Rambling Josh

What is the purpose of car alarms? There is a pickup on campus that seems to be of the sensitive sort, as a wisp of the slightest breeze or the broken, bumpy wind of a moderately impressive fart, seems to set it wailing. On the high plains in the pan handle of Nebraska there is no shortage of wisps of slight breezes, and on a college campus full of healthy bowelled youngsters fueled with questionable cafeteria food there is no shortage of moderately impressive farts.

Most any hour of most any day…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…Why? I would hazard a guess that anyone, other than the owner of the sensitive pickup, would be more than happy to be an accomplice to grand theft just to make the HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…proceed anywhere out of earshot.

As I am firmly atop my noise police soapbox, the HONK…HONK that signifies that a car has been successfully locked via the key fob, seems an unnecessary addition of noise to a universe nary in need of additional noise. How can one fully immerse themselves in the refreshing wisps of breezes, and the always humorous, broken, bumpy wind.

Other than irritating to crotchety cranks with a penchant for the sweet silence of solitude, what is the harm of such auditory intrusions? Well, I’ll tell you! Hold onto your wig, these findings will be so surprisingly terrifying and troubling that your skyward dashing eyebrows may very well knock it askew.

National Geographic recently reported that, “Studies have shown that loud noises can cause caterpillars' dorsal vessels (the insect equivalent of a heart) to beat faster.” THE HUMANITY! The next time you hear a HONK…HONK, think of the poor caterpillars and the accelerated pitter-patter of their wee little hearts.

Think of their stubby appendages, too short to reach and provide a sound dampening respite to their fuzzy ears, leaving them completely at the mercy of the HONK…HONK.

Curious, I Googled, “Do caterpillars have ears?” and it turns out that they have “sound-receiving hairs on their bodies” rather than ears. Hmm? I then Googled, “If caterpillars had ears would their appendages be of sufficient length to reach them and provide a sound dampening respite in the event of a HONK…HONK?”

It seems that this question ascended to an intellectual level beyond that which smarty-pants Google has yet to summit. In a lame and mildly pathetic attempt to save face, Google offered, “According to a new study, some plants can hear caterpillars eating leaves and respond by emitting caterpillar-repelling chemicals.”

In case you are curious, plants don’t have ears. So Google says. Yes…yes…except for corn. Good one.

The National Geographic report didn’t indicate why, or if, a caterpillar is harmed in anyway by the accelerated prancing and lub-dubbing of their little hearts. Perhaps the reader was to assume that such was bad? Perhaps people that sit around listening to caterpillars' hearts with tiny little stethoscopes, while they intermittently blast Metallica through tiny little headphones, just want their mothers to be proud of them for getting their findings published in National Geographic?

“What does your son do?”

“He produces broken, bumpy wind.” So it goes.

A bit of Spring weather found the Black Hills this weekend, prompting many a folk to get out and about in the various manner folks like to get out and about. Hikers, bikers (pedal and the vroom-vroom kind), runners, ATVers, and topless Jeeps (not topless Jeepers) were among the hoards heading for the hills.

It’s nice to see people out enjoying all that the Black Hills has to offer, but it would be even nicer if they’d stay away from my favorite hiking spot. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

There’s a lovely trail system that is only about a 10-minute drive from our house, so rather than walk our dog around the neighborhood tethered to a leash, I prefer to get out into the hills where we can both be untethered.

The majority of the time Wilson and I have the whole area to ourselves, but when I rolled into the trailhead this weekend there were about seven cars scattered about the parking area. There are several different routes one can take from the trailhead, so the chances of running into someone is still fairly remote.

In instances like this, where I know there are several hikers out on the trails, I like to increase the odds of not running into anyone and wander about off-trail. Hiking on a trail is fine and dandy, but I’ve found that I prefer picking a general direction and wandering through the forest in that general direction until a different direction of interest presents itself.

Often, when I hike on a trail, I find that my gaze will inadvertently fixate on the trail, like a beast of burden, head slowly lolling from side-to-side, the miles sliding by largely unnoticed. Whereas traversing hill and dale off-trail, in a largely unspecified direction of my choosing, keeps my mind alert and much more engaged in the moment.

I suppose that whenever personal choice is a part of the equation or actively interjected into a situation, we human types will become more engaged in whatever it is we have been allowed the autonomy to do. When we go off-trail we get to see what we want to see, not what the well-meaning folks that established the trail think we should see. So it goes.

