The Casper Daily Press for January 4, 1916: Wilson takes charge when mediators fail

The view from Casper, which was similar to the view expressed by Cheyenne's Leader.

The Cheyenne State Leader for January 4, 1916: Wilson to change Mexican policy

The United States, having failed to acquire Carranza's signature to the protocol, was reacting by giving Carranza what he wanted most, an American withdrawal.

From a century later, it's hard to see how this wasn't just implementing the protocol plus giving Carranza what he wanted.

The Inter Ocean disaster figured large in the press as well, as well as good fortunes for wildlife.

A Happy New Year 1867-A Happy New Year 1917. Life: January 4, 1917.

Dutch Oven Roast

One of our cows and potatoes from our garden.

New Year's Resolutions

Not everyone does these, but I do.

And I keep track of my old ones.  When I do ones for a new year, I look to see how I did on my old ones.

Which makes doing the new ones easier as I tend to find, indeed I nearly universally find, that I failed in last year's.

Sigh.

Some of that is circumstantial, maybe.  My reach on those does tend to exceed my grasp.  But on others, I'm just habituated, I guess, to the path that I'm resolving to divert and therefore, I don't.

How about you?  Do you do New Year's Resolutions, including any big ones?

The Cheyenne State Leader for January 3, 1917: Negotiations with Mexico at a hiatus

The Cheyenne State Leader ran the story a little differently, but it was still of real concern.  Negotiations with Mexico were at a hiatus.

And filings under the new Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 were so high that the Land Office had to shut its doors.

Drugs were in the headlines as well, something I wouldn't have expected in a 1917 newspaper.

The Wyoming Tribune for January 3, 1917. Things getting worse with Carranza?

Things didn't seem to be going well with the negotiations with Mexico at all.

The cartoon must have seemed to be the case to quite a few at the time, as Villa seemed quite resurgent.  But in reality Carranza was simply insistent on Mexican sovereignty.  He was dealing with two major contests to his administration at the same time, which was pretty risky, but in retrospect, he did it pretty well.

New Years Day Dinner, Casper (antelope) Cheese Steaks.

The first time, I think, I've had all four of my cast iron pans in use simulatenously.

The Local News: The Casper Record for January 2, 1917

But, the Casper paper didn't feature Mexico at all.

Indeed, I'd be disinclined to put this one up, given the stories that I've been following, but for the fact that by only putting up the Cheyenne papers that covered the story in Mexico extensively I'm giving a false impression.  In Central Wyoming, when you picked up your local paper (there were two) you might not be reading about such events at all.

Residents of Natrona County Wyoming, on this day, were reading about a railroad disaster near Thermopolis. That spot, by the way, is still bad and there's been a train wreck there within the last couple of years.

Like residents of Cheyenne, they also were reading about the weird gubernatorial spot in Arizona.  Long term residents of Wyoming would recall, however, that Wyoming had a similar episode about 20 years prior to this one.

And there were the cheery economic articles, common to Wyoming papers of this era.

The Local News: They Cheyenne Leader for January 2, 1917

The Leader was less dramatic on its news on Mexico, just noting that Mexico might be getting a "sharp warning" from the US, given the directions that negotiations were heading.

In other news, labor laws were being debated and the Sheridan police force was locked up in an empty freight car.  That's embarrassing. 

John Osborne, returned to Rawlins, was being vetted, apparently, for a VP position in 1920, showing that premature electioneering is not a new thing.

The local news, January 2, 1917: The Wyoming Tribune

Well, the holidays were over and back to work.

What did the papers have to say to Wyomingites on this day, that blury, hopeful to many, burdensome to some, first real work day of a new year?

We'll start with Cheyenne.

The Carey owned Tribune, after reminding its subscribers and advertiser to pay up all week, was starting the year off with a bolstering inspirational message at the top of its paper.

And the depressing news that it looked like things were breaking down in our negotiations with Mexico in Atlantic City.

Royal Bank of Canada merges with the Quebec bank.

On this day, in 1917.

I don't have much  more than this, on this one, other than to note that the Royal Bank of Canada is still very much around and that it's Canada's largest bank.  The merger was a business combination of two very large, and even then old, banks, with the Royal Bank of Canada being the survivor of the merger.

Camp Wilson, Texas. 1917

Camp Wilson, TX.  Copyright deposit January 2, 1917.

Where's the Rose Parade?

A question in this household first thing this morning.

