A Magnetic Storm

As a G4 geomagnetic storm unfurled curtains of aurora across the night skies north of us this week, a less visible drama was also underway. On Monday, Jan. 19, Earth felt the strongest solar radiation storm since 2003. From a sudden rupture on the sun, charged particles were hurled outward at near-relativistic speeds, crossing the 93-million-mile dark in minutes to under an hour. Some slipped through Earth’s magnetic guard, sliding along invisible lines toward the poles, where they vanished into the upper air, a reminder that we orbit not a lamp but a restless, convulsing star.

While these magnetic events can be disruptive to satellites and the power grid, they are also beautiful to behold, triggering a mad dance of colorful northern lights. Last night, we witnessed another display thanks to the geomagnetic storm. I missed the most intense colors by a minute or two, but managed an image of Desiree on the deck watching the storm. Please note, the strange object in the upper left is a wind sculpture hanging from the overhang of the house, not a UFO.

Desiree on the Deck

—Mitchell Hegman

Lake Ice

I should have titled this “Lack of Lake Ice,” considering present circumstances.

I have lived along Hauser Lake since 1991. In previous winters, ice typically sheathed over the entire lake surface sometime before Christmas. It arrived reliably, easing its way across the water until the lake settled entirely for the season.

Now, here we are having reached January 20, following weeks of abnormally warm weather, and a section of the lake remains open not far from my lakefront. It’s an unfinished thought, a dark patch that looks like it’s still deciding whether winter applies this year.

Canyon Ferry, Holter, and Lake Helena also feature open water. None of them seem quite ready to commit.

At the same time, frigid temperatures and brutal winter storms have charged in and overtaken the eastern half of the country. Winter, it seems, went east and performed with conviction. Out here, we are essentially upside-down in our weather, watching the season happen somewhere else.

Strange stuff.

I have posted a photograph of the lake just below my house.

Open Water on Hauser Lake

—Mitchell Hegman

Naked With Angry Bees

Desiree and I watched an episode of Naked and Afraid filmed on the island of Palawan, the same island in the Philippines we visited in 2024. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, but experiencing it naked rather puts a twist on things. To further add to the weirdity (my word), the pair of naked survivalists attacked a thriving beehive to steal honey.

Full disclosure: I would not attack a beehive fully clothed, even if I were second in line. But I will share a photo of the island where the beehive attack took place. Please note, the beautiful red speck on the beach is our Desiree. Finally, if you go there, wear your clothes.

Palawan Island

—Mitchell Hegman

The Order of Things

The order of things goes as follows: wake up, kiss wifey, plow through the day, kiss wifey, go to bed.

It’s difficult to tinker with this order. Plowing through the day and then waking up is impractical, if not potentially dangerous. If you go to sleep first, you can’t effectively kiss wifey. I don’t want to wake up and then straightaway plow through the day without kissing wifey.

But I think I can work with this: kiss wifey, kiss wifey, let the rest fall where they may.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Personal Wishlist for 2026

Following are a few modest things I want this year:

• I want to see somebody else named Mitch achieve worldwide fame, because we need more noteworthy Mitches.
• Bigger huckleberries.
• Give me one full month where I don’t either jam a finger, stub a toe, or bonk my head on something.
• If I have to cohabit with spiders, I want little, short-legged jumping spiders to replace all the creepy, all-legs-and-hair spiders in my house, because jumping spiders are as cute as arachnids get.
• Find a use for the roll of tar paper in my garage.
• I want to listen to Johnny Horton singing The Battle of New Orleans on an LP record while I watch the turntable spin, a stack of my Legos riding at its center, rotating along just as it did when I was seven or eight.
• See a change in internet query algorithms so Montana is not the first mention when I search for information on “aggressive house spiders.”
• Find an amendment in the governing rules that allows me to reach the end of a rainbow.
• Give me a morning when nothing needs fixing, explaining, adjusting, or improving, and everything is allowed to be exactly what it is.

