The Homestead

About a mile south of the house are the remains of an old homestead built more than a hundred years ago. Dr. G and the Professor, with help from their dogs, horses and kids, have worn a serviceable trail out to the homestead over the twenty years they've been here. Even with their kids grown and gone, the G's and their dogs still make regular trips to the homestead. Their Newfoundland has treed more than one bear on that trail.

Mr. T and I have hiked out there several times as well. This weekend was balmy and sunny, and in accordance with the arrival of spring, we set out for the homestead with boots instead of snowshoes. We even put a dog pack on Alaska, to introduce her to the accessories required for her new life as a trail dog. The weather was glorious and warm, and The Kid abandoned his shirt after about twenty minutes.

Almost nothing of the original homestead remains except some grizzled old apple trees that still dutifully bear fruit every year. The trunks of these trees have been scored every which way by bear claws, but still they stand. At first I wondered whether the trees were contemporaneous with the homestead, because this would have made them quite old indeed. But then I read that apple trees can live to quite advanced ages.

The homestead is situated near the rear edge of a natural meadow ringed with aspens, larches and other evergreens, and with a clear view of the Cabinet Mountain range. The property was acquired by a lumber company long ago, and the surrounding area was logged two years ago. The lumber operation left piles and piles of discarded tree trunks, and the logging trucks carved deep tracks that still linger in the grasses. But the homestead is still and silent again, except for the twittering of the birds.

The meadow must have looked different in the heyday of the homestead -- the trees were no doubt older and taller, for one thing -- but the fundamentals are probably the same. Elk bed down here now, and the bears, of course, have broadcast their presence on the trees. Coyotes, driven off an adjoining mountain by a newly established wolf pack, traipse back and forth across the meadow and the trail, discarding bones and other pieces-parts along the path.

Looking out at the mountain range, I had a sense of what a felicitous place this would have been to locate a home in the late nineteenth century. Game would have been abundant. The home site was two miles away from the brand new railroad and the town growing up around it. The seasonal stream at the edge of the meadow offered water, and the river in the valley would have been thick with trout and, during part of the year, chinook salmon. Huckleberries grew on the mountain. And then there were the apple trees. The winters would have been harsh, and along with the abundant game would be grizzly bears and mountain lions. But if they could deal with the cold and the predators, this was as good a spot as any to make a go of it.

I wonder what happened to the people who lived here, and their house.

A day may come, very soon, when another home -- and another, and another -- is built in this idyllic meadow. The whispers in town are that the logging done on the surrounding forest was a "real estate cut." Plans have apparently been drawn for big houses on large lots. I worry, as always, about the animals, but particularly the bears. They need the space. The Professor and Dr. G have 130 acres that surround our paltry six, and they care about the wildlife -- The Professor thinned some forest last year but made sure to leave enough thick passages for the bears. But further fragmentation of habitat can only drive them further into the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, away from people. Always away. And then my own habitat becomes more sterile as the chances of seeing bears on the road I now share with them diminish ever further.

The dire real estate market has likely given the wildlife of the homestead a reprieve. This town has never really bustled, even during the most prosperous of times. As The Professor says, the best thing about this town is that it has so little to offer. And with the amount of housing stock languishing on the market, it seems unlikely that anyone would invest in this little corner of the world. But time and "progress" march inexorably on.

And I worry about the bears.

Give me a moment while my fingers thaw

We've arrived. And it was a short trip, friends. Very short, compared to what we're used to doing. We left this afternoon and made it here before dinner.

Of course, it's a Montana winter and that means it takes the entire evening to warm the house up. The bedrooms have their own baseboard heating but the upstairs relies almost entirely on the wood stove. We got here 90 minutes ago and I'm still wearing my parka.

But I can actually type now, so that's a good sign.

Christmas Eve, Cabinet Mountains

Hope you're all having a grand time. I know I am.

Sunday before Christmas

Cloudy, 32 degrees. There are about six inches of snow on the ground. Thomas and I took our walk this morning, crunching companionably through the snow crust together.

Snow tells a tale of the mountain that's hidden the rest of the year. It reveals the intensely, almost manically nomadic nature of deer, and records the passage of other animals. This morning we saw rabbit tracks interspersed with bobcat tracks, a drama written in the snow, but with no discernible ending. Did the bobcat get dinner? Or did the rabbit live another day?

Snow tells part of the tale, but doesn't promise more than that.

