Rebecca January 31st, 2008
So here I am just last Saturday.
This picture was taken by my friend Patia. We were cross-country skiing–okay, ersatz telemark skiing around the backside of Missoula’s North Hills, the grassy, windswept foothills of the Rattlesnake Mountains. Just moments after this photo was snapped I took the first in a series of spectacular tumbles, culminating in a sprained left thumb and swollen, bruised knee. My thumb is fine now. My left knee is still black and blue. What’s amazing about this picture is not the fact I’m actually smiling (a rare thing in photographs), but that fug hanging over Missoula in the background.
Yes, Montana’s second largest city is somewhere under that brown quilt of smog.
Missoula has atrocious air inversions in the wintertime because it lies at the bottom of a bowl (the Rattlesnakes to the north, Sapphires to the east and south, the Bitterroot Range to the west). Just look at that. Ugh. I swear, I didn’t start getting sinus headaches until I moved here. I must have been spoiled by all that pure California pollution.
Rebecca January 20th, 2008
Can you believe I didn’t see this pileated woodpecker yesterday until I skied right under his Ponderosa pine and heard the “pock pock pock” of his beak on the tree? I don’t know why. The garish red of his crest stands out against the winter landscape like Britney Spears at a debutante ball.
Rebecca January 17th, 2008
This is part three in a continuing series I like to call “Ha Ha Ha, You Suckers: I Get Paid to Do This”.
Trust me, while most of you see the sign for a dumpy little cafe I’m about to enter on a snowy weekday afternoon, everyone reading this in Montana’s jealous.
Rebecca December 26th, 2007
My Christmas was not all it could be because I had to start fasting midway through the big day to get ready for a doctor’s appointment first thing this morning. Why would I put myself through torture like that? Well, I’ve been having some health issues. My doctor, whom I dearly love, has an impossible schedule (only available on Wednesdays because of other commitments, and on vacation for most of December). Then there was the matter of those three magic words: calendar year deductible. She ordered a whole variety of blood tests to get to the bottom of the problem. All required an empty body and a clean bloodstream. This meant I had to put the wine bottle down and the fudge and the pork back in the fridge ’round about noon on Christmas day. Good thing I took today off from work. When I returned home from the clinic I picked all three right back up where I started four days ago.
And in case you’re wondering, yes, the nutjobs were protesting in front of the clinic this morning. I gave them the Christmas finger.
While I’m loafing around on my last day of Christmas vacation waiting for a call from my doctor (”Put that bacon down! Your cholesterol level is 940!”), I thought I would take part in Sweetney’s Mah Fridge: Let Me Show It To You photo pool on Flickr. I can’t believe how shiny and clean my fridge is; judging by the contents of it you’d think I subsist entirely off a diet of citrus fruit and cheese.
When I find out what’s wrong I’ll let you know. Until then, would you care for a slice of aged Gouda and a clementine?
Matt December 17th, 2007
This weekend I got a companion for my dog, Cooper. I’ve been wanting to get him a pal for a while now but was holding out for the perfect dog. When I saw this little cutie I just couldn’t resist. Say hello to Molly.
Rebecca November 22nd, 2007
Happy for you and me maybe, but not for poor Lurkey.
Rebecca November 21st, 2007
I love to hunt for wild mushrooms, but there are only two types I can identify with complete certainty: shaggy manes and morels. I’d like to add chanterelles to that list, but I’ve yet to find any here in Montana.
I took this picture of a fly Amanita while poking around in the woods on Cape Meares, Oregon. I was able to identify it because of a funky little mushroom guide I bought on my trip, All that the Rain Promises, and More. It’s full of oddball stories, recipes (like candy cap mushroom cookies), poems and mushroom trivia. It’s also very useful–if you know what I mean. A lot of guidebooks are nice to page through after you’ve unwrapped them on Christmas morning. However, take them out in the field and you won’t be able to distinguish between a white matsutake and a destroying angel until you’re on the waiting list for a liver transplant. Last year, Matt and I started our own holiday shopping guide during NaBloPoMo. Not to intrude on Maggie’s territory again, but David Arora’s little hip pocket guide is the perfect stocking stuffer for the ’shroomer in your family.
Rebecca November 11th, 2007
Just last Friday I took this picture of sea anemones in one of the tide pools at Cannon Beach in Oregon. The day was unbelievably sunny and warm (about 70 F) for early November.
This morning I was eating breakfast and reading the Sunday paper at my dining room table when the ambient light in the room suddenly changed. I turned around in my chair and and saw this:
It’s the first snowfall of the season in town. It inspired something deep down, and I found myself dragging the holiday lights out of a box in my storage closet a hour ago. I haven’t put up Christmas decorations in years. But there they are, stretched out on my living room floor and waiting for me to hang them around my picture windows.
Rebecca November 8th, 2007
While on vacation last week (you’ll see many posts over the course of this month start with those words), I learned about a unique place in America: the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, aka Terrible Tillie or the Eternity by the Sea Columbarium. You can see it far in the distance in one of my photographs:
See that white building on the rock that’s far out to sea on the right side of the photo? That’s Terrible Tillie in all her glory: a decommissioned lighthouse too dangerous to be inhabited by anyone other than seabirds and the dead because of the ferocious waves that sweep across its rock. That’s right, I said the dead. “Columbarium” means a place for storing human cremains. I love learning new words, don’t you? A group of private investors bought Tillamook Rock some years ago and turned it into the final resting place for those of us who love the ocean. When I first read about it in a brochure the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department sent me a few months before my trip, I was interested in visiting (hey, I’m a rather morbid girl). When I learned it’s only accessible by helicopter, I promptly put that interest aside in favor of just getting a nice shot of Tillie. And maybe someday putting my own ashes there. I’ve been obsessing about where I should spread them ever since I scattered my father’s ashes earlier this year. A deserted lighthouse out in the wild Pacific sounded pretty darn cool to me. Then I had to put that notion aside once I got home, Googled the columbarium, and found out–thanks to the New York Times article I linked to above–that’s it’s been mismanaged for years by those same investors.
Oh well. At least I’ll always have the dumpster behind Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles.
Matt November 6th, 2007
Not to steal her thunder, as I’m sure she has a post coming up soon, but Rebecca’s already uploaded photos from her trip up on flickr. Go on, sneak a peak. I won’t tell.
Rebecca October 3rd, 2007
I spent the last few days in Lewistown, Montana on business. Lewistown is in the very center of our state. It really is a lovely little city: a charming 1880s railroad town located at the bottom of the Judith River Basin. It’s surrounded by the isolated islands of forested mountain ranges that rise out of the prairie east of the Rockies. Many of the town’s prominent buildings were constructed more than a century ago by Croatian stonemasons out of the warm buttery-colored local sandstone. Lewistown is just how I imagine a lot of our mountain towns looked before the yuppie rat bastards tourists found them. I took a lot of pictures, but my favorite one is a simple and quiet scene in someone’s backyard.
I love that cat. She was so perfectly still, just like this autumn moment in a perfect little town.
Rebecca September 18th, 2007
It’s a tough life. I get paid to spend my days roaming around Montana, taking pictures like this.
Rebecca September 12th, 2007
Hey Erin! Looks like someone finally arrived, albeit a few days late.
I think I now know why.
It appears there was an incident down at the post office. Our local TV news says the partially consumed body of a mailman was found under some boxes of priority mail.
Rebecca September 3rd, 2007
I spent my holiday soaking in one of my favorite places on earth, Jerry Johnson Hot Springs.
Matt August 28th, 2007
Is a picture of a bunch of baby hedgehogs and their “surrogate mother.”
