Month: January 2020

Today Zaque sent me this photo from his mission:

He was having some fun with “panorama mode” on a camera. And for some reason, the picture reminded me of the cover for U2’s greatest album, The Joshua Tree:

Naturally, I had to do a bit of photo editing, and I ended up with this:

I crack myself up.

Another sunny, blue-sky day. But today it was 25 degrees… practically balmy! Naturally we decided to do some more hiking, this time at Glacier National Park.

Along the way we saw this guy enjoying the sunshine:

I’ve never been to Glacier in the winter. Who travels to northern Montana in January, right? But it’s gorgeous. Everything is blanketed in snow, and there are only like a dozen people in the entire park. The roads were nicely plowed and completely empty.

We stopped several times along Lake McDonald, which was calm and provided some beautiful reflections of the shoreline and distant mountains.

Rocks along the shore had really interesting icicles; we can’t figure out how they form little balls at the bottom like this.

I think that’s Edwards Mountain on the right. (Of course Thom would know all of the mountains by name.)

Hiking was interesting– there was a ton of snow on the ground as well as the trees, so it was like walking through a crazy winter wonderland.

As the sun sank lower, it treated us to an amazing sunset over the lake. Pepper has been working on her photography skills, so here she is taking the shot:

I’d like to think my Canon DSLR does a better job than her cell phone.

It was fun to enjoy another incredible winter day together. Soon we’ll strap on some snowshoes or cross-country skis…

Sun, crystal blue skies, and 20 degrees. Seems like a perfect day for a hike.

After a bit of snow the past few days, today was gloriously sunny. Pepper and I decided to head out for a hike. Initially we considered going up to Jewel Basin, which is well north of us but supposedly breathtaking. But practicality won out and we opted for a nearby hike just a few miles from our house. It’s a trail called Beardance and it winds its way up the foothills of the Mission Mountains, through the Flathead National Forest (the same forest that abuts our backyard).

It was pretty easy going for a little while, and despite the frigid temperature, we were quite comfortable. It’s amazing what some sunlight will do.

However, before long we ran into a bit of a problem. Trees had blown down– clearly during the Thanksgiving hurricane— and many of them were directly on the trail. Hmm.

We ended up doing a bit of bushwhacking to get around the fallen timber. At one point we had to turn back and take a different fork of the trail because there were so many trees in the way we couldn’t find an easy way around them (and didn’t even know where the trail continued from that point). It was a pretty crazy scene.

I was saddened by all these majestic trees on the ground, but Pepper just shrugged. “It’s a big forest.”

Indeed, there are still plenty of trees standing, and we found some beautiful areas.

I managed to do a bit of kameraspielen:

There were some really nice views of Flathead Lake, although they were actually pretty similar to what we see from our house since the trail winds up the same ridge that’s behind us, a few miles away. Still, it was awesome to get out for some hiking in mid-January.

Last week, Pepper and I flew to Arizona. Allegiant Airlines, one of the cheapest budget carriers around, happens to have biweekly direct flights between Kalispell (45 minutes north of us) and Mesa (15 minutes east of Pepper’s sister Jeanele). For around $200 we took a four-day trip on a whim.

At the Mesa airport, you climb on and off the planes on open-air stairs. I can’t help but notice their logo is reminiscent of a firecracker. Am I the only one who thinks a firecracker might not be the best choice for an airline logo?

Firecrackers notwithstanding, the flights were fine and the plane was a newish Airbus 320, not the twenty-seater turboprop I was half-expecting for a fifty-dollar airfare.

I think this is the first time I’ve been in Arizona in January, and it was amazing. Sunny and 60 every day. Now I understand why people “snowbird” there every winter. A number of people I met in Bigfork in September and October vanished to Arizona or southern Utah, and I don’t expect to see them again until at least April. Even though our winter here in Montana has been fairly mild thus far, it’s hard to beat sunny and 60.

Pepper and I went to Jersey Mike’s, which is one of my favorite sandwich shops. There’s only one of them in the entire state of Montana, and they’re not that good I’d drive hundreds of miles. But it was walking distance from Jeanele’s house, so we took a pleasant stroll and had awesome subs.

My brother-in-law David asked if I’d like to head out for some mountain biking. We went with two of my nephews, Kaleb and Luke, and had a great time in the desert. Here’s Kaleb on the trail ahead of me:

The entire landscape was peppered with enormous saguaro cacti. So cool.

Here’s one particular cactus that apparently couldn’t figure out up and down, and ended up getting a bit tangled in itself.

Another prevalent plant is the jumping cholla, which looks sort of like a large fuzzy bush from a distance.

Spoiler: it’s not fuzzy at all.

It has some particularly wicked spines which have microscopic backward-facing needles, so if one impales you or even gets caught in your clothes, it’s incredibly difficult (and painful) to pull back out.

After an hour and a half on the trail, we headed out for some disc golf. I haven’t played disc golf in almost six years, but it was refreshing to know my ultimate skills still come in handy. I easily beat David and Luke, both of whom play pretty often.