Frost on the woodpile

It'll be more than frost next time, no doubt.

Dispatches from Stinkbug Ranch

You know how, on television and in popular culture generally, fathers are portrayed as benevolent doofuses when it comes to childcare and their wives are portrayed as sensible types who always have it together with respect to the kids? It's sort of an Everybody Loves Raymond model. That crap has always irritated me, and not just because it offends my feminist worldview. Even more fundamentally, I just don't recognize anyone I know in that model, least of all my own family.

Which would explain why I realized on Thursday night that my son had not bathed since Sunday. You see, my husband always does that, and he's been overseas since Monday. It just didn't occur to me until The Kid announced that afternoon that "hey-- my feet stink!" (He quickly backpedaled on this assertion when he realized he would have to take a bath without Daddy. Fortunately, his grandmother bribed him into the tub with some pumpkin soap.)

Patricia Heaton's character totally would have remembered to give her kid a bath. It seems I have become the benevolent doofus. I guess this means I have to grow a penis or get kicked out of the club.

The weather has been moody this week, as you can see from some of the photographs I've gotten. But I've stolen little bits of light here and there.

As for pictures, I offer you the main road:



Blogger won't let me upload the other two pictures of the gravel road up to the house, so to hell with it. I'll do that later.

Aspenglow

Well here I am. Back in middle of nowhere, and it's grand. The aspen in front of my house is completely, richly gold. The tamaracks are turning. We ate freshly caught trout for dinner Sunday night. And again I marvel that I feel less isolated in a place where traffic congestion is a moose blocking 5th street.

My in-laws are here with me this week. This is the first time my father-in-law has returned here since he sold us the place a little over a year ago. It can't be easy for him -- I saw him standing, that first evening, staring out at the corral whose fence he built by hand, one split rail at a time. But he's got a permanent companion in the grandson who shadows him constantly, hanging on his every word. And his mood improved markedly Sunday night, after he, Mr. T and the Kid fished a part of the river he'd never gotten around to while he still spent time here regularly.

For my part, life is easy this week. I just had to stop my mother-in-law from bringing the coffee carafe over to my cup and refilling it while I sat on my ass. Mr. T filled the 80's era PornoHotTub before he left, and I might get in once or twice. I've got some photographs scoped out, should the weather decide to cooperate, and I spent ten minutes this morning watching a woodpecker work on a tree down the hill. I do have to work, but somehow it's not as grinding here.

It's all good.

An open letter to a pack rat

Dear Pack Rat:

You probably don't read my blog, but given the ingenuity you displayed in trashing my house during the month of August, I can't be completely sure. Since I have no idea where you are just now -- though you clearly spent some time on your toilet my counters again this weekend while we were gone -- this post may be my best chance of reaching you.

Really, it's not so much that you ate an entire bag of peanuts out of the pantry and then made a nest with the shells in our stove, thus requiring us to discard the entire appliance. After all, we were going to remodel that kitchen anyway, and heck, we can cook on our camp stove this weekend. I can even accept that you appropriated two rolls of toilet paper to make a bed in our linen closet downstairs. One cannot, after all, be expected to sleep on a bare shelf.

But when you so kindly left -- as a sort of rodent memento -- hundreds of tiny turds on the laundry I threw carelessly on the bed before leaving four weeks ago, you placed your dainty ratly toe over the line. It simply isn't done.

You know, Pack Rat, this ain't my first time at the rodeo. And I've gotten meaner as I've aged. But I've been thinking about it, and I've decided to leave you a peace offering. There is a blob of peanut butter in the kitchen -- where the stove used to be -- right next to a couple of dire-looking metallic contraptions.

Help yourself.

Glacial Recession, Part IV

A few months ago I wrote this post but never published it, as it just seemed entirely too navel-gazish:

I think it may be time for new boots. I've had these for almost nine years. I bought them at a small outdoor store in Greensboro, North Carolina just before my first backpacking trip, on the Long Trail in Vermont. I was in my last year of school, and I didn't have the money for them until two days before I left. There was no time for a breaking-in period, but the boots never left a single mark or blister.

These boots have squelched through the mid-summer mud in the Adirondacks. They've taken me on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and Georgia, along Lake Superior and the rest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, atop ridges in the Olympic range and to the edge of cold lakes at the base of Mt. Rainier. Last summer they helped me peel off a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon.

