Practical Advice

Treat everyone as you would like to be treated.  Treat those who give you single malt Scotch or show you their best fishing holes better.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Gravesite

I don’t always admire the sun.  Sometimes, it burns my skin and cracks the earth at my feet.  But, yesterday, the springtime sun felt like a warm kiss against my entire body.

At midday, encouraged by the warmth, I strode out into the honey-colored prairie grasses in front of my home.  I was hoping to discover the first green fingers of bitterroot emerging from the soil.  Maybe a tufted phlox renewing against open ground.

Late last spring I buried Carmel, one of my cats, below a long-needled pine tree at the rim of the gulch at the back of my home.  Near the end of summer a grave robber tried to burrow down to Carmel.  Maybe a skunk.  Maybe a fox or run-around dog.

When I discovered the transgression, I raked the disturbed stones and dirt and pine needles back into the hole.

Yesterday, thinking about Carmel, I turned back and walked to his gravesite. 

A new layer of shed pine needles lay overtop Carmel’s resting place.  The needles shone a deep red where brushed by sunlight.  Above me, the branches and green needles of the tree lifted a little in a cool up-wind from iced-over lake below.

He was a good boy.

Spring is the hardest season.  Not winter.  Spring is when you realized we are not all coming alive again.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Spiders, if They Wanted to, Could Eat All Humans in a Single Year

I am not a huge fan of spiders.  I don’t understand why they need to be so creepy and violent.

And why black widows?

Recently, I bumped into several of articles from different sources making claim that the world’s present population of spiders, if they all worked together, could eat all humans within a year.

That’s really creepy.  And what does it mean?

I am thinking it means we need more humans.  Not Spider-Man type humans.  We need more regular, coffee-drinking humans.  Humans willing to remove spiders from the bottom of bathtubs and sinks.  Humans with spider swatters.

For now, I need more coffee.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Upside

Yesterday, that girl and I drove home from Billings by way of Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs.  The mountain country remains snowy and often swathed in clouds.  Crescent snowdrifts still cling to the lee side of the blonde grass hills at lower elevations.  Antelope, deer, and cattle mill about the meltwaters collecting in the bottoms. 

There is a distinct upside to our gradual exit from winter. 

The beauty of a warm day with snow and a bluebird sky is hard to match. 

Today, I give you, to illustrate, a couple photographs from an early April visit to the Yellowstone Club three years ago.  Big Sky is the backdrop in both images.

Thanks goes to my buddy Mark for inviting us there and taking a photograph of me and that girl with my camera.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Something Other Folks Said

I wish I could play little league now.  I’d be better than before.

—Mitch Hedberg

Lead us not into temptation.  Just tell us where it is; we’ll find it.

—Sam Levenson

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

—Josh Billings

Three Questions

—Is what’s good for ping pong also good for the economy?

—If I stopped using silent letters when speaking would anybody notice?

—Considering the state of technology, is the statement “that’s virtually impossible” false?

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Wild East

Yesterday, after winnowing through the National Electrical Code while teaching an exam preparation course for some journeymen about to take the master electrician’s test, I came home and melted into my sofa.

This teaching stuff is hard work.

As my teaching buddy, Steve, always expounds: “Electricity is hard!”

For some strange reason, I am one of those fraction-of-a-percenters who really enjoys the Code.  To me, the provisions written within the Code range on a scale that starts at confounding but ends at Shakespearean.  Between the ends of this spectrum, I truly enjoy the knitting of shalls and shall nots, the formalized structure.   I even enjoy the run-on sentences dragging ahead like heavy freight trains.  And, in the end, I enjoy toying with my own plain English conversions for better understanding.

Crazy, thick, and perplexing as the Code can be, I think we really need it in place.  I can express why we need it in photograph after photograph.  Today, for example, I am posting a couple photographs I captured in Vietnam in 2009.

-- Mitchell Hegman