—Mitchell Hegman

Advanced Age

I’m creeping up on the age of seventy. I can’t even write it in numerals because it looks too big. This stage of life is sometimes called “advanced age” or “young-old age,” but neither quite clears the bar. In practical terms, I’m nearing an age where breaking in a new baseball cap might be the hardest thing I do all day.

—Mitchell Hegman

One Fire at a Time

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy (decay) tends to increase over time. Order leaks away. Structures relax. Neat stacks of this and that slide toward cosmic untidiness.

This is where I enter stage left. I love to contribute to the work of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by way of fire. At present, I am unwinding the universe daily inside my woodstove. My fires disassemble carefully fashioned chunks of tree and spread stored energy outward in the form of heat, light, and motion, all of which disperse into the room, up the chimney, into the sky, and eventually into the cosmos.

Good, destructive stuff.

At the same time, Desiree and I dry towels next to the stove. Bathed in heat, we piece together puzzles while exporting disorder through the stovepipe and leaving the distant stars to embrace the cold.

And don’t forget a sip of Cold Smoke beer for one more internal contribution to decay.

—Mitchell Hegman

Amended Rules for Deer

Living with deer can be frustrating because they like to eat everything from decorative plants to shade trees. When I first moved out into the country (let’s call it Deerville), I thought I would establish a few modest rules. You know, things such as: no eating wifey’s lilies, no nibbling at my saplings, no munching on the native currant bushes.

Well, the deer ruffled me by not playing along at all. I grudgingly realized I could best avoid frustration by amending the rules. By amending them, I mean softening them to a point where it’s easy for the deer to abide by them. To that end, I’ve pretty much whittled all the rules down to a single agreement: that they don’t bound up onto my back deck and eat my stack of woodstove kindling. They can have their way with the rest.

With the proper rules established, we get along swimmingly.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Little Thing

While browsing cooking supplies and utensils at CHEF’STORE, I stumbled upon a little thing that clearly didn’t belong. Inside an aluminum pot on display sat a tiny yellow plastic ducky, placed there with soft intention.

I love this kind of random, incongruous surprise. I always wonder about the story behind it. In this case, I imagine a small child standing somewhere near the beginning of the tale. Beyond that, the details dissolve.

Sadly, I didn’t have a Cold Smoke beer with me to pose alongside the ducky as a proper size reference. Still, I managed a quick photograph before leaving the ducky exactly where it was.

Thanks for making my day, plastic ducky.

A Little Thing

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Name of Cooking

As I mentioned before, Desiree and I have been watching a Korean cooking series called Culinary Class Wars. It’s a cooking competition where 80 local cooks (the “Black Spoon” contestants) go head-to-head with 20 renowned celebrity chefs (the “White Spoon” contestants) for a shot at culinary fame and respect.

Some of the dishes prepared are not exactly to my taste, but the variety of ideas and cooking methods is impressive for every challenge. I also get a kick out of the nicknames given to some of the competing chefs. The following are a few examples:

Culinary Monster

Witch With a Wok

Barbecue Lab Director

Three Star Killer

Iron Arms

I told chef Desiree we need to come up with a tag for her. I like the name “Pancit Queen.” Desiree favors “Cooking Godzilla.” Either way, I think she would have a serious shot at winning a cooking competition like this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the judges learned her name early.

—Mitchell Hegman

Emergency Lights

I am forever dazzled by the simplest solution to a problem. The leap from can openers to pull tabs is a perfect example. Now consider the familiar problem of losing power at night and being plunged, without ceremony, into darkness.

The old solutions: kerosine lamps, flashlights, maybe an emergency generator with some manner of power transfer. But what if the same LED bulb you screw into a lamp for reading, knitting, or botching your crossword after a second glass of wine could also serve as an emergency light? What if it quietly charged itself every time you used the lamp as usual?

That solution already exists.

Yesterday, Desiree and I picked up a pack of Power Reserve light bulbs, each capable of producing up to ten hours of light when the grid fails. I’ve posted a photograph of Desiree holding one of the bulbs, lit entirely by its own battery.

