Mountrail County Promoter - Columnists

Early Deadlines
This has been another of those weeks at the Promoter. In order to accommodate the needs at our printing plant, we moved our deadline up to Friday for this week’s paper. I’m writing my column on Sunday instead of Monday and I’m going to be at the office at 8 a.m. on Monday to upload pages.
For anyone that sent something to be in the paper after Friday at 5:00 p.m., I apologize if we were not able to get it into this week’s paper. We will get it in next week’s paper unless it was time sensitive.
The bright point for me is that it will allow me to attend most of the Northwest Landowners Association’s annual meeting. When I first got the information and saw it was on a Monday, I knew there was no way I would be able to cover this meeting that is so important to so many landowners across not only Mountrail County, but also the state. That story will be in the December 24 issue of the Promoter. It also allows me to cover a few things on Tuesday that might have been impacted by the time it takes to get our pages ready to head to the printers.
That being said, I hope we don’t have to do this too often. It messes with my whole schedule and then has me spending the rest of the week confused as to what day it is.
No Phones On Thursday
Customers of RTC found themselves without phone service on Thursday. The outage affected customers throughout their service area, but just with phone service. Internet service was still available, The company posted early on their social media about the issues and kept customers updated. They had anticipated the issue being resolved either late Thursday night or Friday morning. They were able to restore  service by about midnight on Thursday, meaning we were all back in business by Friday morning.
We didn’t realize the issue at first in our office. The first indication I noticed was a message from Stanley School’s notification system that their phones were not working and how to contact either building. It wasn’t long after that Christina asked me if I was sure it wasn’t our phones as well. Sure enough, I messaged Holly at RTC and found out it was system wide.
It was really quiet in the office with no phones all day. Christina had plans to work on calling for Christmas and New Year’s greeting ads. We kept checking the phones throughout the day, hoping that maybe the problems were resolved early.
For anyone that tried to call on Thursday and just got that dead disconnect instead of any message or rings, hopefully you tried back on Friday or will reach out this week.
Congratulations Trey!
The NFR floods Las Vegas in December. I have a lot of friends who plan a trip to Vegas just to take in the NFR. That’s never been high on my “to do” list, but one Stanley cowboy may just end up changing my mind one of these days.
I saw Jodi Bohmbach’s first post about Trey at the junior NFR last week. He was competing in steer wrestling and had a pretty stellar first day. Then the posts kept coming. Round after round, Trey was successful in getting that steer to the ground. Not only that, but he was also chasing the title for the ten round aggregate score.
By the fourth day and rounds seven and eight, I found myself stalking Jodi’s Facebook to see how he was doing. Leading at the end of those rounds, I couldn’t wait to see what Saturday brought.
Then came the post on Saturday with the videos and pictures that showed the final result. Stanley, North Dakota’s Trey Bohmbach is the 2025 Ote Berry’s Junior Steer Wrestling World Championship 10-steer average champ. Trey was 48.3 on 10, and won $15,750.
Congratulations Trey! I hope I get a chance to sit down with you very soon to talk about his accomplishment.
Rodeo has been Trey’s life for about as long as I’ve known him. We talked about his trips to the junior high and high school national finals. We talked about his decision to sign with Dickinson State to be part of their rodeo program. He continues to follow his dreams and I’m betting that at some point we will see him at the NFR and we will all be cheering just as loudly then as we were this past week.
There are others of you that will remember Trey for his success on the wrestling mat for the Stanley Blue Jays. We used to joke that it was really kind of unfair for his opponent to face someone that was used to wrestling a steer to the ground.
Roller Coaster Weather Continues
Meanwhile, it looks like our roller coaster ride through winter will continue this week. After half freezing to death on Friday and Saturday, Sunday’s temperatures started to warm up nicely. Of course, that was accompanied by the winds in the morning, but still at least it was not sub-zero.
My weather app on my phone tells me that it will be 35 on Monday, 42 on Tuesday and 40 on Wednesday. That will be glorious. Thursday is supposed to drop back down to a high of one lonely degree. Then on Friday, back up to 32 before dropping to single digits again on Saturday.
True story, I wish it would pick one. I wouldn’t mind if it was somewhere around that 20 to 30 degree range for the rest of the winter. I know that is not going to happen, but a girl can dream.
I’m pretty sure that by the time Friday is over, most of the snow in my yard should have melted. That is unless we get a bunch more snow somewhere in the middle.
Also, I am not a big fan of snow, but I will certainly take that over the freezing rain we saw last week. I spent way too much time trying to put ice melt out on the sidewalks while trying not to fall on my rear. I will also point out that I don’t bounce the way I used to.