Buffalo Gal

March has been a total Lamb all month. We have had such nice days of spring and summer temps. and sunshine. It is rare….we nearly always get one nasty snowstorm in March but not this year!!! Hallelujah!
I drove to town to mail a birthday card to one grandson who has the good fortune to be born in the lovely springtime.
On the way home I was driving slowly and taking in the landscape. (partly due to a lot of soft spots in the gravel road).
I saw one neighbor’s shelter belt glowing with the golden-yellow of willow trees about to bud and burst into leaf. What a beautiful spring color..the golden willow branches. I know why this particular shelter belt is made up of willows….the original settler there could get willow trees free along the river bank and plant his shelterbelt for zero dollars…a great need among early settlers. This is also the case with old cottonwood tree shelterbelts..free for ther taking along the river and other small water bodies.
Both willows and cottonwoods are “dirty trees”..soft and almost spongy wood in them and the cottonwoods spread their fluff all over the countryside in early summer. I always get a bit irritated when our screens fill up with cottonwood fluff but there is nothing to be done about it since I cannot be a female Paul Bunyan and chop down all the cottonwoods in the territory. (although I would like to)
This spring has brought few loud Canadian Honker nesting area fights. I know they are there because i see them flying but they are not fighting like they normally do. It is a mystery.
It is nice not to be awakened in the middle of the night by loud goosefights.

“Peepers” are out making noise ..the frogs emerge from theior muddy winter beds and make a big racket in the daytime and especially in the evening. It has to have something to do with mating.
I have heard a very distinctively different call from all the chickadees in the neighborhood also…I have concluded it is a mating thing too.
“Come to me, my darling little Chickadee”…..oh, waIt….. that was that nasty red- nosed old comedian named Fields wasn’t it?
It better not for him to come back to life..he caused enough trouble the first time around.

The gentle green laciness of the softwood trees like willows and alders is almost upon us. I looked to the north today where groves of alders live and I can see the beginning of the green laciness I so love. I must check out the groves along Highway 10 west tomorrow. That is where I really get to drink it in just for a couple of days at the most each spring. Those kinds of trees thrive in the sandy gravel-y old shores of the ancient Lake Agassiz….just west of where we live.

SADNESS: We are going through the Valley of the Shadow with two extended family members who are dying of cancer. Both went through cancer treatments and not one of them stopped the cancer. It makes me angry to think of the money spent…. like pouring sand down a rathole…. but let’s face it..cancer treatments are a big business for clinics..even if they serve to hasten the death of the victims. It is one of my most upsetting things…..the barbarous cancer treatments instead of concentrating on true prevention. But then there is no money in prevention is there?
Yes….. I get more angry with each cancer death of people I know and love. What the cancer patients go through to try to stop their disease is awful…just awful..and usually futile.
If I were a cancer doctor I would be gravely troubled by what I was doing.
It will not be long for either much- loved person now…..I think of the song by Edvard Grieg…”Vaaren” in Norse but “Springtime in
English……
“Yet once again I could see winter leave and springtime advancing..”
It is written for a dying person and I remember the long- ago death of a Professor’s wife in early spring. The concert choir went to their home and sang “Springtime”for her. It was beautiful and also sad and sorrowful for the dying woman.

Yesterday I was into the archives of the local newspaper searching for information about the Art Show which is coming up on its 44th year. After I finished with my note-taking I walked outside into beautiful sunshine and suddenly thought of a picnic…hot dogs with sauerkraut, beans and buns…..I had to have it, so I went to the super market up the highway and bought the needed items.
And we ate hot dogs with sauerkraut and beans for supper!!!
It was so good…it is a rare occasion when we eat hot dogs but it was really needed last night.
Now all I need is to have first gnat bite or the first woodtick!!!!
Not everything about spring is wonderful after all.

