The Small Salma Hayek

In the late 1990s, Salma Hayek spent three years in my garage.  I wanted to keep her in the house but my wife wouldn’t allow for it.

I am not talking about the actress herself.  I am talking about a life-sized cardboard cutout.  Had it been the real Salma Hayek, I would have pleaded much harder to allow her inside the house.

Knowing I had something of a crush on her, a friend of mine managed to find the life-sized cutout of Salma Hayek and gave it to me.  I must admit, finding Salma standing there in my garage each time I came home from work was not unpleasant.  But during one of my spring-cleaning binges, I pitched Salma out along with some scraps of lumber and a trash bag filled with floor sweepings and rags.

Sorry, Salma.  And I especially apologize for the way I folded you up and stomped you flat.

Well, I have great news!  

Salma Hayek arrived at my house again the other day.  She is smaller this time—small enough that I found her in my mail.  She is gracing the cover of my AARP Magazine.

Since I am presently living alone and nobody is the boss of me, Salma will be staying inside the house this time around.

Together Again

—Mitchell Hegman

Underground

Don’t let the trees fool you.  They may be growing apart from one another above the ground.  But underground their roots are holding hands.

—Mitchell Hegman

Conversation With My 20 Pounds of Housecat

After chasing a mouse around my den, I watched it dart from that room and zip into the nearby laundry room.  I poked around the laundry room for no more than a minute.  There were far too many hiding places in there for me to cover.

After giving up on the chase, I found my 20 pounds of housecat in the kitchen.  Following is my conversation with him:

ME: Splash, there is a mouse in the house.  It ran into the laundry room and is now hiding in there.  That’s where your food is, buddy.  Do the math on that.

CAT:  --

ME: You’re going to help me corner the mouse, right?

CAT:  --

ME: It’s a mouse.  You’re a cat.  You can trot in there and do your thing.

CAT:  --

ME: Mice are small, but they eat a lot, Splash.  And they spend all day eating.  You spend all of your day sleeping.  Are you seeing the problem here?

CAT:  --

ME: Okay.  I’ve got this.

Two hours later, after setting out four live traps, I found myself walking a mouse out onto the edge of the prairie for release in the juniper and sagebrush.

My cat, meanwhile, was napping.

Splash

—Mitchell Hegman

Quick Note to Desiree

I know we remain a half-world apart, but you are behind every door I open and around every corner I turn.  There is no escaping you, my dear.

The essence of you is the essence of me.

When you tell me, over the wires, you have given the last of your spare change to the destitute old woman at the graveyard, I feel myself melting into your compassion.  I am lifted by your laughter and carried by the softest of your tones when we talk.

Somehow, standing here on my mountaintop in the Northern Rocky Mountains, I am also solidly with you there on your island in the South Pacific.

Christmas may yet hold us apart, but you will be here for the first stemless daisy to bloom in my spring.  There is no stopping us now.

—Mitchell Hegman

Locally Strange

Normally, I need to scour the internet to find strange news items.  Not so this time.  Today, I get to share something from the Independent Record, my local newspaper.

According to an article that appeared yesterday, a man named Scott Parent broke into a home on the 800 block of Logan Street in Helena.  Once inside the house, he did a most curious thing—he painted a mural on a wall.

The owners of the home were absent when Mr. Parent entered their house and they did not give Parent permission to paint the mural.  Upon arriving at home and finding the mural, the homeowners contacted the police and asked them the investigate.

The police located and talked with Mr. Parent a short time later.  He admitted he had been in the home and revealed details about the painting only someone familiar with the painting would know.

Mr. Parent has been charged with burglary.

The story left me with a lot of questions.

Did Mr. Parent, a 63-year-old man from Lincoln, Montana, know the owners of the house?  Did he supply the paint for the mural he painted?  What was the subject matter chosen by Mr. Parent and does he have natural talent as a painter?  Would I have wanted to keep the mural if it was painted in my house?

—Mitchell Hegman

Recycling Plastic

I recycle plastic.  Surprisingly, it is a lot of work.  For one thing, there are seven types of plastic and I am able to recycle only type 1 and type 2 plastics.  The items I do recycle must be cleaned and I must remove the caps from eligible plastic bottles.  Furthermore, I must haul the plastic to the transfer station in Helena and load the qualifying plastics into a bin there.

You will find the plastic type marked within a triangle on the container.