The Emergency Bulb at Work

Power Preserve Box

—Mitchell Hegman

Buckets

 

I have a five-gallon bucket problem. And the problem is, I need more of them.

I would classify myself as “bucket reliant,” verging on “bucket obsessed.” While I have salvaged most of my buckets from construction sites and from products I purchased that came with them, I am perfectly willing (and have) purchased them outright at the hardware store.

What follows is an accounting of my buckets as of today:

• 2 buckets reserved for changing filters and water in my hot tub.
• 2 buckets for potting soil or collecting rocks.
• 2 buckets for hauling split lengths of firewood.
• 1 bucket for kindling.
• 1 bucket for chainsaw oil and assorted chainsaw appurtenances.
• 1 bucket for weed eater and chainsaw fuel.
• 1 bucket used as a utility trash can.
• 1 “roving” bucket that is presently being used for collecting ash from the woodstove.

And, on another list, five-gallon buckets place number two on my personal top three non-tool items of supreme utility, which goes as follows:

1. Duct tape
2. Five-gallon buckets
3. WD-40

As mentioned earlier, I need more buckets. I would like to have at least two more empty contingency buckets on hand, because experience suggests that an unassigned bucket is never unassigned for long.

—Mitchell Hegman

Plato Versus Play-Doh

Let’s do a quick recap. Plato is an absolute giant in the realm of Western reasoning. A student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, he wrote philosophy as dialogue rather than decree, allowing ideas to argue, falter, and refine themselves in full view. His work stretched across mathematics, the natural world, morality, and political theory, laying foundations that nearly every branch of Western thought still leans on today.

Play-Doh, by contrast, is a brightly colored modeling compound designed for small hands and short attention spans. It began life in 1930s Cincinnati as a wallpaper cleaner before being rebranded for school classrooms in the 1950s and eventually landing on department store shelves nationwide.

Plato, Play-Doh. Easy to confuse, apparently.

Officials at Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences seem to have done exactly that. In an effort that feels more like housekeeping than scholarship, they recently flagged and banned portions of Plato’s work that touch on gender and sexuality, as though philosophy were a toy aisle where inconvenient pieces can simply be removed. This is not just confounding; it misunderstands the purpose of critical thinking itself. You don’t get to keep the questions that feel safe and discard the ones that make you uneasy. That isn’t education. That’s shaping dough and calling it reason.

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Ground, Out of Mind

There is something deadly in the ground here in Montana. Not slithering or leggy things. Not lethal gases. I’m talking about missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, planted in silos deep in the ground.

At present, the United States operates a land-based ICBM force made up of some 400 Minuteman III missiles. These missiles are deployed in hardened silos across several states. About 150 of those deployed Minuteman III ICBMs are in the ground in Montana, and a fair chunk of those are planted along the Front Range of the Rockies, within an hour-or-so drive from my house. They have been there, marked by fenced-in squares of sterilized ground, since I was a boy.

Most days, I don’t consider them. Just over the mountains, where the Great Plains take grasses from the foothills and carry them east as far as the eye can travel, where the land feels wide and ordinary. It’s easy to forget what rests beneath it. There, set cold and metallic deep into the earth, missiles tipped with atomic warheads idle in a low electronic hum, waiting.

They wait with a patience that outlasts generations, more enduring than memory itself. They wait for a day no one wants to name. And if that day ever comes, they will warm and brighten below the Montana plains and rise from the soil like long, streaking swords. Somewhere far to the north, others may rise to meet them, and the sky will briefly remember what the ground has been holding all along.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Hundred Years of Baby Names

 Top 3 Girl Names in 2025 (Generation Beta)

1. Olivia
2. Amelia
3. Sophia

Top 3 Boy Names in 2025 (Generation Beta)

1. Noah
2. Liam
3. Oliver

Top 3 Girl Names in 1975 (Latchkey Generation)

