The Lone Prairie Blog

What if you're a writer and you have nothing to write about? One of the great joys of having an archive of thousands of blog posts from...

Somehow, on the night of the June 11, 2024 North Dakota District 30 primary election, not long after cleaning up the supper dishes, I ended up on the phone with my ISP. Concerning network issues prompted the call, leading to about an hour on the phone. “I’m trapped in a tech support fractal!” I whispered to my friend as I was put on hold by the tech support gal who admitted she was on hold with someone more knowledgeable and higher up on the tech support ladder. It was trickl

[My sisters, niece, and two grand-nieces recently took a road trip. This is our story.] Weeds poked up through the rocks in the steep dirt driveway that led to the cabin in the northern Kentucky woods. A van full of six women slowly crunched its way up the narrow drive, crushing the smaller stones under its tires with no small amount of noise. The leader of the group wisely parked the vehicle by backing in next to the cabin so that a fast escape would be easy. What did she kn

Sometimes the ideas are just not there. You have deadlines, problems to solve, and whatever else...and there's nuthin' in your head....

"Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute," Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote. What we do not want to think about, what we most want to not do, becomes an object to us. In order to know if we are successful at controlling that addiction, that obsession, that nagging doubt, we have to monitor it by...thinking about it. To defeat the object we keep it front and center, and it defeats us. It's t

How do you get people to remember your content? There are three ways we remember: Immediate memory (senses) Short-term memory (working)...