Type 1 plastic (PET or PETE—polyethylene terephthalate) is used to make bottles for water and other drinks. It’s also used to make cooking oil containers, some plastic jars and containers for many food items.

Type 2 plastic (HDPE--high density polyethylene) is used to make milk jugs, shampoo bottles, cleaning product containers and detergent bottles.

The other types of plastics are either not recyclable or difficult to recycle:   

• Type 3: Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC or Vinyl)
• Type 4: Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE)
• Type 5: Polypropylene (PP)
• Type 6: Polystyrene (PS or Styrofoam)
• Type 7: Other (Often a Mix of Types)

Part of the problem for recycling has to do with the nature of manufacture.  I read this in a post on National Geographic: “There are 2 types of plastics: thermoset vs. thermoplastics. Thermoplastics are plastics that can be re-melted and re-molded into new products, and therefore, recycled. However, thermoset plastics “contain polymers that cross-link to form an irreversible chemical bond,” meaning that no matter how much heat you apply, they cannot be remelted into new material and hence, non-recyclable.”

Additionally, the quality of plastic deceases each time it is recycled.  For this reason, new virgin material is often added to recycled plastic to maintain quality.

None of this is near as satisfying as melting down aluminum cans in the campfire with my Aluminum Beer Can Melting Guild pals.  That has become one of my favorite wintertime activities.

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: millerre

Something Evel Knievel Said

—  “Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.”

—  “When you're mad at someone, it's probably best not to break his arm with a baseball bat.”

— ”I created Evel Knievel, and then he sort of got away from me.”

One-Hundred Leaves

Thanks to our advance into autumn, the chokecherry bush at the front of my garage has been whittled down to the last one-hundred or so yellow leaves.  I started to get an accurate count, but opted out when one of the leaves fell even as I was counting.

I am struck only now, as I write this, by the peculiarity of counting the number of leaves remaining on a bush.

I plead guilty to being peculiar.

At the same time, I treat animals with respect.  I regularly scrub my toilet and shake my throw rugs.  And I try to make allowances for the mistakes of others as readily as I make them for myself.

I stood near the chokecherry for a time, waiting to see if another leaf or two might detach and flutter to the ground.

The leaves all held in place.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, the last chokecherry leaf will fall from the bush and skitter off to become the landscape at large.  Only then will I watch for the lake to freeze.

—Mitchell Hegman

Purple Bottles

Back in June (some 140 days ago) I placed three antique bottles in an ultraviolet (UV) light chamber I fashioned from an extra trash bin in my garage.   The idea was to turn the bottles purple.  

Not just any old bottle will turn purple.  The bottles need to have been manufactured somewhere between the 1880s and the 1920s.  Clear bottles from that era were manufactured with manganese dioxide in the glass.  When exposed to UV light, the manganese dioxide turns the glass purple.

Yesterday afternoon, I fished the bottles from the light chamber to check progress.  They have definitely blushed to a deeper shade of purple.   I captured a couple images of the bottles and then placed them back in the chamber again.  I am going let the bottles “roast” in the light chamber for a while more.

A Single Bottle

All Three Bottles

—Mitchell Hegman

Songbird

Frankie wanted to be a bird, not a teenaged girl.  And she didn’t want to be called Frankie, either. 

Her name was Francina.  Her father called her Frankie because he drank beer.  That was her conclusion, at least.  He had dirt under his fingernails, too.

“I’m Francina,” she would remind her father.

“I know, Frankie,” he would say.

Frankie wanted to a be a songbird, specifically.  A meadowlark, preferably.   But any kind of songbird would do, providing she could sing a sharp song from inside a lilac bush and then fly away.

In the evenings, Frankie sketched herself as a bird.  She prepared dinner for her father and cleaned the house.

Frankie’s mother had been gone for as long as Frankie could remember. 

“Where is my mother,” Frankie asked her father long ago.

“She turned into a bird and flew away,” her father told her.

—Mitchell Hegman

Green Lights

I spent several hours driving around Helena yesterday morning.  Under the best conditions, driving through Helena is odd.  The streets were laid out haphazardly amid gold rush mining claims.  The streets are more a tangle than a grid.

But yesterday proved more than an odd driving experience.

It was extraordinary.

I breezed through nothing but green lights the whole time crossed back and forth through the city.  I am not talking about two or three green lights.  I am talking about dozens of them.  If a light shone red as I approached, it turned green when I reached it.

