Fire!

There is a fire burning about 15 miles away from the town of Red Lodge, moving towards the town of Red Lodge.  This is the smoke plume.  There is a big town meeting tomorrow morning, I guess that they might be setting up the snowmaking equipment on the ski mountain to protect their structures.  I hope the mountain doesn't burn.

In other news.  I left my job today.  I guess that I came to this realization that I can only hit my head against a wall so many times before taking two steps to the left and walking out the door.  It's not like this was a random thing.  I have had a couple meetings over the summer with my boss to try to work everything out.  Yesterday in what started out as a 'mid-summer review' quickly deteriorated into personal attacks and I had to bring in a third party!  

It's hard, and I'm not excited about leaving this place a little over a month before I was originally planning.  It's hard to say goodbye to all my friends.  It's also really good that I can leave, this summer has sucked.

Oh yeah, plus with this fire, I don't think I can take the backpacking trip I wanted to go on.  :(

Bummer

What better end to a frustrating day than going fishing?  Well, I wanted to do just that.  Drove about an hour to get to this lake that I wanted to fish and what happened?  Not only rain, but lightening.  Rain I could have done, no big deal.  Lightening?  That's another element entirely, I'm not messing with that.  

Tiny Little Fish

Went fishing again today.  Caught a little baby fish and sent it back out into the lake.  Then I tried a new lure and a different baby fish grabbed ahold of it.  The problem was that this fish decided to swallow the lure and I couldn't release him.  It died.  Well, I had to step on it's head, then it died.  

Because it died, I have to eat it.  (I was hoping to use it as bait for a bigger fish, but it wasn't about to happen)  So today for the first time I not only killed a fish, but I also gutted and set it up to marinate overnight.

The picture is really just a great illustration of how small this fish really is.

Ice Falling From the Sky

It was an amazing hail storm.  Biggest hail that I have ever seen, it was 1/2" in diameter at least.  The leaves and ice reminded me of mojitos.  Man that sounds tasty now too... 

Iron Horses, Hearing Loss & Machoism

Today was the iron horse rodeo.  Lots of fun.  Boring at points, crazy at points, incredibly insulting at points, but a great exploration part of the culture I'm surrounded with.  So here is your picture tour of the rodeo.

First stop is the parking lot.  I ended up driving, could hardly find a spot for all the bikes parked all over the place.  It looked like in the beginning there was a plan, but towards the back there was no rhyme or reason to how anybody was parked.

You could really tell that this was a professional rodeo by the registration numbers on the bikes.  That right, big numbers written on plates.  Classy.

There I am, sitting in the audience with my colored clothes and all the people around me look something like this...

Oooh! How could I not include a picture of the fabulous snack options available?