Author: cosmo

During the visit from Tara and her family, we were sitting around at dinner in the courtyard and Ethan said, “This house is crazy… it feels like something out of the Clue board game.” After a moment, he added, “What if we made a Clue game in real life?” We all mused about how that might work, and you could tell the wheels were turning in his head. He took some pictures and did some work on his laptop for a while.

And then, he presented us with the cards for Clue in Real Life:

I suppose it helps that the names we’ve given to the rooms in our houses kind of sound like something from a game. Our character cards were hilarious.

They had that “old-timey” feel of the original Clue board game. We divided up the cards, just like in the game, and Ethan explained the rules.

Because we were moving between rooms throughout two houses, we agreed to use texting to tell everyone what was happening. “I’m moving to the Lounge”… “I think it was Lady Ivory in the Great Room with the Candlestick”… and so on. Since the game rules require that characters move to a room when they’re a suspect, there was a lot of hilarious running around.

Here Emi and I are reviewing our notes in the Kitchen while London peeks in from the Party Room. No cheating, London!

Eventually we all ended up in the Mud Room, because we’d all come to the conclusion that was where the crime occurred. Everyone was one or two clues away from a solution, but Tara beat us to it and successfully identified the killer.

It was a ton of fun, and definitely an original idea.

Over the years it seems like we’ve seen a lot of Dave and Jeanele. They’ve visited us in Montana many times, and we’ve visited them in Arizona… even during our mission! When they were serving a mission in Belize, we enjoyed going down to see them. We’re talking about future trips to Iceland or even Africa. This week, though, it was a little more low-key. They finished their mission two weeks ago and decided it would be a good time to go their family cabin in Wyoming and then continue north for a stay with us.

A few years ago, when they were here, they wanted to ride the Hiawatha Trail on the Montana-Idaho border. We drove out there but the weather was terrible: a cold drizzle with temperatures in the 40s. Not a good day to be biking! In the end we visited nearby Wallace and took a tour of the silver mine there, which proved to be a lot of fun. Well, this week the weather cooperated and we had an amazing day biking the trail.

Naturally we visited Glacier, and enjoyed a hike on the east side of the park.

We even saw a moose! This guy was a few hundred feet from us, munching on something in the lake.

As an aside, I sent this picture to my friend Breea, who three years ago offered a bounty to any of her kids who spotted a moose in Glacier. True to form, she promptly paid me a $3!

Pepper captured a classic shot of Dave and I taking a picture of a classic view.

Naturally there was plenty of time to sit around chatting and reminiscing. We played many games of Nerts and Skull King, amongst others, and since the cherry harvest is about to hit full swing, we gathered some of the good ones:

We always love hanging out with these two, and look forward to the next time we see them… maybe in Arizona, maybe in Iceland.

In our orchard we have almost a hundred cherry trees. Of course we care for them all the same: they’re all pruned in the spring, they’re sprayed throughout the growing season (don’t worry, it’s organic spray!), and they all get the same water and sunlight. Every year it’s interesting to see how much (or how little) fruit they produce, and at times there’s quite a bit of variation from tree to tree.

To wit: at the end of one row is a nice big healthy tree that’s shaped nicely and has a lot of leaves. By all accounts, it’s an impressive cherry tree.

And yet… there’s not a single cherry on it. Not one. I know it’s produced fruit in the past, and I have faith it’ll produce in the future. But this season, for whatever reason, it produced nothing at all.

Just down the row, maybe thirty feet away, is a pathetic tree that can’t really even be called a “tree” because it’s little more than a couple of spindly branches. It has a few leaves clinging to its twisted twigs.

But look at its fruit. There are more cherries than leaves! Despite its sad appearance, this gnarled monstrosity produced more than its beautiful, healthy neighbor.

I feel like there’s a parable or message here. Perhaps we see people who appear to be beautiful, successful, intelligent, and motivated. We expect them to say and do great things. We think their “fruit” will be plentiful and amazing. And then, for whatever reason, they do nothing.

Right beside them, there’s someone else who seems timid, defeated, incapable, or even pathetic. We don’t expect anything of them… how could they possibly amount to anything? But they grow, and flourish, and produce something stunning and magnificent.

Never, never judge someone on their appearance alone. They may have far more fruit to give than we expect.

As usual, we’ve had some spectacular sunsets of late, but tonight was particularly colorful.

Today’s a big day for America, and we celebrated by watching the annual Bigfork parade. There’s a fun small-town feel to it, where you generally know at least half a dozen people in the parade, and as you wander the streets you meet another dozen people you know in the crowd. Kyra and Pepper wore their cool cowboy hats (I’ll have to get one someday) and we were decked out in our red, white, and blue.

Afterward we went out on the lake and headed to what we call the Picnic Islands, which are a few tiny islands in Flathead Lake where we can beach our jet skis. We enjoyed a little picnic and watched the boats cruising up and down the lake.

As we were getting ready to load the jet skis onto our trailer at the dock, a man came up to me and asked if he could rent them for a little while. He was visiting from out of state as part of a family reunion, and several of his young nieces and nephews had never been on a jet ski. We agreed to let them take turns for a while, and they had a great time zooming around Yellow Bay. Our payment? Some slices of watermelon from their picnic dinner. It was fun to see their excitement and brighten their day.

We went home and ate burgers, potato salad, and deviled eggs: a proper Independence Day meal. Then we hopped online and played board games with Alex, who was home alone since the rest of his family had gone south for the week.

It was an all-around great time, and I’m always grateful for this amazing country. Happy Fourth!

Our cherries are coming along nicely.

Although it doesn’t look like we’re going to have nearly the bumper crop we did last year, we’ll doubtless have about 95 trees’ worth of cherries we can’t possibly use (we have 96 trees in all). As always, in a few weeks we’ll invite friends to come over and take some of these delicious lapins off our hands.

Every summer our friends Kim and Kelly rent a suite at the local baseball stadium (Glacier Field) and invite a bunch of friends to a Range Riders game. The Range Riders are in the Pioneer League, which isn’t quite the minor league for the Major League, but I guess players can still get called up to “The Show”. So the level of play is quite good.

Tonight was the night, and the three of us had a grand time hanging out in the suite and wandering the ballpark while the home team played a strong game and soundly defeated the visitors 9-4.

The ballpark is really nice, and the weather was just perfect for a game. There was even a firework show afterward. What a night.

Almost fifteen years ago, we bought a huge block of candy chocolate and had a grand time making all sorts of chocolate-covered things. I was in the mood for something similar, so I ordered some candy discs and today we covered a bunch of things with them.

We had caramels, raisins, nuts, Rice Krispies, marshmallows… Kyra decided to dip a few pineapple chunks, and Pepper threw some coconut into the mix. I’d forgotten how good homemade chocolate can be!

Kyra’s been visiting with us, and tonight we all sat out in the courtyard chatting and enjoying the cool summer evening. This is the view over Pepper’s shoulder at almost 10:30:

The sun had finally set, but it was still twilight well past 11:00. Love it.

It’s not truly the solstice, but I was on my way home from a big barbecue I helped organize, and decided to stop at the lake overlook and snap a selfie. It was just after 9pm, and of course the sun was still above the horizon.

I was looking through this blog and found some previous solstice posts from 2021, 2022, and 2023. And every year I marvel at how awesome it is to have such long, beautiful days…