Sweetgrass the Movie: Sweet is not the Word I’d Use

A while back I wrote about frontier life on film, and I forgot to mention another really good watch: Sweetgrass. This is not necessarily a movie for people who are romantic about small ruminants, or for people who are easily bored. It shows the real thing: how sheep are farmed en masses, the old fashioned way, on the range in Montana. 

 

Frontier Life and Survival on Film

As shocking as it may seem, we don’t have any television service. For what little time we have for sitting in front of the tube, paying for cable or satellite TV doesn’t seem worth it. We can catch up on critical news via the radio or Internet. After a while living without TV, you just don’t miss it. We do, however, enjoy a Netflix subscription, and squeeze in an hour here or there to make it partway through a disc before we hit the hay.

Here are some semi-real-life vids on farming and frontier life that we’ve enjoyed lately.

 

Fencing little by little

Wednesday night I got a wee bit of fencing prep done, I went out and measured and marked the post locations on a whole line. But then, I realized I made a math error (darn those, I seem to be challenged in that area) and had to re-do several of the marks. That’s annoying, trying to orange-spray-paint not-so-little notes to myself on roughly mowed grass, “Ignore this post marker, wrong spot, use that one over there…” Hopefully I can remember how to interpret my notations when I go back to place the posts!

I was also vexed to see that one of the wood brace posts I’d concreted-in had somehow shifted, it’s 2″ off the string line, and I had them SO perfect when I set them! Maybe some deer leaned up against it for an hour smoking a cigarette there, 😉 I don’t know; I can’t imagine how they could have moved! So, now I’m debating whether to ignore the flaw and let the fence be crooked there, or to add a 2″ board onto that post to fix the line. Hmm.

After this chore, and after wrestling Old Chessie back to the house (poor, senile dog, he tends to just wander, and fall down, in the field) we watched No Country for Old Men, a Cohen Brothers film. It was violent, which I don’t like, but still a good watch. They have such a weird style, it’s hard not to appreciate their oddity, I guess.