Mitch Altered

Social media is now awash with better versions of everyday folks. Thanks to AI, you can ship your photo off through the mysterious blue tubes and have it altered to your preferences.

Question.

Why not me?

The other day I grabbed a photo (electronically speaking) and handed it off to ChatGPT with firm instructions to “make me handsome.” That’s quite a cliff to climb, I realize, but ChatGPT made a valiant effort by removing wrinkles and giving me a tan.

Desiree also took a run at handsoming me up with an app on her droid. Apparently, that application deemed a mean-looking version of me would be more attractive.

As it stands, I think I’ll stick with the features I inherited from the thousands of years of questionable selective breeding and occasional bouts of heavy drinking.

I’ve posted my original photo along with the altered versions.

—Mitchell Hegman

Perpendicular

Long before I landed in my career as an electrician, I danced through a host of other jobs, including a stint at a local department store. While there, I had the good fortune of being responsible for the toy department, which fit me beautifully. My boss, however, walked with a waddle and said strange things to me. Often, he would stop by just to say, “Everybody loves a duck, Mitch.”

He was my boss, so I never tried to get to the bottom of that.

Years later, I got even in my own fashion. The sprinkler fitter foreman on a big commercial job proved an apt target. He was nearly too friendly and an obvious drug abuser. I liked him a lot. He smoked a pipe, which refused to stay lit for him, and he stared at the wood-framed walls for an inordinately long time before drilling the holes required for his system. I often strode right up to him just to say “perpendicular” with raised eyes before briskly walking away in silence.

—Mitchell Hegman

Puzzle Update

I have an update on the puzzle we are working on. It’s titled The Peckish Pirates. When you piece the entire thing together, you are charged with opening up a second package for some additional “magic” to be applied.

Putting the thing together is, I hazard to say it, puzzling. First, we had six corner pieces. Once you get in a bit deeper, you discover that the inside is filled with edge pieces. Also, there is a series of three sets of three pieces that can be interchanged (incorrectly) at three waterfalls within the puzzle. Finally, the box says the puzzle will measure 28 x 21 inches, but it appears to be closer to 28 x 19 inches.

I am posting a photograph of the three interchangeable sections and another photograph showing our progress to date.

In the event you plan on doing this puzzle yourself, I will not divulge anything more about the puzzle, other than a final photograph before we apply the magic.

Three Matching Sections

The Puzzle to Date

—Mitchell Hegman

Pale Juniper

As an electrician, I made a career out of calling attention to stuff that bothered me. In the construction industry, electricians are known for being, shall we say, persnickety. Apparently, this trait has chased along into my retirement.

Stuff is still bothering me.

Today we need to chat about pale junipers because they have been bothering me for quite some time. Here’s the thing: in theory, we have only one type of juniper tree growing in our region, the Rocky Mountain juniper. But on my property, I have several junipers that are pale green compared to the vast majority. The bark on the young branches is even slightly lighter in color.

Explain that, please.

I sent AI a couple of photographs comparing the pale juniper to others, and then we engaged in a lengthy discussion. In the long run, we both figure the pale junipers are the same species, but the pale types have a slight genetic kink. In my way of thinking, it’s equivalent to humans with blonde hair and blue eyes compared to brunettes with brown eyes. Both still have car payments, dirty dishes in the sink, an aversion to cold weather, and are otherwise human.

I’m a little less bothered now, but the electrician in me will never fully let go.

I have posted a photograph of two junipers growing side-by-side, with the pale juniper on the left. In person, the contrast is striking.

Junipers Growing Side-By-Side

—Mitchell Hegman

Wine with a Twist

Sometime back, a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur informed me that no self-respecting person would purchase wine that comes in a bottle with a twist top rather than a cork.

It’s just bad policy.

If there is any validity to this, I now have a peculiar problem. My go-to red wine for the last fifteen years has arrived in a bottle with a cork. But when I picked up a half dozen bottles to replenish my stock a couple of days ago, two of them had twist tops.

