The seasons have finally turned here in the Cascades, which mostly means a ton of work.  Spring in the mountains is a cranky bitch, like the old flatbed Studebaker I drove when chasing cows on the Fish Creek Ranch out of Eureka, Nevada.  It took a full can of starting fluid every morning to get that motor to run but she would eventually cough and snort and whine and then finally crank in a cloud of black and blue smoke.

Not so long ago I bottomed out.  It was a hard stoppage. If you’ve ever been out on the desert, driving too fast on nominal roads, and suddenly high-centered your rig in the rocks, you’ll have some idea what this felt like.  There were some nasty scraping sounds as my skid plate dragged over the rocks, followed by a solid “kathunk” and a jaw-jamming loss of forward movement.  Things on the backseat ended up on the dashboard.  My seatbelt locked up like a parachute harness and there might have been some whiplash.  It was all quite unexpected because I was actually at a dinner party.

During her first week in London, Ceili took in a service at Westminster Abbey. As one walks through the west entrance of Westminster Abbey, one encounters a memorial stone embedded in the flagstones, a remembrance of one of history’s Great Men: It was a moment for her, as it was for me when I visited the Abbey in 1996. Winston […]

Cattle have long been the bogeymen of environmental extremists, blamed for almost every eco-horror imaginable, but people need to eat, and despite sustained misinformation campaigns by detractors, they like to eat beef.  This year, the average American will consume 217 pounds of beef, and what’s missing from the traditional formulas, Hobbs says, is the long-term health and productivity of the soil.