Tag: Montana

Categories
Homesteading

Day 763 and Winter

When we first decided to move to Montana basically half of the questions people asked us were about the weather. “How are you going to survive the winter?“

I would kind of humor people with stories about how I grew up in the Colorado Rockies and I’ve got Swedish heritage. I had a whole bit about how I was suited to this by nature and nurture. I meant it to be a bit funny but also reassuring. I really am suited to be happy here.

But these days Colorado winters are milder than Montana ones. Global warming trends when combined with a sunny high altitude meant sometimes you can ski in a tee shirt. You’d be surprised at how warm it feels when it’s 40 and sunny.

So I really hadn’t experienced a good cold in a while. And even as a kid, Colorado cold was honestly a lot warmer than an Illinois winter and certainly warmer than a New York one. It’s one of the more pleasant winters you can experience and still have seasons.

And yet here I am in February in Montana and I honestly love it. I love the cold. I love the snow. I even love days with cloud cover. I take great pleasure at looking out over the snow in our pasture to the frosted pines on the mountains barely more than a mile away. The air is always crisp and you can really breathe here.

Montana summers might be some of the best weather this good earth has to offer. Between the cool evenings that stretch the day towards 10pm and the absolutely majestic views, it’s no surprise someone called it Paradise Valley. But I honestly couldn’t love the winters more.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 757 and Hunker Down

I really missed the cold and snow while I was in Prague. You might be confused. Isn’t Prague known for its cold winters? Well maybe not this winter. As it turns out, the unseasonably warm winter in Eastern Europe is good for the energy crisis on the continent, but bad for someone who prefers the cold.

Thankfully we’ve got a massive snowstorm bearing down on the Gallatin Valley that has a polar vortex of arctic air coming along as a chaser. We are expected to get a foot of fresh powder over the next 24 hours and then extreme cold (another -30 with the wind chill situation) will hit us on Sunday into Monday. Looking out on our back porch we have some accumulation but it has been melting earlier.

Several layers of snow on the back porch of our farmhouse looking out across our pasture

Alex and I have a standard storm routine that we follow that is part of our habit of preparedness. The best storm preparedness tip I’ve ever gotten was to clean your house. Wash dishes, do the laundry, take a shower, and anything else that requires power and running water. You will appreciate the clean house no matter what and it extends your ability to cope with something bad happening.

I am currently feeling very fancy as I did my Sunday grooming routine today and my skin and hair are looking fantastic. If we get socked in at least I’ll be clean and pretty. I used a hair glossing seal from BeautyPie and a Mediheal collagen mask and I recommend them both.

A shockingly long receipt from Rosaurs

I also did a massive grocery run yesterday as in addition to the storm we have a houseguest coming up. The receipt was so long I had to take a picture of it surrounded by a partial haul as it’s practically CVS length. Our guest is gluten free so I did some stocking up on options for him, along with a bunch of snacks because why not?

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness

756 and Weather Station

We live outside of town. We’ve learned that means the weather that is being reported isn’t always accurate for us as the various weather stations are mostly at the university or downtown. So what does a pair of homesteaders do? Buy our own weather station! It’s an Ecowitt 2553.

Ecowitt 2553 Ambient Weather Station installed on our side pasture fence to monitor our Montana weather at the homestead

In the US, Ecowitt weather stations are rebranded as Ambient Weather Stations but we were able to order from shop.ecowitt.com and buy it direct, which saved about 40% which we appreciated as it typically runs about $289.

Ecowitt 2553 Ambient Weather Station

The station measures wind direction, wind speed, wind gust, UV & light, temperature and humidity, as well as precipitation measurements (though that works much better with rain than snow).

The weather station feeds all the data to the display screen, which then pushes the data to our home automation system as well. Alex has quite the home automation installation so I’ll leave those details for another day but it is quite fun to know your house is heated based on the actual weather.

Ecowitt 2553 Ambient Weather Station Display

Categories
Travel

Day 749 and Beef

Living in Montana means I have no shortage of excellent beef. I’ve yet to have a bad steak or even a mediocre burger when I’ve shopped locally. Grass fed free range Montana beef is a luxury that is worth it.

I’ve got higher standards for meat because of it. So it was a very pleasant surprise to discover that the Czech appear to have the same affinity for meat as Montanans. I had some truly excellent beef in Prague. And I didn’t even eat a single steak. It was all peasant working class cuts.

Beef Goulash from Pilsner Urquel

Obviously I made time to explore beef goulash while in Prague. It’s not made with expensive cuts of beef. It’s generally Chuck or round. It’s stewed to be tender. The goulash I had at Pilsner Urquel was less than $20 and was absolutely stellar. I don’t drink but the few sips of dark beer I had cut the fat and spice perfectly.

I also I unexpectedly had one of the best burgers of my life at a butcher’s shop called Naso Maso. Their beef comes from Czech Fleckvieh cattle and is butchered in Jenc by hand. The shop only has a few seats but you can come in and order a burger to be grilled on the spot.

Naše maso cheeseburgers

Blessedly the Czech don’t have the same regulatory habits as the Germans so meat can be served rare. Nothing is worse than overcooking a hamburger in my book. Smash burgers were clearly invented to sell low quality beef. The Maillard effect isn’t enough to overcome the fact that it is lower quality.