I lay no claim to being any sort of wine whatchamacallit, and I don't wish to trespass upon anyone's wine sensibilities, but I fully intend to twist the tops off the bottles and drink the wine.

I suppose I’ll need to describe it differently now, too: My wine has an earthy start with a trailer-park, twist-top finish.

I have posted a photograph comparing two bottles of the same wine.

Cork on the Left, Twist on the Right

—Mitchell Hegman

Six Corner Pieces

Now that the seasons are changing and we are slipping toward winter and more time indoors, it’s time for me to work on jigsaw puzzles. Yesterday, I started sorting pieces for one. Every piece of the 1000-piece puzzle is uniquely shaped. Some are shaped like animals, fruit, or other familiar objects.

As always, I first try to sort out the edge and corner pieces as an assembly strategy. I quickly bumped into a weird problem: I found six of the four corner pieces I need.

I think we can all agree that a rectangular puzzle has only four right-angle corner pieces. Finding six of them rather stopped me in my tracks. Naturally, I consulted the picture of the puzzle and quickly identified four rightful corner pieces. Not long after, I found where the other two pieces will land as run-of-the-mill edge pieces.

I am sharing a photograph of the six corner pieces and another showing where the two oddball corners will be placed. I think we may be in for a wild ride on this puzzle.

Six Corner Pieces

Two Not-So Corner Pieces

—Mitchell Hegman

Raided in the Night

Between sundown and sunrise, all manner of critters emerge in the notch valleys of the Northern Rockies to go about making their living. This includes predators, scavengers, and all the hapless nibblers in the timberlands and open parks.

Strange things can happen in the darkness. My cabin and all that surrounds it are not immune to either the associated wonders or treacheries.

I mentioned how I battled with weeds on Sunday. In doing so, I filled one trash bag with spotted knapweed and another with thistle. I lugged the two bags back from the wilds and pitched them alongside the cabin.

When I woke the following morning, the bags had been dragged off to near the fire pit, and something had torn them open for inspection.

Definitely not the work of a mouse. At the same time, I don’t suspect the raid was the work of a bear. A bear would have shredded the bags to bits and made a big mess on the spot. Other than what happened to the bags, I didn’t see any other clues.

I would hazard a guess at what critter is responsible.

I hauled the bags back to the cabin and then double-bagged them for a trip to my trash bin at home.

My Bags Back at the Cabin

—Mitchell Hegman

The Broccoli Incident

I make salads. Desiree, owing to her vastly superior capabilities, covers all the other prep and cooking on either side of that.

I like to chop up all kinds of stuff to add to my salads. Nuts, sweet onion, olives, cabbage, and broccoli are commonly added to a base of kale, lettuce, spinach, and arugula.

Welp, yesterday I had a broccoli incident. Apparently, I got a little too frisky while chopping. As my buddy Kenny used to put it: “I was going at it like a one-armed man killing snakes.” Somehow, even while wearing glasses, a speck of broccoli flicked up into my right eye.

To be perfectly honest, it only sort of hurt, but if someone had been around, I would have played it up a bit. In the end, I merely rubbed my eye, and the broccoli vanished.

I would like my broccoli incident to serve as a cautionary tale. I’m not suggesting we need to start wearing safety glasses when chopping broccoli. But that particular broccoli clearly chose violence. And there may be others.

—Mitchell Hegman 

Abraham Lincoln at the Coffee Shop

Abraham Lincoln stopped at a small coffee shop to grab an espresso. After a few oblique glances, the barista, a young woman with a ring in her nose, recognized her customer.

"I know you," she said. "You're the guy on the penny."

"Heads it is," replied Mr. Lincoln, nodding. "I'd fancied to land my profile on the nickel, but George Washington swooped in on that. I suppose he is a mite more handsome. And deserving."

"You look better in person, if that matters," the barista noted. "You have an aura of kindness about you. Are you into crystals?"

