The View from Here

So thanks to everyone who responded so enthusiastically to my first attempt at blogging. So here is more:This morning I got up early and headed down our street to the base of the mountain that sits just east of us. There is an old railroad track and a trail called the Maude S. Old mining areas were named after wives, lovers, home towns, etc, which is ostensibly how the Maude S. was named. Anyhow...the trail is lined with purple thistle, sage brush, wheat grass (I am making up that name) and once you get to the top you can see a little and distant peek into the Berkeley Pit (the Superfund site with the tainted water from the strip mining), the town of Butte to the Pit's south, and Our Lady of the Rockies (ourladyoftherockies.com), which is worth looking up.

So my point in telling you all of this useless info is to explain the lure of the trail (it is beautiful) and its downside: namely wild animals of varying aggressiveness. I haven't seen any yet, but people keep dropping slightly terrifying statements. Like, "Did you see the moose up there?", or "Watch out for the elk." (Does this mean that I should look for elk or avoid them?--and how do you avoid them? I mean what exactly am I to do when I see elk or moose?) Recently a fellow Butte person (Buttant? Buttian?) gave me the once over and mentioned my diminutiveness and the threat of mountain lions to someone my size. Excuse me. I am small enough that I look like a tempting morsel for mountain lions on the prowl!

Yesterday's Montana Standard included advice for how to dress whilst hiking during bear hunting season. BEAR HUNTING season! So now I also have to watch out for the hunters and the bears?! These bits of information are a little upsetting.

Anyhow, I still plan to hike the Maude S. and the other trails around here. I see other lone women and men hikers, so I will go with the flow for now. Running into something might be an exciting adventure, or a brush with death, or death itself......I promised myself that I was going to live in Montana and actually have some Montana experiences. Let's hope that doesn't include wild animals, but I can't stay inside when the mountain just to my east is beckoning.

By the way, the local paper is having a "Manliest Beard" contest. The contest poster asks: "Do you have any skills when it comes to growing the most manly beard?" I need to ask Keith if he is thinking of entering.

Butte-iful

At the rest stop between Glendive and Billings, MT.

Hello friends and family!

We are finally settling into Montana. Here is just a snippet of things we are doing and what we have accomplished:

View of Butte, MT.

It's a long road from North Carolina to Montana, not only literally, but also figuratively. We have been feeling like foreigners in a foreign land. Not because the good citizens of Montana haven't been exceptionally kind and nice, but because words are different and so many ways are different. We are slowly understanding new words like "pop" for soda, jo jos for potatoes (huh?), youse for you.

We arrived two weeks ago (August 11th) after a long, long journey with two cars and a dog. All of our belongings somewhere in a tractor trailer between Billings and Butte rested on the hot side of some road somewhere. By the 13th of August, we had put an offer on a house "in the flats," meaning not "on the hill," meaning on the south side of Butte, rather than the hill on the north side by MTech. We closed on the 21st and moved in the same day.

Our new house! Pink trim and all. 1966 Kitchen! Awesome. Blue (and messy) Bath.

Our living room with our Stuff! Isn't it nice to be home again?

Few notes to add: Amazingly (to me anyway), cornmeal is hard to come by in these parts. Of course, grits don't even make the shelf at the grocery.

Keith dropped a fridge magnet as we were unloading things, when he picked it up the soil was so metallic that it stuck to the backside of the magnet. (Remember the little boards that had faces you could add hair and beards to with the magnetic stick, the soil looked just like those hairs.) There's copper in these hills.