Friday Farming. All agriculture is local, the danger of taking agricultural advice from Reddit, and Meeting Marcus Aurelius on the prairie.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Longhorn in mixed herd, central Wyoming.  This is from this year. . . a high water year.

From the r/ranching Subreddit on, of course, Reddit:

I just inherited 1200 acres of ranch land. WTF do I do?

My father in law wants to pass on his ranch to me before he passes. He’s in bad health and for some reason decided that I would be the best of everyone to take on his property. I don’t know a god damn thing about cows or hay, having lived in a big city my whole life; but I’m a pretty good mechanic and would fix all of his equipment whenever I visited him, so I guess he likes me and he thinks I’m the best to take things over. The ranch, located in southern Wyoming, hasn’t done anything productive in the past 5 years due to FIL declining health and I have no idea what to do with it. Like the title says, it’s 1200 acres of mostly hilly sagebrush with grassy bottom land surrounded by forest land. I promised him I wouldn’t break up the land or develop it; but how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching? Can I lease the grazing property out; lease the grass land out? Just looking for any advice or recommendations. Any advice is appreciated.

Let's answer the question first, that being, "how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching?"

The answer is simple.  You don't.

Here's the reason why:

level 1

DyersvilleStLambert

·1 day ago

With only two sections, in Wyoming, I’m assuming that he wasn't a full time rancher, or that he leased a lot of land to get by. Most working Wyoming ranches are large for a reason.

So, as a starting point, what did he do with it? 1,200 acres sounds like a lot unless you've actually ranched in Wyoming, in which case, it really isn't.

19

level 2

overeducatedhick

·22 hr. ago

And to be fair, two sections in Carbon or Sweetwater Counties is different than the same area in Laramie or Albany Counties. Your mention of sagebrush suggests that you are somewhere west of Laramie. That also suggests that there are some state or federal leases that are connected to the privately owned land. How many adult cattle does (or did) he run on his place?

The truth of the matter is that, in today's operations, your mechanical abilities are among the most important skills to make a farm or ranch work.

15

level 3

DyersvilleStLambert

·18 hr. ago

True. If you are east of Cheyenne, which is really more farm country, it's one thing. Once you start heading west of Cheyenne and into Albany County, it's another. The sagebrush country of Carbon County, something else entirely. Wyoming has quite a bit of varied terrain and conditions.

None of it will support really dense stocking, however, like some other regions of the country will allow. I'd have to assume, like you, that if he was really ranching, he must have had Federal and perhaps state leases, or maybe some private leases.

As a total aside, the line "Somewhere west of Laramie" is part of one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time, which some credit with starting modern advertising. The 1923 ad for the Jordan Playboy car, which starts off with “Somewhere west of Laramie there's a broncho busting, steer roping girl who knows what I'm talking about".

Replies, from me, and some other guy.

Now, the same thread is full of advice on how this person can just move out and, yee haw, be a rancher.

Bull.

All agriculture is local.  All of it.  A grain farmer in Kansas can't walk right into a bandanna plantation in Africa and expect to make a go of it instantly.  Gardeners all over the country, if they suddenly inherited a wheat farm, would go broke.

And with animal agriculture, this is particularly true.  Ranching in Wyoming may be like ranching in Montana, but it's not like cattle farming in Arkansas.  Frankly, a Northern Plains rancher used to low grass and cold winters would have a lot better chance of being successful in Arkansas, than an Arkansas cattle farmer would of being a rancher here.

And somebody from a city, stepping into land on advice from people who don't realize that 1,200 acres doesn't cut it here as a ranch, and who have never endured our winters.

Forget it.

This property will be leased to a neighbor, or sold.

And let us discuss the injustice of things.

From when I was small, I've always wanted to ranch.  It's hard to explain these things, but I always wanted to.  It's probably one of the two "I want to be when I grow up" things in my personality.  The other one was being a soldier, which I've done.  Regarding that, by the time I was approaching graduating from high school (I graduated when I was 17 years old, not all that uncommon at the time) that was waning, but that desire was expressed by six years I spent in the National Guard.

And I have been a stockman as an adult, but I was never able to make it my full time occupation.

I came pretty close twice, once before being married, and once after, but events transpired and. . . off to the office I go.

There's a difference between being in the Regular Army (which I was for training) and being in the reserves. And there's a difference between being a part-time stockman and a full time one.  Moreover, as I'm in one of the professions, I've entered that weird part of my life, which seems to be the case for at least people in my profession, when the kids have grown up and have their own lives, and your spouse has her own job, and most of the people you meet on a daily basis are in your profession, where your private aspirations just die as other people murder them.

