The air temperature in Bozeman is 20 degrees right now, so I’m going to “think warm” with some pictures of one of my favorite North Carolina summer activities. Most of these are from last summer and a couple the summer before that. Good times.
I’m going to be in Asheville in August and you KNOW I’m gonna have to do me some toobin’.
I’ve been a little weather obsessed lately. To compliment the snowy pictures here’s what things looked liked around campus last Thursday evening. It was warm, I was in shorts and a sweatshirt. Being from North Carolina it is odd when it stays light until 9 pm but none of the trees have any leaves on them. The grass is getting green though, there is some color emerging from the whites and browns of winter.
It is supposed to be cold for the next couple of days but I know spring can’t be too far away.
Monday it was 70 degrees and the first day I’ve worn shorts this year.
Tuesday 5.7 inches of snow fell, a record for the day, beating the old record of 5 inches set in 1896.
That is Montana weather for you. Guess which day I took these pictures on.
There was more to my trip to Missoula last weekend than just Obama. It was actually Hilary’s birthday on Friday. Happy Birthday Hil! Now she has joined me in the 28 years young club. It is fun to have a friend from North Carolina living so close. 2 and a half hours away is basically next-door in Montana terms. If everyone I knew lived out here I’d probably never think twice about moving back east.
I met her posse, a nice, down to earth group of folks, and we went out and experienced some of the Missoula scene. Good times. I don’t go to bars in Bozeman much these days, and If I’m not in bed by midnight I probably turn into a pumpkin.
The two city shots were from a short hike Hil and I did on Sunday, which offered some good views of Missoula and the surrounding area. Even with the clouds (basically a given in these parts recently) the weather was decently warm and it wasn’t snowing and we weren’t walking in snow, all of which I was thankful for.
On a warmer note, the high is supposed to be 67 in a couple of days, and since it has been snowing basically everyday for the past week that will be a nice change.
One last thing, I’ve been making the pictures a little bigger these day, if they are too big let me know.
As promised here are a few more pictures I took of Barack Obama in Missoula, Montana on April 5th.
Describing what is was like being there is a difficult task. The energy there was like a concert, Obama was a rock-star as he stood up on stage surrounded by eight-thousand cheering fans. He spoke for an hour or so on a variety of topics such as energy, education, and foreign policy. He spoke about the change that our country needs desperately and immediately after the eight year political train-wreck that has been the Bush administration.
After he finished talking he spent about twenty minutes interacting with the crowd, shaking hands and holding no less than three babies (I don’t know what compels people to hand famous people their babies.) before waving a last goodbye.
You left feeling good about the world and good about politics, which was a nice change. I felt inspired to try to bring about a small part of the change that this man is obviously working so hard to impart on our great country.
I’m including a video of a short part of his speech, someone has segmented it into topics and uploaded it onto Youtube.
My friend Hilary and I saw Barack Obama speak for about an hour on Saturday in Missoula, Montana. He is an excellent speaker and it was one of the more powerful events I’ve been to in a long time.
More thoughts and pictures to come.
As of tomorrow at noon it will officially be Spring Break for us Montana State folks. Kez and I are driving down the the Grand Canyon and plan on stopping by Bryce Canyon NP as well (I’ve never actually been there.)
We have had a bunch of snow up here and I’ve been enjoying it, but it’ll be nice to get to somewhere a little warmer and less snowy.
To tide you over until next week here are some random picture I’m pulling out from the vault. Except for the picture of the pine needles which I took today.
Photoshop is an amazing tool and one without which digital photography is sorely lacking. I’m not very skilled at Photoshop but the following “before and after” of an old picture that I messed with the other day illustrates how you can make your pictures better without being over-the-top or altering reality too much.
The third picture is just a shot of Mainstreet, Bozeman I took a couple days ago. Before Photoshop it was a picture of an old shoe.
Just when everyone in Bozeman was about to put on their snorkels and flip flops old man winter arrived with a little bit of the white stuff. It is a win-win situation though because I’m happy when it snows and I’ll be happy when I can wear shorts.
On a totally unrelated note here are some pictures from two nights ago. Our friend Elizabeth had Kez and I over for dinner and it was awesome. She was nice enough to give me the recipe but I doubt it’ll be half as good when I make it. That is Kelly on the baritone. They are going to get married later this year.
As a special bonus, you can ponder as to whether the self-portrait of me looks more like a sailor, a statistician, or a hobo.
The other night it was about midnight and I was going to bed when I could hear the wind really howling. I looked outside and it was just dumping giant flakes of wet snow, which were blowing sideways in the orange glow of the streetlights. Usually the snow we get is fairly light but these flakes were ginourmous because it was relatively warm. I decided to delay bedtime and go outside for a few minutes. .
It was really dynamic weather, which is always interesting. But I think it lasted all of about 15 minutes because about as soon as I went inside it had stopped.
The daylight pictures are from yesterday evening when I braved the slop of melting snow to go for a bike ride in the more rural area to the west of town.
Here are a few pictures taken over the last week or so. I’d like to dedicate the captions to Dr. Joseph Sulock.
One of the things I like most about photography is it makes you more observant to the world around you. Until we meet again Seattle…
In 1889 33 blocks of Seattle burned down and when they rebuilt it they….wait for it…….put the streets at the 2nd floor! So you can go underground now and see what was the ground level in ye olden times. Also, if you get lucky Norm Macdonald will be your tour guide.
The Seattle Underground is a network of underground passageways and basements in downtown Seattle, Washington, United States that was ground level at the city’s origin in the mid-1800s.
In 1907 the city condemned the Underground for fear of bubonic plague. The basements were left to deteriorate or were used as storage. In some cases, they became illegal flophouses for the homeless, gambling halls, speakeasies, and opium dens.
It was a much better drive back to Bozeman than it was going out. It is amazing how much of the landscape you can see when the moon is full and everything is snow covered. Also, Luke was nice enough to stop in Butte and let me run around in the -15 degree weather trying to get a decent night shot.
The entire trip to Seattle from Bozeman consists of driving 5 minutes to I-90, staying on that interstate for 10 hours or so, and then exiting in downtown Seattle. About 200 miles west of Bozeman lies the great city of Missoula where my friend Hilary just moved to.
My traveling companion Luke and I stopped for a little while and visited Hilary and Missoula’s fairly vibrant downtown. It was a good stop, unfortunately we had to carry on before the snow overtook us.
