The Cat and Rat Dream
Thursday, 10 June 2010 00:00
Karen Land
Lifestyle
One night, not long ago, at a hotel room in Lawrence, Kansas, I had a nightmare that my new, little house in Montana had been taken over by cats while I was away.
In the all-to-real dream, I returned home from my 3-month work trip to find felines in every corner, cabinet, and closet. The cats were all different colors and sizes, adults and kittens, domestic longhairs and shorthairs, Siamese and Abyssinian. There were cats crouched on the kitchen counters, lounging on my down bedspread, napping on the loveseat, davenport, rocker, and dining room table.
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Barstool Olympics
Thursday, 04 February 2010 00:00
Karen Land
Lifestyle
I remember the days when watching television was a special occasion.
Every year, my horse-loving girlfriends and I counted down the weeks and days until Velvet Brown and The Pie (from the 1944 film “National Velvet) would finally grace our home screens.
No matter if it was a long-awaited movie, a new nature show, or a rare sporting event such as the Olympics, the ritual was always the same. We popped popcorn (the old fashioned way - shaking a greased pan over a flame), flipped the caps off glass bottles of Coca-Cola, and positioned ourselves on the davenport directly in front of the black and white set. During the pre-VCR era, television was a one shot deal - watch it now, or miss it all.
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Prego-Testing 101
Saturday, 16 January 2010 12:37
Karen Land
Lifestyle
So far this season, cows are helping to temper my longing for sled dogs.
Since I moved to Martinsdale, I've had the opportunity to help out on the Cameron Ranch. My friends, PJ and Spunky, work as cowhands on Gil's family spread just at the bottom of the Little Belts. I have the best of both worlds. I get to go play cowgirl on a beautiful ranch whenever the whim arises, and I can pass on those days when thirsty, snow encrusted cattle stand and stare at the water troughs - ice frozen hard as concrete. A few weeks ago, I helped Gil and the girls pregnancy test cows. I was nominated the official record keeper and all around go-get-it girl. I was also given the very important role of wiping the thick, greasy orange wax off the insides of the ears of cows that were missing tags. The wax needed to be cleared away in order to read their tattoo. After an entire day of ear wax removal, I was amazed to find that my usually rough fingers and hands were now silky smooth. The girls and I decided that we should start scraping and bottling that wax to make hand cream out of it. Unfortunately, this hand cream would be quite expensive because most cows don't stand still while I am trying to decipher their faded number hidden under a gooey layer of ear gum; no, they insist on thrashing their 300-lb. head this way and that way, snorting and spewing spittle in my face. "Karen's Bovine Blend" would be pricey stuff. At the end of the second day of prego-testing, Gil asked if I wanted to give it a try. For those of you who don't know exactly how this process works, I'll give you a quick lowdown.
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A Montana Christmas
Sunday, 13 December 2009 12:41
Karen Land
Lifestyle
No matter where Harriet S. Dusenberry roamed across the globe, she always called Montana home.
Harriet, born on a ranch in Lavina on July 24, 1911, cherished the stories from a simpler time growing up on the Trask Ranch along the Musselshell River.
She wanted her 3-year old granddaughter, Dru, to know what a frontier Christmas was like for her as a child, but she couldn’t just sit Dru down on her knee and share her experiences - granddaughter lived in Bozeman, and grandmother lived thousands of miles away in Nepal.
In 1952, Harriet and her husband, Harold, moved to Kathmandu on a two-year assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was the first time the couple had ever left the state of Montana.
“So my Grandma decided to write me a story,” Dru Dusenberry Robidou explained.
She found a Nepalese artist, named Chaitanya Muni Bajracharya, to create illustrations, showing him an American Christmas magazine and the work of Norman Rockwell so he could visualize the style.
Harriet asked the artist to design a rough draft of painted pictures, but instead, he returned with a gorgeous, finished product. The book cost Harriet several hundred rupees, much more than she could afford at the time, but still she was pleased. The book was perfectly done just as her mind had imagined it.
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