Notes

How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto was a frustrating book to read. Not because it wasn’t good—it was very good—but because, like How to Do Nothing and The Wander Society, and even Walden and Thoreau’s Journal, it shows me a world I wish I could be a part of but can’t quite attain. Like many, I need a job to earn money; I need money to pay off my debts and my bills; I need to pay these off so I can… live? Like I wrote about last month, one of my big goals this year is to pay off my debt. Once I do, I’ll have an extra $1,000 or so a month that doesn’t have a job in my budget. I hate that this extra money makes me happy, but it does. I wish I could spend my days listening to the sounds of nature and daydreaming, but I’m not quite there yet. I don’t know if I ever will or if I even want to, but I love reading books that show me that it’s a possibility, that maybe just thinking about this escape is enough to get me through the day.

A few February’s ago, I participated in the Figuary drawing challenge. Every day I practiced drawing the human figure in my sketchbook, and I had lots of fun. I love making stuff.

Don’t mess with the queen.

I live on the Flathead Indian Reservation, so I was giddy with excitement when the latest episode of Sidedoor featured Tailyr Irvine, a photographer from the reservation whose project, Reservation Mathematics, features some old friends of mine. Highly recommended.

September 2017. Fires are sometimes located deep inside the forests and the mountain roads that lead to them are rocky and rough. I drove a Ford F-250 with five other firefighters when I blew this tire and didn’t know it. It was my first flat tire and a good memory.

I love HIIT workouts. I love the fast-pace and the buckets of sweat. In school, I ran the 100, 200, and 400-yard dash. I wasn’t the fastest and I didn’t break any records, but I loved it all nonetheless.

Over the weekend I had some weird dreams. Checked the Health app and saw this:

My resting has been in the mid-40s for years, but I’ve never seen it go down to 34 bpm. That’s crazy! Okay, time for some yoga.

I decided to fully test out Apple Fitness+ this week. On Monday and Tuesday, I did two 30-minute HIIT workouts and felt great after each one, but today I’m sore as hell. I think today will be a good day to try a yoga session before finishing the week with two more HIIT workouts.

Summer of 2015. We were staged in a valley a few miles from the fire while we watched the lightning storm roll in and light up the sky. Many fires are started by lightning strikes, and this one was no different. It doesn’t take much to burn thousands of acres.

Whenever one of our teachers misbehave, we dump a bucket of ice cold water on them. This is normal life in Montana.

I hope to keep posting my love of leaves without shame in the years to come.