In addition, we watched some movies in a home theater, played darts and foosball, I learned a new board game (Splendor), and we spent time just sitting around chatting. It was a good time all around, and given the cheap and convenient travel arrangements, I expect we’ll do it again soon.

I keep telling myself I’m going to start writing again. It’s something I did as a kid and into my college years, but I haven’t written anything for well over twenty years. “What will you do with all that time in retirement?” people ask. Amongst other things, I tell them I’m going to write.

I have a novel in my head. Well, maybe not a full novel, but at least the beginnings of one. And every time I’ve thought I’d start writing it, I found myself sketching out a few more ideas instead of actually building prose. It was a stalling tactic, and I knew it. But Pepper had a good idea the other day: she suggested that instead of writing the whole novel, I start out with smaller goals. “Write a snippet”, she said. “Just a piece of the story.”

Well, today I actually did it. I sat down this morning and hammered out a snippet. It’s one scene from the novel that seems clear in my mind. By the time I finished, I had almost 5,000 words on the page. Not too bad for a first effort.

Over the next weeks and months, I hope to put together some more snippets. And who knows, at some point they might come together into a coherent story…

I used to make New Year’s resolutions.

They were nice bulleted lists, fairly specific, and basically ideas I had at that time for things I thought would be cool over the course of the next year. As the years passed, the number of bullets dropped, the specificity gave way to somewhat vague goals, and the overall theme was more about longer-term visions. After a while, they degraded into one-sentence phrases that might be called “mission statements” to a business: platitudes meant to inspire behavior, but nothing really actionable. And then I just stopped altogether.

So today, as a new year and a new decade appear on the calendar, I find myself thinking again about resolutions. And I decided that I’d rather reflect on the past year, and consider how it might shape the year to come.

2019 was, to say the least, a banner year for our family. We had a lot of major “life events” through the course of twelve months: Kyra returned from her mission, Zaque left on his; I retired from my work at Zing; we took an amazing family trip to Hawai’i; Alex got married; Pepper and I moved a thousand miles to rural Montana. Taken alone, any one of these things is a pretty big deal. But combine them into a single year, and you’ve got a lot going on! Fortunately it’s all good stuff, and now that everyone is settled into missions, marriage, and Montana, I feel like I can take a deep breath and contemplate what comes next.

Retirement’s been interesting, that’s for sure. I’m 47 years old, and if my math is right, I can spend the next 50 years without needing to work at a paying job. Does that mean I will? Not necessarily– I really enjoyed the work I did, and the people on my team, and it’s possible I’ll go back to that in some capacity. For now, though, it’s been nice to not have to worry about checking my email constantly or making sure invoices are getting paid or hiring someone. I’ve been retired for six months now, but the first three were filled with vacations and moving and saying goodbye; the following three were settling into a new place and figuring out all the ways living in a forest is different than living in a city. Finally I’ve come to a point where I don’t have a huge list of house projects, and nothing major to prepare for. So it’s time to actually “start” my retirement, I guess.

And that means finding things to do. Without ultimate games to fill my calendar, I need to figure out a new way to stay in shape. Showshoeing and cross-country skiing are on the list, and I plan to do those in the next month or two. In the summer it’ll be hiking and kayaking. I may get into yoga. And Pepper hints about racquetball.

Then there are hobbies. I feel like I’m making (slow) progress on photography, and plan to spend more time learning to take and process better pictures. That’ll mean getting out for hikes and backpacking, or even just some long drives into the mountains. I have some ideas for web sites and programming work that have been on my mental back burner for years. I’ll carve out some time for them. I plan to read more. And I’ve been saying for years that I want to put pen to paper, so to speak, and rekindle my writing. It’s time to do that.

Finally, there are family and friends to consider. Many people have told us they plan to visit during the summer season. Although it’s often easy to say things like that, when you confront a thousand-mile drive and consider the logistics of a full-time job or a gaggle of kids, that becomes a lot harder. Still, our home is always open and I truly hope we have plenty of visitors throughout the year. Similarly, we plan to travel to see people, and despite the distances, we now have the time to go on leisurely road trips. I’m excited about that.

When the summer comes to a close, it’s our plan to serve a mission together. We’d talked about doing it in 2019, but the craziness of the past year proved to be a bit much. Instead, we elected to settle into a new life and then venture outward again. As of today, our plan is to serve for six months (roughly September to March), come back for a summer or two, and then serve somewhere else for another six. Rinse and repeat. What a great opportunity to experience different places and sacrifice our time to bless the lives of others. I’ve been given so much, and I want to give something back.

That brings me back to the present. Here I am, looking out at the beauty of the forest and the lake outside my house, thinking about how incredibly grateful I am for the chance to experience all this. I spent years planning it, and with a little luck and a whole lot of providence, it actually happened. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. But here I am, and now it’s time to take these next steps.

2020, here I come.