More of Montana is burning and the skies are thick with smoke. A fire broke out about 10 miles down the road from me and western Montana is now under stage I and stage II fire restrictions. This relentless heatwave sees no sign of easing off any time soon, and this smoke will only make things hotter.

I could taste the air on my way to work this morning, so I stopped off to get a cup of coffee at my favorite coffee shop. I enjoyed it while I grabbed my camera and snapped a few photos of the hazy skies.

Sloppy joes for dinner tonight.

There aren’t enough wildland firefighters and the Miller Peak Fire has grown to over 1,900 acres, something I knew would happen a few days ago. That temptation to un-retire from firefighting is growing stronger and stronger… but wildland firefighting is its own kind of commitment that I don’t think I can afford to make anymore. I do miss it, though.

I subscribed to The Athletic yesterday, and I’ve been very impressed and engrossed with the new season of Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants. Seeing the behind the scenes at roster construction is interesting as hell. I stopped watching the NFL years ago (around the time the Chargers defected from San Diego to Los Angeles), but I’m considering jumping back into it this year.

Also, I’ve never coached anything in my life, but I am thinking about popping that cherry sometime during this upcoming school year. I love sports, and I love kids, so it only makes sense, right?

My marigolds first began to bloom a few months ago, and since then, they have brought me nothing but joy. They just recently began to bloom some more, and each time I draw open my curtains in the morning, they are the first thing I see, and oh man, I just love seeing them.

Last fall, at the beginning of the school year, our second grade class planted marigolds and the week before the holiday break, they began to hand them out to the staff. They planted them in milk cartons they cut out and painted themselves, and the marigolds were little shoots when they gave me mine.

I’ve never been a plant person, and I really had no idea what to do, other than water them and make sure they get enough sun. However, it was the middle of winter when I received them, so I was very worried they would die quickly. To my surprise, they are still alive, and I think now they’re flourishing, and that’s so much fun to see.

I may have not been a plant person before, but I think I am one now. What else should I plant?

The Miller Peak Fire is the first fire I’ve seen this fire season, and it’s the first time in many years where I actually missed firefighting. I’ve now been out of firefighting longer than I was in it, and it almost feels like another lifetime ago. As of this writing, the Miller Peak Fire is approximately 500 acres, but considering the terrain and the high heat expected this week, it will more than likely expand and grow bigger than that. Now that I’ve been out of firefighting for a while, I’m hoping for a shorter and milder fire season this summer, which is a stark contrast from when I was firefighter, when each fire excited me to no end. Now I have a road trip in a few weeks to look forward to and become excited about.

Sundays have quickly become one of my favorite days of the week because it is the one day of the week where I stay in and clean my home. Cleaning makes me appreciate all that I own, and coming home from a long day at work to a place that looks good, that smells good, that feels good, centers me and helps me feel good. I have never been one of those people that cleans regularly, but ever since I picked up this habit a few months ago, I’ve realized how much I don’t want to go back to who I used to be and how I used to live. It has also helped me live more intentionally, to own only what is truly necessary to me and my own happiness, and to not allow things into my life that don’t bring me joy. My Sunday resets are meditative and oh so necessary to my well-being. I love them.

Another slow kind of day where I didn’t do much. What I did do was something I’ve been procrastinating on for a few months, and that’s processing the photos I took on my road trip from back in April. I shot a few thousand photos during the trip, and I only recently whittled that down to about 300. Before, my workflow would then consist of editing each RAW file in Capture One over many hours across many days (or weeks, in this case), and I just wasn’t feeling that anymore. I could even foresee how much this problem would intensify during the trip, as I invested in styles for Capture One that I hoped would make editing quicker, but there was something about them didn’t quite jibe with me, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