You don't need a stock working horse. . . you can borrow one.  Wouldn't you like to sell that old one ton stick shift and buy a nice 1/2 ton sport auto, or maybe a Jeep pickup?  You don't need to work cattle this weekend, you can get that big project done at work.

Which is why, I think, that I see so many old members of my profession carrying on into their 70s and 80s. Their actual personality died thirty years ago.  Just the shell is left.  

And in the weird way of the world, here we are.  Some urban dude who has little interest in ranching inherits a small (and it is) parcel, but one that has entertaining possibilities, and isn't really that interested, whereas some rural dude spends his whole life, more or less, in suit and tie.

M'eh.

My wife always says things work the way they do for a reason.  We're placed in one place, under one set of circumstances, because God wants us there for some reason.  We should accordingly accept it, and be happy with it and that we can do what we do, even if we don't realize whatever the good is that we're supposed to be doing by our placement. I try to accept that, but I'll confess, stuff like this frustrates me.

Via Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today Sub. September 20th, 1923:The Inquiring Photographer asks, "If you had the means to enjoy life without working would you continue to work?"

 

Best Post of the Week of January 23, 2022

The best posts of the week of January 23, 2022

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXVIII. The juvenile or nearly so femme fatale edition. Plus, the example of monarchy, Robbing trains, Expats and politics, M&M's, Tucker Carson and Carson Tucker.

Hors de combat

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXIX. The Income Inequality Edition.

Secrets of Playboy (Parts 1&2).*

Justice Stephen Breyer To Retire.

A final Republic of China/People's Republic of China Showdown? Aftermath. Part IV

What's wrong with Justices like Stephen Breyer.

I posted the above entry with the photo above, even though it goes on much longer than that, as the same photo was posted on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today thread where it received a large number of likes and lots of comments.

I'm not sure what it is, and I don't know that I want to, but I've noticed that any photos of young women on Reddit tend to go a bit wild.  It's a bit scary.

Quite awhile back I posted on the same sub a photo of a couple of young Kurdish women and some people were nearly overcome by it.  If I recall, they were simply in traditional dress, getting water.

Anyhow, I'm often surprised but what people are really fascinated by and what they are not.  This is one such example.

As an aside, one sharp-eyed observer wondered if the girl on the right was holding a cigar.  I hadn't even noticed, but frankly I think she is.  Opinions?

I have to say, the two young women look very happy.  I hope their live were happy ones.

2022 Wyoming Legislative Session. Part I.

The 2022 Election Part VI. The Early Landing Lights Edition

Why is Putin Jonesing for Ukraine?

Reddit influences the market.

From Twitter:

Shares of AMC Entertainment surge more than 200% as feverish buying continues from retail traders

On Wednesday morning, AMC Entertainment shares increased by more than 200% during premarket trading and hit more than $15 per share, nearly seven times the average analyst price target. AMC joins GameStop, BlackBerry, Bed Bath & Beyond, Etsy and a list of heavily shorted stocks that have recently seen eye-opening gains thanks to encouragement from individual investors on Reddit’s WallStreetBets. Hedge funds that are short on the other side have been rushing to cover their losses.

Photo via @Forbes

This is genuinely weird.

A Twitter comment from everybody's favorite liberal:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 

Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Anyways, Tax the Rich

Something about this just won't be good.

Resolute Progress. Weeding the Cyber Garden.

Weeding the cyber garden.

On a private theme, but harkening back to the last entry in the recent Resolutions post, I'll note the following.

I have a reddit account.

Reddit is pretty stupid.  It's like Twitter that way.  I have a Twitter account too, but it mostly serves only to popularize these blog posts.

Reddit, well I'm not sure why I got an account.  Probably because I was researching something historical and I tapped into a thread there.  There's a reddit sub on everything.

I like a couple of reddit sites, mostly those that deal with history.  But a few years ago I removed myself from posting on Asks Historians, which is moderated by people whose sole role, it seems, is to remove posts on a difficult to discern and dictatorial basis.  In checking into the moderators at that time I was quite unimpressed with their qualifications as "historians" and I packed up and left.  In that case the "historian" was a student working on a masters, I believe, in one of the highly rarified and highly irrelevant categories of any discipline that exists anymore, that one being a "woke" one that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the era upon which he was writing to start with.

