The humdrum of a normal week was enlivened sometime around last Wednesday, when the radio first started broadcasting warnings of a cataclysmic winter storm due to arrive Friday night. The forecast was for blizzards and “record low temperatures.” (It’s supposed to be -15 degrees by Monday morning.)

We’d bought a permit to cut down a Christmas tree in Lolo National Forest and were planning to look for one on Saturday morning (today), but the impending foul weather caused us to rethink things and head out after work on Friday evening instead.

On our way up the gravel road into the forest, we passed a couple of pickup trucks going the other way with trees strapped down on top, which was a promising sign. Once inside the forest, we parked on a turnout and struck out into the woods to begin our search. Amy half-jokingly consulted her compass as we set out, but actually I can see how someone could get lost on a quest like this one. You end up wandering from tree to tree, and you’re not on a trail, so it would be easy to become turned around.

Plus it was getting dark. We’d left the house at about 4 p.m., and sunset would be at 4:47 p.m., so the light was failing as we searched. Amy later observed that it was probably for the best that we hadn’t gone on a Saturday, as we might then have spent hours hunting for the perfect tree.

And a perfect Christmas tree is hard to find in the forest, if you are used to farmed trees from a road-side stand. The Forest Service prefers if you cut a tree that is growing in a clump with other trees, rather than a tree that is by itself, but trees growing close to other trees inevitably have bare spots where their branches have been blocked and stunted by those of another tree. We found quite a few trees that would look good wedged into a corner, but it took a while to find one that would work in the more exposed spot we have to work with in our tiny living room. Finally, we were successful.

Dusk turned into full-blown darkness while I cut the tree down, the work of just a few minutes with Amy’s grandfather’s crosscut saw. Then we dragged it back to the car and lashed it to the roof with ropes tied through the rear windows.

This morning, there were four inches of snow on the ground here on the Missoula valley floor, so we felt vindicated in our decision to move the Christmas tree hunt up a day. I would imagine that the Miller Creek area of Lolo National Forest, which already had some snow on the ground last night, is probably not the smartest place to drive a Toyota Corolla right now.

It’s hard thinking of things to write here since I don’t ever really leave the house. That leaves only my personal thoughts, which I try to stay away from publishing on a blog with my name on it.

It’s raining snowing in Missoula and the locals have all gone into shock since the sun disappeared around the end of last week. After the neighbors’ BBQ a week ago last Sunday, at which I actually got a little bit of a sunburn, A. and I thought nothing of planning our own BBQ for this past Saturday, as a house warming.

The snow started falling in the late afternoon.

Nonetheless, a fine time was had by all, even if I had to hold my hands over the grill to keep them from freezing, and even if I did manage to utterly incinerate twelve bratwursts right off the bat. I laid them out on the grill, closed the lid, went inside for a beer and became distracted by conversation. Twelve minutes later, I went back outside and shamefacedly scraped the smoking remains into the trash.

By the time the evening drew to a close, I think about 15 people had cycled through, which is really about all you’d want to try to host in a house this size, unless you were to break some people off into groups and send them to my office or the bedroom. (Quiet, you Freudians.)

We hadn’t expected very many guests, honestly, since we only gave people three days’ notice. But fortunately we had overstocked in the meat department, and — what with some steaks our realtor brought and a few other contributions from other guests — we had more than enough. In fact, I ate leftover hamburgers for lunch on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Not to mention one for dinner on Sunday. (What — is that unhealthy or something?)

One guest we met for the first time that evening. He was the friend of another guest and lives catty corner across the street from us. He would have been welcome anyway but came bearing two more bratwursts and two toothpaste-style tubes of fancy German mustard, one sweet and one spicy. (In Sweden, they sell caviar in these little tubes, too.) He and I told WWII stories via our grandfathers: his was a Luftwaffe pilot, while mine saw action as an infantry man on the Eastern Front. Another guest’s father had been a USAF pilot who turned back on his second bombing run ever due to a mechanical problem; only one other plane from his squadron returned that day. He flew 24 missions before being shot down and spending the next 13 months in a POW camp. At the age of 23.

On Sunday, A. and I slept in then walked to Broadway Bagels, literally the only bagel shop in Missoula. (I think. But I’ll be glad to be proved wrong, not that there’s anything I don’t like about B’way.) Then, a day of errands as A. made final preparations for Arizona. (A SAM splint for the first aid kit, some field pants from Goodwill, pipe cleaners to tie around the necks of nestlings so that they can’t swallow their food.)

On Monday, I went for a haircut at my new favorite barber, an old-fashioned place where they leave Playboy magazines lying around the waiting room (but also Cosmo!) and don’t offer either to wash your hair or put anything in it. When the owner is there, his two pugs have the run of the place. I got my hair cut by the other guy, a big fellow with a patch of white hair and a little white mustache. It took us a while to get talking, but when we did I learned that he had wandered by chance into Missoula after leaving Washington, D.C. 35 years ago and just never left. “Hippy days, you know,” he said, in his deep rumbly voice. He really couldn’t have looked like less like an old hippie. “We just loaded up a VW van and took off. We ended up in Missoula and decided to stay. There weren’t any jobs, so I went to Seattle for a year and went to barber school.”