But not from me.  I couldn't care less about the Rose Parade or any football associated event scheduled for the New Years weekend . . . or any weekend for that matter.  No, my plan, like yesterday's plan, was to head out for the wily goose.

Of course, today's plan is working out much like yesterday's, including for a couple of frustrating things I'll simply omit.  Yesterday I had intended that also, but ended up diverted early due to a problem that developed, and then later I dealt with the wind having blow a closed vent off my trailer.

Yes, a closed vent.  It's been really windy.

By afternoon my plans were shot so I diverted the plans and closed out 2016 by going to Confession. A good way to end the year really, and one which, I think, I'll mark as something to repeat in the future on the last day of the year, should that be a scheduling option. Then we went to Mass on the anticipatory Mass.  This morning I was reluctant to wake up my spouse by digging into what I needed to get to head out early, and as a result I know have a mission I'm supposed to accomplish.  Uff.

Anyhow, "where's the Rose Parade?"

My wife and kids watch it every year, although I'll note that my son, like me, trailed off in his interest in it over the years.

Well, as I read this morning "The Rose Parade has kept a 'Never on Sunday' tradition since 1893, the first year since the beginning of the Tournament, that New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday.

Good for them!

Sports on Sunday have been a tradition in the English speaking world back to Catholic England, so it's not really a new phenomenon.   At that time, of course, it was all amateur.  And it was one of the things, along with Christmas, that the Puritans banned during their period of crabby administration of England.

And if that doesn't tell you who should have one the war between the Parliament and the Crown. . . well the restoration of the monarchy didn't just bring back foppish costumes, doggone it.

Anyhow, I admire them still.  Give people Sunday off.  And American sports have become excessively overblown, so perhaps the Tournament of Roses can stand, on this one, not only as an example of the way things have been done, but could be done.

The 1917 Tournament East-West Football Game (The Rose Bowl). Webfoots 14, Quakers 0.

The Oregon Webfoots defeated the Penn Quakers by the score of 14–0 in the Third Tournament East West Football Game, which we know as the Rose Bowl.

Not being a football fan, I'm fairly amazed, frankly, the Rose Bowl is that old, but it is.

The game was scoreless until the third quarter when Oregon scored on a forward pass.  It did again, with a short one yard to go, in the fourth quarter.

Photograph from the Special Collections of the University of Oregon Libraries uploaded to Wikipedia and reported as Public Domain with this caption:  "If you choose to use the image, acknowledgement of the University of Oregon Libraries is requested.

University of Oregon football team, with head coach Hugo Bezdek on the right. This team was the Pacific Coast Conference champions and defeated the University of Pennsylvania in the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1917."

Looking back on '16. . . 2016 and 1916

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and auld lang syne*?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint-stoup!

and surely I'll be mine!

And we'll tak' a cup o’ kindness yet,

for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,

and pou'd the gowans fine;

But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,

sin' auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,

frae morning sun till dine;

But seas between us braid hae roar'd

sin' auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there's a hand, my trusty fiere!

and gie's a hand o' thine!

And we'll tak' a right gude-willie waught,

for auld lang syne.

Robert Burns

As anyone who has the occasional misfortune to stop in here knows, I've been detailing the events of 1916, at least since March when Pancho Villa crossed the border near Columbus New Mexico and shot the town up.

And, I always tend to track current events, but this I've bee tracking them in greater detail due to the election.

And what I can say is that 1916 and 2016 are both years that go down as, well. . . messed up.

Let's start with 2016.

The big news this past year was the General Election in  which 150 of the pundits, including myself (a pundit-lite) got everything wrong.

I started predicting long ago, maybe as far back as 2015 here (and certainly orally) that this election would be a coronation of the pantsuit princess, Hillary Clinton.

I was way wrong.

And I never in a million years thought that Donald Trump would be nominated.  I didn't take him seriously, and then I convinced myself it just wouldn't happen.

Well it sure did.

I've spilled a fair amount of electrons already doing election post mortems, but  at the end of the day what I think is the case is that the country experienced a massive populist revolt in both parties and acted to crush them.  The GOP is cautiously waiting to see what that's going to mean for it. The Democrats are pretending, Black Knight style, that it just didn't happen.  But it sure did.  Overall, the country took a big step towards a populist idea that isn't really a fully conservative one and which is one that the liberal left can't even recognize and therefore refuses to do so.  If this continues to play out in the direction that it started to the country will truly be headed in a new direction, although as with all such things the direction always takes you to a place somewhat different from where you figured it would.

