes old and not black, but one of the beautiful Herefords that dotted all the prairies of Harding County when I grew up.

I was not taking any chances on this new mother by getting any nearer.
The Canada Snow Geese filled the sky and the stubble field along I 29 the morning we drove to the Black Hills. They were a little preview of the sights and sounds of spring in the days to come.

Back in Keith County

We are not going to Keith County, but the John Janovy book is going with us to the Black Hills in the morning. We read his "Keith County Journal" going westward a few years ago. That was "hailed as a classic of its kind and compared to the writings of Thoreau" on the jacket. We truly enjoyed it.

He writes: "...Dip into it when you need to think unfettered thoughts and feel non-directed feelings, when you are ready to free that original and creative element of your own self." Keith County is more than a place, it is a state of mind.

I had best pack a few cough drops to keep my voice going after our two week colds. I will also pack a camera. The friend I am visiting has been watching the birth of baby Black Angus calves near her yard. I hope to photograph one of the curly little babies.

Janovy is a professor of biology at the University of Nebraska.

Fantasy Sleep

It was another one of those nights; I spent four hours thinking and trying to find a radio station worth listening to. If I were a sports fan, I would have it made. Same thing if I enjoyed country music. A little of either goes a long way. Finally at midnight one of the Coast to Coast guests entertained my racing mind with such fantasy I went promptly sleep. My extravagance is using AA cells.

The reality/predictions were that the US has vaults all over Europe ready with tons of US Redbacks with which the US will instigate a double currency system where those with offshore accounts will be given "redbacks," and there will be a separate US-only currency. It will take 12 years for our fall after the billions that have been printed to shore up the banks and defaulted mortgages, as well as the pay off to the citizens promised this spring. "Feed them cake," comes to mind.

Efforts have begun to move the US capital to Denver, which will be the one of the final battlegrounds in a war with China around 2018.

The European Union will collapse within 12 years of its instigation...along with the Euro. The North American Union is in the works with Mexico, the US, and Canada replacing currency with a common currency.

Enough? Wakefulness and Sleep are both blessings with or without the fairy tales.

Skinning Cats

I feel like a turtle coming out of hibernation. My shell is brittle, my parts don't want to work right. But it is the warm sun that draws me to stick my head out the door now and then.

I have been struggling with my book project. God love Bill Gates and his crew, but Microsoft Word has about gotten the best of me, in with the way it wants to boss my pages and formats around. There is more than one way to skin a cat, they say. I finally copied the whole thing into an email, in plain text, and copied it from there to a new Word document. Of course I lost all my little sub titles, all of the foot notes, every picture, and all of my index. Redoing them took less time than fighting with the Format the past two days. I don't know why it took me two days to figure out what to do. There probably is an easier way, but I couldn't find it.

The help screens might be easier to understand if they were written in a common language that I understood. The manuals were no more help. Door stops, all of them.

We sprung forward without much notice as we go to church on Saturday nights. Our fairly new watches sprung forward right along with the time change but it took an extra day as the signal is beeped out of Colorado at 3 a.m. and the real change was at 2 a.m. We still have ice and snow on the north side of the house. So I look out the front door which faces south. A person can almost avoid anything.

Today is a dear granddaughter's birthday. This is her first birthday as a mother. Everything changes with that passage. Nothing is ever the same again.

Child of God

Gracious Savior, gentle Shepherd,
Our little ones are dear to Thee;
Gathered with Thine arms and carried
In Thy bosom may they be
Sweetly, gently, safely tended,
From all want and danger free.