These boots groaned under my pregnant weight while I was photographing prairie dogs and antelopes in the Badlands in South Dakota. They've hugged my feet while I hiked hesitantly around blind corners in Glacier National Park yelling "hey bear!"

They've been a part of most of the deeply gratifying moments I've had in the last ten years that didn't involve parenting -- and some that did. Not to be too maudlin, but giving them up feels too much like the end of an era I'm not ready to close out yet.

Maybe they'll make it another year.

Turns out they didn't.

We hiked about twenty miles over the three days of the seminar, or perhaps a hair less. The second day's hike to Grinnell Glacier constituted the bulk of the hiking, at 12 miles. It was hot, and I worked hard. The first day we hiked to the Hidden Lake Overlook off Logan Pass. On the way back, I felt a sort of odd flapping near my toes. The sole had separated from the boot. It was annoying, but I bought some rubber cement that night and applied it liberally to the detached sole. Then, for good measure, I wrapped the hell out of the boots with copious quantities of duct tape that Jeff had obtained from one of his innumerable park friends.

So we got up to the glacier on the second day, and I saw this standing between me and my glacial experience:


(This person, as you have no doubt astutely surmised, is not me.)

Welp, there was no way I was going through that with my compromised boots. Yeah, 33 degree water and sharp rocks -- just the thing to undo the duct tape and glue. Fortunately, though, I'd brought these along:



But let me tell you something. Until you've had to painstakingly navigate a slippery rock bridge in water just above the freezing point, on feet that are all but completely bare -- well, then you can't possibly understand why I was such a big whiny baby about it. The moment I stepped in, I could literally feel the warmth draining from my feet. (Yes, there was actually a draining feeling.) There were three of these bridges to cross, and I did each one coming and going. By the time I was finished each time, it felt like a thousand needles were pricking my feet.

It hurt. Waaaaah.

Once the pins and needles subsided, it took me about ten minutes to get the feeling back in my feet. Anyone who was completely immersed in that water would die quickly.

Anyhoo, it did the trick. I kept my boots dry, and they didn't blow out completely till there were only three miles left on the hike down. The sharp rocks of the glaciated landscape made perfect striations on the duct tape, and the soles completely detached. But I donned my sandals again, which have a lovely rugged tread on the soles, and continued on.

It was an odd day of temperature extremes, but delightful all the same.


Part V to come -- Wherein I finally shut my trap about this trip, put in a plug for the Glacier Institute, and post miscellaneous pictures.

Glacial Recession -- Part III

The thermometer back at the campground says 95 degrees, but the temperature near the edge of the glacier is at least twenty degrees cooler. In front of me is a massive, grinding river of ice streaked with deep crevasses and powerful enough to chew up mountains.

I’m a little apprehensive about stepping onto this beast, but our workshop instructor, Jeff, is exuberant. He’s already testing the strength of the glacier with his ice axe, listening for hollow, weak ice that won’t support our weight. “Stay to the left of that crevasse,” he advises as he builds a cairn, or pile of rocks, to mark our way. “Oh, and avoid that gray ice over there,” he adds as he moves ahead. Uh, okay. I follow his steps exactly.

Jeff leads us a short way onto the glacier. It’s not safe to go any farther, he says, as the tips of the crevasses extend only a few feet beyond where we’re standing. I look down. The ice beneath my feet seems almost iridescent. Rocks of varying sizes are liberally strewn on and embedded in the ice, accounting for its slightly dirty appearance from afar.

I stay rooted to my spot. Even with the cairns, I’d have an incredibly difficult time finding my way back across the ice safely. Two or three years ago, a day hiker ventured alone onto the glacier while his friends waited, and fell 35 feet into a crevasse. After much grueling work, the Park Service managed to extricate him from the crevasse, but he died shortly afterward.

Jeff talks about glacial formations and characteristics. He points out a moulin, which is a vertical shaft that runs down into the glacier. He reminds us of the discussion in An Inconvenient Truth about lakes forming beneath glaciers, and tells us that moulins like this facilitate the flow of water beneath the ice sheet.

This place is not quiet; different noises punctuate Jeff’s speech. You can hear the loud rush of water somewhere below, and once or twice a thunderous sound interrupted our discussion. Cracking ice.

Even though this glacier is a fraction of the size it was 150 years ago, it still seems just massive. I try to imagine this entire cirque covered in glacial ice, but it seems incomprehensible. But later on, when Jeff shows us how much of the glacier has disappeared just since last summer, the ice appears a good deal smaller.

