Month: August 2026

It’s been almost three years since I complained about Montana’s state flag, and in that blog post I wrote quite a bit about Minnesota: they had a flag almost as bad as Montana’s, and the state legislature decided it was time for a change. They solicited design suggestions from the general public, the predictable craziness of internet submissions commenced, and eventually they settled on a new design.

In 2024 their new flag was announced. It’s not bad… certainly orders of magnitude better than the previous one.

I wonder what it would take for Montana to reconsider theirs? I happen to be friends with a state senator… maybe I should bend his ear. Hmm…

Out in California, east of San Diego, is a little community called Manzanita. We’d drive by it on the 8 many times during our mission, and I always thought it was a fun name: “little apple”.

We have an unsightly, weird, twisted tree in our yard that I’ve thought often of just cutting down. But today while I was working in the yard, I noticed it’s heavily laden with a lot of little apples!

We’ve noticed these before, of course, but for some reason this year’s “harvest” seems unusually bountiful. I have no idea what sort of apples they are, but I grabbed one and took a big bite. They’re very tart. I suppose with enough sugar they’d make a decent cobbler or something, but I’m not about to sit around and eat out of a bowl of them.

Still, it’s kind of fun to have a manzanita tree in our yard. I won’t cut it down just yet.

Over the years I’ve tackled a lot of house projects. It’s a foregone conclusion that no matter how simple a project may seem, I inevitably end up running into something that makes it much more complicated, and take much longer. It’s like some twisted rule of the universe, and it’s incredibly frustrating for me.

We installed some new can lights into the guest bedroom in our house, because it had pretty dim lighting. No longer! These new lights are blindingly bright, and at night it’s kind of overwhelming. Clearly a dimmer switch was needed. I bought one and grabbed a couple of screwdrivers to install it. It’s a three-way, which of course is a little more complicated, but I’ve worked on a handful of them before so it doesn’t intimidate me.

Well, I removed the old switch, installed the new one, and flipped the breaker back on.

To my shock, surprise, and great pleasure, it worked. For the first time in my history of house projects, something worked the first time!

Grinning from ear to ear, I shoved the wires back into the outlet box and screwed on the faceplate. Maybe I’ve finally turned a corner…

About two years ago, we went to Brickhouse Deli in El Centro for the first time and fell in love. Their sandwiches are really good. A few months later, Jerry (the owner) added French fries to the menu. They had a special seasoning on them and were amazing. No matter how many people were in our group for a particular lunch, we’d always split a tray of fries. Pepper and I asked if we could take some of the seasoning home, and they were happy to give us a little cup of it.

Fast forward to today, when I noticed that jar of seasoning in our spice cupboard. I decided then and there to have some fries. I sliced up a couple of potatoes, threw them in the Fry Daddy, and then doused them with Brickhouse seasoning.

They weren’t quite as good, but it was a fun reminder of fun times there.

Today at Rosa’s I noticed a blue Mini Cooper S with an S CAR GO license plate. It reminded me of an ancient joke, and I snapped a picture. It seemed familiar somehow.

Sure enough, I saw this exact car almost six years ago in Kalispell. I guess they’re still driving around the area, sporting their clever license plate…