The Lone Prairie Blog

I’m not new to inappropriate Thanksgiving tales , but a decade ago, after significant professional degradation during this time of giving thanks, I discovered that chocolate was king and some people just deserve the side-eye. At the time, my job was creating content for clients at a marketing and website company. This company no longer exists (nor does the client’s business I am about to discuss), but I swear I had nothing to do with that turn of events. As part of my job, I

While watching my overweight cat swat his partially empty food bowl around and while looking at me accusingly, I was reminded that there are several ways a civilization can fall, some more dramatic and worthy of historians’ attention than others. I considered how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that unfortunate trajectory we are all on, in which entropy (disorder and randomness) always increases as time goes on. I also considered people who don’t put away their shopping car

In February 2006, I ordered a copy of the book A Reader’s Manifesto : An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose . Originally an essay, the author, B. R. Myers, expanded it into a tidy little book that took a swing at the growing pretentiousness in literary fiction. Mixed metaphors, odd imagery, weird word choices. I do all of those things in my own writing, but purely accidental, without any pretension that I’m literary, mind you. Myers’ book landed

I got a new Bible last week . This is kind of traumatic. You live in your Bible and it’s full of notes, bookmarks, highlights, moments of “a-ha!” in the margin—and to start over is super tough. I can think of several good reasons to do it: Your old Bible is so well used (like my mom’s) that it’s falling apart. You want a different translation. You use a new Bible each year and let the Bible be a kind of faith journal for each year. You want a Bible with some study notes or ot

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved. I don’t know how the kids did it, during the pandemic. I don’t know how they were able to learn via Zoom and online platforms. How were you able to, for example, diagram a sentence without spitballs flying overhead? How were you able to work the quadratic equation without some moron in the back row tossing freshly sharpened pencils into the ceiling tiles? How were you able to learn without textbooks, piles of paper and noteboo

Probably Scaber Stalks or Rough-Stemmed Boletes mushroom, found near the International Peace Gardens in North Dakota. Image © Julie R....