Thinking about how strong emotions can be – almost unbearable at times, and for some people, perhaps just plain unbearable – and then thinking about how small we are in the world, I can snatch a glimpse of how powerful energy is. Sometimes emotion feels like the whole universe, as if there is nothing but feeling everywhere. And all of us like that together . . . well, gee.

Thursday we go to Kingman to put flowers on my father’s grave for Memorial Day. The we is my mother and I; this is our ninth year. To tell the truth, I would prefer to go alone – to buckle the pot in the backseat and just drive down by myself. I think my mother goes out of duty, kind of like notching each trip on a tree. We get there; we put the flowers out; I take pictures; she says well no need to stay; we leave.

I’d like to stay awhile, by myself, free to cry.

LettuceHead. Yes, the name just came to me. But LettuceHead is a real person; I have heard about her and I’m fairly certain I have passed by her in a doorway as I went out and she came in. I want to blurt out my opinion of her, but that would be bad, both the blurting and the opinion. So I won’t. But this can be pulled out of me, given the way she treats a very nice lady: LettuceHead . . . is . . . a . . . jerk. Fortunately she doesn’t live in this state, or I would be so tempted to make cole slaw out of her. Ah, but then, I should call her CabbageHead.

I was reading through some articles about the price of gas and how it has impacted people’s lives when I wandered into the business section and found this article – this one RIGHT HERE. This is the first thing you’ll see:

A working Big Sky

vacation

When a rancher opens his bunkhouse to visitors, city folk from all over the world pay him to labor there.

Well, first off, I have always had this love affair with Montana, but then I feel that way about Seattle and the Oregon Coast and, in fact, the entire West Coast. I am torn. Since I don’t have the money to live such places, making a decision is not a pressing matter for me. I can build two or three houses in my imagination and plop them down in whatever setting calls me at the moment.

But, concentrating on Montana and the ranching thing, I have to say this headline made me think of The Pioneer Woman on the Internet and her lodge remodeling for first, the introducing of Thatcher to some ladies who will stay there for awhile, learning about being a rancher wife . . . and maybe end up being Thatcher’s wife. Second, the lodge can be used for cooking workshops, photoshop workshops, ranching workshops(?) and maybe bed & breakfast guests.

She has a segment in which her readers are providing input as to how the lodge should be redone, as well as following the progress. I think it’s up to the front porch part now.

This fellow in Montana has the problem of really rich people buying ranches that neighbor his, which actually adds to his working ranch expense. So, to help out financially, he is hosting groups at his bunkhouse. Depending on the season, they can participate – or not – in ranching chores. Here’s a picture of his ranch house from the site – it’s a little different from the lodge.

That’s Jami Jarrett Moody on horseback (Big ‘Nuf) and her dad and ranch owner Rick Jarrett.

The dog is named Maddy.

The Pioneer Woman calls her husband Marlboro Man and he is right good lookin’; Rick, here, seems more the speed of a lot of Americans. Gotta love the hat; it looks like it has been around some – course, then, so does Rick. His family has been working the ranch since the late 1880’s and he’s fifth-generation at The Crazy Mountain Cattle Company.

As Bette Davis was famous for saying, “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Politically speaking, that is. I think the country is going to wind up with riots. I think I am going to be witnessing history – one way or another – and I think it is going to be ugly.

Of course, it doesn’t take much political acumen to come to that conclusion.

UPDATE May 14, 2009: Noticing that people have come to this post recently following a Google search for “Mike Schatzlein blog,” I checked his blog site and found it is no more.  I had not looked at the site for quite a while since he seldom updated and I guess now, he’s not going to.

Well, you start something and it’s kind of fun and then you think, “Oh, I don’t know, do I really want to do this? Can I really say what I want to say . . . remember, it has to be in my corporate voice.”

Mike Schatzlein, CEO of Dupont Hospital down on, yes, Dupont Road in Fort Wayne began to blog recently. I stumbled across his first couple of entries when I was researching CarePages at Dupont and left a comment that I thought it was great he was blogging, or something along that line. I interviewed Dr. Schatzlein way back before Dupont opened and even got a nice tour of the building, which explains why I actually took notice of his blog in the first place.

I can still remember sitting in his temporary office talking about the hospital and I remember the PR people hurrying over to sit in on the interview. (Say, he was supposed to invite me to the opening, but I never received an invitation. Shoot! Think he forgot? Maybe he didn’t like the finished article. Hey, I thought it was pretty good and complimentary. Okay, let me step back from the emotion.) I enjoyed learning about Dupont’s aims and talking to Dr. Schatzlein about his career and change of focus from the practice of medicine to administration.

He first used the Jarvik 7 in Fort Wayne. (I THINK that’s what he told me.) Now he has written a post about Robert Jarvik and his commercial endorsement of Lipitor, which Mike and I both take – he says rather than cholesterol his primary reason is more because of “its mystical life-prolonging and mood-enhancing effects”. I started taking it for my cholesterol, learned about the possible connection with overall lifespan benefits, but did not realize it was supposed to help my mood. If it does, maybe I have a really, really grumpy baseline. Or, perhaps, he means for it to be interpreted to mean a heightening of moods, i.e. better rages, funkier tantrums, more powerful pouting?

On with it. So I saw the Jarvik post today – but it was written/published on December 6, 2007; it was his 8th post. The next two posts were on the 16th of that month and the next and last post was on January 6, 2008. I read through all his posts and, my gosh, Evan Bayh’s wife got $700,000 for serving on Anthem’s Board? Ack! that is a lot of money. Sorry for that little diversion, my comment was going to be that he refers to having basically two readers in his second December 16 post, which talks about the frequency of his posting. He said he thought it would be weekly; daily wouldn’t work. He figured it would be like a Sunday column and he told a nice little story about playing church basketball in 5th & 6th grade. I liked that. He didn’t post again until January 6th. Of course, I hadn’t checked in during this entire time, although I had thought about it. The thing was I had gotten caught up in a few of theCarePage stories.

I wonder . . . He writes very well and is, of course, very intelligent – did you know he fools around with computer innards, kind of like a surgeon? – so does he feel that he can’t be himself in the blog, has to watch what he says. Heck, that would be a burden. Maybe he didn’t think the blog thing through; I don’t know.

What I do know is I would like to hear more of his opinions – because he’s no dim bulb – and more of his personal stories – because I just plain out like that type of thing.