On a recent off-trail stroll, I was reminded of something the writer, Phillip Connors said, “The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble, to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

A rambling body, a roaming mind, unguided and untethered from convention. Where might you find yourself?

Irish music, or to be more precise, Irish songs, are a form of musical expression that have been a part of my life for pert near a quarter century. I felt it necessary to express that my allegiance to Irish music is with songs, rather than with tunes, as many lump and bind the two into the same sack of wilted shamrocks and limp leprechauns.

“Tunes”, that which generally fall into the category of “Traditional Irish Music” are the jigs and reels sawed out of fiddles, squeezed out of accordions, plucked out of guitars, and beat out of bodhrans. Foot stomping, hand clapping, table tapping, pint swinging music.

No words, no story, just endless loops of 4/4 or 6/8 time until your feet and hands are swollen, your tables tapped out, and your pint is happily swigged or hopelessly spilt. My wife and my daughter like tunes, my son and I are staunch supporters of songs. To our gentlemanly, yet slightly Neanderthal ears, the tunes all sound the same, and they all last much too long. Like a political speech or a mattress commercial. So it goes.

I apologize. It was cruel and meanspirited of me to compare Irish tunes and purveyors of mattresses to politicians. I don’t “hate” tunes, I just vastly prefer songs. I am tremendously impressed with the dedication and skill that is necessary to play these time-honored tunes, but I can’t keep my gentlemanly, yet slightly Neanderthal mind from thinking, “For the love of leprechauns! When are they going to sing?”

My good friend Paul and I have been singing Irish songs at the Rapid City Library in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day for the past three-years. To ensure that they keep inviting us back, we don’t charge for our performance. “Performance” sounds a bit grand for what Paul and I do. Perhaps, “Facilitators of Frivolity” would be a more accurate description?

Whatever you want to call it, we enjoy ourselves, enjoy sharing these songs, and most of all, enjoy getting people to sing along and maybe go home with the lyrics of “Whiskey Is the Life of Man” or “The Black Velvet Band” stuck in their head. There are less useful things to have stuck in your head…like algebra.

This year, Paul and I had a two-state tour for St. Patrick’s Day. We facilitated frivolity on Friday March 15th, in Chadron, Nebraska, at a nursing home, and then loaded up our tour bus (Toyota) and headed back to Rapid City for our library gig on Saturday March 16th.

The nursing home gig was also enjoyable, and as it is any time I “perform” in a nursing home, very enlightening. I like bringing Paul with to nursing homes, like my mother, he’s good at visiting with anyone about most anything. Paul doing what he’s good at, frees me up to do what I’m good at…observing and pondering. I’m not certain those things constitute really “doing” anything, as they look suspiciously like doing nothing? Can one be good at something that isn’t really doing anything?

As we were setting up for our “performance” a lovely little old lady, with her “hair” cocked a bit like a jaunty hat, said to Paul, “When did you die?” This question caught my attention by the lapels and turned my head as Paul hesitantly replied, “Well…I haven’t yet.” A statement, that seemed to linger on the cusp of a question, as if she might know something that we did not.

She smiled and persisted, “I know, but when did you die?” Paul, rightfully so, seemed to be at a rare loss for words, so I unhelpfully commented, “It’s on the calendar. We’re just not sure of the exact date?” Making unhelpful comments can be added to the list of what I’m good at when Paul and I interact with our adoring fans.

She seemed adequately confused by my unhelpful comment, smiled, and shuffled off to lounge on a couch under a window, while a well-fed tabby cat lay on the back cushions gazing out the window, lazily flittering its tail just above her jaunty hair. Jaunty hair, which now seemed to be positioned so as to shade her eyes from the afternoon sun, and shade her ears from Paul and I.

“When did you die?” Good question.

I have been a professor in the Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) Department at Chadron State College for 10-years, a pretty good gig that I feel quite fortunate to have. There are four full-time faculty, and several adjunct instructors, that the various FCS courses are divvied up amongst.

How we divvy the courses up is dependent upon educational background, professional experience, and personal interest. FCS is a rather broad area of study that encompasses early childhood education, nutrition, public health, workplace wellness, gerontology, human services, and a bit of sewing and cooking. A variety of skills, knowledge, and tools we humans can use in an attempt to be well across our lifespan as we crawl, trot, amble, and totter from cradle to grave.