Nobody really knows where this will end, but it is both scary and, perhaps in an odd way, reassuring. For the longest time the Democrats have gleefully been pretending that a revived highly left wing future was inevitable.  It isn't, and we should be relieved.  Progress, that is true progress, of every type should be welcome to everyone.  But the progress that the Democrats have been backing isn't progress but a vision of the world deeply hostile to nature.  They deserved to be whacked as a result.  That doesn't mean the GOP doesn't, it has its own deeply hostile views.  But its whacking, I suspect, is just about to commence.  A lot of that is going to be, I suspect, economic.

George F. Will recently ran an article in which he claimed that the world that Trump promises to return us to, when "America was Great", is the world of 1953.  He based that argument on the correct notation that 1953 was really the last time that the US had a "make everything" economy such as Trump is promising.  And that world of 1953 was based on a glitch.  Europe had engaged in two world wars the first half of the 20th Century that had destroyed its economy, and in the end much of Europe itself, and Asian economies were really a nonentity until the mid 1950s.  No wonder we were the world's economic engine. That world isn't returning, so we're really not going back to that, no matter where we are really going.

The Wyoming legislature, along with Utah's, once to actually go back to the economy of 1916.  1916 was the year that the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 was passed, the World War One oil boom was on, and coal was king.  And they seemingly believe that they can make this occur by legislative fiat over the wishes of the people of Wyoming combined with Trump being President.

One thing that the recent Wyoming efforts to grab the Federal domain have pointed out is how close Wyoming came to being something like Texas where all the land is privately owned and getting access to anything is based upon paying for it, or knowing somebody.  We were really lucky.  The Stock Raising Homestead Act was a good thing, to be sure, but it was already creating problems by the late 1920s and when Franklin Roosevelt acted to bring about the repeal of all three homestead acts in the 1930s he did the entire nation, and the West in particular, a huge favor.  Indeed, it was an economic and environmental favor.  We really dodged a bullet but the legislature seems intent on loading the gun and shooting us again.  The legislative effort to grab the land that has been going on against the wishes of the state's residents is shameful.  Here, however, the fact that Trump was elected probably operates against this trend as he and his appointments have not been in favor of it.

The state legislature will have a bunch of new faces in it this session.  Quite a few of the old hands left for one reason or another and this has actually continued after the general election as at least one member resigned post election.  It appears that the legislature will be even more conservative than the norm, which is pretty conservative, but also somewhat green. As this session is a general, not a budget, session, that could be interesting.

Not that it wouldn't be interesting if it was a budget session.  The price of oil seems to have more or less stabilized and the oilfields are a bit more active than they were six months ago. But anyway you look at it the boom is definitely over and if the bust isn't, something like a bust is.  The state has been struggling for months to deal with the decrease in funds and that's likely to be a major topic in the general session.

Globally the strategy of emphasizing local forces in the war on ISIL with western air support, which I was critical of, has proven fairly effective and ISIL is clearly on the decline as a quasi state force. At the same time, however, its guerilla arm, loosely made up, to say the least, is as active as ever.  2017, I fear, is likely to not be much different than 2016 in those regards.  The year closed out with one such attack in Berlin.  But it was far from the only one.  Included now in this equation are those who claim adherence to ISIL without any real ties directly to it.

All in all, therefore, we can say that 2016, while it wasn't the worst year ever, surely wasn't the best in quite a few ways.

So what about 1916?  If we were living a century ago how would we have found that year?

Well, probably not great either.

I didn't start to track day by day events in 1916 until March, when the anniversary of the Punitive Expedition and the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, occurred.   I have since then, however, and its clear that 1916 was not a great year.  Our intervention in Mexico put us in a state of near combatant in the Mexican Revolution and seemed to achieve fairly little by the year's end.  The year saw its own Presidential Election in which Wilson was able to campaign on "he kept us out of war" only to get elected and then seemingly start to contemplate entering that war more and more.  In Wyoming a series of devastating fires had terrible consequences right up until the end of the year.  The bright spot seemed to be the aforementioned Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 here, combined with a boom in agriculture and petroleum caused by World War One.  All in all, while there were some positive things about the year, a lot of people were likely glad to see 1916 go.