My son may be lucky enough to see the park’s glaciers before they disappear entirely, but it’s unlikely his children will. The drop dead date for these glaciers is 2030; after that, like the snows of Kilimanjaro, they will be gone.


Part IV, coming soon: Wherein a tragic hiking boot blowout requires me to place my feet, for extended periods of time, into water that only a short time before had been ice.

Glacial Recession -- Part II

Now that I’ve offered an ominous opener, let me throw out this confusing fact: The glaciers in northwest Montana began to recede in the 1850’s. I know that all of you – astute observers of human history that you are -- will recognize that decade as preceding significant human-generated carbon emissions.

So what gives? This was the question the instructor, Jeff, posed during his introductory slide show. Is the recession of the park’s glaciers caused by humans or is it merely the result of a naturally occurring warming period?

It’s both, of course; the question poses a false dichotomy. Geologic history is peppered with alternating periods of glacial advance and retreat, and the earth had already entered a period of glacial retreat when we started energetically pumping carbon into the atmosphere. So while human activities may not have caused the glaciers to begin melting initially, it’s a safe bet that those activities have dramatically increased the rate, in recent times, at which the glaciers are melting.

Take a look at the picture below.



Where Jeff is standing marks the point to which the glacier extended just last year, and it will recede even further yet this year. And this is on the side of the glacier and not the “toe” – in laymen’s terms, the tip – of the glacier, where melting occurs most rapidly.

It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of thing you hear the wishful thinkers say all the time: “But the glaciers started melting long before the petroleum era, so it can’t be global warming! We’re just in a naturally occurring warming period!” The foundational facts are correct, to be sure -- the glaciers did begin to recede awhile ago, and we are in a natural warming period (or, as I understand it, the end of a much cooler period, which may not be exactly the same thing.) It’s the conclusion they reach that’s faulty. The era of human-generated carbon is coinciding with that period and elevating the planet’s temperature to the point of grim consequences.



Part III: Wherein I attempt to avoid becoming a permanent part of the glacier, as glacial recession, though occurring rapidly, will not happen quickly enough to free me from a crevasse should I be so unlucky as to fall into one.

Glacial Recession, Part I

This is Upper Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park.

As late as 1969, there was no Upper Grinnell Lake. That's because what is now the lake used to be part of the Grinnell Glacier.

The lake gets bigger every year.

Fire

One of the things that distresses me in Montana is the sense you get, starting about July, that the whole damn place is about to go up in flames. Drought conditions have afflicted the American West for more than a decade, and it's spreading. Now up to a third of the entire U.S. is suffering from drought.

I've been spending time in Montana for seven or eight years now, and I have no recollection of summer conditions that weren't incredibly dry. It's remarkable if you're not used to it. It's as if you can feel the dryness sapping the moisture from your body. There's almost a friction to the air.

In these conditions, the slightest spark can destroy thousands of acres.

I'm eyeing the weather report tonight, because scattered thunderstorms are forecast for Thursday. It seems this is how so many fires are sparked in that area -- by thunderstorms that don't offer enough wetness to discourage fire, but just enough lightning to start one.

Fires are already burning all over the West, including Oregon, Washington and Montana.

I spent some time in Glacier in 2003 when the park was besieged by fire, and it made an stark impression on me. Last week I walked through some of the forest that had burned during that summer, and observed the succession -- beautiful wildflowers against black, charred tree trunks.

Time. As I strolled through the burn I marveled: it's only time that's the difference between a leisurely walk and standing in the middle of an inferno.

The view from my kayak

Snowshoe Peak over Bull Lake, northwestern Montana

Hello, I'm an adorable baby mountain goat from Glacier National Park

Your daily dose of way-too-friggin-cute.

(Courtesy of Tony.)

Hoofing it

There is nothing quite like spotting a freshly severed deer leg on the trail to quicken the pulse and heighten the senses. This effect is magnified when that trail branches off your driveway.

The leg was mostly stripped clean of meat, but undeniably fresh. There are a number of possibilities as to the transporter of said deer leg, ranging from the mundane to the dire. A coyote could have dropped the leg after stripping it from a scavenged carcass. Or it could have been the mama bear who's been loping around this mountain for the last couple of years. Or it could have been -- and I watched the treetops as we headed back home -- the elusive mountain lion.