About five years ago, one of our long-time adjuncts retired, leaving the Aging and Death course he had been teaching for many years without an instructor. Yes, there is a course called “Aging and Death”.

I was asked if I would be willing to give the course a go until we could find an adjunct, and five years later, I am still giving it a go. Going in, I never imagined that a class about getting old and dying would become my favorite course. Nor did I imagine that a bunch 20-year-olds would be interested in taking such a class, but it is full every semester.

For the course content, I have gathered information from various much-smarter-than-me-sources to cobble together what I hope to be a semesters worth of useful stuff. Hope…sometimes that’s the only hook left to hang one’s hat on. So it goes.

Us human folk seem to like stories, so the story I try to impart over the course of a semester is summed up with the acronym SCENES.

• Social Connectivity
• Cognitive Reserves
• Exercise
• Nutrition
• Emotion Navigation
• Stress Navigation

A movie is composed of various scenes, and if the majority of those scenes are of sufficient quality, the movie as a whole will most likely be enjoyable to watch and deemed a worthwhile investment of your time.

It costs money to go to a movie as well, but money comes and goes, time just goes. If one’s life were a movie, I assume one would want it to be good and to be long, to have sufficient quality and quantity. “Healthspan”, our quality of life, and “lifespan”, our quantity of life, both stand to benefit if we get our SCENES right. Good SCENES, good life.

The three components of healthspan, as expressed by Dr. Peter Attia; 1) Mind, 2) Body, and 3) Spirit, are each impacted, directly and/or indirectly, for better or for worse, dependent upon the quality, or lack thereof, of the SCENES we produce. Whereas, our lifespan, given all of the unknowns that we share space with as we move through life, is a bit more of a crapshoot.

I ask the students to think of themselves as a “Community of Yous” stretching through time. Presumably, one would want the “you” 10…20…30…40…50…or more years from now, to look back at you today appreciatively for the quality SCENES you’ve produced over the years, rather than regretfully.

We spend the semester exploring SCENES, exploring love and loss, exploring grief, exploring death with the hopes of learning how to live better.

I don’t know for certain if I remember the actual event, or if I think I remember the event because I’ve seen the pictures, and have heard the stories? Sometimes you see pictures and hear stories enough that it all begins to drift together and form what we perceive to be a memory. I don’t know if this is one of those times? I’m not sure it matters.

I suppose the only reason it might matter, to me anyway, is that if it is an actual memory, then it is my first actual memory, and if our lives are simply a composition of our experiences, and the memories of those experiences, then it is where the composition of my first chapter of life began to take shape, and where the composition of my Great-Grandfathers epilogue was nearing an end.

I do know that I was two-years old when my Great-Grandfather, Josef Gins, passed away in 1974. He was 81, born in Durningen, France, during the last decade of the 19th century. Actually, it was Durningen, Germany, when he was born. It is a small border village whose borders have shifted throughout the year’s dependent upon which country claimed victory in the latest war.

It always seemed odd to me that the location of a line on a map was all that was necessary to make him “officially” German at birth rather than “officially” French (like his parents). I have no qualms with either, but if we are to consider stereotypical proclivities and characterizations, I am more likely to knock over a glass of wine while reaching for a stein of beer than vice versa. I also look silly in a beret.

The memory in question, this first possible memory I have of this world, is of me sitting on my Great-Grandpa Josef’s lap, while he sat in his rocking chair and thumbed through a magazine. The very same rocking chair that was incinerated when our log cabin went up in flames a few years back. As David Bowie sang, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

As I was only 2 years old when this “memory” was formed, I am fairly sure that much of it has been filled in by a photograph, but I feel as though I remember seeing him lick his fingers before he turned each page of the magazine. Groundbreaking stuff (sarcasm).

Yes, my first memory, the spot in time where it seems that my tabula rasa was first scribbled upon, is of a small…slightly built…old man, licking his bony finger and turning the pages in magazine. An earth-shaking revelation (also sarcasm).

Perhaps, as two-year olds tend to explore the world with their mouths (filthy little creatures), I was simply impressed upon by the realization of another possible use for that slobbery hole in my face and grubby fingers at the end of my stubby, milky white arms? It’s as if I can hear the brain, encased in that big bobbling head atop that wee little body, say, “Well I’ll be…page turners…that’s what these things are for.”

