Microsoft Innovations: Empowering the Mobile Experience

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Microsoft is a global technology leader, constantly driving innovation and transforming the digital landscape. With cutting-edge mobile applications and cloud solutions, the company enables users to work, learn, and enjoy entertainment wherever they are.

Innovative Solutions for Business and Personal Use

Products such as Office 365 and the Azure platform have revolutionized the way both businesses and individuals operate. Microsoft’s mobile solutions provide seamless access to essential tools, ensuring productivity and connectivity on the go.

Security and Reliability

Security remains a top priority for Microsoft. Regular updates and advanced protection technologies guarantee that users’ data stays secure, whether they’re managing business tasks or accessing personal information.

Discover More

Committed to making technology accessible for everyone, Microsoft continues to innovate and grow. To explore the latest developments and learn more about their diverse range of products, visit the official website at Microsoft.

The best laid plans…

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

83224221_2504375533000175_2122483210305667072_n

Greetings from a hotel room in Elko, Nevada where I landed on Monday night to be a part of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, but have spent the first few days in Urgent Care and fighting off a terrible flu. Luckily I haven’t missed any performances and the medication is kicking in so I’m ready for a whirlwind three days of performances, but it’s just another reminder that there are things we simply can’t control, no matter how long I’ve been planning for them.

Our health is one of them for sure. And then, of course, there’s the weather. It’s always the weather. T

A few weeks ago that variable threw another wrench in my plans as I found myself holed up in Fargo during an epic blizzard. So that’s what’s this week’s column is about. That and how my darling husband is keeping it all together while I’m out telling my stories and trying to stay healthy. Thank God for him.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go blow my nose and write the next one!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Forum Communications

I spent last week across the state in the middle of a 72-hour Fargo snow day.

I arrived in front of a winter storm so epic that they gave it a name, you know, like they do hurricanes. And I suppose it deserved a name since Mother Nature added a 50 mph wind on top of 50 feet of snow and we all woke up to a regular Elsa-style eternal winter.

And so there I was, stranded inside a hotel room among the buildings of downtown Fargo, all the work I was supposed to be doing canceled, which freed me up for things like sleeping in, watching movies and eating brunch for like three hours before heading into lunch, and then supper and then cocktails and so on and so forth until it was time to sleep again.

It was just terrible. I was unnerved. Probably because I was super rested and hadn’t had this much free time since high school… I was half-tempted to start work on another degree…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

My husband answered my phone call to report that things were going just fine. Cows were fed, dogs were fed, horses were fed, cats were fed, kids were fed…

“Yeah, I’m getting so much done at home with them,” he said. At least I think that’s what he said. I could barely hear him over Edie singing the entire soundtrack to “Frozen II” at the top of her lungs in the background.

“No you’re not,” I replied, because I know the truth.

“Of course I’m not,” my darling husband declared. “All I do is make food and clean it up and make food and clean it up and make food and clean it up…”

So, yeah, everything was fed. Which isn’t an easy task, I know, especially when it means bundling up a squirmy 2-year-old who barely ever wears pants and coaxing a glamorous 4-going-on-16-year-old out of her ball gown and into snow gear in order to load them up in the old pickup and feed the cows a few bales.

The whole getting ready process alone takes a lunch break to accomplish, and that’s if one of them manages to actually stay in her snowsuit long enough to convince the other to find some socks.

“What do you mean Rosie bit Edie in the forehead?” I asked him, clutching my chest, mildly alarmed between sips of cabernet. Turns out there was a fight in the feed pickup over the silk costume gloves my husband let Edie wear outside, because girlfriend’s gotta look glam. And that, apparently annoyed her little sister…

I wondered if this was foreshadowing. And then I wondered if there were bite marks. But I didn’t ask.

Instead, I adjusted my pillows on the hotel bed, grabbed a handful of snack mix and said something like, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I wish this weather would cooperate.” (Takes a sip of wine.) “But it looks like the interstate’s closed from here to Bismarck.” (Opens new bag of Cheetos.) “It could be a while until I get on the road…” (flips through the channels on the hotel television).

And then I put him on speakerphone so I could really get comfortable while I tried my nicest Midwestern wife tactics to wrap up the phone conversation so I could catch up on episodes of “Beat Bobby Flay.”

“Well, I suppose,” I said.

“Where did you go for supper?” he asked.

“I should let you go. Sounds like you have your hands full,” I tried.

“Have you forgotten the normal volume of our lives?” he asked.

“Did I hear something crash? You should get that,” I suggested.

“Is it still blowing bad?” he asked.

And we went on like this for a while until someone or something in the house peed on the floor.

And eventually the road cleared as it always does and I pointed my car back west through the snowbanks, feeling at least five years younger and a million times grateful that I married a man who can handle all the crumbs and baling twine and bite marks so I can focus on things like work and surviving blizzards that have names I can’t remember.

