WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTOS BELOW
I stopped screaming when I was 9 or 10 years old. No one came to save when I was 3, 4, 5 years old. They still didn’t when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. So, I internalized my screams and pain and stopped asking for help. I have wailed once since then on the day I nearly lost my eye, but I did not scream. Monday was different.
Irene and I left home just before 8 a.m. We had a 9 a.m., appointment at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. She had signed up for a class to learn beadworking from HarmonyStar Straub, an Oglala Lakota artist from Crawford, Nebraska.
Yesterday, I went to pick up my ballot to vote early in the 2024 election. Waiting in lines is difficult, so it’s been beneficial that I can pick up my ballot and take it home, where I can calmly spend time choosing a candidate or picking a for/against and retain/repeal issue.
The Sugar Factory in Scottsbluff on the evening of January 11, 2024.
A few days ago, I woke up to find my computer had rebooted. When I went to recover my open files, LibreOffice went through the process, but, then, nothing. Untitled1, Untitled2, Untitled3, and so on were empty. I sat and stared at my screen. There was no anger, only sadness. I’d lost the all the posts I had been working on for the blog except one. That one is titled Book List 2024. I lost the last bit of the file, but it’s easily replaced.
I wanted to share one of my recent favorites again for this post because I find myself looking at it often and smiling.
Throughout 2023, I’ve been taking steps to spend more time outside and slowly get back into the world. I took a break from the world for a while for two reasons.
The first was that I worked the night shift and worked three 1-hour shifts on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. This doesn’t leave a lot of time to do anything else, especially when you stick to that time all week.
The second I haven’t really spoken much about until lately. I don’t know how much I’ll share, but therapy had become a detriment for me and I couldn’t really see it. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out and do things, I literally couldn’t. It wasn’t depression. It was the extreme fatigue that comes with constant flashbacks.
I think that’s all I will say for now as I wanted to share some neat photos I took. There isn’t really a long story for each one, just something cool I wanted to share and put out there.
One of my favorite places to hike is the Cedar Canyon Wildlife Management Area. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. If you sit quietly anywhere, you can hear the birds and the crickets. If you’re there on the right day, you might hear elk or see bighorn sheep.
Today, I went for a hike with my friend, Jen, who is relatively new to the Scottsbluff area. We hiked a little over five miles in total.
This is our adventure, or mis-adventure if you’ve ever hiked with me.
A robin rests on a fence post at the Scotts Bluff County Fairgrounds.
On October 28, 2013, Steve Frederick gave me the opportunity to prove I could write. As the editor of the Scottsbluff Star-Herald, he told me on my first day, “I can’t teach you how to write, you already know how to do that, but I can teach you to be a reporter.”
For nearly six years, that’s what I did. I learned about my adopted home of Scottsbluff and all of western Nebraska. I found cool stories to tell and suffered through countless boring meetings, so I could go out and tell more cool stories.
My mom had just taken me to get my hair cut. She had to run a few errands before we went back home. I was sitting in the front passenger seat. We were stopped at the red light by the police department when a friend of hers started talking to her from the next lane over. After a few minutes, her friend asked her who the boy was with her in the car.
“That’s not a boy, that’s Irene,” Mom said. She said it matter-of-factly like her friend was an idiot for not recognizing me. I was six years old.
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