I had a small discussion with a high school friend last week. It started with talk about pennies when I related my recollection of how my cousin Warren put a copper penny on a railroad track by our local train depot when a whole lot of family members were waiting for cousin Lester to arrive for a WW2 “furlough” After the train left, we found the penny which was flattened into a thin gleaming golden–orange disk about the size of a quarter after the train had run over it.
After that thrilling experience I asked for a penny every time we went to meet relatives at “the Junction” railroad stop northeast of our town for as many years as the train was a viable means of travel from Minneapolis to our town.
I got lots of flattened copper pennies and I kept them for quite awhile when I was still a small child. I can still feel the scary feeling when the huge locomotive, puffing coal smoke and steam, would come into the depot area. The ground would shake and so would I but I could barely wait to go find that penny that had been changed by the heavy train cars.
Then we got on the topic of penny loafers which were “all the go” in the 1940s and 1950s. I can still remember seeing teenagers older than me in the 1940s wearing penny loafers which were brown leather slip – on shoes with a slot to put a penny right on top of the shoe. Everyone had penny loafers!!!!
They were so cool. If you did not wear your “saddle shoes” to school you wore your “penny loafers. Both boys and girls wore penny loafers. I think I had my last pair of them when I was a senior in high school. By the time I went to college, little black flats…. “ballet shoes”… were all the go…no more penny loafers, saddleshoes or “white bucks” (the fad introduced by teen heartthrob singer Pat Boone)
I looked up stuff about pennies.

“A penny saved is a penny earned” was one of Ben Franklins’ wise sayings but Mary Landrieu a politician from Louisiana said this:
“A penny saved is a penny earned doesn’t do much good if you owe a quarter”
Yeah that is right!
I wonder if that could be applied to our national debt/deficit crisis somehow?

“The bad penny” described a worthless person or a ne’er do well.
“The bad penny always shows up” says that a rotten person will usualy come back to where they started!

A penny for your thoughts was and is said when someone appears to be deep in thought. Lots of people think their thoughts are worth a lot more than one penny….in today’s world of bad economics and high prices and rampant inflation, maybe we should be saying “five bucks for your thoughts”.

“Cost a pretty penny” indicates that someone paid a lot for some item.

“Pennywise and pound foolish” is one I never understood. Now I find that it means someone is thrifty in small things but could be foolish in saving when the item or thing is very big and worth a lot. Makes sense to me now.

We have a jar of pennies here at our place. When it gets really full we think of a way to give it to one of our grandkids or more than one of them. Even in their advanced teen ages, they love to get the jar of pennies and sit down on the floor to count them out and divvy them up between them.
I lived in the era of “penny candy” when one penny bought you a little tootsie roll, a piece of Fleers double bubble gum, and other small pieces of candy. Those were the days! A penny could buy you a treat!!! And if you had five pennies you could buy a bottle of pop or a candy bar or a good sized ice cream cone or a bag of popcorn at the local theater.
THOSE DAYS seem to be gone for good unfortunately.

My cousin Duane is right….getting older is not for sissies. As I passed into my 7th decade I was pretty spry..still am BUT my muscles and ligaments have a nasty habit of getting very sore and stiff when I work them at something like….gardening. It was too tempting again today to not go outside and resume the cleaning up of flower beds along side our house. In my earlier salad days I engaged in a fury of planting perennials all around the house…it is a long way around out house and so far I have not had the heart to replace the flowers with grass. But I am paying the price this evening by walking like I am carrying a fifty cent piece between my buns and also limping painfully after sitting down for awhile and then rising and trying to move.
I did a lot of cleaning up of dry leaves I put there last fall and after raking at them I asked myself
“Why did you do that?” It is a lot easier to dump the dry leaves over the plants in October than it is to rake them out in March!!! Wow! I usually do not do that til late April or early May. This summer in March is way cool.
But it is hard on an old girl who forgets her true age when she gets in a garden.
I had to take a couple of OTC pain relievers and I also rewarded my hard work with a couple of those little bite- size Milky Way candy bars.
You know, of course, that tiny little candy bars have NO calories because they are too small to hold any calories.
What I want now is to lie on one of our sofas and not move for a long time.
What will happen when I plant the vegetables? I may be laid up for days.
This part of growing older stinks.