At any rate, to this day, which is many days removed from that day on Great-Grandpa Gin’s lap, whenever I lick my fingers to turn a page, I think of him. Odd? Possibly. But to simply be “thought of”, in most any context after we are gone, seems to be more desirable than to not pass through anyone’s thoughts ever again.

Perhaps, when I am gone, memories of me will creep into my loved one’s thoughts, riding swiftly upon the thick, noxious odor of a pungently stout, yet silent, fart. As Terrance Mann said in the movie Field of Dreams, “The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”

Like the 3rd-cousin (twice removed) that you were guilted into including in your wedding, the usher of our memory into the minds of others may not be of our choosing. So it goes.

A cousin of mine was looking for some home video footage of our Grandpa, Fritz Ellis, for a project he is working on. The footage in question is from the Ellis family Christmas in 1986, Grandpa’s last Christmas, as a heart attack took him June 1, 1987 at the age of 58.

I was 14-years old when Grandpa died, and I thought 58 seemed old, now, at 51, I realize that what a 14-year-old thinks is fairly limited in scope and accuracy. One doesn’t know, what one doesn’t know, and at 14, I knew very little beyond playing baseball, pushing a lawn mower, and ogling at girls. Not necessarily in that order.

Watching the shaky home video footage of their little yellow flat-roofed house in Lignite stuffed with clatter and chatter under a wafting and waning cloud of cigarette smoke, I became aware that that wasn’t only Grandpa Fritz’s last Christmas, but it was also the last Fritz and Helen Ellis family Christmas.

One is rarely aware of such finitude in the moment, endings that come and go without a hint in the moment of never coming again. So it goes. Can one become better aware of the end of such moments? Or, probably more accurately, aware of the possibility of the end of such moments?

The ancient Stoic philosophers believed so, and they practiced what they called “premeditation malorum”, or, “premeditation of evils” for us non-Greek speakers. It is also, a bit less ominously, referred to as “negative visualization”, and, as the name implies, it is the practice of visualizing the worst-case scenario that could occur in a moment, prior to engaging in that moment.

Some see this practice as a bit morbid and depressing, but others find that it helps them be more present in the moment, to savor moments more fully, and, in the end, experience a greater degree of gratitude and a much more vivid memory of the moment and those they shared the moment with.

Would I have approached that Christmas differently if I had engaged in negative visualization before loading into our 1977 Ford Econoline and making the half-block journey to Grandpa and Grandma Ellis’s? I’d like to think so, but again, I was a knucklehead 14-year-old, so who knows if there was space amongst my limited cognitive bandwidth for such contemplation?

Side note…back in the 80’s, although Grandpa and Grandma Ellis’s house was roughly two rock throws away from ours (two rock throws at 14-years old…12 rock throws and a doctor’s visit away now), it seems we never considered walking?

Perhaps premeditation malorum is a tool you may find useful in fostering a greater degree of gratitude for moments that may, or may not be, the last of such moments? It’s kind of like dragging your feet on the merry-go-round at recess when the big kids got it spinning a bit too fast.

Premeditation malorum seems to slow the whirling world a bit and bring the faces and moments blurrily flitting by back into some semblance of focus.

Those that are concerned about robots taking over the world and subjecting us human types to lives of servitude to their robot needs, wants, and whims, obviously do not have an iRobot Roomba in their household.

Our son gave us a Roomba for Christmas last year, a labor-saving gift of the sort that one seemingly gives to parents who are seemingly deemed “aging” and thusly in need of labor saving. I took no offense. If you are offended by aging, you have a long uphill climb downhill.

The Roomba, like everything else nowadays, comes with an app. Not an ape. An ape would be useful. Cleaning gutters, grooming the dog, filling birdfeeders, peeling pesky bananas, breaking in cowboy hats…an app can’t do any of those useful things, but it can make you feel like an ape. An ape in a cage that you willingly bought and built yourself into. So it goes.

The Roomba app, the one that can’t break in cowboy hats or groom the dog, requires you to name your Roomba, so after a bit of thoughtful deliberation, I named ours Alice. Alice did such a bang-up job keeping the Brady Bunch household ship shape, I thought I’d see if her robot cousin (twice removed) was cut from a similar cloth. They are not, and 9 out of 10 Sam The Butchers prefer Alice Nelson to Alice Roomba. There always has to be at least one weirdo in every bunch.

