Leaky Buckets

  Making Vegan Food... It was early summer of 2021 and I felt like a garbage pile. I felt bleh. I assume that most people know that feeling. Every day felt the same. I had a feeling of wanting to do something exciting but not having that much motivation. I needed to shake things up. When I feel this way, I get very angsty. I act like a grump until I come up with some wild idea to chase.  In a fit of anger, a self-delusion of self-betterment, I decided to try something radical. I turned to Sam, riding in the passenger seat of the truck and blurted, “I want to go Vegan.” Yeah, I know, huh? To my surprise, she agreed without hesitation. To me, veganism was a personal challenge. I was not doing it for any social justice or crusade. I was not doing it because I believed the animal products were bad for the planet or unhealthy. I just wanted to see if I could do it; if I could control my appetite and achieve a personal goal. We set a length of six months for our experiment. Short en...

  Cue Alan Jackson's Livin' On Love as we build our house... I’ll admit I found the gospel of Alan later in life. My first forays into country music canon were slightly more alternative. The outside lanes; the Western and Texas scenes of country music. Corb Lund. Turnpike Troubadours. What got played on the mainstream radio always seemed too much like pop, even in the so-called glory days of country music. It was impossible not to know who the greats of country radio were, and their songs rotated through my iPod playlists. George, Garth, Reba, etc. But it was not until my late twenties that I found my patron saint of country music. His name was Alan Jackson.  One snowy day at work, I was hanging drywall and pondering my feelings for the lady who is now my fiance. Livin’ on Love came on the radio. Hearing Alan’s words about the endurance of a life-long love grabbed onto me. While I knew the song wasn’t about me and my love, it felt like it could be. The song spoke to me in the ...

  Just another family of moose trying to beat the cold snap I live for this weather. I take some sort of sick pride in my thermometer reading -30 when I wake up. Neighbors posted photos of -40. Farmers in central Montana shared pics of -71 with wind chill. One of the best parts of the internet is commiserating about the frigid weather. Everyone is saying the same thing below their picture of a thermometer; maybe this will drive out the so-called invaders from California and elsewhere. It might kill a few pine beetles too.  Alas, I found two pine beetles crawling across my living room this morning. Like anything smart, they found a warm place indoors. It occurred to me that anyone moving here from California can afford to heat their houses. Their houses are also big enough that they won’t go insane sitting inside for a couple days. That’s why the Californians invented the internet, so that they wouldn’t get bored indoors. They literally invented Facebook where all these tough M...

  Cookie, Paddy and Paul and me, Ireland 2019 As we tottered out the front door of Hegarty’s Pub and Hotel well after midnight to slurp down some fresh Irish air, Sam was like an anchor on my shoulder. For the past eight hours, she had downed round after round, sacrificing her health for mine, surreptitiously swapping her empty glass for my full one so that I could keep singing country music classics to our new Irish relatives. We were both completely pickled and managed only one lap of the park before stumbling into our room above the pub.  Both of us fell asleep instantly, proud that we had lived up to the title of being from Butte, America, even though we weren’t.  We had pulled into the village of Carrick, in County Donegal, Ireland, in the late afternoon. Like everywhere else we went in Ireland that week, it was a comfortably sixty five degrees and breezy. I have never encountered such consistently pleasant weather anywhere else in the world. Sam firmly decided that ...

  Heli-golfing New Zealand with new friends           It was spring of 2016 in the USA, autumn on the South Island of New Zealand and I was taking a break from hitchhiking. I had been recruited by a wealthy family to help with their elaborate gardens in return for lodging and food. When I say recruited, I mean “accidentally employed,” but that is a story for a different time. For the past month, I had been spending a few hours every day revitalizing the fifteen foot wooden boat for the neighbors of my hosts. After a morning of songwriting and gardening, I would ride my bike down the hill to the shore of Lake Hayes, where I would grind, sand, caulk and repaint the inside and outside of this antique boat in return for grocery money. When I needed sanding discs, I would climb in their jet black Maserati, and cruise down to the New Zealand version of Home Depot. Clad in a respirator and safety glasses, life was good. One day, I arrived like I always did ...

  Actual Hawaiian Waves, Maui, 2015 I have an elaborate bedtime routine in the winter months. When darkness lingers for extra hours at both ends of the day, I need a routine to tell my body when to wake and when to sleep. There is no set time for the routine to begin, it all depends on when my creative brain is tired. Some nights it is barely 6:30 and I find my eyes drooping. Other nights, 1am will slide onto the clock dial as I look up from my typing in astonishment.  I stand up carefully, making my way towards the bathroom trying to step on the less creaky spots on the floor. Toothbrush in my mouth, I return to the kitchen, tidying for morning, putting away any leftovers from dinner that remain on the stove. I tiptoe across the living room carpet and grab a few chunks of firewood for the stove then throttle down the damper, taking a moment to bask in the warmth of the cast iron. I slip on muck boots and let the old dog out, careful to not let him wander too far. Too much tim...

  Cooking kangaroo meatballs on Thanksgiving 2015, Melbourne, Australia I am on a quest this morning. Sitting here at my kitchen table, firmly planted in my chair with a box of peanut butter pretzels and a cup of tea, I am going on an adventure through time to find a lost piece of writing. I woke up this morning with a wriggling thought in my head about an idea that I had back in 2015 while camping in Tasmania. My sleepy brain thought that it would be a great idea to write today’s column about this really cool idea, except my awake brain demands more accurate information. What I meant to be a thirty second trip down memory lane has become a full fledged archaeological expedition into my distant past.   Cue the hurtling credits of Indiana Jones as I plug my external hard drive into my computer. I have opened a portal to the past and there is no telling when I may return to the present. This hard drive is my Holy Grail of memories; telling the tales of all my great adventur...