My cure involves Nyquil, that syrupy sickbed absinthe. Amy shudders and gasps when she swallows it, and requires a chaser of chilled juice, but I find I quite like the taste and prefer to let it linger, so that I can savor its bouquet. Nyquil tastes to me sort of like Jagermeister mixed with a little cough syrup. Perhaps the bars should offer this combination, with a thermometer in it as a swizzle stick. Back in high school, a friend of mine and I were two of the only people who ever bought Dr. Pepper from the hallway soda machine. “But it tastes just like cough syrup,” I remember someone saying, to which my friend replied “What’s wrong with cough syrup?”

I see it like this: if Montana weren’t the kind of state where avalanche risk can close highways, it also wouldn’t be the kind of state where my wife and I can drive an hour from our house and snowshoe around on top of a hundred inches of snow so fresh and smooth and untouched it looks like some giant has arranged immense scoops of vanilla ice cream all the way to the horizon, which is the best way I can think of to describe the conditions we enjoyed up at Lolo last weekend.

That’s where I’ll be doing most of my posting from here on out. (Margin Notes may turn into more of a “what we’re doing these days” space, if I have time.) I hope you’ll follow me there, even though my subject matter will of necessity change a little (although my editor tells me that the memoir pieces are “always appropriate”).

My feature at New West is called Missoula Notebook. Hope to see you there.

See you next Sunday.

Also, some new sidebar features:

• Calendar: Days on which I’ve posted are bolded, gray, and italicized. Clicking on them takes you to the post or posts from that day.
• Recent Posts: Lists titles of and links to, well, recent posts.
• Tags: Now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, I can “tag” each post with words related to the subject, and these tags will show up in the left sidebar in the aforementioned “Tags” section. You can click on the tag to see all the posts it’s associated with; the bigger the tag, the more posts it connects to. (I’ve only tagged the last few posts, so there’s not much to find yet.) So far I’m doing this pretty randomly, but I think I’ll need to come up with some principles to guide my tagging choices so that you’ll find more than just a fleeting mention when you click.
• Recent Comments: Links to recent comments.

Enjoy!

This might also limit the exhaustiveness of my report when I get back, since it’s hard to catch up on several days all at once. I can only promise a vignette or two or three, and those no earlier than Monday.