Because I was getting tired of editing, I began to finally play around with recipes for my Fujifilm cameras, and I quickly took to it. Like, almost immediately. This was exactly what my photography was missing, as I explained a bit in my post from when I went to Kerr Dam last month. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Fuji’s X RAW STUDIO app, and even though it is slightly buggy, I really like it. It’s very easy to create recipes with it and even easier to assign them to specific slots on my camera. If you put two and two together, then you can see where my head is at: I began to apply some of my favorite recipes for the X-T4 onto the photos I took during my road trip, and they have been coming out a lot better than I could have imagined. And what’s cool about the X RAW STUDIO app is that you can play around with exposure, highlights, and shadows and apply some nice edits to the photos. It doesn’t allow for cropping or straightening, which is a feature I would love it to have because then, I don’t think I would even need an app like Capture One anymore. And what’s cool, too, is that all this processing happens on the camera itself, so it’s kinda like I took those photos with those specific simulations while I was out and about. Not quite, but close.

I’m not finished processing these photos because, again, I’ve been lazy today, but the photos I have processed look pretty good, and that makes me happy and every excited to both finish and to head out on the road again. I’m super excited about that.

A lazy day at home. Earlier this week, I received this poster by Anderson Design Group, and I’d been looking at it on and off today. For a big part of my adult life, when I thought of traveling, I always thought of traveling overseas: Europe, Asia, Australia. During my road trip in April, however, I realized how much of America I haven’t seen and how much of it I want to see. So I bought this poster to remind me to explore America. On the wall facing this poster, I have more posters by Anderson Design Group that, in a way, tell my story. In order, I have city posters from San Diego, Los Angeles, Montana, Seattle, and Portland.

I now want to go east, and I think I settled on when: the first week of August. I don’t want to be around when my town hosts their annual Pioneer Days event; instead, I want to be on my way toward Chicago. I miss cities, and that feeling only intensified when I visited Seattle and Portland earlier this year. I’ve always wanted to visit Chicago, so that’s where I hope to be in a few weeks time. I’m not much of a planner, so the only thing I have to do next is to fill out my leave form at work. After that, who knows. I’ll hit the open road and see where the road takes me.

I learned recently that art history translates as storia dell’arte in Italian. The only significant thing about this is that I found it beautiful. Storia dell’arte. God dammit that sounds so beautiful to me. I had taken a few months off from my Italian studies, but I resumed them again this week, and I forgot how much fun it is to listen and to write and to speak in Italian. I love this language, and I wish I had more time to take it as seriously as I’d wish. I wish I had more time (and discipline) to do more, but at this stage in my life, I’d take what I can get.

It was a quiet day. I spent most of it inside my air conditioned office fixing more broken computers. I’ve made good progress this week, but mostly, it’s been full of solitude.

To break up the monotony, I walked around the neighborhood near my school a few times throughout the day. During one walk, I was greeted by an elementary school student playing with her sister in her yard. “Hi Mario,” she said, and just those words broke whatever melancholy I had been feeling at the moment. “How’s your summer going?” I asked her. “Good,” she said, then ran across her yard and began to play again. Later, I ran into a recent graduate and his girlfriend also going for a walk, and we waved and said our hellos. I returned to my office and cherished both my brief but valuable moments of human contact and the very refreshing AC.

On my way home from work, I decided to pull off and head toward the reservoir. I felt like I hadn’t been here for a while, but apparently, the last time I was here was last year on this exact same day. I went early in the morning then, and I went during the middle of the day today when temps were in the mid 90s. It was hot, but it was beautiful, and after I took some shots with my camera, I drove back onto the highway and made my way back home. After a few minutes, though, I had to pull off again.

I grabbed my notebook and began to write my feelings about what I had just experienced. What struck me the most was how decisive and nonchalant I was about this mini excursion. I had written about my anxiety before, and I thought of this again as I appreciated how far I’ve come over the years. I remember how tough it used to be for me to even get out of the house sometimes, and now I crave adventure.

I mentioned yesterday about the road trip through the Pacific Northwest I took in April, and I’m planning to head east sometime at the end of July or early August, and if the me of four years ago saw the me of now, I believe he would be proud. I am proud of how far I’ve come, and I am truly very excited to see what’s next.

Here’s to my next adventure.