Christopher Cudworth

This muskrat emerged for some much needed fresh air and sun today. Their coats are amazing.

Anyone resources on book editing out there? I have a new book titled Nature Is Our Country Club completed. It examines the sustainability movement in the golf industry and what it teaches and means to world at large. I am looking to collaborate with an editor on proofing, editing and finalizing the manuscript before submission for publication. Work on Google Docs or Word. Message me if interested to discuss compensation if this is your bailiwick.

This is my of our dog Crash, a hound mix rescued as a . He was fostered first, adopted but neglected, and came back through the program to be welcomed into our home along with our other Lucy. Crash is and I've taken him through training to build and he's come a long way. He still "ruffs" at people and in the , but thrives in hanging out with dozens of other . He's my wife's couch buddy during the evening, stuffing his nose under her leg for winter warmth.

If you want a dog or cat portrait message me and let's chat!

I had the song Misstra Know It All by Stevie Wonder in my head this morning. The lyrics are astoundingly prescient to what's going on today.

He's a man with a plan
Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Playin' hard, talkin' fast
Makin' sure that he won't be last
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Makes a deal with a smile
Knowin' all the time that his lie's a mile
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Must be seen there's no doubt
He's the coolest one with the biggest mouth
He's Misstra Know-It-All
When you tell him he's livin' fast
He will say, "What do you know?"
If you had my kind of cash
You'd have more than one place to go, ooh
Any place he will play
His only concern is how much you'll pay
He's Misstra Know-It-All
If he shakes on a bet
He's the kind of dude that won't pay his debt, oh
He's Misstra Know-It-All
When you say that he's livin' wrong
He'll tell you he knows he's livin' right
And you'd be a stronger man
If you took Misstra Know-It-All's advice, ooh, ooh
He's the man with a plan
Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Take my word, please beware
Of a man that just don't give a care, no
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Say, he's Misstra Know-It-All
Can his mind take a pain
Take your hat off to the man who's got the plan, yeah
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Every boy take your hand out
To the man that's got the plan
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Give a hand to the man
That you know he's got the plan, hey, hey, hey
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Don't you know damn well he's got the super plan, hey, hey
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Give a hand to the man
You know damn well he's got the super plan, hey
He's Misstra Know-It-All
If we had less of him
Don't you know we'd have a better land
He's Misstra Know-It-All
So give a hand to the man
Although you've given out as much as you can
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Check his sound out, he'll tell it all, hey
You talk too much, you worry me to death, hey, hey
He's Misstra Know-It-All
He's Misstra Know-It-All

This bend in the road is where Highway 9 from MacGregor, Iowa to Decorah crests a hill offering a vista dozens of miles to the north. I love old fenceposts and barbed wire. They speak to me of years in the . Coming up from the Mississippi River basin is a long climb, and the rolling territory challenges farmers with contours that in winter still bear crop remnants glowing gold in the morning sunlight. I've driven this straight dozens and dozens of times over the years on trips back and forth to .

Order yours today here: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/golf-illinois-christopher-cudworth.html In advance of my new book titled Nature Is Our Country Club, I'm creating products in line with its topic, the State of Golf In America and beyond. Here's a fun product you can order for the in your life. A Golf Illinois image available on all kinds of fun renditions from framed to , phone cases and more!

Some fun recollections of some early tri-days gone by...and still going strong. https://werunandride.com/2024/01/27/racing-in-racine/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDLWz2lt9kA
Nothing's changed since 1983

My Life Is Good Provided to YouTube by Warner RecordsMy Life Is Good · Randy NewmanTrouble In Paradise℗ 1983 Warner Records Inc.Assistant Engineer: Bob FernandezFender Rho...

https://werunandride.com/2024/01/25/carry-on/
Excerpt: "The caregiving I offered had evolved. Following mother's passing back in 2005, I walked out of my dad's house after a visit with him and stopped on the sidewalk. "This is all up to me," I said out loud. I suddenly grasped that I was responsible for the decisions about his care and well-being. Yes, I had brothers to call on for perspective and advice, but I was the principal caregiver. I managed his medical needs, finances and social interactions. It changed me and how I looked at the emotional and practical aspects of life. You have to do what you have to do, and deal with anything that comes along. Don't be dramatic about it. Carry on."