It's probably the coyotes, though. Wolves have reestablished themselves a few mountains over, and it's put pressure on the coyote population. There's a sister pack that's been hanging around for awhile, and they have regular conversations with the Newfoundland down the road.

That said, none of us will be venturing down that path alone for the remainder of the trip.

Long days, inundated kayaks

The length of a July day in Montana provides no natural corrective to the urge to stay up late and sleep in. With daylight lasting till 10 p.m., you can get up at noon and still have time to get in a full day of playing. But you miss the cool mornings when the moon is still high and the birds aren't yet too hot to sing.

Still, we've had some fun so far. We've had the kayak out to Lake Koocanusa twice (yesterday we flipped it while towing it with Tony's 16-foot boat, and the less said about that, the better. Let's just say it's not easy to drain a kayak while standing on a six-inch rock ledge. ) I let both of the older kids try the kayak, and they learned it quickly. Ahh, the easy adaptability of youth.

Today we're going to let them try the canoe.

Tomorrow is Glacier.

I'm hot. Fortunately, the water is a cool 67.4 degrees. Time to go.

Wherein Trailhead meets her political hero, issues queries about habeas corpus and plays groupie

So we arrived in Montana at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning after -- get this -- ten stops on the road from Portland. The first was to fix a wire running from our vehicle to our trailer. The second was a dramatic and unexpected halt in order to secure my kayak, which was about to skitter off the top of Tony's van and into oncoming traffic. The rest were an assortment of pee breaks, meal breaks, and a brief interlude in Spokane to buy a toilet and some zero-VOC paint.

At length, we drove the half-mile up the gravel road to the house. That we arrived in the middle of the night was of no importance to the children, who thought it was an excellent time to play an entire game of pool until the road-weary adults herded them downstairs to bed. I rose at about ten, stuck my hair into a clip and drove into town to get some breakfast food. At the checkout counter, my fatigue-narrowed eyes lit upon a small entry in the upper left hand corner of the local newspaper:

"Senator Jon Tester will be in Libby Saturday, where he will host an afternoon 'meet and greet' for residents. The gathering, at the pavillion at River Front Park pavillion, is free and open to the public...."

Oh my.

Even though this isn't really a political blog, I'm a total political junkie. I don't write much about politics because, let's face it, that's kind of gilding the lily in light of the vibrant political blogosphere that's churned along for some time without the slightest contribution from me. I assume readers will be unsurprised to learn that I'm somewhat of a leftist, and those who know me understand the effect that little blurb would have had on me.

I've been a huge fan of Jon Tester since the Montana Senate primary last year. He's an organic farmer and environmentalist. In spite of meeting a fook of a lot of politicians in my life, Tester was the first one who impressed me enough to induce me to make a campaign contribution. (Jim Webb was the second.) I followed his campaign religiously. There was simply no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.

He didn't disappoint me in the slightest.

I've met three senators, three or four governors, a former United States attorney general, mayors of cities large and small, a bunch of federal and state judges and politicos of all stripes, and until I met Tester, I'd never met one without a certain veneer of artificiality. Despite being a fervent consumer of all things political, I generally dislike the practitioners of it. The fledgling, baby politicians at my old law firm were an interpersonal irritant. I found them insufferable, with their canned smiles and the pablum that passed for conversation because, oh my God, we can't possibly say anything that would piss off someone, somewhere, at some time.

These are not really my kind of folk. I have no use for them, and they had little use for me. Compared to them, see, I'm a loose cannon.

So on some level I was prepared for disillusionment. But it never arrived. Tester and his trademark flattop swept briskly out of his car and into the pavilion and immediately began talking about renewable energy. Then he took all manner of questions from the group, including some obviously repetitive queries that he simply answered again. He issued blunt, straightforward opinions and rattled off obscure statistics about this or that. There was no equivocation. He fielded questions about trade, immigration, veterans' benefits and eminent domain.

I raised my hand. He smiled and nodded at me.

"Habeas corpus," I said. It wasn't a question so much as a statement.

"I can tell you right now I support the restoration of habeas corpus and I'll vote for that."

This was right after being grilled by a Vietnam vet with whom I'd just engaged in some light disagreements about the wisdom of the Geneva Convention, of all things. No equivocation, no preface about winning the War on Terra, just "I support that."