I wonder how many hippies wandering the country in the early 1970s ended up going to barber school? I wonder if barber schools saw a drop in enrollment during that hairy time?

“Things sure are different out here in the west,” he said.

Amen, brother.

The sun has finally returned to Missoula, although unlike just about everyone else here I can’t say I’d gotten my fill of winter yet. I didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy the balmy temperatures and blazing bright desert (yes, technically) sun at first, having to work all day Saturday and then being stuck in a class on Sunday. But late on Sunday afternoon I noticed some neighbors out on their front porch, two houses down, and I decided to walk down and re-introduce myself. Before I knew it, I was ensconced in a lawn chair with a beer in my hand, looking forward to the BBQ they were cooking up. (Actually, I contributed a steak I had in the freezer. Sutton’s BBQ steak recipe: (1) Place on the grill still frozen. (2) Remove when cooked to desired level of doneness. (3) Eat. Turned out pretty well.)

Amy sort of got to enjoy the weather. On the one hand, she was outside in it. On the other, she was taking a wilderness first aid class, so she was having to diagnose imaginary head trauma and sucking chest wounds. Apparently the instruction was very dramatic, including little pumps the instructors used to spurt blood out of their fake wounds. One scenario was further enlivened by one instructor’s ability to hold and produce a surprising amount of fake vomit from his mouth.

Sorry if you were just eating breakfast.

Amy’s class is part of her last-second, desperate preparations for another field season. She leaves in just over a week. Actually, I leave with her: I’m now an official sworn USGS volunteer deputy (you can just continue to call me “deputy”) and will be piloting one of the government SUVs down to Arizona. It won’t make me rich (there’s just a piddling little per diem), but on the other hand Amy says we can use walkie talkies to talk back and forth between the vehicles, so it all evens out.

I’ll hang out for a few days to help set up camp, and then I’ll fly back to Missoula.

In other news, I quit drinking coffee (I took the week I went without it while sick and decided to run with it), and my hair is now long enough to comb. (Normally, I wouldn’t include such a trivial piece of information, but whenever we do our reader surveys, the one subject everyone always says they want to hear more about is Sutton’s hair.)

Flu, that is, which I’m just getting over. We moved into the new house and then promptly succumbed, Amy first and then — just long enough later that I began to think perhaps I was immune — I went down, too. There’s an immunological point of interest here. Amy had received her flu vaccine, while I had not. All told, it seemed I suffered slightly less than she did during the peak of it, although my cough is lingering longer. I know, I know, the real question is how I did compared to how I would have done if I’d had the shot. Now that I think about it, I haven’t gotten around to getting one of these shots for years. But let’s just say I’m highly motivated to get one this fall.

Because the flu sucks.

So, when last I wrote, Amy was not even home from Venezuela yet. She made it, obviously, although I suppose it goes almost without saying that one of her flights was delayed coming back and she missed a connection. Not too bad, compared to what’s happening with the airlines these days.

In the next few days after Amy’s return, we cleaned the new house and decided one night to repaint the living room and my office. Anyone familiar with our Baltimore living room will find the color familiar. We are trying to establish a nationwide “Sutton and Amy’s Living Room” brand.

We finished packing the house and moved that Saturday. I had put a local “lumper,” or mover, on hold to help us out. But a friend showed up early and helped me knock out so much of the heavy stuff that I ended up cancelling the lumper. He sounded more disappointed that he now would have no excuse to miss the baby shower his girlfriend was hosting, as opposed to missing out on the money. I promised to buy him a beer sometime.

As we moved in, we had offers of help from not one but two sets of neighbors; we sent the blearier looking couple — still holding coffee cups — home, however. But our immediate neighbors helped out for a couple of hours and even joined us for pizza and beer in the box-choked living room afterwards. A nice change of pace from the hide-behind-the-blinds types up in the South Hills.

That Sunday, we cleaned the old house. Spent almost 8 hours at it. Nice big place, that house.

And we had five or so days to settle in and unpack a little before the flu arrived. Two weeks ago, on Saturday morning, Amy was all abuzz with unpacking and related project goals. Then I realized I hadn’t heard her moving around for a while and found her huddled under the covers in bed, wracked with chills. At first we assumed it was some Venezuelan bug, but after a day or so it became clear what we were dealing with. I fetched cold drinks and made tea, waiting for the first signs in myself. While I waited, I proceeded with working on a business case study I’m doing for a new client. Unfortunately, this wasn’t complete by the time I got sick, but on the plus side I learned that I can still write decently well with a fever.

But goodbye to all that. Today is my third day of feeling healthy again, while Amy’s been back at work since Monday. I took my first morning walk since before getting sick, something I’m looking forward to making a regular practice of now that we live in an interesting-looking neighborhood again. (I keep forgetting to bring my camera, but wait until you see this place.) Today I walked down to the California Street foot bridge, across the recently undammed Clark Fork River, and looked at the mountains to the west, their tops lit up by the morning sun. It was so picturesque, it made me nauseous. Or maybe that was a little lingering flu.

Well, now that we’ve got the move out of the way, and with no serious illness to hold me back, look for updates nearly as scintillating as this one on a little more regular basis.