I have never experienced such a thing in my entire life.

The more green lights I whisked through, the more excited I felt.  What kind of luck was this?   I found myself grinning as I green-lighted my way through town.

I began to feel as though a higher power was ushering me effortlessly from place to place?  To what end that?

Wait a minute.

My smile turned to a frown as another thought occurred.

What if my clear path through town was a bad thing?  What if the higher power was pushing me along to meet a bad end?  What if I was being directed to a train crossing or deadly intersection at the exact wrong time?

I seriously considered pulling off the road and waiting for a spell before I driving through the last two lights I needed to clear.  But, no, I took my green lights as they came and eventually arrived back home too early to drink a beer.

—Mitchell Hegman

Morning Report: October 20, 2021

I have sipped at my coffee and eaten beets, known as ‘beetroots’ in other parts of the world, for breakfast.

I often eat vegetables for breakfast.   And I don’t think beets taste like dirt, though I am no expert on this matter.   I will be expelling pink fluids following this breakfast, but I am assured no harm has been done internally.

In the larger view, my 20 pounds of housecat disapproves of the cooling temperatures as we plod toward winter and I disapprove of the amount of plastic used in our everyday lives.

Recently, I have been trying to find a place where I can inject the word “spork” in an everyday conversation with someone, but have had no luck as of yet.

End of report.

—Mitchell Hegman

Uh Huh

Today I am featuring a video of Jade Bird, an English singer, songwriter, and musician.  Her music has largely been influenced by folk and Americana music artists.    

The song featured is a pretty lively acoustic piece.  I have watched her sing several live versions of this song.  She sounds exactly the same during live performances.  That is always refreshing.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS3G7fVoMhk

Cabin Crossers

I had two trees near my cabin I call “cabin crossers.”  They are something akin to “Earth crossers” (asteroids with orbits that cross the orbit track of Earth).  In the long run, one or more Earth crossers could collide with Earth.  Cabin crossers might topple against my cabin.

The cabin crossers at my cabin were both sickly and dying Douglas firs with dead tops.  Each of them reached something near 80 or 90 feet above the understory.  One tree leaned heavily in the direction of the cabin.

I and a group of my favorite people spent early Sunday morning at my cabin felling the two trees and cleaning up the aftermath.

My friend Geddy Parker, a man with considerable logging experience, acted as the lead engineer and sawyer.   For the cabin leaner, Geddy attached a rope as high up the tree as he could reach with my extension ladder.  While he made his cuts and pounded wedges, two of us pulled on the rope to direct the tree away from the cabin.

Both trees dropped away from the cabin in a shower of shedding limbs.

After the trees fell, all of us worked together to chop up the trees, pile the limbs and stack the cut lengths for easy access later.

Geddy counted tree rings and found both trees something near 220-years-old.

Though we all worked hard, everyone enjoyed a day in the woods.  After we finished our work, I prepared hot dogs and hamburgers on a campfire. We chatted, laughed, and simply enjoyed being around good people all day.

Thanks, everyone!

 

Assessing the Leaner

The Crew at Work

Examining Tree Rings

End Result

Video of the Second Tree Dropping

—Mitchell Hegman

The Large and Freaky Spider

If you have known me for more than, say, fifteen minutes, you understand that I don’t like spiders. In my book, they are about as creepy as a thing can be.

At the same time, I have taken something of an uneasy comfort in knowing that our big ugly spiders don’t jump.

Granted, there are jumping spiders.  We have them here in Montana.  For some reason jumping spiders have never given me the creeps.  Jumping spiders tend to be small, have short legs, and big button eyes.  They don’t look quite as spidery to me.  And their jumping somehow makes them even less spidery.

I read somewhere that some jumping spiders can leap two feet in distance.  That’s a grasshopper right there.

Anyhoo, a really ugly thing happened yesterday.  In the early evening, I stepped into my laundry room to grab something.  I took only one step before spotting, on the floor near my feet, a really big, long-legged, hairy spider with enormous boxing gloves (palps) held out for a fight.  The spider saw me at the same time and jumped.

Listen to what I am saying: “The big creepy spider jumped up into the air.”

I don’t want to say I panicked…

Okay, I panicked.

I tore off my shirt, threw it down over the spider, wadded up the spider, and then ran to the back door and flung my shirt off the back deck.