Sunday Morning Scene: Casper's Downtown Century Old Churches

Recently we posted an item that addressed a number of local events, riffing off of a Casper Weekly Tribune article:

Lex Anteinternet: The Casper Weekly Tribune for December 29, 1916: ...:

In very local news two locals bought the real property on North Center Street where St. Anthony's Catholic Church is located today.  The boom that the oil industry, and World War One, was causing in Casper was expressing itself in all sorts of substantial building. As we've discussed here before, part of that saw the construction of three very substantial churches all in this time frame, within one block of each other.

St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Casper Wyoming.

I thought, given that we've been focusing on the 1916 and general mid teens, of a century ago, theme, we might note the other churches that were part of this World War One era local boom.  First, some additional photos of the church noted above, from our Churches In The West blog.

 

 

Another one of the churches built in this time frame, and only one block away is the First Presbyterian Church, Casper Wyoming:

 

As noted in Churches of the West:

This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park.

The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.

And another, in the same area, is St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Casper Wyoming.
 

 

We earlier noted:

 

This traditionally styled Episcopal Church includes the office buildings for the church a meeting room, kitchen and a day school, so the interior space used for services is smaller than the large exterior might suggest.

The view featured on the bottom photograph could not be seen until recently, as a large house once stood in what is now an open area. The church is across the street from the former St. Anthony's Catholic School, which has moved to a new location across town. The church was built in 1924.

There are a few more churches located downtown, including one that predates these three. But we've included them here as they demonstrated was going on in Casper about one century ago, and yet remain very much in use today.

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world

Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur.

I know that years, as a measurement of time, are somewhat arbitrary in their calculation.  Why not have them run from June 1 to May 31, for example?

Well, we don't.  And being a calculating species, the calculations mean something.

I can honestly say that while I doubt it would be apparent to many people who know me, unless they know me very well, 2016 was one of the hardest years of my adult life.

It started off, I suppose, sometime mid winter, maybe even in December 2015. I've completely lost track of it but some time ago we had to move my mother from what I'd call a nursing home into an assisted living facility.  I thought she's like that better, and maybe in the end she did, but that was hard.  Anyhow, sometime in the middle of the winter things really began to change.  Her already impaired memory rapidly began to decline.  And then her health followed.  This was followed by endless trips to the emergency room until an honest doctor informed us the end was really here and we could just best prepare for it.  At that time, we supposed it to be days, but it became weeks, as her tough old physical self refused to go where her mind had already gone.

 

My mother, as a young adventuresome soul.

My relationship with my mother had been strained since some point in my early teens but one of the odd twists of fate that occurs in life is that my father, who stuck with her in a way that truly did honor to their Catholic marriage vows, died just as an earlier condition of her began to stabilize.  He was 62 years old at the time, nine years older than I am now, and that had been a hard thing for him. That left me and my mother in that relationship and in a lot of ways it repaired itself as a result.  Later that left me and my wife with dealing with the devastating decline in her health and mental status and we carried the ball on that, helped by my father's fantastic siblings, for years.

She finally passed away in April.

You will hear people guiltily proclaim such things to be a relief. I don't know that I've felt that in any sense so much as a vacuum, and its hard to describe.  I'm an only child and now the framework of my early life is gone in a temporal sense.  In a other worldly sense it seems more real than ever, however.  To some degree the burden of my mother's illnesses has gone and the mother I had back before I was 13 is strangely present.

In another, however, I feel like I lost both parents this year.  I hadn't really realized it but the need to take up where my father had left off when he died kept me from fully feeling the impact of his loss even though we were very close.  Filling his shoes at home was a huge job, and I never did it adequately by a long shot, but it took up a lot of the space that grief would have filled.  Now that its gone, the grief came in late with it. 

 

Me and my father at the local fish hatchery, about 1966.

January through April, therefore, was a nightmare.  Weeks thereafter weren't much better as we dealt with all the things that a death brings along.  It was a hard winter and spring.

Death didn't stop there, however.  Just before my mother died, her brother Mark died.  I didn't really know Mark and I'm not sure if I ever met him.  He was the sibling of my mother's that I knew the least about. She was quite close to her brothers and sisters but for whatever reason Mark is one that I just heard less about.  I only talked to him once in recent years and at that time it was quite clear that he was very confused, not a good sign, so old age was catching up with him.  My mother, in a state of decline, reacted not at all to it really, which I suppose was a good thing.