Meanwhile, Neale sends the following word from the Golden State:

I’m assuming you read something about the Olympic torch being diverted from its planned route yesterday in San Francisco. Apparently it disappeared into a waterfront warehouse, only to reappear elsewhere in the city hours later for a truncated relay, far from the thousands that had gathered along the planned parade route (including both protesters and families that just came to see it). Well, in this case “elsewhere” was none other than directly in front of my bike shop. I arrived for work at 2pm to find a chaotic scene of police motorcycles rushing up and down Van Ness Avenue, blocking traffic and shouting at pedestrians to get out of the road. It took almost an hour for anything to appear over the crest of the hill on Van Ness, but eventually two large charter buses, surrounded by hundreds of police on foot and in various vehicles, pulled into view. The buses stopped on the block in front of the bike shop, and a fairly decent sized crowd, mostly from neighborhood businesses and houses, grew along the side of the road. The bus opened, and the torch emerged. At this point me and my coworker were standing in front of the shop, me with the cordless phone. I answered a call from a woman that explained that she was with one of the local TV news networks, and was wondering if I could see the torch, because they had had reports of its location and looked up businesses in view of it. She insisted that I go on the air and answer questions. I was reluctant but thought it might be amusing, so I said OK. After a few confusing moments on hold, I could hear the audio from the newscast, a pro-tibet protester speaking his mind. Then one of the anchors said my name, and asked me some questions about what I was seeing. I gave a brief description of the scene, and noted that the torch didn’t look like it was actually lit. The anchor snapped at me. “Oh I assure you, it’s lit.” Ok, I said, whatever you say. Eventually the torch passed, surrounded by a phalanx of police and bodyguards. A few people booed and some people cheered. Everyone snapped pictures. The swell of people following on the sidewalk knocked over our display of bikes, domino-style. And then it was gone. So thousands of people showed up to see the torch yesterday, and I’m one of the few hundred that actually got to see it, just by showing up for work.

I am sitting in a canoe chair (those little legless collapsible seats also known by the brand name “Crazy Creek”) in the master bedroom of our new house as I type this, having arrived here about an hour ago to make use of the land line phone to record an interview that now appears to have fallen through.

The interview was to have been a conference call between me, two employees of the company that is my client and the president of a technology firm , but after about fifteen minutes in the “conference room,” waiting for the robotic voice to announce that the interviewee had joined the call, one of the client representatives decided we’d been officially stood up and pulled the plug.

Other than the few items I brought with me today, the house is still empty. From the door, the bedroom looks like it is set up for a stakeout or a phone scam: expensive computer and phone equipment, a tangle of wires on the floor, and not much else. The sort of sight that would be most unwelcome after you’d finally tracked down the “offices” of those people who said you’d won an expenses-paid cruise and they would just need your social-security number and birth date for a U.S. Customs form to complete the reservation.

Next to my camp chair is a stack of two milk crates, elevating my phone (and, thus, the speaker-phone mic) to about head level for best sound quality. At my right hand, ranged on the cream-colored carpet for ease of reference, is a group of pages torn from a technical manual, showing diagrams of various components of the high-end server that was to be the subject of the call. A yellow pad and pen, as analog backup for note taking should my computer fail. A water bottle.

And the window open to the sounds of a wet Missoula day, the shouts of children at recess in the playground drifting in from across the street.

I wonder what the rooms looked like that my fellow conference callers were sitting in, though I can guess. Despite the rather heady fumes from the recently — and gorgeously — refinished wood floor in the living room, I’m betting I have the better end of the deal, which is why I’m not complaining that the call got cancelled.

Since last I wrote, I passed a hectic weekend, trying to get as much work out of the way as possible before this week, our last before the big move this weekend. So a lot of typing and thinking and staring bleary-eyed at web pages on BizTalk servers, Virginia mountain-music bands and indicators of young-child health and well-being, just to give you a sense of the incongruous assortment of clients I have right now.

But all work and no play makes Sutton a dull boy, so, on Sunday afternoon, I joined a friend for a leisurely drive out onto Forest Service land just south of town, where we parked his truck, dragged a tall cardboard box out to the base of a snow-covered hill, and — over the next couple of hours — shot it to pieces, along with some cans brought along for the purpose, with a .40-caliber semi-automatic pistol and two revolvers (.22 and .44). [1] (We were going to shoot some clay pigeons with a shotgun as well, but apparently there is a shortage of “clay load” shells in the state.) This was relaxing indeed, and I was able to attack my work with renewed vigor on Sunday evening, although I eventually called it quits in favor of watching a little more of Thunder Road, the 1958 Robert Mitchum movie identified on the DVD box as “the definitive moonshine movie.” I picked it up the other day at the local Hollywood Video, along with the Gregory Peck film On the Beach (1959) after making one of my recurring pledges not to watch any more movies made more recently than 50 49 years ago. (Most recent cause: a bad week in which I viewed two vomitous recent releases, 3:10 to Yuma and The Kingdom. I don’t know why I keep thinking that big-budget blockbusters will ever do anything other than make me want to roll the television off the balcony, but somehow I just keep screwing up. Take my video-store card away before I rent again!

Amy gets back from Venezuela tonight.

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1 Yes, one really can behave this way and it’s entirely legal. On Forest Service land, the default setting is in favor of the carrying and discharging of firearms, providing you are not doing it in a way that endangers anyone else. And since there is approximately a mile of space for every current resident of Montana, finding a safe spot is not exactly hard.