About the same time I left all of the ones that dealt with the law.  I deal with that at work.  Why would I want to read about that when I'm not at work?

Today I packed up and left from a pile of reddit "subs" including an economic one on which I posted quite a bit.  Being on an economic sub was just an invitation to constant argument with people's whose views don't matter in any real sense in the larger world, but whose presence on a sub gives them a place to massage their often off centered egos and pretend like people are listening. To make it worse, economic subs tend to be flooded with teenage socialist and anarchists who aren't that in the real world, and those who have a completely Utopian view of the world such as, and I kid you note, Christian Monarchist who seek a restoration of a world that never existed.

Indeed, reddit is really characterized by its anonymity, which is true of the net in general, but particularly true of reddit.  Economic subs, for example should be populated by the fairly serious, but they tend to be populated by some who are really on the margins of the topics. Added to that, you never know if the person you are debating is a 60 year old PhD in economics or a 14 year old writing in their parents basement.  Indeed, the Socialist Anarchist Monarchist stands a good chance of being the 14 year old son of two orthopedic surgeons in suburban Detroit rather than a down and out machinist in Dresden.

I suspect, moreover, that this is true of all threads on serious topics of broad interest.  They probably all start out populated by a very few who care deeply, and know deeply, on the subject, but then the margins come in.  I'm a pretty serious Catholic, for example, but I avoid the Catholic reddit subs like the plague and from what I hear they're deeply rad trad, which probably leaves the orthodox normal in constant highly rarified debates.  The same with economic and political topics.  You may start of with the economics of subsidiarity but sooner or later you'll be debating with teenage socialists.  About that point the people who really cared about the topic leave.

Who needs it?

I sure don't.  

Needless argument only serves angst.  So, on day 2 of 2021, I've reduced my participation in that.

I also did that, I noted, by wiping out not only a whole bunch of reddit subs I had on my follow list, but a bunch of Twitter accounts I was following.  Twitter is even worse that reddit for its screaming irrelevancy but thanks to the times it's become something that is actually influential.  Our departing President hasn't helped that by posting on Twitter all of the time, but this didn't start with him.  

Following anything on Twitter is nearly a guaranteed way to end up disappointed in somebody.  For example, I like some cartoons quite a bit, and one of them is Dilbert.  I made the mistake of recently following, therefore, Scott Adams, who writes the cartoon.

I can't say I wasn't warned by eee gads, his political posts are the far edge of outright nuts.  Just a few days ago he was repeating the "won Georgia" fantasy that Donald Trump also posted on and it wasn't too long ago that Adams was insisting Trump would still be re-inaugurated on January 20.  I really don't care what Adams thinks on politics and now I wish I didn't.  I removed him a couple of days ago.  But after weeding the reddit patch, I went in and did the same on Twitter. Stuff than just causes angst has gone.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau. 

More Random Acts of Randomness

The juvenile nature of Reddit

It's worth noting that anyone exposing an absolutely absurd idea with conviction on a platform such as Reddit, let's say, for example, that Western societies return to a monarchical form of government, are probably 15 year old kids typing from their laptops.  Yes, their unyielding belief is probably genuine, but its also a the youthful delusion of somebody who takes their position in the school forensic club way too seriously. 

The Twitter Convinced.

It's also worth recalling that all Twitter political debates, aren't. They're just mutual self affirming circles.

There's dignity in distance

Likewise, people who feel they must unburden their angst on Twitter should realize that you can't get any serious advice from anonymous strangers in 200 characters.  Such stuff caused me to dump the feed of a academic historian whose feed went from fascinating World War Two topics to a non stop critique of her Mid Western relatives and the lamentations over her divorce. 

There's a place for that, but it isn't Twitter.  If you must continually critique everyone you know and continually dump on your ex spouse in public, get a blog where you can at least do it in greater volume . . .but be prepared for intelligent counters as well.

The Republic has been this divided.

The next pundit idiot who comments that "the public in this country has never been so divided" should go to library and look up Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote.

Nobody knows if a Teen Talent has any.

It doesn't matter what pundits say about a person like Billie Eilish.  She's not famous because she's a massive singing talent, she's famous as she might be an attractive 18 year old who is the midst of a massive dopey teen meltdown more befitting somebody who is 15.  People like watching that for some reason.

Nobody really knows if a teen star has any talent until they're pushing 30, quite frankly, by which time they aren't the same person they were when they were 18, for which we should all be duly thankful.