It’s a real pleasure to enjoy exceptional beef from people who clearly appreciate everything about the nuances of the execution. Montanans and the Czech clearly share similar values.

Categories
Background Chronicle

Day 729 and My 22 Round Up

I scrambled a bit to do round up of this year’s posts. I went through through each day individually and attempted to sort posts that grabbed me into succinct categories. I don’t want to call it a “best of” list so much as a set of themes and experiences that made up my 2022. It was quite a year.

The most popular post I wrote this year was my viral hit about dickriders by a huge margin. The tweet got several million views and the blog post got upwards of 50,000 readers. Nothing else even compares. I think my some of my most honest writing came through two days in May when Alex and I decided to buy our house in Montana. Day 499 and 500 respectively. But I cover a huge breadth of topics over the year so without further ado here is the list. In no particular order.

Twitter Shit

Dick Riders or Don’t Outsource Your Credibility

Excession, Nerd Wounds & Needing to Be Liked

Gender Politics.

Mommy Issues, Girlbossing, & Chivalry for Women After Feminism

The Cuckservatives

The Fuck Boys

The Thot Leaders

Startup Content

My #5Before40 Project to Build Chaotic Capital in Public

Managing Founders or The Rule of 3 Asks

How To Do Cold Outreach

Managing Winter As A Metaphor For Downturns

The Importance of Corporate Governance for Startups

Glass Cannons, Gaming & Going Critical In Startup Life

Accidentally Ahead Of The Fraud Trend

Shoot The Puck or Letterkenny as a Metaphor for Startups

Vibe Shifts, Web3 and End Times at EthDenver

High Agency People

How I Sensemake My Investments

Emotional Work

FTX, Crashes, And History Repeating

A Love Letter To My Husband About Chores

Being A Daddy’s Girl

Halfway There or 500 Days

Vinegar or Why Boundaries Are Good

The Emotions of Buying Your First House

The Emotional Security of Owning A Home

A Painting Without Shadows is Flat

A Deep Sense of Okayness

Watching Others Drown

Montana

Bozeman, Boulder and the Uncanny Valley of Progress in The American Mountain West

Hospitality, Guest Rooms & Welcoming

Leaping into Action or How A Wilderness EMT Course Helped Me Work in Chaos.

We’re Not In Colorado Anymore & Our Digital Barn Raising Move

Health & Biohacking

The Personal Politics of America’s Drug War

Aesthetics, Religion and Botox

The Poetry of Migraines & Stretched Time

A Meditation On Heat, Social Mores, Pain, and Texas

Tracker Jacker or When Your Health is Outside The Mean

Politics

Preparedness, Consumer Culture & Distrust

Margin Call & Collapse

Women & Bodily Autonomy, Young Male Reactionaries and Groypers

The Humiliation of America’s Broken Immigration System

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 718 and Change

As I supposed is natural towards the end of a calendar year, I am thinking of the ways this year has changed me. I will surely look back on 2022 and think that was a year where a lot happened.

I expect a lot to keep happening in the future. If anything 2022 will feel slow by comparison. You can already feel the present speeding up can’t you? That sense of anxiety you feel all around you is a collective state of future shock. Our endocrine system has been pumping cortisol on overdrive as we desperately try to sensemake the chaos. And it’s only getting worse.

Yes I’ll remember that this is the year I moved to Montana. I’ll remember it as the year I really began to formalize my investing. I’ll remember it as the year I laid the groundwork for huge personal life changes. I’ll remember it as the beginning of a new chapter.

But I’ve really got no idea how fast this thing is going to go. We’ve got a recession and geopolitical power struggles and commodities concerns and climate chaos and who knows what’s next. But I think if you are nimble and can adjust fast you might just surf this wave. I’d be prepared to wipe out. But I think it’s going to be a good ride.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 716 and Slightly Embarrassed

I spent my entire day on Twitter. I’m not embarrassed by that to be clear. It felt like a vacation day. And even though I live in a majestic mountain paradise, I will spend my time off inside looking at my phone.

Yes it was absolutely gorgeous day in Montana. I marveled at the playful pinks of the sunrise over the mountains in our backyard while drinking coffee. And then I got back in bed and on my phone. And you better believe I fucking doomacrolled.

I just gorged myself on cheap attention calories. Gimme that dopamine drip. I did not even try to modulate my consumption pattern or prevent myself from going into fight or flight. It was goblin mode. I’m still not embarrassed.

But Twitter is a fucking mess. Watching people go tribal on Elon Musk is worse than people going tribal on the president somehow. Maybe because it feels more personal to me? Don’t get me wrong Trump felt existential, but Elon Musk is personal.

And it’s fucking embarrassing watching people react to him and his decision making. Here it is my industry’s moment in the spotlight. The technology industry showing itself as a keeper of common goods and open discourse right? Absolutely fucking not. We’ve shat the bed. Old management was incompetent sure. But new management is not an improvement.

