The wife and I will be paying attention to the Powerball drawing tonight.

For the first time ever.

Since the jackpot is so huge, and we have never done this before, we decided to buy a couple tickets before we left the SoDak state.

The gal at the Kwikee Mart could not understand that we had no idea of how to proceed. We had to read the little packet, and then go back and ask her a few more questions. And then she finally let us throw our money away.

The attendant at the first station where we first asked? Quite friendly. But they didn't sell Powerball. Only "Scratch & Lose."

His name for those games, not ours.

Some thoughts to retain from our trip to eldest son's college:

They had recently had a wildfire in the prairie lands north of Lusk. Close to the road was one lone juniper, the only green plant on the hillside of black. It was untouched, as was a neat circle of green grass immediately below its branches. How did that happen? Do its branches shed inhibiting chemicals, like sage and pine, that reduce grass growth under the tree, hence less fuel for the fire?

Did the branches shade that little circle so that the heat never reached ignition temperatures? Did dew condense under those branches and provide just enough humidity to prevent ignition there?

I got to go on one BLM prescribed burn, and ended up taking the weather data as they tried to ignite the forest. Things were going well until two itty-bitty clouds moved in front of the sun. That slight drop in temperature was enough to shut us down. The crews would torch pines and sage alike, and could never get an entire plant to burn, much less spread like wildfire.

Sometimes fire is so finicky.

And other times, it does what it will, and nothing will impede it.

We could tell we were moving out into the prairie. After one break, the heelers came in with sandburs on their legs. A first for them. I haven't had to pull out sandburs for a long time.

Learned a new word from a crossword puzzle.

"Brogan."

Sorry, but I didn't know that one.

Saw a large, 3-story white house with green roof out in the middle of nothing in the prairie just west of the state line. Nothing around it. No trees, no shrubs. Seemed odd, but I realized all the old sheltered homesteads in this country once looked just as incongruous, just as empty, back before the big plantings of shelterbelts in the 1930s-50s.

Far to the south, south of Edgemont, there appeared to be a geometric array of dozens of concrete domes or quonsets. No idea what they are. Minuteman missile silos? A huge hogfarm? We had no idea.

There were longhorns wandering loose on the Fairgrounds at Edgemont. Don't think they were supposed to be.

Passed by a bluegrass festival in Hot Springs. They'll have to play loud to be heard over the cicadas.

Somebody needs to take the Highway Engineers for SoDak aside and have a talk with them.

First, they call the extra passing lanes installed on steep hills "Truck Lanes," so presumably they know the lanes are there so faster traffic can pass slow-moving semis.

So why do the extra lanes disappear one third of the way up the hill, only to reappear on the top third? This is about as stupid as can be.

Almost nobody passes the trucks on the bottom third of the hill. The trucks are still going great with all the momentum they built up as they approached the hill.

And by the time you reach the top third of the hill, it is too late to pass. By now their slow travel has already forced you to slow and shift down to keep from rear-ending their load. Near the top of the hill, the best you can do is creep by the truck with a one or two mph (that's ~1.5-3 kph for you Canadians and New Zealanders) advantage.

Really, the only place you need a passing lane is in the middle third of the hill, where SoDak does not have one.

Secondly, since we're on the subject, why call them "truck" lanes? There are more slow-moving motor homes on your roads there than there are semis.

And thirdly, the SoDak engineers should go driving in some of their neighboring states. They will discover this new invention called a "Highway Sign" that can be used to notify drivers when a passing lane is about to disappear.

Kinda handy sometimes.

Unlike their neighbor to the south, SoDak allows someone to hay their highway right-of-ways. We're not just talking about mowing them. We're talking about collecting the cut grass into those huge rolled hale bales.

Probably makes sense, but who gets the hay?