Lincoln considered for a moment. "I'm afraid crystals have largely evaded me. I do enjoy Aesop's Fables, though, and recently I've been taken by Bob Dylan's music. I enjoy his weave of narrative and song. And I appreciate that his voice has not fully come in from the wilderness. It's honest."

As Abraham Lincoln was talking, the young woman made change and handed it over.

"How weird is it to get paid with pennies?" she asked.

"At first, it made me uncomfortable. Now, the oddity of it walks directly through me untouched," Lincoln admitted.

"When things got weird for me, I got a nose ring. That's what I did."

"Interesting. I will keep that in mind."

Ten minutes later, Abraham Lincoln found himself rolling down the sidewalk with a newly minted penny in his pocket and a coffee in hand.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Slide

I woke from a dream in which death was, literally, a long slide. Two women with indistinct facial features and I were stationed at the top of the slide so we could shove people off when their time arrived. As was bound to happen, someone I knew, an apprentice I once taught and liked immensely, appeared beside us.

When the time came, I helped push her down the slide without question.

I woke immediately after this and now sit on my sofa in the pre-dawn, wondering why my brain does this to me.

—Mitchell Hegman

Four

I watched a program on television last night featuring a woman who pronounced the number four as "fo-were." For me, something like that is the equivalent of having a tire blow out while driving down the highway.

It's the end of all forward progress. I need to pull over before severe damage is done.

For the rest of the program, I kept repeating fo-were every time the woman appeared. Today, in the fresh light of morning, I don't even recall where I was headed with the show.

But henceforth, fo-were shall be the new four.

—Mitchell Hegman

105 Degrees

Late Saturday afternoon, while driving from Helena to East Helena, my car registered a temperature of 105°F. That’s about 40 degrees higher than my preferred maximum temperature. It also ties the official all-time record high temperature for Helena.

When my car recorded that temperature, I had serious concerns that I might melt into a white-haired puddle. I insisted that Desiree capture an image of the numeric display on the console of the car so she could share my manner of demise with future generations.

You know that thing about all of us returning to dust?

Welp, apparently, I am getting an early run at that, too. When you look at the photograph of the temperature on my car’s display, you’ll see a lot of dust.

—Mitchell Hegman

From What I Gather

Under certain conditions, sound carries itself remarkably intact across the lake. In the latest installment of this, I heard a pair of young “ladies” talking. From what I gather, there are a lot of “fuckers” on that side of the water.

—Mitchell Hegman

7000 Photographs

Something weird happened to one of my game cameras at the cabin.

Before we unpack the weird stuff, you need to understand that I have three game cameras posted near the cabin. The camera we are talking about is shooting images at around 550 kB in file size.

That’s fairly small. At that size, the 32 GB SD card in the device would readily hold something near 58,000 images. The camera is strapped somewhat haphazardly atop the four-foot stump of a giant fir we were forced to fell last year.

Here’s the weird part. When I stopped to pull the SD card before driving past it, I found the camera had been knocked askew and was directed mostly at the sky and nearby treetops.

So, consider this: we are talking about a camera triggered by motion. What has more motion than trees in the wind? Given this, I found over 7,000 images on the game camera, all captured in a bit under two weeks. The first dozen images were of a righteous herd of elk milling about in front of the camera. Apparently, one of the elk nosed the camera and oriented the business end skyward. All the thousands of other images were of empty sky.

I’m sharing one of the photographs, showing the elk flowing past the camera as darkness descends on the mountain valley.

Elk Captured at Night

—Mitchell Hegman

Logging In

Given my struggle with passwords and the fact that I am all thumbs with my smarter-than-me phone and other electronics, I often struggle when attempting to sign in to any of my various apps and accounts. Also, I have never had a TikTok account. So, imagine my surprise when I retrieved my phone from my pocket after poking about in Desiree’s flower garden and found a new email on an account I rarely use. The message read as follows: “You're receiving this email because you used Sign in with Google to sign in to TikTok on July 25 at 9:02 AM.”

My phone was in my pocket at 9:02.

Apparently, my butt logged in to TikTok without informing the rest of me.