Then the floor guy, who was scheduled to start work today, called to tell me the new house has no power. Then I realized that I’d misdirected an important Amazon package (so urgent that I’d paid extra to have it overnighted, for the love of Pete!) to an old Baltimore address, where it had indeed arrived in record time. Just 2,400 miles away from where it will do me any good.

So much for the good mood, especially since both of these mishaps are inarguably my fault.

Before she left for Venezuela, Amy jotted a few new-house-related to-dos on a pad in the kitchen. One of them read “Electric — changed to our name.” In the rush before Amy left, we hadn’t discussed any of these items, and — when my eye fell on the pad a few days later — the grammarian in me saw “changed” and assumed that it had been taken care of. If I’d thought about it, of course, I might have found it strange for Amy to make out a to-do list of things she had already done. But I didn’t think one more second about it until the floor man’s Scottish brogue came through my phone at about 10:45.

Fortunately, he’s an understanding guy and can simply put off starting until tomorrow. (He looks like a beer drinker, so maybe he’s on his way to the pub as we speak; he did say he’d leave his machine in the house, so I guess he’s taking the rest of the day off).

As for Amazon, the problem there was that, when I was completing my order for an iMic(the preamp device I’ll need in order to make audible recordings of phone interviews using my MacBook’s Garage Band program), my eye fell not on the delivery address but the billing address, and so I blithely clicked through and inadvertently sent my package off to my old work place, which is where I always used to have things delivered so as not to tempt the junkies with packages left on the front steps of our house.

Unfortunately, I need this device so badly, so quickly, that I guess I’m just going to have to reorder it, overnighting it once again, and then just deal with obtaining/returning the other one later. (Anyone in Baltimore need an iMike? Let me know — we’ll work something out.)

I discovered I needed the iMic when I was at the new house yesterday, testing my recording setup on the new landline there. [1] Just plugging my trusty Radio Shack phone tapper straight into the line in on my MacBook, I was able to pick up faint sounds, but not high quality enough to send to my new client’s transcription service (yes, they treat their writers well!). The problem is that the line in isn’t powered, so — unless you’re using a source that boosts its signal to line level on its own, like the kind of microphone that needs a battery or some other gadget along those lines — you just won’t get much volume.

And, of course, the power was working just fine when I left.

Yesterday also included the first official trip to Home Depot as a Missoula home owner. I know some people love that sort of thing, but there is probably nothing I like less than going into a hardware store. I was only there to get keys copied and to buy a downspout extender (to direct that leaking hose faucet further away from the house until I can fix it), but I could feel a sort of gravitational pull on my wallet as I walked the aisles, like the money was trying to drain out on its own.

I heard from Amy later in the day, as I was curled up reading a white paper about a Microsoft server, which is just how I like to spend my time these days. She and the crew were in town from their jungle camp for a few hours. She says things are going well: no problem locating nests (she was worried it might be difficult for her to adjust, since apparently you use very different methods in dense jungle, compared to the relatively more open high-elevation forests in Arizona) and no problem quickly learning the new species down there. I think she has a real knack for this stuff, although of course, being Amy, she denies this.

She says she has heard monkeys in the jungle but hasn’t seen any yet. I have asked her to bring me one if possible. I’m looking for a replacement for Zuzu the cat, and I figure only a highly intelligent primate could rival her for her ability to annoy the living crap out of me as I try to work at home. Lately, one of her favorite spots is on my desk, where she basks under my green-shaded faux Tiffany desk light like it’s her own personal heat lamp, which is fine, but of course when she wakes up it’s time to play chase the pen or paw the edges of folders until I have to forcibly eject her from my office. It’s finally dawned on me that her most active, fidgety behavior probably indicates hunger (i.e., she is finally regretting ignoring her food for three days straight and wants some fresh processed offal ASAP). To try to buy some peace just now, I went up and opened three different cans of cat food so that hopefully she can find SOMETHING she likes, fill up her annoying little belly and go sleep it off somewhere.

I know a monkey wouldn’t be much better, but at least it would be, well, a monkey.

On the pop culture front: last night, before going to bed, I wasted a few brain cells watching the latest excrescence from Fox, Nothing but the Truth, this new game show wherein contestants are hooked up to a “lie detector” of some sort and then asked increasingly more personal questions as they work their way up a pyramid of cash prizes, from $25,000 to $100,000 and beyond. Family members sit with the contestant on stage, allowing the camera to zoom in on the quavering upper lip of, say, the contestant’s wife, while she waits for her husband’s answers to questions like “have you ever slept with any of your wife’s sisters?” or “is your wife the most attractive woman you’ve ever dated?” It doesn’t matter what the answer is, of course, it only matters whether the lie detector’s sultry female voice announces “that answer is… true.” [2] If yes, he keeps his money and can move up the prize pyramid.

But of course the show’s producers aren’t interested in giving their money away, so — with each step up in possible prize amounts — the emotional stakes of each question increase. It is easy to imagine an appearance on this show having severe consequences in the lives of the contestants and their families, a fact that is actually pointed out in between rounds by host Mark Walberg (not Wahlberg), a helmet-haired fellow who manages to mix at least a little genuine concern in with his overall smarminess.

