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Zaque loves hot sauce. Valentine’s Day is coming up. And I found the perfect gift for him: dynamite hot sauce!

It includes five sauces of varying degrees of hotness, including ghost peppers. Zaque should enjoy it. Knowing him, he’ll pour it on his cereal in the morning…

I’ve been skiing for twenty-five years now. Never had a lesson, and never wore a helmet. Nope, back in 1995 I bought an amazing stocking cap that I absolutely love, and I’ve worn it every time I’ve gone to the mountain.

Back in those days, no one wore helmets. It just wasn’t cool.

But these days, it seems like I’m the only guy on the slopes without one. Not only are helmets more in vogue, they’re much more comfortable and useful.

So I went helmet-shopping. I’ll probably end up with a Smith Camber, which seems like a good compromise between the fifty-dollar ones that might protect my noggin in a crash, and the three-hundred-dollar ones that are probably meant for skydiving without a parachute.

When I go skiing in a couple weeks, I guess I’ll heave a sigh because I’ll look like the rest of the masses. But, as Pepper reminded me, $170 for a helmet sure beats the cost of skull surgery if I get clocked too hard. RIP, stocking cap.

I love French bread. It goes well with so many meals, especially pasta and meats. So these days, when we go “to town” to get groceries, I grab a couple loaves and stash them in the freezer, where they keep quite well for a few weeks.

But I don’t get the expensive French bread. That stuff costs a dollar.

Nor do I get the stuff that’s 40% off. A man could go broke spending that kind of coin.

Nope, I wait until it’s 64% off, and I can get a loaf for thirty-six cents.

I saw this on the back of a car the other day. I like it.

For most of the day, there was a really cool fog hanging over the forest.

I would’ve loved to take some time along the shore of the lake, photographing the docks that seemed to extend out into a blank landscape of grey. But we were on the way somewhere and I didn’t have my camera…

My good friend Dirk is starting his campaign. And it’s a good thing too.

Just kidding. I took a screenshot of him during our online Dominion game, and decided he looked presidential.

Pepper really enjoys our fireplace, and I find her sitting directly in front of it quite often. Today she’s reading a book.

It looks terribly uncomfortable to me, but she says the warmth is totally worth it. (And no, our house isn’t cold at all.)

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.