I’ll retrieve my shirt again sometime next year.

—Mitchell Hegman

Hearing Problem

I have been fighting a severe infection in my left ear for over a week.  The infection created a great deal of what I can only describe as pressure inside my head.  For a time, it felt is if a golf ball was stuffed in my ear.  Even now, five days into taking antibiotics, the pressure in my head is such that both ears have been impacted and I cannot hear very well.

Fighting my ear infection made my think about a story from my friend Bill.  Bill’s wife, after constantly being forced to repeat things to him or having to yell to get his attention, talked him into scheduling a hearing test.

Following the test, Bill’s wife asked how it went.

“You’re not going to like what the doctor said,” Bill answered.

“Why not?” his wife queried.

“The doctor said my hearing is perfect.  Apparently, I am just ignoring you.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Good to Know

• It’s okay not to like French toast.
• Never invest money with a man who speaks ill of giraffes.
• Don’t cook liver using a recipe that does not involve throwing out the liver in the end and eating everything else instead.
• In mechanics, matters of ethics involve grease and torque.
• When it comes to parasitic disease, you cannot always trust water, but beer and wine are safe.
• If stranded in the dark, don’t walk toward a pair of glowing eyes.
• The best cure for a bad golf swing is to go fishing.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Dog’s Best Friend

Today, I am sharing a short video about a dog named G-Bro and the dog’s best friend, Buttons.  If this video doesn’t set you in a bright mood for the rest of the day, nothing will.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKztz7xHxkA

A More Ambitious Thief

When I was a kid, I had a few unsavory friends who were not above filching items from a store now and then.  They all shared a common strategy in their thievery. The strategy was simple: they only nabbed items small enough to hide away on their person.

I bumped into a story from June of this year about a thief with an exponentially larger scheme.  A contract truckdriver named Alberto Montemayor made off with 21 tons of pistachios from Touchstone Pistachio Company, of Fresno, California.

Mr. Montemayor was caught after detectives and company officials reviewed surveillance video from the company’s parking lot.  Police eventually located a tractor trailer filled with the heisted nuts in an area not far from the Touchstone Pistachio facility.  Inside the trailer, police discovered where Mr. Montemayor was working to transfer pistachios out of one-ton bags and into smaller bags. 

I am almost impressed with Alberto Montemayor’s moxie and ambition.

Almost.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: www.cbsnews.com, www.people.com

The Steller’s Jay

Over the last few weeks, while wandering around in the vicinity of my cabin, I heard the distinctive call of a hawk on several occasions.  Each time I heard the call, I scanned the open sky above me but saw nothing.

Over the weekend, while chatting with my neighbors near their campfire not far from my cabin, Patrick told me a Steller’s jay had been regularly hanging around them.  “The jay doesn’t seem to mind us at all,” he added.  “It will land in the trees right alongside us.   The coolest thing is, it makes the call of a hawk now and then.”

I laughed.   “I have been seeing a Steller’s jay and hearing a hawk,” I said.  “That might explain a lot.”

No more than ten minutes after our conversation, the Steller’s jay appeared in a spruce tree about fifteen feet from me.  I watched the bird jump up through the limbs.  Just before flying off to another tree, the jay made the call of a hawk.

Steller’s jays are an interesting study.  They are highly intelligent, bold, and more aggressive than most birds.  Steller’s jays will eat almost anything: insects, berries, seeds, smaller birds, small animals, and they hang around us because they crave our table scraps.  Most interestingly, Steller’s jays are known to mimic the sounds of other birds and animals around them.   When threatened, they may imitate the calls of owls, hawks and even domestic cats.  Steller’s jays are found within in the forests of the Rocky Mountains.  I see them fairly often at my cabin. 

    

Steller’s Jay

Hawk’s Call Video

—Mitchell Hegman

Photo: Dillon Hanson/USFWS

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyZZAD4tWDk

An Impromptu Aluminum Beer Can Melting Guild Meeting

After an extended summer break, our Aluminum Beer Can Melting Guild held an impromptu meeting down at the lake over the weekend.  We managed a quorum by allowing Kevin’s cat, Snowball, to take a stump and join us.

This was the first meeting of the guild since spring.  Mostly, the meeting provided us with an opportunity to refresh our skills and burn the summer dust off the guild’s equipment and “safety-third” gear.  

