Month: November 2014

Alaska:The Last Frontier is a reality TV show about homesteaders and their lives in rural Alaska.

Many of their activities are similar to the ones I’m familiar with working on a cattle ranch. However, calamity seems to follow these homesteaders everywhere.

I was watching tonight as they started building a fence, thinking this is not going to go well. They narrowly avoided breaking the quarter-mile wire strand. Then they began herding cattle to move them to a new pasture. According to their narrative, they’ve had cattle for generations, but they don’t demonstrate it. There is one behavior you can count on with cattle, since they are heard animals, they will always follow the crowd.

But it is interesting to see that each family member owns an area of expertise–fishing, keeping bees, smoking salmon, growing vegetables, composting, welding, hunting, butchering, etc.

They eat what they grow and kill. They work hard. They know where their food comes from. They know how many hours of labor it took to put the turkey or bear pie on the table. They are thankful and mindful of the life that was sacrificed for their dinner.

Watching these Alaskans is inspiring, entertaining and even comical sometimes.

We buried my grandmother today. She lived a wonderful, long and prosperous life. She was the last of my grandparents and now they are all gone, but vividly living in our hearts and our memories.

She was here today and gone the next. I am so sad, but relieved that she didn’t linger or suffer.

She was making banana bread the day she died. There is dignity in dying that way. She was still making plans—still living. We should all be so blessed to live and die with such grace.

Her life was not always easy, she struggled and was tested in her 84 years. But she never broke character, always remaining faithful and certainly was an example of a life well lived.

Love to you, Maw Maw

Time is truly a precious commodity. It’s here, then it’s gone. Most of our regrets in life revolve around spending time differently or about what we didn’t do.

Today I regret that I don’t have more time with my grandmother and that I didn’t do more with her.

She is gone now and with her goes her stores of different days, the stories of her family—of my family—what she did as a kid, and about the changes in the world that happened in her 84 years.

What I don’t regret is the time I did spend with her and the things I did do with her. It was time well spent.

Sometimes things don’t work out like we planned… like blogging every day in November. However I will do my best to blog as many days as possible.

Yesterday I wrote an obituary rather than a blog post, heaven might wait but the newspapers don’t.

I am savoring a beautiful full moon and the crisp fall night.

Tonight we went to our concert association’s program. We saw the Grammy-award winning band Asleep at the Wheel.

Our little town’s population is roughly 8,000. We are 90 miles from the closest city that could attract musicians like this.

A ticket for the season costs less than $100 and student tickets are $20. The association produces five or six shows a year.

They bring a variety of top-notch performing arts to our rural area. It includes Grammy-winning artists, Broadway productions, the symphony and regional theater.

It would not be possible for many to partake in the arts without the association’s efforts to book talent.

And for students, including my kid, it is a rare opportunity to expose him to culture and art that couldn’t be had any other way.

Bravo.

In November of 2011 I started blogging daily. I kept it up for months, then I started a new job and you see the downward slope. Less and less, until it’s been nearly a year since I’ve paid much attention to my blog. It’s not like I wasn’t doing important stuff. I’ve renewed my blog domain for another year.

Well, it’s time to get back on the horse … Today is November 1^st, and I’m going to set a goal of blogging daily, once again accepting the challenge of NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month from the BlogHer network.

Just like getting back into a routine at the gym after 40, I’m going to work up to it. More photos and fewer words…

I’m not exactly sure what kind of flower this is, but it was sticking out between the fence slats. We only have a few more days before the killing frost happens.