Locally, just as my mother started to decline one of the male relatives in my extended family did as well.  He was really the last of my father's generation or near generation of my collection of local male relatives left alive. My Uncle Bob died some time ago as had my Uncle Bill.  My Uncle Frank is very much alive be he is quite a bit younger than my father.  Joe was a contemporary of Bill's and like him a World War Two veteran.  With him, it seems to me, the last of the giants of my youth have passed on and those of us left behind can hardly measure up to them.

As if that wasn't enough two more death visitations hit before the year ended, indeed within the last few weeks. One was the death of the husband of a high school colleague of mine.  This is the second time she's lost a husband. This one passed when a blood clot developed following knee surgery, and therefore it was unanticipated.  A true tragedy that left her with two distraught teenage daughters.

The second was the odd news that my grandmother's estate in Quebec is winding down.  It's been open since the 1970s. That seems nearly impossible in the American context but it had something to do with providing money from the sale of her house in Montreal to support an uncle in a nursing home.  He's still in the nursing home so something must have been worked out, but its odd to think of.  This year, as my mother became increasingly ill, she was asking about her own mother and if she was still alive.  Now, in an odd way, her mother's estate has come back to visit us after her daughter passed on, the third of her daughters to do so.

In the spring my son graduated from high school.   That is of course a happy event, but it's hard not to be a bit self reflective about it, particularly in a year like this.  I'm not going to go into it in depth, but what it does bring to me how very, very fast we grow up and into adulthood, and for that matter how fast adulthood passes us by. At age 53 the horizon of my time here on Earth is clearly visible. That doesn't bother me all that much but it does make me realize how very poorly I compare to my father and his role as my father.  I wish I'd been that good of father to my children, but I haven't been and I'm well aware of it.

Some of that is occupational and some of it isn't.  I've come to be very much aware of that this past year as well.

Occupationally I've worked now for nearly 27 years as a trial attorney, and I'm using the term advisedly, i.e., "trial attorney".  Plaintiff's lawyers have appropriated that term as if they're the only trial attorneys that there are, but that's complete bs. There's no trial without a defense and plaintiff's lawyers are no more or less trial lawyers than defense litigators are. For that matter, I've long thought that the real trial lawyers out there are the state's prosecutors and the public defenders, both of whom are in trial all the time.

Anyhow, civil litigators, which may be a better term for trial attorneys, don't make the best spouses and parents, I think.  It's a really stressful occupation and it follows a person home everyday.  Additionally, and as I've tracked continually on this blog, civil litigators travel constantly and this means that you aren't there a lot.  I've missed birthdays of my children, spouse and late mother, via travel.  I was out of town in a trial when my daughter became quite ill as a young child and I was in trial when the outside water line froze.  All this means that my wife had to do double duty quite a few times, including times when my mother was quite sick, and that's a hard and unfair thing.  Additionally an occupation that trains you to interrogate and argue and which regards those as virtues will impact your personality at least to some degree, and probably not universally in a good way.  Looking back on it, it's pretty clear to me that my own father was much more patient and caring than I have been in the same role.  He wasn't a lawyer and he was always there.

Of course, it's easy to pin the blame on something other than on ones self, and maybe that's just it, frankly.  Probably my father was just flat out a better person than I am.  I certainly cannot be one of those people who laments the faults of his father, to be sure, as mine are much more manifest than his.  My personality may be such that I would tend to exhibit a lot of these traits no matter what, who knows?

Anyhow, given the passing of my remaining parent and the arrival in adulthood of my son, these defects have been quite glaring, in my view.  I have pondered those a fair amount.

I noted travel above and this year has had some unique travel incidents that added to the general gloom of the year.  In January 2016, just after the turn of the year, I had my 2007 Dodge D3500 develop a critical exhaust problem which required me to seek assistance immediately, which in this case meant driving all the way back to Casper in sub zero weather without stopping and, moreover without slowing down too much.  Quite the adventure that only those with diesel particulate filters would be familiar with.  The exhaust system of that now old truck had to be rebuilt.  In late summer I went to my mother's old house to pick up my son, who now lives there while attending college, so that we could go to Cody.  I had a pretrial hearing that morning and he was coming along.  It was early, early, and as he didn't come to the door, I briefly waited and then decided to go to the door and knock. Even though I have never done this before, I forgot to set the parking break and left the truck in neutral.  As I was at the front door, I heard a rolling sound and . . . to make a long story short it rolled down the block as I ran after it until what was going to happen was obvious.

