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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.

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…