My question is, what’s next? Not to get all “slippery slope” on you, but it seems to me that the same market that supports a show like this is probably also ready to watch shows in which people compete as to who can break up with their current spouse in the most hurtful way possible, or maybe who is willing to lose his or her virginity in the most degrading circumstances.

I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas.

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1 We never got around to installing a landline in the current house; in fact, the only reason we’re doing so in the new house is specifically so I can have a more stable connection for recording phone interviews for this new client, who requires it. I’ll be glad to have a landline again, though — there all kinds of emergencies I can imagine in which it could make a life-or-death difference to have a phone that (1) doesn’t depend on electrical power and (2) can’t be lost somewhere in the house when you need it. Serial killers come to mind, although I guess they usually cut the line on their way in. Oh, well.

2 According to Wikipedia — which is NEVER WRONG — the Colombian version of the show was pulled off the air when a woman answered “yes” (apparently truthfully) to the question, “did you pay a hit man to murder your husband?” Under the terms of the show, she got to keep the money.

For more Sutton, check out his Missoula Notebook.

I’ve let this space languish in favor of my new gig over at New West, called Missoula Notebook (and if you haven’t read and commented on my latest over there, you must be the only one on the planet), but I’m in the mood to jot a few notes here again and start putting up some more pictures. I’m enjoying the column format at New West, but I’d also like to share some of the day-to-day details of our ongoing adventures here in Missoula/Montana/the West, etc.

The big news, for those who don’t know, is that we settled on our new house last Monday. We are putting off the move until Amy gets back from Venezuela, where her department runs a project similar to the one in Arizona that she manages (she left on Tuesday, the day after our settlement). Everyone wants to know if I’m having to do all the packing, but she got a big head start on it before she left. (She’s trying to make up for last summer, not that I think she has to.)

While she’s been gone, I’ve been trying to remember to bathe and go outside, not so easy when you freelance from home and there is no around to keep you on any sort of schedule. (Even the cat is relatively indifferent whether she gets dinner or not.) I’ve been over to the house a few times and intend a return trip today. We are having the floors redone and I have to get a copy of the house keys for the floor guy, plus I want to stop by and jury rig something so that a continually dripping (running, really) external faucet doesn’t continue soaking the ground right next to the house. (If there’s a cutoff valve, it is far underneath the house in an unfinished and virtually inaccessible crawl space, but at least the movement of the water keeps the pipe from freezing.) I also want to get some photos of the place while it’s still empty and the floors are all beat up, so we can showcase our accomplishments.

Yes, the place needs some work. The roof is a little rough, but is estimated to be good for another two years. A lot of houses around here have these interesting-looking metal roofs and metal siding, a vaguely retro-future industrial look I’m keen on. Amy (no more “A.,” since her anonymity is gone in my Missoula Notebook pieces) worries that it will make the house look like a spaceship, to which I say, “yes, and?” The garage paint job is looking rough, too. I wonder if we can just slap new siding over the old wooden siding? Not sure I’m keen on sanding down a building that probably has lead paint on it.

But the yard is big, the massive tree shades the house nicely, and the former resident left the necklace of elk skulls hanging around the tree’s trunk (not to mention a rig in the garage that looks like it’s for hanging game from the ceiling — if I win a big stuffed animal at the next county fair, maybe I’ll impale it on one of the hooks). And best of all, there is a little park across the street with a playground and a “splash park.”

I can’t wait to spend a few Saturdays there.

I worked until eleven a.m. or so and then drove my parents downtown. We strolled by the river, ate lunch at Dauphine’s, visited Fact and Fiction. It was 99-cent movie day at Crazy Mike’s video rental, so we stopped by to stock up. We strolled the new releases, and what a vomitous bunch of movies they were, but that’s Hollywood today: very smart people making awful movies that are designed to do nothing more than make money from certain segments of the population that can be expected to spend a lot of money renting awful movies. I found that I didn’t even need to slow down and look at titles until I spotted a movie that the store held only a few copies of. Most of those were crap, too, of course, but, in general, the fewer copies of a certain movie that a store carries, the higher the chances that I will be able to watch it without wanting to run out into the backyard, douse myself with gasoline, and set myself on fire.

