Tag: Family

  • Bringing People Together, Sharing a Meal, & Benefitting Ranchers Affected by Storm Atlas

        A Senior Project Success: When our son Myles said he was thinking about putting on a steak feed to benefit the Rancher Relief Fund for his Senior Project (a fairly new requirement for South Dakota high school graduates), I was very proud that he came up with that particular idea all on his…

  • Beef Flavor Factors

    Even though my family is able to fill our chest freezer with a wide variety of different beef cuts, I still get confused in remembering where each cut comes from and knowing the best way to cook them. This is especially true now that new value cuts have been created out of the chuck, shoulder,…

  • Guest Speaking at DakotaFest’s Women’s Brunch

      My blog was temporarily down, so this post is later than intended. On August 22nd, I spoke at my largest audience to date. I was the DakotaFest Women’s Brunch guest speaker at the Highlands Conference Center. The theme was “Growing Up Country,” and my talk was a spinoff of that called, “There’s A Little…

  • Family Reading

    Reading to my kids is something that I still haven’t outgrown, even though they have. As my kids got older and started school, I couldn’t give up the reading time I shared with them. When they were small, I read a lot of illustrated children’s books to them. Once they learned to read and began…

  • Ag United and South Dakota’s True Environmentalists

    Agriculture faces increasing scrutiny from people and organizations that are far-removed from the land and the sources of their food. Our food doesn’t come from a grocery store—they’re just the distributors of it. Food comes from crops grown by hard working farming and ranching families. A lot of criticism is stemmed from lack of being…

  • The Supper Table: Nourishing a Family Tradition

    The one thing I have fought hard to keep as a tradition in my household is having meals together as a family; most especially supper. In today’s busy world, I am shocked that sitting down together as a family is not a priority with a lot of families. Many allow busy schedules to infringe on…

  • Life’s Instruction Manual

    It always irritates me whenever I come across quotations that say something about how life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Life and knowing how to live does come with an instruction manual: it’s called the BIBLE. It’s not only the only manual a human will ever need in order to know how to live…

  • Our Would-Be Millennium Baby

    The due date of our second child was January 1, 2000 and by the second trimester I got really tired of hearing “Oh! Maybe you’ll have a millennium baby!” I was supposed to have a “Millennium Baby” but she arrived three weeks early instead.   Naturally, I wanted the same doctor who delivered our first…

  • Our Family Gin Tournament Tradition

      Having a “Gin Tournament” on holiday family get-togethers has become a family tradition in the last decade. When my brother Clay was dating his now wife Sue, he was introduced to the card game gin while visiting her family on their ranch near Enning, South Dakota. Her folks play a lot of gin and…

  • Sale Day

    Some of our steers (Technically, Friday is the day I normally use to post about stuff that’s gone on in the past week that’s worthy of mentioning but we had a busy Thursday and Friday).  Thursday morning was a big day for us–we sold our calf crop in Belle Fourche. Our help showed up before…