Dryer sheets are completely pointless.

You really don't need to buy them. No, you don't.

Time announces its person of the year

Thereby guaranteeing with its choice a second full day of ranting, raving, screaming, proclaiming, crying, yelling, showing, and self righteous accolades and condemnations on Twitter, Reddit and Facebook.

And then there's December 10, 2019. . .

which I predict to be a particularly silly, self affirming, self righteous, day on Twitter and Facebook, as well as certain quarters of Reddit.

And I'm not even pointing fingers, I'd note, at any one side when I say that.

So, if in terms of combating Russian influence in the election cycle, there's one simple thing you can do. . .

which is not getting your news from Twitter, Facebook or any sort of social media.

Just don't.

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, whatever.  The news there is junk.

Want news?  Get it from a local newspaper or a respected national one. And by that, I mean the print edition, not the online edition that has a zillion screaming comments.  Or get it from a respected radio source.  Get it from television, if you must (the least best alternative) but don't get it from the net.

That's the source that's easy to manipulate, which has been manipulated, and which is going to be manipulated.

The goofy cleanliness of the modern world.

The other day, I posted a thread here with this Leslie's magazine cover:

On the same day, the same cover was posted on Reddit's 100 Years Ago today subreddit, but not be my.

I posted a link to this in the comments:

As you can see, there's a Salvation Army Rest Room posted there, which caused some Reddit wag to post:

Great, now I want to see if the S.A Restroom had any hand sanitizer.

Not a good idea really. From Time Magazine, regarding hand sanitizers.

But that zeal is hurting us. According a recent World Health Organization report, our obsession with germ killing has resulted in antibiotic-resistant bacteria in every corner of the globe, thanks in part to our willy-nilly use of wide-spectrum antibiotics and, yes, our love of hand sanitizer. [Update: Many hand sanitizers, it has been rightly pointed out to us by the makers of Purell, are alcohol based and have not been named as a cause of bacterial resistance; those of documented concern are the ones that contain triclosan or triclocarbon.] But we’re not even the main problem. In the U.S. the overuse of antibiotics in farming to prevent animals from getting sick and to fatten them up is also widely fingered as the No. 1 source of drug-resistant bacteria. And every year, 2 million Americans get infections not treatable with antibiotics — and 23,000 of them die. The animals get slaughtered, but we get sick.

Yup, they're making the world more dangerous.

Now, I know that I'm swimming upstream on this one, but I absolutely despise hand sanitizers and the way they absolutely stink.  This probably reveals something to do with my upbrining and roots, but not in the way you might suspect.

Now, let me note what I'm not saying.  I'm not saying that you should eschew soap and water.  Nope, not at all. Wash your hands, normally, before you eat. Brush your darned teeth too (indeed, it might help prevent you from getting Alzheimers).  But had sanitizers . . .bah.

When I was a kid I can recall my mother, if somebody obviously sick had come over, washing this or that with Lysol, which reeks.  The theory was that this was going to kill germs, and it probably does, but it also stunk up the place and in my youthful logic I figured that whatever killer germ had come in from the sick person was now there and I'd probably breathed it in already.  Engaging in chemical warfare wasn't going to help.

And to make things plain, being a rude primitive who has hunted my whole life and who has ranched as well, I know darned well that I've injested quite a bit of raw blood of various animals simply accidentally at one time or another.  Indeed, I hvae hovel hand scar I acquired when a sage chicken scratched me and my wrist was already bloody and I didn't realize our blood had co mingled.

Don't believe me?  Here's the fresh wound after I discovered it:

I didn't die from the wound and I didn't go to the hospital or get a tetnas shot or anything. Maybe I should have.  It infected and I put idodine on it pretty early on. Probably as soon as I washed up and found it.  It's healed into a nifty looking scar in my mind.

Hey, German aristocrats wanted dueling scars. . . . I have one that I came by honestly.

Anyhow, the point is that it seemed obvious to me, perhaps because of a scientific bent at an early age, that while we don't want everything swimmiing in bacteria and cleanliness is really important in preventing infection, sterilizing the planet achieves the opposite.  Cleaning is one thing. . . soap and water is good. . . but treating our hands like we're characters in The Andromina Strain or Outbreak is over the top.

But we've become manic about in a way that's a little freaky.

