Category: Uncategorized

Finally! After a long afternoon of working in the yard, I enjoyed a nice relaxing soak in the hot tub.

Mission accomplished!

A few weeks ago, Kyra and I did some prep work on the hot tub. At the time, things didn’t turn out so well, and we learned that the motor was kaput. After some research, I ordered a new one online. I also ordered the myriad of chemicals one needs to keep the water in balance, and then sat back to wait.

Over the last few days, the online orders have trickled in and now I have all the stuff I need. Kyra and I cleaned out the spa (again) and I installed the new motor. It proved to be all sorts of adventure, as house projects tend to be for me, but in the end everything seemed ready to go. I filled it with clean, crisp well water (again), set the temperature, and walked away.

To my delight, everything worked and the water warmed up. It’s currently sitting out there at a nice 102 degrees. I still need to play around with the chemicals, adjusting the pH and alkalinity and all that, but I’ll get it sorted out.

Tomorrow we plan to go out on the lake, and after a few hours of that cold water, I suspect a soak in the hot tub will be pretty nice. I’m looking forward to Hot tub, part 3.

When we moved to Montana last fall, the trees were just starting to turn color. The larch were absolutely stunning, practically glowing yellow against the dark green of the pine and fir. This was the view of our backyard last October:

Larch are the only coniferous trees to lose their needles during the winter months, and let me tell you, once they do… they’re ugly. They look dead, with a bunch of spindly branches.

But as spring comes around in earnest, they’re starting to bud and the light green leaves are, again, an interesting contrast against the other darker trees in the forest.

Pretty soon it’ll look like a real forest again!

One of my favorite things to do is go out to a restaurant for lunch or dinner. In the midst of all this coronavirus hullabaloo, I’ve missed that. We bought a bunch of gift cards from local restaurants, just to provide them some support while they were closed. Now that Montana (and much of the country) is re-opening, it’s time to use those cards!

On Monday, we started out with lunch at Cove Pizza in Polson. We were the only ones in the restaurant, which felt a little weird.

Then it was dinner at Outback Steakhouse in Missoula. (No, we didn’t drive an hour and a half to Missoula just for that… we happened to be in the city anyway.)

On Wednesday, Kyra and I took a jaunt up to Bigfork for lunch at Rosa’s Pizza. (But I forgot to snap a photo…)

Today we were up in Kalispell, so we dropped in at Mackenzie River Pizza.

Everyone was being respectful of social distancing and all that, so it seemed fine. I’m excited for things to (gradually) return to some sense of normalcy.

It’s been several weeks, but the house painting is finally finished. The crew we hired took a little over two weeks to handle the walls and cathedral ceiling, and then we took over to paint a few rooms without high walls. Add a few more days to “air out” the house and clear the paint fumes, and here we are. We’ve officially moved back into the main house, which was kind of funny because we had to pack up our stuff at the party house (where we’d been living), bring it across, and unpack it. Then we had to set up all the furniture again, since it had been moved and tarped during the painting. It was almost like moving again… okay, maybe not quite that bad.

In any case, after all the hassle, it looks pretty dang great. The mint green is gone, the horses are gone, and the color accents the wood trim well.

It’s taken a while– seven months, to be precise– but we’re finally making some serious progress on removing the fallen trees in our yard and the surrounding forest. Over the course of those months, I’ve been taking a few hours here and there to limb and buck the trees, leaving us with piles of branches and stacks of firewood littered all over our property.

I donated an enormous amount to a local Boy Scout troop, who sells the wood as a fundraiser. The Scoutmaster told me “We’ve learned that around here, people would rather buy firewood than Scout popcorn.” Yeah. I remember when my boys were selling Scout popcorn. The price was exorbitant, and the popcorn was probably the worst I’ve ever tasted. I mean, it was awful… so bad that when other Scouts would drop by my house to sell popcorn, I’d pay them for it but ask them not to deliver. I was happy to donate to the cause, but I didn’t want that horrid stuff.

Anyway, back to the story. The Scouts carted off two huge trailers full of firewood. My friend Austin brought his whole family over last week, and together we disassembled three entire trees and loaded up his trailer. His friend Nate also came over, and took off with a mammoth load of larch wood, which is apparently really good firewood. All told, I probably got rid of ten trees’ worth of wood.

But those pesky fallen trees were still in my yard, and no one wanted them. I hired a local contractor named Roberto to come over with his heavy equipment and take care of them. Yesterday he rolled up the driveway in a front loader and went to work. He scooped out two of the root balls in my side yard:

In the photo above, he’s doing his best to fill the enormous hole left by one of them. Then he drove around to the front yard and started on the three trees there.

It was pretty impressive to watch him cart around these multi-ton behemoths like they were pick-up-sticks.

Pepper got a turn, and she threw a couple of tree trunks around!

Just kidding. There are probably liability issues if he lets customers drive the machinery.

In the end, Roberto hauled away a total of nine dump trucks’ worth of stumps, branches, and assorted debris. We’d been accumulating it for months as we worked through the destruction. Now we have massive holes in our yard where there were once majestic towering trees.

I’m sad not to have any trees in my front yard any more, but at least we don’t have massive overturned root balls! Next step: topsoil and some grass seed, followed by a few months of patience.

Today was a beautiful sunny day, so we hopped on our jet skis and headed south to Bird Island. It’s a decent-sized chunk of rock and trees on Flathead Lake, and a friend said there’s some good cliff-jumping.

Here’s Kyra cruising toward the island at around 40mph:

I attempted a shot of our wake as we paced her, but it’s kind of tricky at that speed…

When we arrived at Bird Island, there were a couple guys there already. They’d beached their boat, and were listening to music while eating a picnic lunch from a big cooler. We chatted for a bit, and they commented about how much fun our jet skis must be. Indeed, but we can’t carry a big cooler and a boombox very easily.

We set off to explore the island. Sadly, cliff-jumping isn’t a great idea right now because the lake is still eight feet low, so all the underwater rocks are exposed.

The island is aptly named, however, because there were a ton of geese honking and flying around. We stumbled over a nest of goose eggs (mom was particularly unhappy with us, and we realized this was the reason).

After gallivanting around for a bit, we hopped back on the jet skis and explored several other nearby islands (all much smaller). We went down to Finley Point and found a house that we’d looked at a year ago on our house-hunting trip. We agreed we were glad we hadn’t bought that one.

It was another gorgeous day on the lake. And tomorrow’s supposed to be even warmer…

Back in Longmont, I’d get together with a group of friends every few weeks for a board game night. I really miss that tradition, and with recent events requiring everyone to stay at home anyway, I figured it would be fun to have a remote online game night. So I checked with four of the gang, and tonight we all jumped onto a video call and played a few games.

It was a blast, and it was especially good to see old friends I haven’t seen in seven months now. Although it’s a ton of fun to have Kyra at home, where we can play games in person, it’s nice to “hang out” with a bunch of friends a thousand miles away.

We’re having steak for dinner– yum— but I’m going to have it in “traditional” format (marinated and seared) whereas Pepper and Kyra are making steak fajitas.

I’m pretty sure my way is better, but hey, each to their own…

Today the crew put the first coat on the office…

And made a lot of progress on the ceilings and high walls. It’s hard to tell from this shot, but it’s really nice to have that old mint green changed to a very light beige.

And the dreaded horses are gone! Now we have just a large blank wall without that frightful old mural.

They should finish the rest tomorrow, and then wrap up with a few more days of work on a second coat. We’re getting there!