When I read about the body found in a grave near Williston it was pretty clear they had found Sherry Arnold. Now testing in a lab in Montana has proved it.
I have little compassion for the monsters who did this…to pull an innocent women off her jogging track and immediately strangle her..for what? The thrill of killing someone? Who knows? These jerks had been using meth all the way to ND from where-ever they came from.
If they are found guilty I have a few hopes for them.
The death sentence…with no fooing around. Swift justice for Sherry.
I have a few ideas about how to carry it out….for starters a bit of strangling for them but not enough to kill them—just let them be terrified for their lives like Sherry Arnold was for hers.
But she died Just because as couple of druggies needed a thrill.
After the faux strangling, take them to a hidden meadow near Williston and have them dig a couple of graves; then put them in the graves, bound and gagged, and start throwing dirt on them so they can experience a bit more terror.
Finally haul them to the MT state execution place and put nooses around their necks and let them stand for a few hours on a scaffold thinking about what they did to Sherry Arnold.
Then open the trap and let them swing.
Monsters like these men do not deserve any civil treatment when they are sentenced to death for the horrible crime they committed against an innocent math teacher—and all those who loved her.
Sherry Arnold deserves REAL justice.

We found out that our cat can still climb a tree even with only three legs.
She was shot in the shoulder by some Idiot about 7 yeavs ago and amazed us with her powers of recovery after an amputation. We have always been concerned about her being able to escape from a dog or other enemy like oridinary cats do–by climbing a tree.
We knew she could do it when she was a kitten because she and her sister Mikey climbed the same tree when “Otto” our late granddogger chased them there over 13 years ago.
Two days ago our friend Audie stopped by to chat and he had his gentle, rather rotund black lab Sheba with him because Sheba begs to go for rides in Audie’s pickup. She is not a cat chaser and is used to them but when our cat saw Audie’s dog she did her cat thing and started to run. That made Sheba curious so she followed and the cat ran to a tree where she climbed it with her three legs, no sweat!
Sheba went back to listen to the men chat and I decided I had to help Kitty Princess get down from her awkward perch on a small limb. She had her three legs wrapped firmly around the branch and was not about to let go. She was not meowing her alarm call but I had to be the rescuer anyway. It was not easy. She was up too high for me to reach her but we have a huge pile of straw protecting our outlet from our water to air heat pump system.( in the winter)
I climbed the straw pile (without hurting myself)
and began to utilize all my Silver
Sneakers strength training and also the stretching excercises.
I finally reached the bottom of the cat and got her legs unwound from the branch but she was not about to get down yet. We had a fairly significant wrestling match and I still did not fall off the straw pile and do myself harm.
I don’t know why but she did let go and I managed to put her on my one shoulder. Her tail was fluffed out the maximum alarmed cat size and it made seeing my way back uphill a bit difficult. I was in long dry grass , partially blinded by a fluffed up cats tail, feeling claws sink into my shoulder and strenuously trying to get uphill with my catload. We finally got ot higher ground with shorter grass and then got up the deck stairway without either of us hurting the other one too badly. (I cannot claw her back and I was almost wishing I could)
I did not need to go to the
ER for any stitching or bandaging, the cat unfluffed her tail and willingly came inside the house with me where she acted like nothing happened after all. She took up her post on her cat tower and calmly watching the juncoes clean out the deck cracks of birdseed.
Last evening as the sun was setting (right in the middle of the horizon..) we decided to go have a look at Gary’s swan pond to see if one pair of battling swans had returned. We took Kitty along just to hear her sound off her eerie catcall she makes when taken in a car. She assumes that we are going to the Vet clinic and she hates doing that so she catcalled for awhile but finally settled down on my lap and sort of enjoyed her car ride.
No swans.
Oh, how I hope they settle there as Gary says they have done for several years.
I would love to spend the summer taking rides up Gary’s road and watching swans.

I am a rebel in a few ways…not many but some that really matter to me.
What really matters to me is that I am iun charge of my own health and wellness….I refuse to be led by the nose by allopathic medicine (standard MD medicine)
There some issues I really get upset over and it involves the “medical tests” MDs say you MUST have!
I will not have invasive procedures for the sake of the medical community’s making money for their particular clinic or system.
Mammograms are one of the current MUST HAVES.
I have long been suspicious of that procedure for a couple of good reasons….the test itself uses radiation which MDs insist is “harmless” but I have done enough research on radiation to know that it is not harmless.
There is also the issue of “false positives” on the test which can lead to another invasive procedure..a biopsy which can be hamful in spite of what the MDs say.
A well known person who has questioned the routine use of mammograms on what is mostly healthy breast tissue has spoken out publicly. Suzanne Somers who is more interested in Alternative Medical care, expressed her doubts publicly on more than one occasion. She has done extensive research on the topic of mammography.
There was a study done in Sweden involving 60,000 women. This study found that 70% of “tumors” detected by mammography were not tumors at all…false positives is what it is called but it leads too many women down a path of anxiety and further invasive procedures.
I do not allow routine dental X rays either on the same grounds—too invasive and too much radiation . My views have been respected fortunately and I do not have dental X rays as often as routinely prescribed by the ADA.
I am not at all convinced that the radiation you receive in mammograms or other radiation procedures is as “harmless” as MDs make out. Radiation builds up in human tissue and it is NOT harmless. There has even been question raised recently about mammogram radiation causing cancer in healthy breast tissue. The test itself is barbaric involving crushing of the breasts which leads to wondering if the crushing could cause an existing tumor to burst.
Anyone who had undergone a mammogram understands the word “crushing”.