If you need me, I’m home now, likely feeding or wiping something…

Actually, no, if you need me I’ll be in Elko while my husband is feeding something or wiping something. I owe him, I know. He knows it too.

See ya out there!

A New Song

Posted on January 20, 2020 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

A New Song

“If being closer to the ground, makes for softer falls, you have to be tough to stand tall.”

I was 17 years old, getting ready to move away from the ranch and out into the world when I wrote that line, feeling the pull of growing up looming over me like the nurse who calls your name and is now waiting in the doorway for you to follow her back for the diagnosis.

I knew that impending adulthood should more thrill than loom, and so there I was, behind my guitar, trying to convince myself…

“I don’t believe in fairy tales or staying young forever…”

My voice sounded higher, lighter, but surprisingly not timid and unsure like I know I felt in that studio in frigid Fargo where I recorded that song over Christmas break during college, when it seemed every other student was back home with the familiar. Almost 20 years ago.

I chose to stay away to create a piece of work that would mark the very frozen, determined and often lonesome four years I spent away at college, with long stretches of time spent traveling the Plains, singing for my supper. Wondering what to be when I grew up.

My 2005 Release

It was avoidance in the form of work. It was the same thing I did the summer after my freshman year, knowing that if I went back to the ranch, I might never leave. So I stayed to be a grown-up.

And then I blinked and I’m grown up. And the grown-up version of me listened to those words tonight, staring into the path my headlights cut on Interstate 94 headed east to where the snow is piled high up past my knees.

snowy road
I just purchased $50 worth of face cream on an impulse to try to keep the evidence from 36 years of laughing, worrying, rolling my eyes and sleeping face-down with the pillow smashed over my head from truly showing and I was trying to keep my mind off of a rolling argument my husband and I have been having for a couple months now.

When I called him to check in, the puppy had just pooped on the carpet, and one of our young daughters had stepped in it. This was no time to try to work through it again.

I let him go and decided to seek refuge in a voice that used to be so familiar to me. I rarely listen to my music after it’s produced and out in the world, unless I have to relearn something. Which always baffles people — that I would have to relearn a piece of music I wrote myself, as if once it’s down, it’s etched in my memory.

But it’s all so much more complicated than that, isn’t it?

Because we move on. We change, and along the way we pick our favorite stories to carry with us. My songs have been like that for me.

Jessie Veeder Music

I suppose sometimes relationships are like that, too. That’s why marriage can be so beautifully maddening. Because it’s a song you’re continually writing with someone who, sometimes, may be singing in a completely different key.

When I wrote those words at 17, I loved the boy who would become the man who, as I type, has likely fallen asleep in one of our kids’ beds, fully dressed, neckerchief and all, taking care of the things we love while I’m hundreds of miles away telling stories.

69440831_2560153260701570_3977398492170551296_o

Was this the fairy tale I wouldn’t let myself believe in? How could I have ever known what it would truly take to make the happily ever after that I muse and ponder and write about these days?

At least I knew then that I couldn’t know, and that’s the beauty of it all for me.

The new song? It has uncertainties, but they are changed now.

And it has more patience and apologies, good humor and messes and arguments in the kitchen.

Oh, and two daughters with the world before them, perfectly oblivious and twirling across the unswept floor.

And it sounds less like a child and more like a woman in a three-day ponytail standing next to a man in a wool cap who together believe fiercely in that fairy tale, not the one that sparkles and shines, but the one that holds on tight…

Watch for the release of my new album, “Playin’ Favorites” that celebrates the songs that influenced me in the spring.

And check out my music website,jessieveedermusic.com for a list of places I’ll be playing near you!

To be a cowboy

Posted on January 13, 2020 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

To be a Cowboy
Forum Communications

In a few short weeks, I will pack up my guitar and head for the desert in Nevada for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

It will be my second invite to this event that features cowboy singers, entertainers, makers and poets from across the country, each looking like the plains and valleys, mountains and foothills they were born to and all trying to answer and ponder the question — what does it mean to be a cowboy?

I close my eyes and I see him, my Great-Grandpa Veeder. I see him as a kid who came to settle this area with an ill father and a mother who had seven other children to care for. And so he took to it, helping to break up land, grow vegetables and raise horses for farming and threshing

I like to think that he was a man who, like the Badlands full of rocks and rattlesnakes, was not so easily tamed. And so he became the 50 mph winds, the biting, relentless horse flies, the dropping temperatures, the green grass and the rain that eventually fell with a promise that this all might work out if he was brave enough to endure it.

He couldn’t have known then that the work he was doing might someday be revered as sort of glamorous. He just took to it, like I said, and at barely 21, he bought his own place down the road and the rest is a history I walk by on my way to catch my well-broke horses or give my daughters a ride on their pony.

History like his old threshing machine that sits as a relic among the tall grasses and thorny tangle of prairie roses.

Threshing Machine .jpg

History like that humble red barn he moved in and rebuilt with his two sons, one of them my grandpa.