 

 Sigh. . . .

And what was going to obviously happen is that it was going to hit a house.  Yes, a house.  But, oddly enough, or perhaps not, it executed a nice backwards right turn and swung off to the side of a sides street, hitting a tree and bouncing into a Subaru, which it destroyed.   My truck was pretty badly damaged but workable and I drove it to Cody that day, but not before I was made a little late by a really long delay as a real jerk of a policeman investigated the thing.  It's the second time a member of my family has had to interact with Officer Crabby who is, frankly, an asshole to deal with even when you fully admit its your fault.  He needs to retire. . . to Syria.

Anyhow, that was a bad deal but I have a lot of vehicles and so it wasn't a huge inconvenience when I was down to my Jeep, which I drive most days anyhow.

It was inconvenient when, a couple of weeks later while my Dodge was in the body shop I hit an elk with the Jeep.  Uff.

 

Ouch.

It had to be hauled into town. We were lucky that I was driving really slowly at the time, but it sure did the damage. So, at that point, I had a Jeep and my Dodge D3500 in the body shop.  Before the Jeep came out, sure enough, my wife's Tahoe went in for some fender damage it sustained in a parking lot.

No sooner had the D3500 come out of the shop and the check engine light went on.  This meant it had to go into the garage, which it did. While there it was determined that it needed a new clutch, which isn't cheap for a big truck of that type.  Went it came home it went back out in the field, hunting, next weekend and the check engine light came back on with an exhaust warning.  Usually the diesel particulate filter will burn off but it wouldn't, so it had to go into the deisel shop for that.  It was there for a long time while they worked on the exhaust and when I got it out they warned me right away that it might need new injectors but they didn't do them as they were pricey.  Well, I didn't even make it home before the light went back on. Sure enough, I needed new injectors.

To cap it off, early this month I drove to Pinedale in arctic weather and the light went back on. Fortunately, this time, it was something really minor and was back out of the shop within a day.

At some point in this vehicular saga my wife suggested that maybe I should consider looking for a new truck.  I bought this one new in 2007.  I'm really disinclined to do that as I like the truck and if I were to do it I'd have to buy a really pricey one to get the same thing I have now, a 1 ton manual transmission truck.  I'm down to Dodges, really, which is okay as that's what I like anyhow, but it's clear the options for manual transmissions are dwindling.  That actually argues for getting a replacement now, while I can, but I drive the Jeep most days and have a foolish notion in my head that at age 53 I won't ever need to buy another vehicle.

Indeed, I started the year off hoping to finish improving the Jeep to where I want it to be, which would have required adding an external tailgate rack to it and adding a winch but I gave up on that due to all the vehicle expenses.  Maybe next year. And with all the money that's now gone into the D3500, I'm keeping it.  It only has 140,000 miles on it and I figure it's good for at least another 140,000.  Besides, somewhere in this mix I'd bought new tires for it and I hardly have any miles on them.  I do regret not switching out to higher walled tires, however, as I've always found that this truck doesn't have the clearance it should.  Now that it's old, and I've done a lot of work to it, however, I'm going to definitely get higher walled tires next time around.

That's because I get that truck stuck in the snow nearly every year and have this year, while elk hunting, which of course I did this year. This is so routine for me, however, that it's not in the list of unfortunate events.  I do that every year.

Which was on one of the few days this year I was able to go hunting.

 

I've complained about this already, and if you ask my wife she'll tell you that I'm wrong, that I went hunting every weekend during big game season, but that just isn't true.  It isn't true as, for the first time in my life, I didn't draw an antelope tag.  I also didn't draw a deer tag, but of course I could and did go general.  I drew elk tags, however.

This is a matter of some frustration and part of it is my fault. I could have and should have put in for landowners tags for antelope, but I didn't.  I didn't as I wanted to be able to range over the entire area, not just the place the landowners tags pertained to, which is ironic as last year I shot an additional antelope on that very land.  But neither my son nor I drew.  Very disappointing.  And frankly it makes me a bit miffed, which I generally am not, on how licenses are apportioned.

We went general deer, but that was frustrating as Rob's goons followed us all over to make sure that we didn't step foot on private land, which I will remember next general election when he's running for reelection.  We never did, but we could have gotten a deer but for that.  But we also could have gotten one if I hadn't been so busy.

