Category: My Columns
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The Pringle Well
You can’t get a beer at Pringle’s watering hole like you can at the Hitchrail Bar and Restaurant but the town well sees just as much activity as the Rail does. The Pringle well has become an unlikely hub for social activity. It started getting an influx of attention about the time the drought started…
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Auction Addiction
Auction bidding may not be recognized as a disease but it can be just as detrimental as other addictions/diseases such as excessive equipment upgrading or shoe buying, ball cap saving, or obsessive-compulsive vehicle washing. If you can’t resist bidding on or buying something at an auction you may have auction bidding disease. Symptoms accompany every…
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The Rodeo Tiller
Bull riding is a highly anticipated rodeo event because it provides lots of danger, unpredictability and close calls. All of which makes me think of our rototiller. Initially, the thought of using a tiller on our garden excited me when my husband got it from his dad. It was old when my father-in-law bought it…
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Play Dirt
Dirt and boys they just go together. When our son was a toddler, his idea of hitting pay dirt was getting to play with it. His fascination for fine dry soil started a dirt-kicking phase. It all began when he followed me under the slat-covered porch one day to clean out all the debris that…
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A Horseshoe Takes the Cake
In honor of our wedding anniversary this week, I decided to share a wedding story. When I tell people about the custom-made wedding cake top we had, they have to follow me to the gun cabinet to see it because that’s where it stays now. I wanted something western looking instead of the standard wedding…
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Kid Therapy
I’ve been sending my kids to therapy regularly for a long time now. I’ve insisted on it since they were babies. After spending too many consecutive days indoors, my kids will relapse in behavior; a sign that they need some therapy. Like a woman waiting too long before re-dying her hair, their behavior becomes very…
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Give Me a Line
Of all my husband’s lines, my favorite is the one that pertains to doing laundry. It’s my four-strand Binford clothes line that he made for me. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on line-drying clothes. Years of learning my lesson the hard way with clotheslines have helped to develop the line-drying criteria and etiquette…
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Our Marriage Rulebook
There’s a reason why it’s been said that marriage is a lot of work. It’s because there’s so many stinking rules! Take my husband and me for example. We both assumed sharing everything was a perk to getting married. He’d get to use all of my guns and I’d get to drive his pickup. Neither…
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Rekindling Branding Day Romance
The romance between my husband and me began in springtime. We’d only been dating a couple of months by branding season and he introduced me to his family on their branding day. We spent that day, and the rest of those May weekends helping neighbors gather cows to corrals horseback, and wrestling calves together. Our…