Some other invasive “tests” that allopathic medicine insists you MUST HAVE: Colonoscopies. I just read an article titled ”
“Too many colostomies use costly sedation” MD medicine does not give patients viable alternatives to such things as colonoscopies…it is just prescribed routinely as a so- called “preventive” test but it does not prevent anything. I have thoroughly investigated true preventive measures and a colonoscopy is NOT preventive.

A third routine rest now recommended is the Prostate exam which will more often than not, lead to a prostate biopsy–another barbaric invasive procedure that does great harm… especially introducing infective bacteria into the prostate gland. A prostate needle biopsy is done through the wall of the rectum. Can you find a more bacteria laden area in the human body?
Prostate biopsies lead to “false positives” also…very problematic for the patient. I talked with a retired Urologist from GrandForks who spoke against prostate biopsies as they are done now. He had had too many patients who ended up with serious bacterial infections.
Why is MD medicine so slow in developing alternatives to the present invasive procedures that can cause harm and turn a person into a long term patient after they submit to the so called neededd routine “preventive” testing? None of these tests are preventive.
There is no viable alternative test for a mammogram..certainly not recommended in medical clinics. Somers has researched the subject and found that there are alternatives to mammograms but you are not told of them by allopathic practioners.
Dr. Samuel Epstein has written a book which I am sure causes MDs to go bonkers:
THE POLITICS OF CANCER is the title.
It is not hard to find information on the internet.

“Mammograms Cause Breast Cancer” by Dawn Prate

“Prostate biopsy alternatives and cancer treatment options” (Feb 10, 2012)

“Too many colonoscopies use costly sedation”

I think it is not hard to figure out why there are not alternatives developed on a lot of these questionable invasive procedures. It is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ taken in by medical systems which drives the machinery.
I have come to the conclusion that I have to take charge of my own health and wellness in as much as I can do in order to protect myself from some medical “tests” that MDS insist is for “prevention”…. a falsehood completely. True prevention does not make clinics the money they need to stay afloat. Years ago, clinics and hospitals lost a lot of income when routine and unnecessary hysterectomies were ended by forces outside of hospitals and clinics.
Same with all the tonsillectomies that were done on healthy tonsil tissue; after medicine itself discovered that the tonsils were very necessary for catching infections and keeping it confined to that tissue, routine “preventive” tonsillectomies ceased on children who were subjected to anesthesia and hospitalization on a very routine basis. I still have my tonsils thanks to an old fashioned country doctor who believed that tonsils were very important to the body.
A lot of my contemporaries had the surgery just as a routine thing decades back…and I would guess that many senior citizens had their tonsils “yanked” routinely in decades past.
My views are controversial and frowned upon by allopathic medicine. I am “not good for business as usual” at clinics.
I keep a close watch on my own health and wellness and study real preventive measures for a lot of health issues.
My best source is written by a Harvard educated MD named Dr. Robert Balch and his wife Phyllis Balch, who has a PhD in Nutrition. The Balch book “NUTRITIONAL HEALING” offers sensible solutions to many common health issues but also makes strong recommendations for consulting a doctor in specific situations.
I will continue to anger MDs with my questions and alternative suggestions which they do not like to hear about.
I hve had plenty of hot “conversations” over my views on true healthcare.