We melted down only twenty or thirty cans in the campfire on our first run, but completed a flawless pour of aluminum in the end.

Posted are two photographs from the meeting.  I am also sharing a video of Tad making the first official pour.

Snowball on Her Stump

Red-Hot Ingot Mold

Tad Making the Pour

—Mitchell Hegman

Bristol and the Glove

Yesterday, I drove to my cabin and helped my neighbors, Patrick and Mary, clear dead standing and downed timber from the upper part of their parcel.  Most of timber was lodgepole pine and not particularly large in diameter.  At the same time, the work proved exhausting due to the inclines we worked and the tangles of downed limbs and trees we had to scramble through.

After a couple hours of wrestling logs, we loaded my neighbor’s truck with some of the five-foot lengths we had staged along their road.  We hauled the logs down to their camp near the creek.  The logs will later be cut to smaller lengths for firewood.

We unloaded the truck and then spent a few minutes sipping at Cold Smoke beer and chatting alongside a campfire.

Before I sat near the fire, I peeled off my coat, gloves, and ear protection muffs and piled them on the ground nearby.  Toward the end of our break at the fire, I looked down to my pile of clothing and protective gear and noticed one of my gloves was missing.  Glancing around, I spotted my neighbor’s dog, Bristol, fast asleep on the ground alongside the glove she had lifted from my stuff.

I pointed the dog out to my neighbors and then walked over and snapped a picture.  The dog didn’t so much as twitch.

“I wonder what was in your glove that put her out like that?” my neighbor Patrick teased.

“That’s easy,” I answered.  That glove was filled with hard work today.  Made me tired, too.”

Working the Mountainside

Truckload of Wood

Bristol and My Glove

—Mitchell Hegman

How Many More Times?

How many more times will my 20 pounds of housecat and I reach the same impasse when I try to let him out the back door?  How many more times must I explain to him that I don’t control the wind or weather he encounters?

—Mitchell Hegman

Chaos Stone

As I have mentioned before, my house rests on shoulders of material washed down from the surrounding mountain ranges by ancient waters.  We find an astounding variety of rocks in this terrain.  Some collected specimens are strikingly (if not astoundingly) colorful.

We have one type of rock, usually found in stones larger than a loaf of bread, that is comprised of contrasting swirls and patches of color ranging from yellow to deep purple. 

While a fellow rock hound (and owner of a nearby sapphire mine) was visiting my house, he spotted a few of these colorful stones I placed alongside my front walk.  “I get that stuff at my mine,” he said.  “I call in chaos stone.”

“I like that,” I responded.  “That name fits for sure!”

Posted are images of a smaller specimen of chaos stone I pried from the surface of our road a couple years ago.  This particular stone looks as if tie-dyed.

Chaos Stone

—Mitchell Hegman

Journal Entry (November 6, 1994)

Today, I am posting a journal entry from November 6, 1994:

This time of year, snowstorms swab through the high ranges, dislodging summer's elk.  Slowly, the elk trickle down to lower elevations, the herd bulls bugling and thrashing saplings with their antlers as they push cows and calves.  At the same time, from the lowest points in the blonde valleys, men ascend the foothills hills.

The point where men meet elk is hunting season.

I no longer hunt for big game, having many years ago lost the heart for it.  Just the same, I occasionally accompany friends on the hunt, packing only my camera and a lunch.  Other times, when asked, I might help a friend retrieve game from the mountains. 

In years past I have helped the St. Clair family butcher and package deer and elk.  Two days ago, Leo (age sixty-seven) and his daughter (eight months pregnant) dispatched a cow elk in the Big Belt Mountains, and dragged it back to Leo's place.  Today, I walked down and helped them butcher the elk.

I must admit, something primal an unshakable within me enjoys butchering harvested game animals.

The rose-colored muscles of game animals fascinate me to no end...the way they gather and rush to the whitening tendon points that look like snow-capped mountains, the way the ribs stand like lodgepole pine, the way the muscles layer into thick fabrics.  I am not repulsed by the damp cave-smell of freshly cut meat.

Slicing through the dark meat as I divided part of the rump into steaks, I felt almost as if I were cutting through the earth itself—my knife a river carving hard into red hills. Dark folds, cutbanks, promontories appeared at each turn; some features sloughed away as the knife pared the cool mass.

