Big Sky Blog

Randy’s Billings Free Press continues to improve — he’s done a great job with it. He’s got a great layout/design, fresh content, images, tags, the whole thing. If you live in Billings - or will be visiting - you owe it to yourself to both read the Billings Free Press AND add it to your blogroll (or bookmarks).

The roster of all of the Big Sky Bloggers! Please let me know of anyone that I have missed, and keep me posted of new bloggers. If you ever run out of blogs to read, come on over here and just start clicking!

I’m not sure what calendar she is referring to, but Tara from Ohio has posted a blog entry about “Montana Appreciation Day!” I did some light Googling and couldn’t find any references to such, but I sure like the idea of having a day of appreciation for our wonderful state! Tara, we might have to make you an honorary Montanan :-)

UPDATE: thanks for the comment, Tara! Folks, check out some of Tara’s other calendars, such as this one for May 2008.

Remember back in February the Big Sky Blog got hacked? And I had to start from scratch, because I wasn’t able to import all of the old entries from the backup? Well, the good news is that I was finally able to do it! So everything is back, going all the way back to the beginning in August 2004. The bad news is that everything from late February 2008 until May 2008 is gone, but that’s a small price to pay to have just about everything else back.

Here’s a list of the blogs that I’m pretty sure were new to the Big Sky Blogroll since February:

Oro Y Plata: from Maleesha, who recently returned to her Montana roots after exploring life outside Big Sky Country.
Lamnidae: a lefty political blog.
Roots & Leaves: from Beatrix, a massage therapist and herbal specialist in Great Falls.
Fancy Rants: pop-culture observations and rants from Miss Fancy Rants.
Livingston Weekly: happenings in and around Livingston.
From The Front Porch: Another returning Montana native!
Charming My Life: this one is brand-spankin’ new!

If you haven’t already, go say hi to our newest blog-neighbors!

Courtesy of Craig (via David), here comes the newest Montana blogger: Evangelina Duke, aka Miss Montana 2005!

I trust that all of my fellow MT bloggers will click on over to her site and wish her well as she represents the Big Sky State!

I noticed the beautiful full moon this morning and I grabbed my camera to take a picture of it to share. I was not overly happy with the way it turned out so I wasn’t planning on posting it until Kalamity challenged Monatana bloggers to share their pictures so I decided to share it. Be warned I am not particularly happy with the way it turned out.

My Saturday morning routine is like this (with some parts excised because this is, after all, a family blog): Get out of bed, stumble into kitchen, start coffee, check email.

Usually, I don’t get much of anything — even the hate mail has slowed up some. I must be losing my touch.

Anyway, I’ve been using the Google News alerts to email me links when certain events happen. It’s very cool, and only rarely sends irrelevant items.

I expected to get at least one alert this morning, as related to my earlier post so I didn’t pay too much attention to it when I first opened the alert.

As is my habit, I’ll often click over to read something else in the middle of a post while I try to get my thoughts together. (All two of them.) So, I went back to my mail client (Thunderbird, in case you were wondering) and read the rest of the alerts.

There was one entitled, “Doctor faces murder charges for ‘mercy killings’.” Mercy killings? Ennis?

Long story short (yeah, right), it was the doctor who used to practice in our local clinic before he hung out his own shingle. I always thought of him as mainly goofy, and a borderline quack, so I guess I’m not overly surprised now that I’ve had a couple hours or so to digest the news.

My first reaction was an out loud, “Oh my God.”

The odd thing is that the incident was right around a year ago, in the same time frame as Jamie’s murder. Give or take a little bit, but given the previous murder rate (essentially zero since the beginning of time) in Ennis, that’s quite a coincidence.

In reading the article, I get the distinct impression that he knew what he was doing, and went ahead and did it.

But Bischoff said charges weren’t filed earlier because none of the family members were willing to testify against him.

[. . .]

“I gave her a shot to make her feel more comfortable and ease her suffering,” he said. “Three or four of her family members wrote me thank you letters.” (Emphasis mine. –Ed.)

This is just bizarre.

Today, George Davis will be (I guess “has been” by this time) sentenced for the June 2003 shootings in Ennis that left a young man dead, and a family without a father.

God may have mercy on him; I’m rather hoping that the court doesn’t.

I don’t know what, if any, relevance it has, but Madison County Attorney Bob Zenker used to work for Judge Loren Tucker back when Judge Loren Tucker was plain old Madison County Attorney Loren Tucker and Bob Zenker was Assitant County Attorney Bob Zenker.

Interesting, no?

(Cross-posted to mtpolitics.net.)

(Begging everyone’s indulgence, I thought I would repost this item — a week or so late from the Hebgen Quake anniversary. Originally posted here.)

Growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, the loudest and most oft-voiced lament was, “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.”

As fairly recent events have proven, this isn’t always the case.

Of course, being a relatively young western town, there are plenty of stories about exciting stuff that had already happened.