Toilet Agreement

Every spring I have a portable toilet delivered to my lakefront.  The toilet is then used and maintained throughout the summer months.

Apparently, something revolutionary happened in toilet-world over the winter months and porta potties became a pretty big deal.  Given this, I was required this year to sign a three-page “agreement” prior to the delivery of my plastic toilet.   Within the document, I needed to place my initials alongside fourteen individual accords in addition to signing my name.

The days of transactions agreed upon with a simple handshake (after washing them) are no more.  And, weirdly enough, my marriage license required far less thought and engagement than my toilet agreement.

My Portable Toilet Agreement

—Mitchell Hegman

Rocking After Midnight

I have had my share of strange dreams, but nothing compares to a set of recurring dreams I experienced the night before last.  I launched awake from the first dream a few minutes after midnight.  Within the dream, I was a member of the rock band Led Zeppelin.  I didn’t actually play music with the band but I was somehow important to them and we were discussing how some songs were to be performed live.

I drifted off to sleep and fluttered awake again at around two 2:00 am, pulled from a second Led Zeppelin dream.  In the this dream I and my bandmates we were sitting on a ridiculously tall sofa watching another band rock away on a distant stage.

Off to sleep again.

At 3:53 am I rolled awake for the last time.  Implausibly, I had arrived from a third dream of being part of Led Zeppelin.  Details were evasive this time, but I had been with the band again.

The afternoon before my Zeppelin dreams, I played their classic Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You twice in a row on my sound system.  On the second go, I cranked the volume up high enough to rattle my household dust bunnies a bit.  Either the song stuck with me or the dust bunnies tried to get even with me as I slept.

What might happen if I played Nilsson’s The Lottery Song on repeat?

—Mitchell Hegman

Another List of Recently Learned Things

• Eggplant is a fruit, not a vegetable.
• If a bug tap dances on your face at 3:53 in the morning, you are going to wake up every time.
• Peanut butter is an excellent agent for cleaning leather.
• 67 is the new 13 (learned on my birthday) 
• On rare occasions, snakes that make a habit of eating other snakes may literally eat themselves, swallowing their own tail after mistaking it for prey.
• With enough force, even a dull object can penetrate the skin.
• It’s possible to live without a hot tub, but it’s not near as fun.
• Toilet paper matters.

—Mitchell Hegman

Living With Deer

Cohabitating with mule deer in their natural habitat provides you with exactly two options.  One option is to surround your yard with high fences so you can grow pretty stuff within.  The other option is to allow the space around your house to assume the modest sensibilities of the landscape around you.  

I have been cohabitating with deer for over thirty years and have managed to do so by xeriscaping my yard with a sparsity of “deer-proof” flora.

If you are married to a Filipina and living in deer country (read Mitch Hegman here), the choice between the two options is likely to shift directions.  You may need to invest in fencing material and lumber.

Having been raised in a tropical paradise, my island girl wants flowers, fruiting plants, and green around her at all times.  She desires plants with baubles and bows and whistles and bells.  You know.  Deer food.

This year, we will begin the process of a green transformation for parts of my yard.  As a starting point, I picked up materials and constructed a cage around a small garden plot we prepped last fall before winter fell upon us.

For the purpose of easy access, I provided an easily removable six-foot panel on the front of the cage.

More to come later.

Working on the Fencing in My Kitchen Shop

The Completed Cage

Front Panel Removed.

—Mitchell Hegman

Translating Your Writing

You know your spelling is wholly inaccurate when spellcheck prompts you to translate a word you just wrote into English.

—Mitchell Hegman

Bitterroot Rosettes

Montana is known for extremes in weather.  Given this, having the bitterroot as our state flower makes sense.

As a starting point, the name “bitterroot” carries three spare letters, which is admirable at a minimum.  More importantly, the bitterroot plant is a perennial adapted to survive in a harsh, arid environment, and is well-suited to drought conditions.

These very conditions define wide swaths of Montana.

The bitterroot goes dormant in winter and is one of the first plants to emerge in spring, appearing seemingly overnight with a rosette of fleshy leaves. By mid to late May, the plant produces showy, oversized pink flowers. After flowering, the plant produces brown seed pods that contain small, black seeds. As summer cools down, the bitterroot plant enters dormancy, dropping its leaves and retreating underground.

True to form, I have spotted bitterroot in my walks along our country road.  Like everything else this year, they are showing up late, but I am happy to see them at all.

Emerging Bitterroot

—Mitchell Hegman

Great Ponderings

Albert Einstein deliberated for years on end in his attempt to understand the great fabric of numbers and formulae holding together gravity, space, and time.  It took him something near ten years to develop his theory of general relativity.

Friedrich Nietzsche grew a formidable mustache and spent a lifetime pondering traditional morality and the pursuit of individualism, creativity, and the affirmation of life in the face of the existential challenges of modernity.

For several minutes, I have been wondering if I should have one or two slices of sharp cheddar on my burger.

—Mitchell Hegman