Carry on My father Stewart and mother Emily with my daughter Emily, circa 1993. After several years straight of focusing all efforts on maintaining my late wife’s health through cancer treatments, and…

https://werunandride.com/2024/01/23/dating-as-a-widower/
As I work on this autobiographical book Competition's Son, I cover some complex issues in life. Sometimes it's a strange ride.

https://werunandride.com/2024/01/23/dating-as-a-widower/
As I work on this autobiographical book Competition's Son, I cover some complex issues in life.

Dating as a widower The term “widower” seems so loaded with tradition and history, it deserves a definition right here and now. I looked it up and this is what it says: a man who has lost his spouse by dea…

https://werunandride.com/2024/01/22/grief-and-choices/
How we move through life in the face of grief is a choice that is difficult for some. Much depends on the circumstance of our association with those involved in the art of dying.

Grief and choices At times I’ve considered whether I’m “missing a chip” when it comes to grieving lost loved ones. Over the years I’ve met people, both men and women, that can’t r…

Continuing this autobiographical work titled Competition's Son on my blog WeRunandRide. Considering the Unexplainable as it pertains to Life and Death and how we cope.

The unexplainable My son Evan Cudworth and daughter Emily Cudworth. In the wake of my wife’s passing, my children still had obligations to meet. My son was in a job out in New York. My daughter had a semester …

Food for thought on a weekend, because every day is a good day to consider the meaning of reality. While visiting London a few years back, we stopped by the natural history museum where a statue of Charles sits. I posed next to him chuckling to myself that if this were placed in a church people might well mistake it for the old man that many folks imagine as God. And that's the point. The limitations of our imaginings are what hold people back from grasping both the full meaning of and the role of in human . People that take the story in the Book of Genesis as literal with its 24-hour days and God swiping or to create , , and never get the chance to experience genuine at what actually created through . It takes and and frankly, a ton of so-called and random outcomes to produce different of living things. 99% of all life that once existed is now . That equates of course to the story, where God wipes out everything on . So the narratives aren't that far apart. What Darwin did was connect the dots of that grant us the and to work with evolutionary theory to drive , and understand the in its glorious fullness through the intersecting theories of , and every field of . But offers none of this. It is as locked and still in its usefulness as a in a museum. It explains nothing and offers nothing useful for the present or the future. It even insults the past, especially as it denies the existence of human dating much farther back than the 6-10,000 years the offers up as a complete history of the human race. Never let your be eclipsed by a truncated version of . Scripture can be reconciled to science by the path of and , just as leaders like taught us to believe through based on order. Darwin never claimed to be a god. He never set out to debunk religion. Along with Charles Russell Wallace he introduced an explanatory theory for the Origin of Species and from that, we've expanded our understanding of life through and and even the God Particle realm where matter seems to have a of its own.

As I'm focused on submitting more writing to magazines, I'm experimenting with subjects and forms. Here's a piece I invite you to read. Honest feedback is welcome. On interest. On length. On flow. On grammar and writing. The companion illustration is included.

# #

The Upper Iowa is a National Scenic River winding its way through one hundred miles of jagged country in Northeast Iowa to its destination at the Mississippi River. Pale limestone bluffs topped with dark cedar ridges usher the river on its curling course from Bluffton to Decorah. That section of river is a favorite daytrip for canoeists and kayakers, but not one to mess around on when spring floodwaters wrap wayward canoes around fallen trees. On windy days, open waters show whitecaps and weak paddlers make painful progress. It’s rough going as well when river levels fall in summer and boats get dragged across gravel. More than one loving couple has broken ties over a bad river experience.

These are the risks you take in the Driftless region where wild woods and waters test the will of adventurous souls. One doesn’t have to wander far out of town to find fun trouble. The mountain biking trails in Decorah feature enough ridge-line single tracks to tempt people who love terror and treasure the occasional tree meetup. Road cyclists strain up steep grades on the way out of town, then grind over windswept rollers that the RAGBRAI ride loves to toss in at the end. The fat tire community rides snow-packed roads in winter and kicks up dust all summer. For all others the twelve-mile Trout Run Trail throws hills at you every mile or two.

A long heritage of Luther College distance runners (as I once was) has logged thousands of miles in those hills where both human and natural mysteries abound. Petroglyphs etched into riverside walls testify to the people that once occupied the Driftless region. From deep within the earth cold water pours out of springs into rambling trout streams where native brook trout share riffles with stocked with rainbows and browns.