Honestly, this is slightly distressing. What might be next? What if my butt started making moves on the stock market or diving into bitcoin investments?

—Mitchell Hegman

Road Hazards

Certain inputs tend to stick with me longer than they should.

If, for instance, I happen to wake up to a song, that song will rattle about in my head for the rest of the day. Or if I find a big spider on the floor, every suspicious spot or motion in the house registers as a spider for the next several hours.

Recently, I had to have new tires put on my car because when I tried to have the existing tires rotated, the technician discovered they were coming apart where the tread meets the sidewall. “You need to get new tires right away,” he suggested. “Chunks are missing from one of them.”

That’s a pretty big input.

Within a few hours, new tires were mounted on my car. Now, at least for the short term, my driving experience has been altered. Every time I drive up behind another vehicle, I’m scoping out the tires.

I just know there is trouble out there.

—Mitchell Hegman

Butt-Wipes

It's unlikely that rap music will ever overtake the sound of waves shuffling across a Montana mountain lake. Improbable that two words could topple you with laughter. Implausible that only my kiss could stop you from drowning in mirth.

But then a chrome-and-glitter wakeboard boat emerged, with too-loud music thumping.

"Butt-wipes," I said of them.

I swear, honey, you would have died laughing had I not enfolded you.

—Mitchell Hegman

Habakkuk’s Penny

While handling a Bible someone gifted Desiree, I noticed a rather conspicuous gap between the pages in one spot. Upon opening the Bible there, I found a shiny new penny.

Strange.

Why there? A random act? Sheer chance? Or might some design be in effect?

The coin marked the beginning of Habakkuk, a minor prophet. I was unfamiliar with the book and had to do some studying.

Habakkuk is a remarkably honest little book. The prophet looks at a world drowning in violence, corruption, and injustice and asks God the question believers have been asking for thousands of years: "Why don't You do something?" God's answer is unsettling. Habakkuk learns that faith is not built on having firm answers. Sometimes it must carry true believers through hard answers and anguish. By the end of the book, nothing around Habakkuk has changed. Trouble is still coming. Yet his outlook has been transformed. He chooses to rejoice in God, even if the crops fail, the livestock disappear, and every earthly reason for optimism evaporates.

This is not far removed from the story of Job, but it is more distressing in one respect. Habakkuk receives no earthly restoration like the rewards bestowed upon Job for his faith through strife. Instead, he is left to trust God without seeing the outcome he might have hoped for.

I am afraid I would require a firm answer about the need for suffering and, thus, Habakkuk's penny is lost on me.

Habakkuk’s Penny

—Mitchell Hegman

Face-to-Face with a Fox

I woke this morning thinking about the time I opened the door at my cabin and found myself face-to-face with a fox. The fox and I, standing no more than fifteen feet apart, just stared at one another. Neither of us said a word. After several rather uncomfortable moments, I closed the door again and tried to carry on with my day.

Turns out you can’t have a normal day if it begins with meeting a fox face-to-face right from the get-go. For the whole day I was wondering, “What was that all about?”

—Mitchell Hegman

Drunk Deer

Somewhere in France, there exists a woodland happy hour. French police recently warned drivers to watch for drunken deer wandering into roadways after eating fermented fruit and decaying plants. Police described the animals as displaying “totally unpredictable behavior,” which is apparently the upscale French equivalent of saying, “The deer are absolutely hammered.”

A video accompanying the warning (which I have shared here) shows one deer twirling and frolicking like it had just rediscovered disco music. Authorities cautioned motorists to watch for erratic crossings, strange trajectories, and disorderly escape attempts.

I can’t entirely fault the deer. Winters are long, and living is hard in the wild. If I were living in the woods and discovered that rotten apples could briefly transform existence into a warm, spinning lantern festival, I too might give them a whirl.

Of course, here in Montana, our mule deer can handle their liquor. They are not apt to spin themselves into oblivion. They are more likely to get surly and show you the business end of their antlers.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fofBnwT3p1A