Alice Roomba and her hoard of robots are not going to take over the world any time soon. A well-placed garden-variety kitchen chair will occupy their time long enough for you to make a sandwich (tuna on sourdough with gouda cheese…toasted) and do a load of laundry (extra spin cycle) before the superior artificial intelligence is able to free itself from that four-legged labyrinth and hunt you down.

Be advised, if you happen to be an active or retired milker of cows, and only possess and squat upon three-legged stools, I am not able to confidently deduce and declare the level of threat Alice Roomba imposes upon you and your herd.

Alternatively, if you are fresh out of chairs, a well-placed sweat sock or a shoe with dangling shoelaces will suffice in halting the menacing overthrow of your human world by Alice Roomba. In a pinch you can always just sit on the couch and lift your feet up. The same way you did when your mom was rudely interrupting the two-hours of kids programming television stations offered per week.

I say… I say…Now you’ll never know what pearl of wisdom Foghorn Leghorn imparted upon Henery the Chicken Hawk.

Fellow human types, we shall overcome the tyranny of robots and apps, and age and rage against the forces of labor-saving devices bent on making our hands and minds soft. Aging, laboring for life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, are privileges, rights, and responsibilities that some choose not to shoulder and some, by no choice of their own, are not granted.

Alice Roomba, I know what you are up to, and you are not going to get away with it.

I hope you Upstate North Dakota folks are happy, you ordered so much bitterly cold weather that the state couldn’t hold it all and some spilled over into South Dakota. Yes, I know, only -10 degrees rolled across the border, compared to the -30 you kept for your own enjoyment, but at a certain point cold is just cold.

Yes, I also know that as soon as you read that you blurted out, “-30…without the wind.” Without the wind…yeah right. As a former paperboy, making my way north along King Street from the Stevens’s to our house, my scrawny frame seemed to always be leaned into a north wind.

A wind that was often enough to make an alter boy cuss like his mother. Obscenities screamed into the cold abyss, stifled and muffled by the snot-crusted facemask and pummeled by the wind, would flutter helplessly upon the toes of my shuffling moon boots. Confession for such obscenities was never deemed necessary, they and the purveyor had suffered enough. So it goes.

Once the papers had been delivered, and I had unsaddled myself from that odd and torturous front-back Minot Daily newspaper delivery bag, I would happily head out into that same bitter cold and wind to dig snow forts with my friends for as long as the bread sacks in our moon boots managed to keep our feet warm.

A body and mind at play is much more willing to endure the elements than the same body and mind at work. What one considers “play” and “work” is somewhat subjective, and dependent upon the interests and motivations of the individual. Play can be work, work can be play, it’s all relative to the quality of the match between the activity and the individual.

David Epstein, the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, recently spoke about this match quality and how it relates to what we often refer to as “grit” in individuals. Epstein stated that, “Often what we see as grit, is actually fit.”

That is, if what the person is doing, either at work or at play, is a good fit for them it’s not grit that keeps them doing it, it’s the fact that they enjoy it. Whatever “it” is, is a good fit for them for whatever reason. Epstein explains that “grit is a state, not a trait”, which I find encouraging, as an individual’s state is much more malleable than an individual’s traits.

We’ve all tried to force square pegs into round holes, literally and figuratively, at various times in our lives. Of course, if the round hole is big enough a square peg will fit, but never without gaps of varying degrees leaving a bit of space unfilled or a bit of life unfulfilled.

Dedication, hard work, sacrifice, willpower, stick-to-it-iveness…grit…appear much more readily and in greater supply when our efforts are directed at something that is a good fit for us. They still appear when our efforts are leaned into a cold north wind, but the spurs (and language) we employ to move forward in such circumstances are a bit more pointed.

Happy New Year to you and anyone else wanting and/or needing such a year. Happy, that is, not so much new, that ship has sailed. One can obviously get new shoes, new socks, new cars, new houses, new friends, go to new places, see new faces, but within all that “new” lingers our same old sweaty feet. “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Research on happiness indicates that roughly 50 percent of our average day-to-day disposition (good, bad, or ugly) is genetic, 10 percent our environment or circumstances, and 40 percent our choices, habits, and decisions. As the saying goes, “Genetics loads the gun, but our environment pulls the trigger.”

I would add our circumstances, our choices, our habits, and our decisions to the itchy trigger finger as well. An itch that we can choose if and how we scratch, regardless of the 50 percent we were blessed or cursed with in the bowl of genetic soup we were handed.

