Herding words – or cattle – in South Eastern Montana
Thanks to Craig at Earley Tech Solutions for helping me fine tune my web site. WordPress is definitely user friendly, but my site has been enhanced with Craig’s expertise and assistance. South Eastern Montana is lucky to have such a talented young mind return home fresh out of college to start his computer based business.
Got an email from Martin Black today, which reminded me of something I want to share.
In my first novel Magpie Summer. Allie gives a talk at her 4-H meeting on hackamores and references Hackamore Reinsman by Ed Connell. Martin Black now has the distribution right on Connell’s neat little book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history and use of hackamores.
If you don’t know, Martin Black is an Idaho rancher, braider, clinician and sells traditional vaquero gear. I am proud to say I bought my favorite hackamore and mecate through Martin’s web site.
The Powder River County Extension office is sponsoring a workshop on obtaining oral histories and I’m excited about attending next week. The workshop is an outgrowth of a statewide project to assist communities record stories and the presenter is Paul Lachapelle, Extension Specialist at MSU Community Development.
The StoryCorps archive is the largest digital collection of human voices and are stored in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. for future generations. The extension office shares guidelines to simplify recording oral histories and explain the digital recording and sharing process.
Similarly, Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation Districts has undertaken a project to record oral histories of ag women, a critical component of Montana’s heritage that we lose daily. I kept hearing radio ads about the project and told my mom that she needed to tell her story – after the training, maybe I’ll be able to record her story!
The contact for the oral history project is Linda Brander at LLbrander@mt.gov. and as stated on the DNRC website, “Once an oral history is completed, it will go into the oral history collection at the Montana Historical Society (at https://mhs.mt.gov/) and be placed on the DNRC website. This will allow people from all over the world to read the histories.”
We’ve been to a lightning caused fire on a neighbor’s place that burned about 2 sections, but all the neighbors and volunteer fire departments did their usual remarkable jobs and got it corralled pretty quickly. The weather continues hot and dry, but instead of 106, today we had 96, so things are looking up!
I’ve worked less on web development the last few days. Instead I’ve concentrated on sewing on the baby quilt, then started making a wood pallet bench for the yard. Sonny calls my style of carpentry botch-ass, but I call it rustic.
I took a photo of Windsor at one of my favorite trees on the ranch. I used to play here when I was a little girl – now I ride by once in a while and reminisce.
My filly Windsor and I moved a bull today and he fought us a little. Windsor turned perfectly with the bull the first few turns then in her youthful exuberance worked too fast and got out of position – that’s something Allie’s colt Snooker would do, too. In fact, a scene is percolating in my mind right now – I’d better go grab my pen…
I’ve been working diligently on this web site following the steps outlined by WordPress’s 10 day course. It’s been pretty painless, occasionally frustrating and definitely satisfying as I near my short term goal of a functional web site. Also working on a baby quilt and learning dressage via books and practice with my 4 year old filly Windsor. The difference between dressage and ranch riding is a world apart, but I believe one will help the other.
On the writing front, I’m in the editing (actually, it’s re-editing) phase on the second Magpie book. I really enjoy editing but find it takes more concentration than the original writing.
Although we’re in the midst of a heat wave in which we’ve meandered around 100 degrees for the last 10 days, I’m off to meet some of my family for an evening at the Fort Peck Theatre.
I’ll get content on all of my pages soon.
Scary times!!! My first blog and it’s like jumping off a cliff into a lake but I’ll just grab my nose and leap…
Hot days here in Eastern Montana. Yesterday, Sonny and I walked out of the roughs in 95 degree heat after having a flat tire on the side by side as we made repairs after bulls broke down a gate and damaged the fence. We would gladly have traded wheeled transport for our horses if we could have.
As we recovered in the afternoon, I started my web site, which I hope leads to building a platform for becoming a published author. I’ll hope to be more inspirational with future posts.
Sandy Snider Stahl 