As we butchered, we spoke kindly of the animals taken from the mountains.  We spoke poorly of the hunter seeking only the heft of antlers, of the hunter that wounds and walks away.

The St. Clair’s gave me a few packages of steak to take with me when I left.  Lugging the packages up through the juniper and sage hills as I walked home, I paused twice to gaze out over the storm-bred mountains, the home of elk.  The weight of the steaks soon fatigued my arms, as any such thing should.

—Mitchell Hegman

Beamed Down to a Strange Planet

Waking during the middle of the night is sometimes like finding yourself beamed down to a strange planet.  A wholly dark and oddly quiet place.

Last night, rousing well after midnight and in a stupor, I could not find my bearings at all as climbed from bed and set forth.  Staggering about, I fought against what seemed double gravity.  With my arms outstretched against the black of night, I threaded through an array of dark shapes hovering around me.  Doors in the wrong places.  Walls rising up against me.

And a stray thought suddenly surfaced as I soldiered on: Why didn’t I like broccoli as a kid, considering how much I crave it now?

After indeterminable wanderings in the darkness, a familiar shape (something gray as opposed to black) appeared before me.

This shape I knew!

Happy to a point of delirium, I stumbled against the shape.  Once there, I blithely sprayed the wall, the floor, the seat, until finally correcting and delivering a steady stream into the toilet.  Lovely and satisfying, this known place in a dark and untamed universe.

—Mitchell Hegman

Stuff I Figured Out on My Own

• The trick to outliving your pet tortoise is not dying first.
• One roll of duct tape is required for every $1,200.00 of equipment or tool purchases. 
• Underwear is optional.
• Dancing beyond the edge of the dock is swimming.
• You are never too old to throw water balloons.
• You don’t need to stand next to someone to stand with them.
• Construction is 90% managing the mess you make.

—Mitchell Hegman

Crying in the Ravine

Something in the predawn brought to life coyotes in the ravine below my house.  A half-dozen or more of them erupted into a chorus of howls, yips, and cries.

The howling of the coyotes immediately drew me outside to the back deck.  I have not heard them like this in more than twenty years.  When I first moved out here to the country, I was surrounded by coyotes.  At night, they cried out whenever a low-flying plane overflew them.

I stood under a full canopy of stars trying to understand what the coyotes were saying.  The coyote song is ancient, but I still fail to fully comprehend it.

While the cries of so many coyotes in shrill refrain might frighten some people, I found myself in perfect calm.  I have no immediate beef with coyotes.  I listened to the chorus of cries until the coyotes, one by one, lapsed into silence.

This is where I live—a calm place between coyotes crying in the ravine below me and the unwavering gallery of stars above me.

—Mitchell Hegman

Mongolian Metal

In a moment, you will experience what happens when a band from the Steppes of Mongolia merges traditional music with metal.

The Hu Band formed in 2016 and has seen great success since.  A couple years ago, they reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hard Rock Digital Song Sales Chart.

Songs by the Hu feature both traditional instruments and throat singing.  The song posted today is a simple, yet powerful construct.  I am convinced this is one of those music adventures you will either love immediately or dislike at once.  

Reading the comments below the song is also entertaining.  Here are a couple examples:

Skexzies

“This song makes me want to Drink Blood, Ride Horses, and Conquer the World with an Axe.  Odd feeling since I'm 82 and use a walker to shuffle about! "

Jayson Raphael Murdock

“I played this for my dog, he's now a werewolf.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc

This Night's Moon

Chopped in half and forced to trudge across the broken hills, this night’s moon is a beastly bride.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Book, Camping Chair, and a Cold Smoke Beer

What does a book, a camping chair, and a Cold Smoke Beer have in common?

I can answer that.

Yesterday, they had in common being gathered up by me and carried into my sunroom as part as my first official session of rest and relaxation there.  Given a cool outside temperature and ample sunshine, the sunroom proved the perfect warm place for me to sit and read a book.

I did exactly that.

Thirty years ago, I framed a doorway for the sunroom, but finished over the opening with a wish to one day add the sunroom.  On March 5 of this year, I began the initial demolition of the brick and stucco on the exterior of the house to make way for the sunroom addition.  I worked throughout the spring and summer to complete the project.

Yesterday, was they day I first used my new room.

March 4, 2021

July 5, 2021

July 16, 2021

September 30, 2021 (Me Reading in the Sunroom)

—Mitchell Hegman