Speaking of soup, when I was in Ireland, I made it my personal mission to test as many bowls of seafood chowder as possible. To date, Kitty O Se’s, in Kinsale, County Cork, has my Golden Shillelagh blessing for the grandest seafood chowder I have thus far burned my greedy gob on.

When Dawn was planning our family’s menu for the holidays, I declared that I was going to make Irish seafood chowder for our Christmas Eve meal. I wasn’t just going to make any old seafood chowder, I was going to attempt to match, and perhaps surpass, the bowl of goodness I feasted on at Kitty O Se’s. That being said, I suppose it would be a bit silly to set out to match the worst bowl of slop you’ve ever grazed upon.

Dawn added steak as a “side dish”, just in case the South Dakota seafood performed like a fish out of water. Also, our son doesn’t eat fish, or any other underwater dwelling creatures, and it was too late to uninvite him to dinner. So it goes.

We were fortunate enough to have both our children home for the holidays this year and enjoyed some quality time together. Time that seems so difficult to come by as the years go by. Standing in the late-night quiet of our house, light spilling from the Christmas tree, I felt a special kind of contentment that, over the years, I’ve found only comes from having our family under one roof.

And the seafood chowder? Mmmmmm…Golden Shillelagh worthy. I looked up “Mmmm” and found that it is something called a “onomatopoeia” and is defined as “an emotional expression of contentment.”

Contentment. It seems to be abound in my little world this holiday season, and for that, I am quite grateful. I am also grateful for the new socks to stuff my old feet in, the bottle of bourbon and fistful of cigars to wrap my old piehole around, and a Tushy Classic 3.0 Bidet to…well you know the aim of that south of the border spritzer.

The trigger has been pulled for a running start to “happy” in the New Year. I wish the same for you and yours in 2024.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-W.B. Yeats-

Dawn asked me a few days ago, “How’s the Christmas letter coming along?” I responded, “It’s fermenting.” Hopefully fermenting like the palate pleasing, mood lifting effervescence of one of my Uncle Tim’s finely crafted beers, and quite unlike the resulting rumblings, south of the border, that said beer sometimes provokes. But(t)…one can rarely have lightening without a bit of thunder. So it goes.

It seems that there is a tipping point somewhere in life where one ceases to desire the type of presents that can be enclosed in boxes and wrapped in paper. A point where all one desires is time. Time with family, time with friends, time…Where does it go?

They say that how we spend our time is how we spend our lives, and just as high-quality items we spend our money on last longer, quality time spent with others does the same. Longer in the moment, longer in memory. Like a one-year prescription to the jelly of the month club, “…the gift that keeps on giving on the whole year.” “That is Edward…that it is indeed.”

Dawn continues to give her prescriptions, knowledge, and skills of physical therapy to those that hobble, limp, and shuffle her way, so that they may hop, skip, and jump back to their lives and the things they enjoy spending their allotted time on.

I’m in my 10th year at Chadron State College, where each and every day of those 10-years, I have stepped on campus and whispered a grateful, “thank you” for the meaning the work I get to do brings to my life.

Sierra is still bumping around New York, making a go of it in the many fits and starts of the film industry. The recent screenwriters and actors strike gave her some time to start a photography business and focus her lens and talents on capturing a bit of her clienteles life and times. With a creative eye, like her Grandma Joann, and the gumption of her Mom, she has built an impressive portfolio of images. Snippets of time.

Jackson has completed an accident-free year of bumping around Rapid City and the Black Hills area in his brown truck, delivering a variety of necessities to the masses (personalized socks, mullet wigs, and things people are too embarrassed to purchase in person). In his free-time, which drivers for UPS are not in large supply of, he can be found “spoiling a good walk” on the golf course.

Wilson, our 2-year-old Shepsky (the apple of Dawn’s eye), is a whimsical turd who continues to test, and to thwart, any and all of my seemingly foolproof attempts at canine containment. The fool appears to be I…he being the proof. He’s a good dog (don’t tell him I said that), and a willing hiking companion with a penchant for chasing deer hither and yon, over hill and many a dale.

So…that’s a bit of how the Ellis Family has spent their time since you threw our Christmas card and letter in the burn barrel last holiday season. I hope it offered a flicker of warmth and perhaps singed an eyebrow.

If we don’t see you between this letter and the next, we wish you a very Merry Christmas, a staggeringly good New Year, and an overflowing cornucopia of time well spent.

The Ellis Family

Josh, Dawn, Sierra, Jackson, and Wilson