Into this environment I came as a college freshman with nature on my mind. I was never disappointed. There were ruffed grouse drumming in the woods. Wild turkeys burst into flight as we ran past. Hawks and pileated woodpeckers soared on valley thermals. Great-horned and barred owls called at night and the moon and stars shone brightly during our runs outside of town. In one dank ravine on an early winter day, I found a wayward Townsend Solitaire and through all these experiences I fell in love with the place.

As field biology students in college, we spent a semester exploring Driftless region flora and fauna, documenting all kinds of species in our lab notebooks. Each turn of a season called us into the field. We trapped voles and mice during subzero January weather, marveled at skunk cabbage emerging in February snow, reveled as spring wildflowers bloomed in profusion on southern hillsides, and waded into cold ponds catching frogs and salamanders. Back in the lab, we stuffed birds and mammals learning the elements of taxidermy.

Field biology class raised expectations of what could be found by keeping eyes open for new discoveries. Yet some came about by surprise. On a warm spring day in late April, I was running with a fellow steeplechaser on a road beneath some south-facing bluffs when he suddenly leaped in the air and landed six feet down the road. He turned around and pointed at something curled up in the dust. I looked closer to identify it as an Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake. “Awesome,” I called out. “A rare species for my bio journal!” My running partner was not impressed. “Come on,” he urged me. “Leave that thing alone. Scared the hell out of me.”

From that point on, I ran that stretch of road every few days hoping to find more species of snakes, but had little luck. In early May, I decided to try the route one last time. Running along with my eyes hopefully trained on the roadside, I was startled when a man dressed in a white cowboy outfit jumped out from behind a tree. He held a hammer in his hand and down the front of his shirt ran a spatter of rich, red blood. Giving his hammer a shake, he asked, “Do you wanna see my snakes?”

I wasn’t sure what his next move might be but admit to being curious about what kind of snakes he was talking about. I had a few days left in class, and my lab book was still hungry for a few new species. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see what he’d found. “Sure, whatcha got?” I answered. He raised his hammer to point at the tree behind me. I turned around and saw a ring of snakes nailed to the trunk of the tree. Blood trickled down the bark.

Taking a quick glance to make sure the Cowboy Guy was a good distance away, I stepped closer to look at his snake collection. I ticked off the species in my head: bullsnake, fox snake, corn snake, and peering farther around the tree I found a milksnake, garter snake and a large canebrake rattlesnake with a beautiful cinnamon stripe down the back. That made me sad, then a bit angry. “What the heck?” I said out loud, turning around to face him.

The Cowboy Guy grinned. I decided to leave at that moment. “Thanks for showing me your snakes,” I offered, and moved to step around him. He blocked my way, so I threw my best football fake at him and took off running toward campus. Back at the college I related my encounter to some teammates. They were skeptical at best. “Sure,” one of them teased, rubbing his chin in mock doubt. “A Cowboy Guy killing snakes…”

“If you don’t believe me,” I told them, “We’ll run back out there. I’ll show you!”

We ran back out but the Cowboy Guy was gone. All that remained on the tree was the ring of blood spots where the snakes had hung. I pointed to the blood on the bark, but my teammates ribbed me even harder. Only one of them sided with me and admitted, “That must have been weird.”

I’ve had many years to contemplate what motivated the snake-killing Cowboy Guy. Had he been raised by his family to fear and destroy snakes? Did he simply enjoy hunting them and tallying the slaughter? Or was he just whacked in the head?

Edgar Allen Poe once described the instincts of madness as the Imp of the Perverse, and perhaps that why I stayed to see the man’s reptilian quarry. “We stand upon the brink of a precipice," Poe wrote, "We peer into the abyss -- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees, our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling.”

Most of us contain the Imp of the Perverse through healthier forms of release. We run or ride, scramble or climb, swim or ski or hike to remote places to expend energy and pursue exhaustion. We welcome its release from whatever tension fills our heads. For many, these paths offer sanity and salvation. It helps us feel alive and real, not driven to hammering snakes on a tree to gain some mad sense of satisfaction. We can enter the Driftless region without letting the Imps of the Perverse take over.
But you never know.

Illustration for an upcoming magazine story submission titled Imps of the Perverse.

My of a corn snake in leaf camouflage. I never did many but the process is fascinating. You draw the image into an emulsion over a copper plate, then dip it in , which burns into the plate. Then you clean it all off, ink the plate and put it through a press to transfer the ink to the paper. This was how created black and white images for centuries. Now we can do it digitally, and even more than that, with . never stops changing. It's the of the beast. I produced this in Orville Running's class at Luther College circa 1977.