A mountaineer who aspired to climb Mt Everest was asked why he wanted to do it.
His reply was “Because it’s there.”
And so I am going to use that reason for going outside today to plant spinach and lettuce on March 20…the Day of the Vernal Equinox. I have container gardens sitting in the warm sunshine on the concrete pad under the deck…..that is where I will be planting seeds today….March 20 or not!!! BECAUSE THEY ARE THERE!
It is time to bring forth some more green things…not really me doing it but the Creator providing warm days and blue skies and also the seeds that are “cold-resistant”. Spinach and lettuce seeds sprout best when it is cool like it is now. The soil in the smaller container gardens is plenty warmed up for such seed plantings.
While I am out there I am also planting 3 Asian lily bulbs (pink ones)
It is going to feel so wonderful just digging in the dirt!!!! Life on earth started in a Garden…..we who love to plant and reap need to keep up the ancient rite of Spring.
I have to go back and inspect the green shoots of the mum plant and the tulip sprouts also. What a joy!!!
I also want to see the sun set tonight—right in the MIDDLE of the horizon on the Vernal Equinox day that will only bring more and more sunlight and longer days to the Northern Hemisphere.
We endure so much darkness in late fall and early winter….we deserve to have more and more light as we journey toward June 21…and then the cycle begins to reverse.
Sunrise, Sunset, Daybreak, Sundown, New Moon, Full Moon…..patterns set in place by the Mighty Creator God repeat themselves according to His orderly
Creation.
I am so thankful!!!!

Internet news sites are being “scrubbed’ after several reports emerged that Malia Obama is spending spring break in Oaxaca,MX with about a dozen of her friends…and 25 secret service agents. Mexican police have blocked all access to a hotel in Oaxaca where the teen aged girls are staying.
The Obamas have studiously tried to avoid any publicity that affects their daughters but now that has changed. The news is still on Canadian news sites but the London Daily Telegraph is one media outlet that has scrubbed the story and substituted another one on their website.
There could be plenty of reasons why the story is being stifled. The best reason is that tourists have been warned by the US that they should not be traveling in Mexico now due to the violence and chaos of the Mexican drug warlords.
I would assume that 25 Secret Service agents will be very effective in protecting Malia Obama and her friends.
Still….in light of all the travelers’ warnings it seems odd.
I suppose Malia could be exhausted from her most recent vacation to Hawaii and may need some R and R from that.
I wonder what the cost to the already debt- and deficit- ridden US government will be for the travel on a fuel guzzling jet plus paying 25 secret service agents for special duty?
This does not seem to matter to the Obamas ..they seem to consider themselves Royalty and must be treated differently than ordinary citizens who are struggling with the results of the administration’s economic troubles of recent years.

Still posted this morning:

“Obama’s daughter spends spring break in Mexico” (from a Canadian Gazette report)

“Why is the story about Malia Obama’s vacationing in Mexico disappearing from the web?”

** additional article :

“Malia In Mexico Despite
Security Warning, Story Being Scrubbed”

(this one is NOT being scrubbed)

The warm days made me go out to my flower gardens. I could not resist the clarion call to dig a bit and also to apply my brand spanking new hand shears to some old dry stalks leftover from the fall dryness and the winter frosts. I spent a few hours clipping off the stalks of perennial flowers…dried stalks of daisies and lilies and chrysanthemums. When I clipped the mums, I noticed a familar sage-y scent. I peered at the base of the plants I was clipping and sure enough…there were GREEN THINGS down by the soil. I lay flat on my belly-side on the warm bricks of a walkway past the garden…..I got my face way down near the soil and there were green leaves coming through, ready to start the new season. Mums do have a sage-like odor and the fresh small greenery was emitting the familiar perfume. It did my heart good and I thought of two spiritual words: Death and Resurrection. It is nearly Easter for Christians and the Gospel message is clear and plain……the death of Christ and His resurrection changed the world forever for those who choose to believe in Him and His free gift of eternal life.
Each spring with the coming of the new green growth on plants and trees and even in the lawn grass—we see such a clear picture of death (fall and winter) and resurrection (spring and summer).
Only the willfully Blind do not see it.

I also discovered–upon getting down and dirty in another part of the flower gardens—–the tiniest little shoot from a tulip bulb. Not to worry…tulips are so tough they can take cold weather and even a spring snowfall. It has happened before and it only makes the tulips more beautiful when they bloom.
There is the greatest time of the year coming when those bulbs burst into full beauty with the tulips nodding in the breeze and spring sunshine.
It can’t come soon enough for me!