I went into Twitter being purchased by Elon Musk modestly optimistic. He’s our guy right? He’s one of us. He likes startups and capital and technology. He reads the same science fiction as me. We’ve got friends in common. This is what it’s like to be a fan of the home team right?

Well fuck me sideways it has been going poorly. The site is pretty broken but I’m over that. It’s just the constant mayhem. Dave Kellog termed it adhocracy. Some random bullshit happens and the whole website has to lurch around conspiracy theories and rationalization.

It has frankly not been a fine showing for techno-libertarians. Not sure about showing up for a monarch executive now that you’ve seen your civil rights up for terms-of-service revisions by fiat huh? I’ve always thought the neo-monarchists to be dickriders but that’s a sentence that’s only comprehensible to the terminally online. And yes I should go outside and touch snow. I’ll do that now.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 708 and Early Bird Special

Somehow we missed lunch today. A busy morning involving a drive into town to meet a new doctor had some second order effects. All our meetings got pushed back. I agreed to a media interview over the typically blocked lunch hour that Alex and I share. One thing led to another.

We just ate lunch at 4pm. Which I think is basically an early bird special. And frankly I’m ready to go straight to bed after that meal. Alex made a bacon & scallion macaroni and cheese that hit my empty stomach with an intense urge to engage in rest and digest.

My circadian rhythm has up up before down and ready to sleep as soon as the sun is down vibe these days. Which in Montana as we near the solstice is 4:40pm. The setting sun is sending down tendrils of orange and pink light through the clouds as the wind in the valley pushes a light snow flurry out to the west. It’s majestic as fuck.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 701 and Frozen Goods

My Black Friday purchases are slowly making their way from warehouses in Denver or St Louis or other parts unknown to me in Montana. When I placed the orders I was so excited for the good deals.

But instead I’m just finding new disappointments. Four out of six items I ordered from Splendid will have to be returned. A pair of pants from Lunya is simply made for someone taller than me. And the remaining pieces of the order from Nadaam still hasn’t shipped yet. I hope my new negligees from Skims don’t disappoint as my track record on soft goods isn’t looking so great. Failures all around.

I’ve also had a few issues with trying to order cosmetics. I do a big order with Briogeo once a year. It’s in transit during a very chilly day. It was 10 degrees when I woke up. And I’ll admit I’m concerned about receiving a complete frozen bottle of shampoo. And it is expensive shampoo too.

We’ve had this issue before. Ipsy and Allure monthly boxes show up half frozen in the mailbox for a day. A Sephora order went straight to our mailbox where it sat for two hours before I got the alert it has arrived. It was cold but not fully frozen. I am afraid to look up how much efficacy is lost if retinol is frozen. What about vitamin C? How bad is it to freeze your cosmetics?

Because we live out on country roads and outside the town limits, we find our packages are often delivered by men in pickup trucks doing piece work contracts. They are nice folks but there isn’t much they can do about an expensive skin cream freezing solid in their open pickup truck bed. I would try to buy things in person but we don’t have a Sephora here so that catalog order life remains how people get stuff in rural America.

I used to have concerns about melting cosmetics when I was in Colorado. So perhaps freezing is an improvement. But I’m definitely wondering if we will need climate controlled options for certain kinds of deliveries in future for items that need a moderate temperature band. It could be a brand issue to have your product not work because the chemical bonds got wrecked by extreme weather. And we are all about to get more extreme weather as a normal feature of daily life.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 699 and Storms A’Coming

I love preparing for a big storm. It’s all of the fun parts of preparedness with none of the dystopian fantasies that sidle up to larger types of resilience & doomer chores. A big snowstorm is prepper-light, all the taste and none of the calories.

We’ve got a big snowstorm coming into Southwest Montana that is likely to close a few passes and drop significant snowfall. We’ve yet to map how predicted snowfall in town matches our actual snowfall. Sometimes it’s two or three times as much. If town is getting 4-6 inches, I’ve learned to expect at least a foot. I’d be thrilled if we got the 2-3 feet that is predicated for our neighbors in Big Sky & Yellowstone but it probably won’t drop that much on us.

The last time I wrote about preparing for a big storm was the day of the Marshal Fire in Boulder. I wrote about how I do all the washing and cleaning before a storm hits just in case we lose things like heat and water. Little did I know I wasn’t preparing for just snow that day but for one of the most devastating fires in Colorado history. Freakish outcomes have become commonplace and we humans adjust our hedonic treadmill to accommodate the bad and the good.

So I’m excited for the little preparations we get to make before this storm comes into the valley. I did an inventory of our fresh foods. Recipes and meal planning were done to reflect existing purchases (we’ve got a New York strip that is calling to me) as well as what could be easily incorporated into new meals if we stay snowed in.

Alex put a plowing plan in place for our driveway and parking area. We brought in wood from the cord that is stored in our hay shed. A run to to the grocery store and the dispensary is being down as we speak by my husband. The dispensary is next door to one of the cheaper gas stations so that’s a double win. Always remember to gas up before a big store. This includes diesel too if you have a tractor or snowblower that needs it.

My last chores will be doing laundry and washing my hair. As we recently had some well pump repairs I’m feeling relatively confident about water staying flowing but you never regret a fresh head of hair and plenty of clean dry socks.