One of the compulisons that Howard Hughes develoepd was to constantly wash his hands.  They were clean, but he washed them and washed them.  This was rightfully regarded as odd.  But now I see people all hte time who can't pass by a hand sanitzier dispenser without glopping it on their hands.  I've been to the hospital to visit people and been there with others who pass by one, and then another, and then another and use it every time.  I don't use it at all.  I don't intend to use by bare hands to do exploratory surgery on a person infected with ebola.  Yes, I know that I might touch something in the hospital.  If things seem to me icky enough, I'll wash my hands when I get home.  But I'm not going ot use the hand sanitzer.

For that matter, I see the stuff in offices now and during cold and flu season I'll see people use it again and again and again. I go through most flu seaons without getting the flu.  I cna't take the shot for it as I'm allergic to one of the constituents, so I'm out there just risking it old school style.  If anyoen should be using the hand santizer in a paranoid fashion, it's me, but I'm nto going to.

Just give it a break.  You're making it worse.  You need to be exposed to some regular bugs in order to have a functioning immune system. And bugs evolve a lto faster than you do, so they're outstripping any hand sanitzer on the market pretty quickly.

So say no to hand sanitizer.  Do your immune system and the planet a good turn.

Slowing down in more ways than one. . .

around here, and in other ways, that is.

It likely isn't terribly noticeable, but we've been slowing down here.

From Life Magazine, January 6, 1910.

The Great War is wrapping up and with it daily posts almost certainly will as well.  It's not that we haven't enjoyed tracking things on a frequently or even daily basis from the Columbus Raid forward, it's just that we have no intention whatsoever of going forward with that sort of thing from November 11, 1918 on.  This isn't "This Day In History" blog.  We've already done a "Today In Wyoming's History" blog and that is more than enough (and we still add to that from time to time).  Indeed that one turned into a book (which you should buy. . . Christmas is coming up).

I did give some thought to continuing on with this sort of thing after World War One to catch the end of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic but I'm not going to do it.  History doesn't work that way.  It may seem that things are compartmentalized, but they aren't.  For Americans the Punitive Expedition flowed into World War One, which was my point in keeping this blog going like I was on frequent posts, often with century old newspapers, and then the Spanish Flu came up in the midst of it and because of it, but the so did Prohibition, and so did the revelry of the Jazz Age.  That's how life really works, but that's not how a student can approach it really.

So as we "countdown" the days to the Armistice, we're also counting down the days of daily posts of the "today. . ." type entry.

You may have noticed that things have actually slowed up already. That was inevitable as the end of the war became sort of a vague running fight as it became obvious that the Central Powers were done. So there were no more big battles, and hence none to report on.  The end of World War One, in fact, began to resemble the end of World War Two, in which units simply advanced day after day, some units encountering stiff resistance, some encountering surrendering German (or Austrian, or Hungarian, or Ottoman) troops. So that sort of entry has slowed up.  After the last really huge event of the war, which has slowly started, the Kiel Rebellion, there isn't a lot to read about as the war was mostly just Allied soldiers marching on foot and getting into occasionally fights.  Things didn't happen more quickly, quite frankly, as in World War One all of the armies mostly advanced by foot still. By World War Two, just a little over two decades later, the Allies were advancing every day in 6x6 trucks, which speeds things up a lot. So blog entries here, while still daily, have actually slowed up.

But other things have as well. For one thing, after three years (also about  the start of the Punitive Expedition) we deleted our Reddit Account.

Deleting on Reddit means that the account is truly gone.  You can't restore a deleted Reddit account.  

I had really mixed feelings about Reddit to start with, and I still do.  I mostly don't like it.  It claims to be the Front Page of the Internet but it's really the 7th Grade Home Room While the Teacher is Out of the Classroom, of the Internet.  It's a mess and mostly deserving of a poor reputation.  But I did like the "100 Years Ago Today" Subreddit.  Nonetheless, we're out the door and not posting there anymore.  And we can't, as we deleted the account.

Deleting it wipes out the temptation that would have been there to keep on keeping on, and frankly I was getting sick of Reddit.  The point at which you feel you have to post on some page on the net daily like that is when you should get out and wipe out the temptation.  I can post here when I want to.  I don't have to every day and in fact there's been years prior to 2015 when months would go by between posts. I don't see that happening now (unless a certain event which I'm hopeful for does occur, in which case there will be big changes here indeed), but that is the case.  Being a blogger is supposed to be fun avocation for when you can't be outside, not a job.  A lot of Redditors don't seem to realize that.