One movie I picked was “The Agronomist,” Jonathan Demme’s documentary about the Haitian journalist Jean Dominique, who did his job — i.e., challenging the thieves and murderers who ran his country, from Mother Teresa’s good friend Duvalier, through the horrid General Cedras, and even including the initially well-intentioned Aristide — so well that he was gunned down by thugs a few years back. The movie was a one-night rental, so we watched it last night. I was expecting a bit of a broccoli movie, i.e., a movie you don’t enjoy watching but know you should. (You know, “eat your vegetables” and all that.) But the movie was transfixing, from interviews with the charismatic Dominique (an odd-looking man who was never far from his pipe), to footage of voudou ceremonies and street demonstrations, to the director’s unobtrusive narrative style in which the subjects are mainly left to speak for themselves except for occasional clarifying captions briefly explaining the context of a certain historical development. Out of many aspects of Dominique’s character and personal history that struck me, I was particularly affected by the way this man, educated in a French university, a film lover, a quoter of Shakespeare, an eloquent — even poetic — writer and speaker, demonstrates the important role of art in helping people to imagine a better world, even as he worked to give a voice to illiterate Haitian peasants, who it may be fair to describe as some of the most unfortunate people on earth. I highly recommend the movie if you’re the slightest bit curious about Haiti or journalism, although it may make it difficult to do mundane things the next day like, um, keep a pointless blog.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been getting cool already, temperatures dropping into the thirties at night and rising back into the fifties — occasionally maybe only the forties — during the day. When I first get up to type these entries I’m bundled in sweat pants, shirt, bathrobe, etc. I get dressed later in the morning, and in recent days I’ve found that jeans and a long-sleeved shirt isn’t always enough to keep me warm, even inside at my desk. The last few days of last week I ended up putting on a watch cap and my new vest (which I should tell you more about) just to get me through the late morning and early afternoon. Sutton, you ask, why not turn on the heat? And I answer two things. First, it’s only October, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, so we don’t want to fall back on having heat too early. (What if, in the heart of winter, the heat doesn’t feel like enough as a result?) Second, and this is related to the first point, this house doesn’t have central heat, it has baseboard heaters, each controlled individually. Once we start using these things, I’m sure they won’t be that difficult to deal with, but for now they seem like an impossible pain in the ass, and that’s kept us from firing them up. It will also be fun to see the resulting electric bills once we finally do, although of course by “fun” I mean “the opposite of fun.”

Anyway, Friday was a cold, gray, drizzly day. I set out for class in a turtleneck (yes, me and Al Gore), my new vest, a light jacket (the one with the elbow patches, which I wear to look academic so that no one on campus suspects me for the interloper I am), a wool watch cap, plus the usual pants, shoes, etc. Not the warmest outfit I could have mustered, but still, it’s only October. As I made my hunched way across campus, collar turned up against the rain, I really felt cold. I looked at my “fellow” students and tried to gauge their reactions to the weather. Were they behaving as though the weather had finally turned?

Let’s just say I saw a lot of flip flops. I think it’s going to be a cold winter.

Friday’s lecture topic was the late-1800s feud between Montana copper baron Marcus Daly and William A. Clark (as in, I guess, the Clark Fork River that runs through the middle of town — one fun thing about studying history is learning the meanings behind all of the local place names), another captain of Montana industry. Both men had money, but the professor described Clark as “one of the richest men in the world at the time”; Daly was the founder of the Anaconda Mining Company, which at one point employed half of all Montanans. Historians don’t agree (as usual) as to the reason for the feud, but it was probably related to bad business dealings/rivalries and/or the fact that Daly was Irish Catholic and Clark Scottish Protestant (two classes of people not generally given to holding hands and singing rounds of “Kumbaya” together), not to mention Clark’s frequent public disparagement of one of Daly’s close friends and business partners, a man of Middle Eastern descent (!), as a “nigger.” Anyway, Clark would have given anything to become Montana’s first U.S. Senator, and Daly would have given anything to stop him. And later, after a pretty significant fight over that issue — a fight that grievously corrupted Montana politics for years and pretty much made the state a nationwide laughingstock — Daly would have given anything for “his” town of Anaconda to be named the state capital, while, basically to spite him, Clark wanted it to be Helena. Between the two men, over $1 million was expended in bribes, gifts (liquor and cigars), and advertising intended to shift public opinion on this issue one way or the other. But, when the vote came, people simply voted for the town closest to where they lived. Helena, boasting more residents, took the day, and all of that money turned out to have been spent for naught.

In the evening, I drove back to campus to pick A. up and we headed down to a barbecue being thrown by the Department of Biological Sciences in Kiwanis Park, close to downtown. It was still rainy and cold, but there was a pavilion, and, in addition to the various grills smoking away, someone had lit a fire in one of these saucer-shaped backyard-fire containers that seem to be all the rage these days, and so there was a spark of warm cheer to the event. Or was that because of the keg of beer? We spent a long time talking to a colleague of A.’s, and I learned that he has been teaching himself how to hunt with a bow (a traditional bow, no less). He plans a hunting trip soon, solo, to try his hand at bow hunting for elk, and another one to help a friend take a deer. The friend will be using a rifle, and he will help his friend flush the deer. I asked if I could tag along for the latter trip, and he said he didn’t see why not.

This barbecue was unusual, so far in our Missoula sojourn, in that it involved no bear sightings. Not that we really expected there to be bears, since we were downtown and surrounded on all sides by either residential areas or the downtown business district, but it is a fact that, out of three barbecues we’ve been to so far, bears were spotted at two of them. And it is a fact that the area seems to be absolutely crawling with bears. I can’t be bothered to go back and make a formal study, but I’m pretty sure that it’s accurate to say that The Missoulian has carried at least one bear-related story per day for weeks. Not all of these involve actual attacks, but, when they don’t, the subject is the increasing encroachment by bears into areas they once steered clear of. This is their hyper feeding season, when they desperately try to pack on the pounds in order to be able to hibernate all the way through the winter, and of course there is less and less food for them as the planet continues its not-so-slow slide into environmental ruin. I already mentioned the bear shot in Idaho a few weeks back, the first grizzly spotted there since 1946. An update on that story informs us that this bear can be determined through genetic evidence to have traveled over 160 miles to reach that area, which can partly be chalked up to the wanderlust that some grizzlies feel (though this wandering was over three times longer than what’s typical), but of course food scarcity has to be taken into account as well.