Our early spring-like days are bringing out the urge to do battle in male BIG birds like wild swans and geese.
On Saturday after spending several hours near a rural cattail pond, one of my closest relatives watched 2 pairs of white swans and a coule of pairs of wild Canadian geese swimming on that pond.
The two Cobs (huge male swans) were battling it out for being King of the Slough that afternoon. It lasted all afternoon.
Swans are huge birds..the largest birds in the family of ducks. Adult swans can have wingspans as wide as 10 feet, they can weigh up to 30 pounds and are often 60 inches long.
The two male swans did battle in their swan’s fashion…..first their necks were touching and then they were applying great pressure on each others’ necks. Ultimately one of the males would launch himself into the air for a short distance and then land with a huge splash near the rival male and go at it again with the neck wrestling moves. After several hours of battle one pair of swans..a male and his female flew over a small hill to another pond that was hidden by the hill. The males were likely badly in need of a nap and some food.
The geese settle their own hashes and the two species (swans and geese) ignore each other and are able to co-exist on the same pond. But they refuse to co-exist with another pair of swans or geese!
It is definitely a one- swan or one- goose pond when all is said and done.
I was driven to see the scene of battle on Sunday afternoon but all was peace and quiet and NO swans or geese were in sight. I was disappointed after looking forward to seeing the beautiful swans sailng on the water. We drove slowly home on another country lane and suddenly, looking to our left, we saw a large white patch in a stubble-y cornfield. I had brought field glasses along and a look through them proved that it was not a seed bag in the field…it was a pair of swans resting after feeding on corn, we supposed.
They were HUGE! I can easily believe that they have 10 foot wingspans after seeing them resting in that field.
I plan to go back to the pond near the road and hope to see them living there this summer.
Swans are birds who have had many legends and stories written about them. The most familiar is of course, THE UGLY DUCKLING by Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish storyteller.
Baby swans are truly ugly.
The little “cygnets” are almost black….dark, dull gray at best and are not very pretty to behold. But as they grow they become the majestic white swans with the orange bills with the black “mask” across their beaks.
Swans are seen commonly in Europe’s waterways…. especially on small rivers and streams.
A recipe for “baked swan” survives in English cookery since swan meat was considered to be the most luxurious of roasted meats.
The old recipe said to scald the dead swan and remove its bones; then parboil it and season with salt pepper and ginger and finally “lard it” before putting it in a deep coffin with rye paste. Thgen it was baked til it was done. There is also a large amount of butter called for…an entire “store” says the recipe.
I could not eat a beautiful swan. I could not eat most wild birds as I did not eat the ducks and partridges and pheasants my dad brought home long ago. I turned into an instant vegan when there was wild bird being served for dinner.
Other swan legends exist in many cultures including Norse, Finnish, Dutch, German and other European countries’ stories.
One ancient Greek myth…”Leda and the Swan” has a large male swan coming to earth and fathering sons by Leda a beautiful woman.
The expression “Swan Song” is part of our culture and others’ referring to an ancient belief that a Mute Swan is silent all its life til just before it dies when it sings a beautiful song.
This legend is untrue but it has not stopped it from being believed.

There are several kinds of white swans in the Northern hemisphere: Mute swans, Trumpeter Swans, and Whooper Swans. Some swans in other parts of the world are black or have black or gray feathers bmixed in among the characteristic white plumage.
If I do not get to see the swans on the pond to the north of the Bluff, I will have to go to Bergeson’s Nursery because there are ALWAYS a pair of pure white swans on a large pond on the nursery grounds. They nest in that pond without fail, year after year and are observed from Eric Bergeson’s high perch on his house by the pond.
On our own wooded land down by the dead river bed, there are ferocious territorial battles taking place. I heard a huge commotion and saw ona pair of Canadian Honkers taking off the water making a loud squawking noise.
Other geese must have been invading the territory.
I saw my first robin this morning early. I had heard them singing their characteristic song but had not seen one “in bird” aka “in person”.
The Juncoes are still here before moving north for summer. They are enjoying their status as welfare Juncoes because I have been scattering their favorite finch food out on the grass near the Spruce trees. They are such sweet little birds.