Now, a person with work in an area that's having a big down turn cannot or should not complain about being busy and I'm really not, but that was part of it.  I didn't have the time to devote to it this year like I normally do. That was a big part of my lack of success for elk as well, which I've already lamented. Added to that, when the weather finally turned to where t he elk hunting got good my son was in finals so that meant I was doing it as a solo project. That's not easy, but it also was an odd thing I hadn't really experienced since I was his age.  Indeed, it made me look back at that period when I was in university and he was here.  I kept wondering why he wasn't getting out for big game. Well, now I know, too late to appreciate it.

Being busy has, this year, added to my waist line. My weight routinely varies by about five pounds and I haven't gained weight, but I have gained girth.  This doesn't make me fat, but going into 2017 I need to do something about that.  My trousers are tight and I don't like that.  This is due, again in part, to being really busy.  If you are getting up early, working all day, and coming home tired at night you likley aren't going to get a lot of exercise.  And I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to a hotel gym.  Wait, I'm not one of those people who feels comfortable going to any gym.  This has never been a problem for me as I'm not a heavy eater, but when you are not getting a lot of exercise during the day it can start to become one.  This year I need to loose a few pounds, which is not all that easy to do really.

Somebody who has lost a few pounds is my son, which is due to the effect of living outside the house.  My wife is a good cook and its always easy to eat more of anything if you aren't the one cooking.  Now that he's living outside the home, in my mother's old house, he's cooking for himself and he's not bad, but like a lot of single adult men, you just don't feel like whipping up three big squares a day.  One will do, and that tends to be a single course meal generally.  I well recall it from when I moved to Laramie and lived on my own, although I have to say that we weren't exactly doing much fancy eating at home at that time anyhow.

As noted, he's now living in my mother's old home here in town while he attends college, which is working out well.  However, the house itself turned out to be one of the years events.  

My mother loved her house and when she became ill I kept it.  I feared, and I am certain that I am right, that if I had sold it it would have killed her.  I rented it out for awhile but for much of that time it was empty as a busy person has little time to be a landlord.  Well, neglect on my mother's part of certain things and the long passage of time of all kids mean that certain things needed to be worked upon, and one of those things was, the plumbing.  In a major way.

 

The plumbing line, in the basement.

This was totally unanticipated and not a very pleasant experience.  Fortunately insurance paid for a lot of the work. Thank goodness for insurance.

And then there was politics.

That may seem to be an odd thing to add to all of this, but I think a lot of people felt a bit out of sorts this year due to the election. The General Election turned out to be truly surreal and we're still feeling it.  The Presidential election turned out to be a sort of revolution with the voters saying no to the establishment of both parties, and for good reason, but in a sort of scary way.  Nobody ever knows where revolutions end up once they start, and we don't know yet.  Some turn out really well, such as the American Revolution.  Some turn into freaking disasters, like the French Revolution.  As the revolution isn't over, we don't know where it ends up.

Even locally it was bizarre and it continues to be. Odd gaffs kept one candidate from being reelected but didn't keep another from being elected.  Candidates and even reelected politicians resigned on an untimely basis messing up the polls and the results of the polls.  A body of the Wyoming legislature launched off on one of their occasional "don't tell me what you want, we know better than you" efforts, which hasn't fully played out yet.  It was a truly odd year.

It strikes me that all of these things are simply life.  It's just that they all occurred in a single year.  But then, they probably weren't all that bad.  The truck didn't go through a house, by the Grace of God.  The elk didn't end up in the window of the Jeep.  Insurance covered the plumbing.  So, all in all, it was probably a better year than I imagine.  

Still, I'm hoping for a better 2017.

Best Post of the Week for the Week of December of December 25, 2016

2016 exits, and 2017 begins

An introspective entry.

State student population drops

So reports the Tribune.

This is, of course, no surprise.  Particularly as a recent Tribune report noted that the population of the state had declined, albeit not by much, last year.

This is caused, of course, by the decline in the oil industry we've been experiencing over the past couple of years.  If prices stabilize at their current levels, which it seems likely they will, this decline will likely stabilize as well.

It comes, of course, at the tail end of a school construction boom that anticipated an increasing student body, not a declining one. So, what the ultimate impact of that is will be yet to be seen. We note, of course, that that the local school district has determined to close one older grade school, a decision which would not seem unrelated to this story. And given as school construction, along with highway construction, has been a major economic engine in the state, and that's winding up, this remains as a story whose full impact is very much unknown.