The bear stories made such an impression on me that, for this past weekend’s trip to Glacier National Park (on which more later), I decided to pick up a can of bear spray, i.e., pepper spray specially formulated for use against bears (I think mainly because it discharges in a 30-foot “shotgun-cloud” pattern). I wondered if I were being paranoid. We never ran into any bears, as it turned out (well, just the one dressed as a Montana State Trooper in the hotel lobby, but he seemed friendly enough), but just this morning I was leafing through The Missoulian when I saw this headline: “Carroll Student Attacked by Bear.” (It seemed intent on eating him, until a friend fired a pistol and it ran off.) And on the article’s jump page, there was a smaller item about a hunter in Yellowstone who killed another attacking grizzly with a pistol, which, from everything I’ve heard on the subject of shooting grizzlies using anything other than a powerful rifle, is really only possible if you can aim your shot up through the roof of the bear’s open mouth. (In Into the Woods, author Bill Bryson, while he is outfitting himself to hike the length of the Appalachian Trail, overhears a gun-store owner offer to file the sights off of the handgun that a customer has just announced he is purchasing for bear defense, because — the gun-store owner explains — it will then hurt less when the bear takes it away and shoves it up the guy’s ass.) And last night I was flipping through the local “alt-weekly,” the Missoula Independent, where I saw mention of “frequent black-bear sightings” in town, especially in yards that boast unharvested apple trees and, of course, around unsecured trash cans. And yesterday evening, we were walking on a trail through Moose Can Gully, a quarter-mile from the house, surrounded on all sides by houses, when two kids we encountered (chopping down trees with an axe, curiously enough) told us excitedly that they had seen bear scat and “signs” in the gully. So now, I’ve gone from wondering if I were being paranoid in planning to take bear spray along to Glacier, to wondering if I should carry it with me at all times.

Oh, and, in other news, a sex offender disappeared from his work-release job yesterday. The article was headlined “Search is on for escaped sex offender,” but I think it should have read “Madman on the loose” because that’s the guy’s actual last name.

At first this was funny. It always is. How unfortunate it is for cats that their expression of utmost, deepest anger sounds essentially ridiculous to human ears (not to mention that the little mewing sounds they make for attention sound like the brattiest imaginable whining noise, so that while they are telling you they wish you could all spend a little more quality time together, you are trying to remember where you put the drowning sack).

But it got old. It always does. I kept shooing Zuzu off of the back of the couch, hoping to divert her attention, but she kept bounding back up, back arched eight inches above her head, otherworldly wails issuing from her mouth.

I realized the only way I was going to get any peace, so that I could continue reading the front-page article about local city-council candidates being forced to perform the chicken dance at a local pre-election event “aimed at [the] younger generation” (aren’t you old folks jealous?), would be to temporarily take up arms in Zuzu’s name. I went out the front door in my bathrobe and gathered some of the “river rocks” that the condo association keeps stocked in the flower beds next to each unit’s driveway and walked back through the house and out onto the deck. The cat was still standing next to a fence a few units down and looked curiously up at me. Zuzu had followed me to the sliding-glass door. Kill it! Kiiiillllll it! she wailed, or noises to that effect. What had I gotten myself into, I wondered, my hand shaking, sweat beading on my brow. Was this really the right thing to do? Or was Zuzu manipulating me to do her evil bidding?

I picked out my first rock and raised my arm. As soon as I did, the cat took off running. (Someone must have thrown rocks at him before.) It wouldn’t be long before the cat would reach the cover of the large pine tree out behind the units, but I had lost my stomach for grim violence so early in the morning, and so my throw was halfhearted and half calculated to miss. My second rock also went wide, and I cannot say I was sorry, although Zuzu looked at me suspiciously as I reentered, as if wondering just how committed I really was to the cause.

I ignored her, sat back down at the table, and turned to an article about hunters reloading their own ammunition (i.e., they pick up their old shell casings, buy new bullets, i.e., the little thing that actually gets fired out of the barrel, and then repack the shell with powder), which apparently saves them quite a lot of money, in addition to letting them customize how much powder is in each shell in order to, say, reduce wear and tear on the barrel of an antique rifle, or increase the striking power for large game, and so on. The headline was “Adding Life to Bullets.” I take this as yet another sign that we really are in gun country. Other signs spotted so far include:

• The fellow we met on the Canyon Falls trail near Hamilton a few weekends back, striding along with his kids (excited four-year-old boy clutching a small container of water that, from the way he handled it and gazed into it, probably contained some specimen of the local fauna that he had scooped from the creek; excited eight-year-old boy dragging several massive branches behind him; and tragically bored twelve-year-old girl bringing up the rear, listening to an iPod), wearing a large, silver revolver in a black nylon shoulder holster. I asked one of our hiking companions — not a local, but someone who has lived here for a while — if this was, strictly speaking, legal. She shrugged and said, “as long as it’s not concealed.” I offered that the Forest Service, whose land we were on, might have a different opinion. She told me that “gun laws in Montana are mostly theoretical.”
• The sign at the front door of Sportsman’s Warehouse, a huge sporting-goods (a term which, in these parts, heavily implicates hunting) store in one of the Reserve Street strip malls: “If you plan to remove your handgun from the holster while in the store, ensure that it is unloaded and the breech open before entering.” (Is it my imagination, or do I hear something of an implied threat behind those words, sort of similar to the way the gunner’s mates at the Coast Guard shooting ranges — their fingers lightly caressing the butts of the sidearms they habitually wore — sternly advised us not to turn from our firing lanes with an unholstered weapon in hand?) Meanwhile, back behind Sportsman’s Warehouse’s gun counter, veritable acres of wall space were given over to row upon row of handguns hanging from hooks, easily several hundred of the things in view, in dozens of shapes, varieties, and colors.
• The full-color ads in the daily paper, touting rifles, handguns, and ammo. Only today, I noted that a “great junior or women’s rifle” was available from a local outfitter for only $319, while apparently a basic Remington twelve guage gauage gauge (WHY can I never remember how to spell that word?!) can be had in these parts for around $250.

Later in the day, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Gmail to let me choose between two different “signatures” (the little block of information, usually containing one’s title, email address, phone number, etc., that appears automatically at the bottom of a new email you are composing). Why, you might ask, do I need two different signatures? Because a client of mine would like me to use an email address based on her business’s internet domain when I do work on her behalf, so that, essentially, I will look like an employee of hers when I email her clients.

But I didn’t want to have to check a second email account, worried that I might forget and therefore miss some essential message. (Also I am just lazy.) So I had this client set up my account (which we’ll call “me@GenericBusiness.com”) to forward to my Gmail account (which we’ll call “me@gmail.com”). This meant that any message sent to my GenericBusiness.com address would show up in my Gmail inbox, where I would be guaranteed not to miss it, since I check my Gmail inbox approximately every thirty seconds throughout the day.

Next, I was able to set up Gmail so that I could respond to these messages as “me@GenericBusiness.com” as well (as opposed to “me@gmail.com,” the usual return address). The basic framework of what I needed was now in place. The problem was that I also wanted a different signature for each account, so that, (1) when I send a message as “me@gmail.com,” the signature block will include my personal contact info and web site, but (2) when I send a message as “me@GenericBusiness.com,” the signature block would include GenericBusiness.com’s contact info and web site. Strangely, Gmail does not offer this option; as far as they are concerned, the only way to use more than one signature would be to type or paste them in each time I compose a message. (I guess they’re too busy planning to colonize the moon to come up with useful features like this.

But since I use Firefox’s web-browsing software, and since Google’s products are “open source,” meaning that they publish the nuts and bolts of how these products work, meaning in turn that thousands of geeky computer types can create add-ons and modifications to these products, I was able to add what’s called a “script” that changes how the Gmail web site behaves for my email account. First I had to add the Firefox script manager, Greasemonkey. Then, via Lifehacker, a wonderful blog that covers “tips and downloads for getting things done,” I found the “Multiple Signatures in Gmail” script written by a developer who goes by the on-line moniker of “Choonkeat.” This was easy enough to install — like any of these add-ons, you just click on a link — but, because it had to generate my specific signatures, I did have to open the script (sort of similar to the source code of a web site) and insert my signature information, which was extremely frustrating until I realized that you cannot use an apostrophe in the text of your signature, since whatever scripting language is in use reads apostrophes as programming language, not text, and it bollocks up the whole process. After an embarrassingly long time, however, I finally figured it all out, and now I can easily switch identities and signatures within my Gmail webmail browser window.

So I was definitely ready for a Pabst Blue Ribbon (ah, Natty Boh, how I miss you) and episode two of this season of “The Office,” still essentially the only television show A. and I make any effort to watch. (I mean, I’ll turn on “Family Guy” from time to time, but if the baby or the dog are too long coming on-screen, I tend to get bored. And we can’t seem to adjust to tuning in “The Simpsons” at seven p.m., which is when it comes on out here in the hinterland if you can believe it. But on a related note, one could easily get into watching the various “Late Shows” out here, because they all start around ten p.m. I mean, I haven’t gotten into it, but one could.) Two of A.’s Bird Camp colleagues joined us. Really, the only reason A. stopped and bought PBR on the way home was because one of these colleagues is known to prefer “cheap beer,” so it was like something out of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” when they turned up with a six-pack of a local microbrew, purchased only “because A. likes fancy beer.”

Anyway, “The Office” was good, although I wonder if they are overdoing it with these hour-long episodes. As short as the show used to seem, the hour-long ones can feel a little indulgent, and the rhythm and pace seems to fizzle after a while. Don’t get me wrong, the show is still top notch, and it’s not like I wasn’t happy to look at the clock at eight thirty and see that there was still another half hour to go. I wouldn’t say that the show is currently at the peak of its comedic powers, but the writers seem to me to be doing a good job maneuvering the extremely tricky point they are at in the overall story arc and the various characters’ development (i.e., the Jim-and-Pam romance, which, if mishandled, could really easily turn the show maudlin and pointless).

No word from my parents, who I think should have reached their hotel near Glacier National Park last night. We join them Saturday, in preparation for which I have been brushing up on my bear-fighting techniques. I might even buy some pepper spray today. I really don’t think I’m being paranoid, but I’ll put off briefing you on local ursine news until tomorrow.