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You may notice the Saratoga Sun recently won a few awards for last year’s work. As a matter of fact, we picked up 20 Pacemaker awards which garnered us the Sweepstakes Trophy for most Pacemakers earned. We could not have done this without you. Several of the stories which won awards would not have been printed without someone letting us know that an event was happening. We picked up a first place Outdoor/Environmental Reporting award because the Elk Mountain Senior Game Warden alerted us to the fact he was on the lookout for Chronic Wasting D...
A small human is standing at the side of my bed calling me names. “Daddy. Daddy ... Daddy!” My eyelids, still heavy with sleep, struggle to open. “What is it?” I ask. “I pooped,” he says. The odor that assaults my nose confirms his confession. “Change my butt,” the tiny being demands. Checking my phone I see that it’s 3 a.m. I let out a sigh as I sit up and get out of bed. My son, Jareth, will be turning 4 years old this weekend. I am amazed that I, a person who can barely keep a houseplant aliv...
For this column, I am introducing another of my sayings I find myself telling people all the time: “It is a historical fact, nobody has beaten death.” Whether the words are original from my mind or not, the meaning of it is pretty accurate. Writing a column on death is intimidating and all week long, I agonized on how to approach the subject. The reason I decided to attempt even trying was that the beginning of the year had me reading obituaries of about a half dozen people with whom I have had...
I have been told by semi-reliable sources (yes, you Carrie) that green is neutral for our school district. I will explain further because that statement is probably a bit confusing. The Encampment Tiger’s colors are red and black; the Saratoga Panthers are zinc and amethyst … oops … purple and yellow (wasn’t that the same somehow?); and the Hanna Miners are blue and orange. When fans here go to a game they may well be rooting for both teams. Around here it is entirely possible that the rooter ma...
“No matter what you do, someone always knew you would.” ~ Ami McKay The first column of the new reporter for the Saratoga Sun has often been one in which they introduce themselves to readers, but what happens when the new reporter is a familiar face or was a semi-regular subject of the former editor’s columns? When a new reporter would join the newspaper and introduce themselves in their first column, I would wonder what I would write if ever given the chance. Now I have the chance and I am st...
My folks just celebrated 53 years of marriage in the beginning of December. Wow. Over 50 years with one person. Staggering. I am proud of them for being able to take the words, “For better or worse,” to the heart. Marriage isn’t easy from my experience, which wasn’t really very long, especially compared to my parents. I can say, I found being married gave me a bond to someone that really wasn’t there when we were dating or even engaged. Marriage was a shelter for me to come to when the world was...
Amid the week after Christmas, piles of wrapping in bags, shiny paper and boxes in trash with the tags. Sad little scissors sit broken and bent, from clamshell packaging--they don’t make a dent. The lights are still sparkly, still light up the town, but pretty soon work begins in taking them down. Kids run around ‘cause they’re still out of schools, having a good old time while acting the fools. But the tots are forlorn from here to Hoboken, Christmas is gone and their new toys are broken. Uncles and Aunts and those other relations, bid farew...
The holiday Season is upon us and soon a large portion of us will be traveling. That means driving, airplanes, busses and the like. It also means hotels. Mini Bars (not the kind you are thinking of) Hotels are usually a checkpoint in your vacation. You have traveled a bit, then you get to stop, shower and shave before you continue your journey. Anyway, a fixture at most any hotel or motel is tiny soap. There are tiny shampoos and tiny conditioners too. The tiny soaps I find fun. The tiny hair products not as much so. The “fun size” bars see...
The holiday season has started. This past Thanksgiving, I realized I was enjoying this holiday again. It has taken me four years, which is about the same time I stopped living overseas. Thanksgiving was probably the toughest holiday to celebrate for many reasons when I lived out of the country. When I had a restaurant in Taiwan, because we marketed as American style cuisine, we were packed during this time. It was all hands on deck for two-to-possibly-three seatings, serving a couple hundred dinners. That sort of volume had me doing everything:...
There is a guy out there who, according to western legend, puts people to sleep by sprinkling magical sand onto people’s eyes. That guy is the Sandman. He even has a famous song: “Mr. Sandman.” Yeah, well, the Sandman needs to hire some Sandlings, because he has apparently fallen asleep on the job. Some soporific servants might be a good thing. He probably doesn’t want to add anyone though. I hear Sleep Stewards Local 101 is a tough union. Of course, all this may be tied to the supernatural sedative sand shortage of ’16. Whatever. I think it...
I have been immersing myself in the world of spirits lately. Not the Halloween ghostie spirit type, but the culture of alcohol. A project I am working on has me coming across bits of info I have found interesting on the consumption of spirits. A lot of what I have come across, is mostly historical and not so relevant to modern times. Still, more than once when looking through my books—I have over 200 books on bartending, spirits and recipes published before 1930’s and another 500 or so from the decades after—I find myself saying to mysel...
You may have noticed there are quite a few headlines on the internet designed purely to lure you into clicking on them. These story titles, dubbed “clickbait,” are designed to pique your curiosity and quite often have absolutely nothing to do with the story that comes up when you get there. Kinda like my headline here. Sorry. Not really. ; ) Hey look, I even used an emoji in one of my columns! Anyway … As much as I like to write good headlines that actually have something to do with —and are descriptive of—the stories they go with, I decided t...
I commute 40 miles one way every day I work at the Saratoga Sun. My job before had me going back and forth from Laramie. That means I have been exposed to a fair amount of driving in Wyoming, most of it in Carbon County, just going to work There are elements of being on the road in Wyoming I find so much better than any place I have ever lived and other facets that scare the hell of out me when I am driving. The Wildlife Might as well start off with my biggest fear being on the road in this...