1. Jennifer
2. Amy
3. Heather

Top 3 Boy Names in 1975 (Latchkey Generation)

1. Michael
2. Jason
3. Christopher

Top 3 Girl Names in 1925 (Greatest Generation)

1. Mary
2. Dorothy
3. Betty

Top 3 Boy Names in 1925 (Greatest Generation)

1. John
2. William
3. James

—Mitchell Hegman

Television Crossover

Artificial intelligence (AI) is still negotiating its way around the learning curve. On occasion, an input might cause AI to swerve a little wildly. The other day, for example, an AI-generated police report claimed an officer from Herber City, Utah, was turned into a frog while answering a call.

Back in December, the Heber City Police Department started using a pair of AI programs, Draft One and Code Four, to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The frog issue occurred when, on a call, in addition to recording the words and actions of an officer, a camera also picked up a nearby television, which happened to be playing the movie The Princess and the Frog. AI, being ever-diligent in its transcribing work habits, tied everything into a nice, neat package and then turned the officer into a frog in the ensuing official report.

While a great deal of labor is saved using AI, the officers now know a certain level of oversight is required to keep their reports from drifting into fairy tales.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: UPI

At the Back Door

It didn’t arrive all at once. I can’t say when or how it settled in, but at some point it became important to me that I appreciate the look of the curtains at our back door.

I didn’t set out to notice them; I just did.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Seaweed Notification

I learned a new thing and, as a general courtesy, I’d like to share it with you. Here it is: Korean seaweed tastes just as seaweedy as any other seaweed.

You’re welcome.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Ground

I recently had a conversation about septic systems with a gentleman I bumped into. I’m just odd enough to find septic systems, and conversations about them, quietly interesting. I’ll spare you most of the details of our chat, but I will mention that the soil type at the drain field is a huge consideration. The ideal soil for a septic drain field is deep, well-drained loamy or sandy loam soil with moderate permeability that allows wastewater to percolate slowly and evenly for proper treatment.

When our conversation turned to the soil, the gentleman asked, “What’s your soil like?”

I laughed. “Oh, I don’t have any of that. I live on a pile of rocks.”

I regularly make this claim about where I live, and I suspect most people assume I’m joking, but I’m not. My “ground” is mostly river-washed cobbles with an occasional run of sand, left behind by ancient waters.

Pretty rocks, I grant you.

To show you what I mean, I trotted outside and took a photograph of the ground not far from my house.

My Version of Topsoil

—Mitchell Hegman

Three Rows and a Cold Smoke

I set into winter with a plan for firewood. Over the spring and summer, I created three rows of split rounds outside and two stacks inside my garage. Each row and each stack theoretically supplies me with a month of fires, covering November, December, January, February, and March.

So far, thanks to mostly mild weather, the wood supply is winning against my burning schedule. I’ve burned through the entire November stack but still have a fair bit of December and all of January left to feed into the woodstove.

Not bad. I think we can call that a win.

Stay warm out there, my fellow wood gatherers.

I’ve posted a photograph of my outside wood rack. Please note, as a size reference, the Cold Smoke Beer at the center of the photograph.

Stacked Wood and Cold Smoke

—Mitchell Hegman

The Year of the Fire Horse

According to the Chinese calendar, we will not be chasing after snakes, monkeys, or roosters. Beginning in February of 2026, this is the year of the Fire Horse. Honestly, I don’t know what that means. But as long as I don’t have to feed it, I’m good.

Out of curiosity, I checked my birth year and discovered I was born in the Year of the Fire Monkey. That sounds more fortuitous than the Wood Sheep or Metal Rat. And even if it isn’t, I’ve decided it is.

After consulting the Chinese calendar, I did what anyone would do and searched for “random stuff on the web.” The third result was a video titled The WEIRDEST Websites That Actually Exist. I watched enough of it so you don’t have to. Consider it a public service.

Have a great start to your new year. I’ve posted the video here for those of you who don’t know better.

—Mitchell Hegman

VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuEWJUQx98M