Indeed, that's why in my view even the allegedly very best sites on Reddit are mostly junk.  They're prisoners of their moderators who take their positions all too seriously and often, if you can check up on them, have thin qualifications indeed.  The supposedly good Ask Historians subreddit, for example, mostly wipes out posts with dictatorial moderating.  If you bother to look it up, you'll find that one of the moderators is a grad student studying the historiography of the sexual history. . . something only an academic could care about and which qualifies you not to be a moderator, but  rather a barista at Starbucks, barely.  In that fashion the subreddit reflects the nature of academic historians who tend to detest historians who aren't academics, as if they own history, even though their own fields of study often render their work, frankly, utterly meaningless.  I haven't checked up on all of them and there's no reason for me too, I should note, but this is sort of emblematic of the that site, which is supposedly one of the best Reddit has to offer.

Not that I'm picking on that one alone. The History Subreddit is junk as well with no effective controls, which is typical of most of Reddit (and oddly has one of the same moderators).  The Subreddit dedicated to Catholicism is a Rad Trad war zone in which absurd flights of fancy about returning the world to a mythical golden age when the world was ruled by pacific Catholic monarchs who cared only about their people are taken seriously, even though thinking like that retards serious thinking.  The economic Subreddits are haunted by adherents to all of the ridiculously absurd adherents of every wacko version of Socialism that were the pets of 19th Century Socialist thinkers who mostly sat around Paris coffee shops smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee before switching to wine about 9:30 in the morning, discussing their latest socialist/anarchist/winniethepoohist theories before stumbling to the beds of their paramours around 1:00 p.m (although the Distributist subreddit had some thoughtful posts on it fairly regularly).   About the only thing worthwhile on Reddit is the 100 Years Ago Today sub, but as for about a week I was vaguely feeling "well I have to post there", it was time to make it so that I couldn't.  About the only thing really left worth noting was the daily death toll for British Empire nurses due to the Spanish Flu, and that was just depressing.

I thought about doing the same thing with the Twitter feed we have here, but it doesn't have the same "gosh we must post" aspect to it and is easier to ignore.  The Pinterest account associated with this blog is the same way. There is one, but it mostly serves as theoretical advertising back to this site when we have an interesting photograph in a post that we accordingly link back to that site.  Pinterest, quite frankly, is even bigger junk than Reddit, which is saying a lot, as its a random mishmash of crap.

Anyhow, this blog will in fact live on after November 11, 2018, and it will feel weird not track daily events.  But at that point my purpose for doing that will have departed and I won't keep doing that.

This returns us back to the original focus of the blog, which was theoretically research, or actually research, for a novel that was set in the Punitive Expedition.  While starting off on that it occurred to me that my desire to be accurate in the novel was difficult as there were a lot of things I just didn't know about, particularly on the details and warp and woof of daily living.  The blog has served to fill  in a lot of those details and I will say that the 100 Years Ago sub did as well (as has the great A Hundred Years Ago blog which we'll continue to lurk on and post entries back here on), but mostly accidentally for the Subreddit as I posted photographs that I started looking up in 2015 and then read the articles, mostly those posted by a Redditor called "The Alaskan" who wrote really interesting posts on it.  He dropped off, however, and then reappeared, and then dropped off, even though he's a site moderator (and that was a well moderated site. . . but one now advertising for moderators.  Another frequent poster called Michael Noir also did interesting daily posts but he suddenly dropped off as well (another reason for us to depart, as we don't want to be the only one carrying the ball on it and certainly don't want to feel obligated to do so).  Perhaps everyone in the group who posted regularly came due to World War One, and indeed the sub itself notes that it was set up to study WWI by the originator, much like this blog was set up for a similar purpose.  If so, perhaps it's served its limited purpose.

Anyhow, with the end of the Great War this thread will return more to its original format, which will also mean reduced posting. Frankly, if it carried on with daily stuff, it'd get really boring, if it hasn't already.  That may mean that the readership drops off, but we're not a subscription based newspaper with bills to pay from our daily publication, so if that's the case, so be it.

Another reason, we'd note, that this we're doing this is that life is busy and we've been busy with life.  Blogs are just a hobby and once a person feels compelled to blog they're a problem.  We've had a super busy couple of years and as a result it's been surprising that we've posted so frequently.  Btu there are things to do, and they need to be attended to.  So focus here has been dropping off.

Not that the blog will go away.  Rather, the posts will be more like they were the other day when we ran a couple on hunting during World War One. They'll go back to focusing on that earlier time, but not on an anniversary type basis.