Author: cosmo

This morning I woke up really early and was surprised at how much light was in the house. Looking out over the lake– which we can see from the master bedroom– I saw an amazing full moon reflecting in the water.

When we were cross-country skiing, we stopped for a brief lunch. Pepper pulled out the food she’d packed, and I sat down beside her. “Where’s your lunch?” she asked. In answer, I dug into my jacket and found an old Lifesaver.

She thought it was so ridiculous that she took a picture of it. Contrast her carrots, blueberries, sandwich, and hummus against my energy ring:

What can I say– this is how I hike.

Open burning started this month, and I’ve seen a few smoke plumes around the valley. While that’s kind of a bummer, it does make the sunsets more spectacular. Here’s last night’s:

You can see a thin haze along the mountains across the lake. And yes, the sky was really that pink.

This is Todd.

This is the kind of stuff Todd makes:

He’s a chainsaw artist with an open-air shop behind a local gas station. Today as Pepper and I were driving past, we saw him working out there and decided to stop and meet him. It’s pretty cool art! Here’s the four-foot-tall bear he’s currently carving:

We agreed it might look pretty good on our front porch. Or this cute little guy (maybe a foot tall) inside the house somewhere?

Pepper pointed out that I’ve had fun with our chainsaw, so maybe I should get into some art. Yeah.

At lunch today, the restaurant had one of those cheesy little hometown newsletters. I saw this list of “things to be thankful for” and enjoyed it.

When I first bought my car, I think I washed it nearly weekly. It was always spotless, inside and out. But over time, as with all things, the luster faded and eventually I was washing it every few months. Then I’d only have it washed when I brought it in for an oil change (the Honda dealership washes cars).

I don’t think I’ve washed it in the past two years or so. It was so filthy that you couldn’t really even touch it. I’d rub up against it on accident, leaning into the trunk or something, and my jeans would have black smudges on them. Pepper and I would grab the inside of the trunk to close it, because touching the back of the car was so bad.

It was 45 degrees and sunny today, so I dragged out the hose and went to work. It took three washings to finally get through the dirt, but the end result was pretty nice. It’s good to see a little shine again.

A few days ago I read an article about companies who sell books “by the foot”. Apparently people sometimes want a bunch of books that just look cool in their homes, but they don’t really care what the books actually are. Since I just unboxed all of my books, I was thinking about books and thought I’d take a quick gander to find out about this crazy business. Sure enough, you can buy books by the linear foot, with various pricing depending on what you’re getting.

For example, you might want a bunch of books by color, so your bookshelf can look something like this:

Or this:

You can buy a whole bunch of books in a single color, like burgundy or black. For those people who have really fancy family rooms, perhaps a collection of “vintage” leather books would be best:

(I admit, these are actually pretty cool. They’re at least 60 years old, and up to 150 years old, according to the web site.)

Or, if you’re a less discriminate buyer, you can just order a box full of random titles.

What a strange business…

In our Colorado house, we had so many books. There were fourteen bookshelves, each about seven feet high, scattered throughout the house. And every one of them was completely filled, including double-stacking of paperbacks. Thousands upon thousands of books. It was glorious.

Before we moved to Montana, we agreed to get rid of a lot of the books. Frankly, we just weren’t going to read some of them again. And also frankly, both Pepper and I generally read e-books these days, so physical books aren’t as useful. We gathered boxes and boxes of books and donated them to the Longmont Public Library, Goodwill, and ARC. I think we probably gave away nearly two-thirds of our collection.

Still, we had a couple dozen boxes of books that we packaged, hauled to Montana, and stuffed into a closet. We kept telling ourselves “we’ll unpack them one of these days”.

Today was that day.

That single bookshelf in the conservatory has nearly all of my books. (You can’t tell in this photo, but it’s double-sided, so there are actually twice as many books.) It’s a little sad that I whittled down my collection to this. But these are the books that I might read again someday.

Pepper is busy unboxing her collection and putting them into several bookshelves elsewhere in the house. Despite telling me I needed to be more aggressive about giving away “my” books, I can’t help but notice she’s kept more than I did…

In any case, it’s nice to have books out again. Despite the convenience of e-books, there’s something special about a good old paperback.

One of the great things about being a grown-up is you can do pretty much all the things you wished you could do when you were a kid. Like buying a bag of Tootsie Pops that are only grape and cherry (the Two True Flavors).

Looks like I’m all set for another month or two…

Although our main purpose in going to Glacier over the weekend was to do some cross-country skiing, you can’t just go to Glacier to do some cross-country skiing. I took advantage of the opportunity for a few more photos of this breathtaking place.

Interestingly, it looked quite different from the last time I’d been there, a little over a month ago. There was much less snow. Here’s a shot from the same place I snapped a sunset photo in January:

Still, with lots of snow or a little snow or even no snow at all, Glacier is a magical place.

Here’s a shot of the master taking a few photos of his own:

Katie took one of me and him standing side by side taking our pictures. I’d bet good money his shot looks better than mine. I don’t know how he does it, but I aspire to be as good as him.

Julian uses an entirely different technique:

Another good day in “the park”. I love being so close to Glacier.