January 7 three years ago. Never forget it.

During my senior year at Luther College I studied Field Biology with Dr. David Roslien. By then I'd changed majors to Art and a minor in English, but I was eager and interested in continuing my science education. The course was arduous and detailed, and we kept field notes along with the directed studies of local marshes, ponds, prairies and other habitats in Northeast Iowa, one of the most diverse ecosystems in the Midwest. We waded into cold springs to catch frogs, trapped voles in subzero temps using mousetraps and peanut butter, traveled to Cardinal Marsh where I schooled the class on duck IDs as the resident birder in the course. We stuffed lots of birds and mammals in taxidermy, and I painted watercolors of the six or seven frog and toad species we had to collect. While I did not go on to become a scientist in life, I am a "citizen scientist" of sorts, and glad I took this class as it gave me insight on the methodologies of science and how to defend them in the face of anachronistic beliefs of religion and politics.

While I'm not a , I grew up and spending plenty of time outdoors. At one point in my career, a collector and friend commissioned me to do a series of portraits of antique . These Mason decoys were rare and classic, and in original condition. I love the of decoys and am a member now of to support the work of that organization. I had a blast painting all the details of these decoys and the surrounding cattails. Perhaps these decoys were as likely to be used in bays as on ponds or rivers, but they look plenty happy to me.

Despite what some people would tell you, one of the greatest disciplines in life is knowing when to quit. Example: Painting "plein air" requires absolute commitment to rendering what you see and the simplicity of this painted at the Susquehanna River south of Lancaster, Pennsylvania years ago shows what it means to knock off before you ruin something. This rendering took no more than fifteen minutes, and wasn't overworked, always a danger when painting outdoors.

As every will tell you, is as much (or more) a matter of and as it is . Yes, it helps to have ability, but it is how you use it that matters. This study is from an I did at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. While there, I curated their entire art collection, even sifting through a trunk of by Richard Bishop, whose estate donated his work to the Lab. I was impressed with his control of line and shading, and how he used so little to say so much. I copied his to learn how he achieved such economy of , making notes along the way to cement these in my own head and .

They're baaaaaackkk! Every December here in Illinois we welcome the return of to the Fox River. Flocks of 10-50 of these arrives to spend feeding on river bottom crustaceans, diving below the surface to glean in even the coldest conditions. In some years, the freezes all the way to the existing dams that keep the water open. By late February goldeneyes begins their fascinating breeding behavior with males throwing their heads back while emitting a high "peeeeennnnnttt!" call to impress females.

Here's Crash keeping a watch out for the New Year. Happy New Year to everyone!

During my sophomore year at , I traveled to Laboratory of Ornithology for an . Along with curating the entire collection, I drew portraits of the rare and falcons at the Hawk Barn. At that time in the late 1970s, peregrines were still under great threat from pesticide poisoning due to use of . Cornell's program helped restore this to the wild along with legislation by the including the (Happy 50th Anniversary!) while laws limiting use of certain allowed the to recover. These days, peregrines are doing far better in the Lower 48 states, even nesting in urban areas where they keep populations in check. Achieving balance and with is always worth it.

I also curated the entire collection of art, thousands of and from

Along with inch-wide cereal boxes, shrinking orange juice cartons and candy bars the size of your little finger, we can add commercials interrupting our viewing across almost every paid streaming service.

Amazon just sent this:

We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.

Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:

Sharing this I produced for a Christmas Gift Guide years ago. Happy Holidays, all you squirrels.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyBrElSoL2i/?igsh=ajZ0MGVwaTBxajE4

Merry Christmas From the Dick Handler Quartet and other famed Christian musical artists!

These Album covers are amazing 🤦‍♂️😬👌 #funnyreels #reel#reelsinstagram #reels #reelsvideo #funny #album #music #christian #fail #doingitwrong #laughs #laugh #video #fun #memes #meme #dankmemes #dank #comedy #entertainment #humor #smile #happy #smilemore #behappy #goodvibes #positivity #positivevibes #vibes

If you're seeking some "eternal" wisdom and amusement, try this on for size.

Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator Random Deepak Chopra quotes generated at www.wisdomofchopra.com

While I've written two books on thus far, a while back I produced a modestly syndicated cartoon (Local newspapers) featuring Prez, the Canada goose that made the full leap to live among humanity. In these episodes, he encounters a man of the cloth and has discussions of what and religion are all about.