So afterward I waited to shake his hand with a few other people. Tester lost a few fingers as a kid in a confrontation with a meat grinder, and I noticed up close that's on his left hand, not his right. When my turn arrived, I told him I was a supporter, and that while a lot of Democrats seemed to have replaced their spines with silly string in recent times, he hadn't disappointed me once since November and I hoped he continued on his current trajectory.

He gave me a huge smile and we exchanged a few further pleasantries. You can tell it's early enough in the game that he still genuinely enjoys hearing from an ardent supporter. The overall impression I got was that the same guy I was talking to would be pretty much the same guy who chatted with his family later that week. He was refreshingly real. And his intelligence and the depth of his knowledge was obvious.

In short, I felt I'd just met a guy who will shape up to be one of the great public servants of my time. It was a pleasure.

And no, I didn't get a picture. This is because Mr. T was headed back to the truck to get my camera battery, which we'd inadvertently left in the car. He was supposed to run to the car, grab my camera, put the battery back in and discreetly take a picture while I was meeting the good Senator.

But nooooooo. He had to stop and gab with some folks on the way back, and completely missed the window of opportunity. Ordinarily he would have spent some time in the doghouse for such a thing, but I was pretty stoked from meeting the latest in a long line of great public figures to hail from the American West.

Now that I've posted the lizard

I can actually post the pictures Jennifer over at Under the Ponderosas asked me for two weeks ago. Here goes:



This is a still from some video I took when I climbed up behind the house on Christmas Eve last year.



This is from the road. This picture is four or five years old, before we owned it.



From the second floor in the solarium. That thing at the bottom is the hot tub cover.



Another view from above the house, this time of the valley. It's late spring in this picture.



This is the view from the living room. Those are the Cabinet Mountains.

All right, I'm whipped from packing, and I have to be up early to pick up my cork flooring at the Environmental Building Supply place before we go.

We're supposedly getting internet access at the house this time, so I won't be gone for too long this time. Raise hell, etc.

Summer? What summer?

I was just looking back and noticing that this blog was a good deal more interesting back in the winter. This is strange, because winter is not my season. Seasonal affective disorder has afflicted me since I was about ten years old. Around the first of March things get really grim. Ordinarily, this is when I take off in a southerly direction if I'm lucky enough to be possessed of sufficient time and fortune, because I simply cannot stand it another moment.

But this year was a little different. Mr. T had bidness in Orlando in early January, and the idea of my staying here alone with dogs and kid was untenable. So I went along and we tacked on an additional week of vacation so I could go to my favorite place in Florida -- the swamp. Beaches are fine and dandy, but the best place to be in Florida, other than the freshwater springs, is unquestionably the Everglades. Being in the swamp in January had two immediate benefits. One, this blog was more interesting, because I was able to post pictures of alligators in compromising positions and videos of anhingas eating exotic catfish. Second, I wasn't as much of a basket case for the rest of the winter, having had two weeks of sunshine in January.

June, on the other hand, has been disconcerting. I've had solid work for the last six weeks that, while it pays the bills, kills every creative impulse and keeps me indoors. Not that June is any great shakes in the Willamette Valley anyway -- I'd guess half the days have failed to crack 60 degrees -- but sickness and work have kept me indoors for the sunshine and warmth we have gotten.

Fortunately, July is nearly here, along with -- I hope -- a bit more time in my schedule to get out and enjoy the blistering heat I crave. I'm also hoping I can pry this blog out of the current ditch in which it resides, existing merely as a repository for my pissing and moaning.

In that vein, we're leaving for Montana this Friday. Good friend and occasional commenter Tony will be going this time as well, along with his three kids. I expect that his youngest son and Trailhead Kid will raise all sorts of hell together, as they tend to do when they are in each other's company for more than, say, two minutes.

Even the dog, Thomas, is restless. An hour ago, he tiptoed into my office and gently placed his squeaky hedgehog on my lap. He then cast me a plaintive look that said, "If I must be stuck in this suburban prison, would it be too much trouble for you to toss my hedgehog down the stairs so that I might run after it? It's a pale substitute for chasing deer out of the garden, but I'll take what I can get right now."

I couldn't help but sympathize, and I pitched the toy down the stairs for him until it got too slobbery and gross. He'll feel better next week.

Later on I'm hoping to get some pictures of the Montana place up. There's a screen shot of a video I want to grab, and that takes a few minutes for me to figure out every time I do it. It's difficult to do that in between reading cases on arcane corporate law issues, so I hope to grab a block of time later on.