Author Archives: twosheepstothewind

I’ll just come out and say it. I side with those who think prairie dogs are cute.  It isn’t that I want to start a range war or anything. For overgrown rodents, they *are* cute. They make funny sounds, live in holes (almost like hobbits) and they come out to play and look around. RanchersContinue reading “Prairie dogs: Cute or cursed?”

At the top of Vicki’s bucket list for travel in 2022 was Yellowstone National Park. We planned the summer around it, but made time for the Montana Dinosaur Trail, the Badlands and cousins in South Dakota and 10 days in Canada. But Yellowstone is clearly “WOW!” territory. The eruptions that formed the landscape are someContinue reading “Yellowstone in 200 words and 40-ish photos”

A new hip, a new trailer and a new year. It’s amazing how life keeps happening whether you blog about it or not. Yes, after spending much of the first year of retirement hobbling about on a failing hip joint, I went back to my favorite orthopedic surgeon and completed my set of artificial hips.Continue reading “Back to the blog”

My first trip in an aircraft was while I was in college, on the way back from Harrison, Arkansas. A guy with what made me think of a Korean War helicopter from M*A*S*H was giving flights for $20. We went up a few hundred feet, circled around a bit, then landed. It was one ofContinue reading “Wings Over Topeka: Visiting the Combat Air Museum”

The realization dawned slowly, then became clear as day. Vicki and I had attended Sunday services at a historic church in rural Kansas, east of Manhattan. As I was hunting for a good photo of the front of this stone structure, I was frustrated by the lighting. Then I understood why. The front was shaded,Continue reading “Roots: The church that faces north”

For most of my career, I worked the swing shift, starting somewhere between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., and then working until midnight or much later. That often meant I was working at sunset, stuck inside a building. Often with no windows. Sunrise? What’s that? I knew it happened, but most days you couldn’t proveContinue reading “Twilight Zone: Breaking the Dawn”

There is a destructive idea at the center of this great nation. I mean this literally. Absolutely literally. Vicki and I were visiting cousins in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. One of their community’s claims to fame is being the closest city to the geographic center of the United States. Since we already have a photoContinue reading “What we found at the center of the nation”

Big houses are cool.  Downton Abbey we all know from TV.  Biltmore, when the Vanderbilts built more than anyone else in the United State at that time, was where I got up close (only inches away) from an original Albrecht Dürer woodcut! Sheridan, Wyoming, has its own version of the big house, right up onContinue reading “Labor Day: Life downstairs at an American mansion”

A bad hip can give you a case of the extremes. Look down the campground toward the laundry room 30 yards away and think, “I’ll drive.” Look at a 1.7-kilometer trail around a remote lake and think, “I can do that!” And then you start writing a blog entry and go to Wikipedia to verifyContinue reading “A short walk around Emerald Lake”

Admit it. The only physical representation we have left of long-dead dinosaurs are their bones, preserved as fossils. They can come in a range of colors, depending on the soil and water conditions in which they were preserved, but they’re still just bones. I’m not saying that when you’ve seen one set of bones you’veContinue reading “King of Fort Peck”