Barn in snow

Time has passed us by enough now that we are wondering what to do with it. Should we tear it down or rebuild it? Has there ever been a truer metaphor for this generation of ranch families?

A relic that reminds us we have entered another realm entirely. A realm where steel siding and roofing and concrete would serve us much better, just like the new tractors with GPS and Bluetooth connections that we will likely never be able to afford, no matter how hard my great-grandfather, and my grandparents and my parents, worked to get us to this place where we can ponder.

Are we cowboys? Not like him. Not like Great-Grandpa Eddie.

Cowboy

As a kid, I spent my winter nights sitting on the pink carpet of my room inside the walls of my parents’ house tucked in the hills and oak trees of a ranch that has now been in my family for over 100 years. Behind my guitar, with a pen in my hand, I would attempt to work out the mysteries of the place in which I was raised, and will myself to understand how I was meant to belong here.

guitar

I wasn’t strong enough to open gates on my own. I wasn’t patient enough to break the horses my father broke. I wasn’t gritty enough or savvy enough or ballsy enough or grown-up enough to do the very thing that I wanted to do, which was to jump in and be brave.

But I love the sound a horse makes when she’s clipping the green grass from the ground. And the smell of the clover and the way a hay bale rolls out in the winter snow behind an old feed pickup and the black line of cattle following it.

feeding

I love the creak of a saddle, the scum on an old stock tank and the bite of the wind on the hilltop and the weather that changes up here like the light and the seasons and how it feels to really be out there in it.

Knowing it. Working it. Caring so desperately about it.

winter barnyard

And so on that pink carpet, I wrote it all down. These cattle. These horses. This land and the big sky and this overwhelming sense that this might be our purpose, no matter how completely uncertain it is.

To be a cowboy.

See ya in Elko.

Click herefor a full line up of performances and where you can catch my dad and me performing.

This New Year, let a toddler inspire you…

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

This new year, let a toddler inspire you
Forum Communications

Facing down the new year, like Rosie!

Isn’t it funny how time ticking on still astounds us, regardless of how we are aware that the spinning earth moves us on into a new hour, a new day, a new week and on and on until we’re standing in a life we almost all say, we could have never imagined…

Each new year, like many of us do, I make a small list of goals I’d like to accomplish. And although I’ve gained a good solid 5 pounds eating fudge and prime rib this holiday season, I don’t like to clutter this list with things like “eat less pasta and more carrots” because, for me, that’s a daily struggle.

No, I like the goals on this list to be a bit more tangible, like spend more time with my friends, or get my children’s book done for cryin’ out loud. Those were on my list last year, along with more dancing and the same amount of pizza. As you can imagine, with two little girls, I did really good with the dancing and pizza thing and, astonishingly, I made enough progress on that book that it looks like it might be a reality for this new year.

But I’ve been playing phone tag with my across-the-state friend for about six solid months, and it’s left me wondering why on earth that is the goal I couldn’t get to? I didn’t realize that “time for friends” thing would be so unrealistic. Oh man, how adults can complicate things?

I would like to blame it on that time thing, and how it piles on us ailments and responsibilities and big complicated feelings, but above all of that is how easily we can forget that time is a gift. And there’s nothing like the holidays, that space between Christmas and New Year’s Day spent with growing kids and aging parents, to remind you of a life that’s fleeting.

Like my children will never again be 2 and 4 at Christmas. The reality struck me as I was dancing my way into the new year in my mother’s kitchen. She had the music on and her granddaughters were holding hands and twirling, sliding and stomping, skipping, clapping, giggling and shaking their tushies to the beat between the kitchen cabinets.

My 2-year-old, Rosie, is particularly into busting a move, and I found I couldn’t take my eyes off of her as she waved her hands and wiggled, demanding us all to “watch this!” And that was classic Rosie, really, living the two years of her life with absolute abandon, with a life mission to do it herself, to make a mess and to get a laugh.

Over the past week, I had been pondering and discussing what I might put on my new year list — finish the new album, declutter our living spaces, start a compost bin, save more money — but everything I came up with felt like very adult tasks that should be on my list of everyday chores, satisfying and responsible maybe, but uninspired.

Watching my young daughter in the kitchen that night, hair flying from her ponytail and into her face, feet bare, tongue out, letting her tiny body show the world what was inside her heart, I just really wished I could be her.

And that was it. Inspiration. I threw tangible to the weeds and wrote my list, not just for the new year, but for the new decade as I learn to embrace motherhood, friendships, aging and new phases.

I want to live life more like Rosie. And that looks like this:

If you want something done, do it yourself.
If you can’t get it done, holler for help.
Wake up running, but embrace your naptime/bedtime.
Worry less about what you look like and more about what you feel like.
And while you’re at it, remember: true fun is usually messy.
Ask for a taste of whatever they’re having.
Push the limits, but know when to retreat to the tent in your room for a book and blankie break.
Love. All. The. Animals.
When you do something good, make sure you know where they keep the treats.
Dance like you were made for it.