Glacier NP Photos

I have some photos from my trip posted. I still have to add captions. Here are a few from this album:

Deer in Waterton campground.

Hidden Lake

Mountain goat on Highline Trail

Iceberg Lake

I am Not a Pod Person

In my recent post on the tech services at Glacier National Park I inadvertently left off the fact that they have podcasts too. How could I forget podcasts? I dunno, I just did.

You can download from the GNP site here or for free from iTunes. They encourage you to do so before your visit, but you can bring your laptop to a visitor center in the park to get them too.

And I still think it’s cool.

National Park Tech

I’ll have more info (and photos, of course) from my trip to Glacier National Park (GNP) soon. But here are a few things I found interesting:

GNP has webcams.
This one has a nest of ospreys and is right next to one of the visitor centers. They had a telescope set up in the visitor center when I was there aimed at this nest too.

GNP has RSS news feeds.

GNP has blogs.

GNP has fans on Facebook here and here (and others).

GNP now Twitters too.

For a park that is a year away from its centennial celebration I think this is all pretty cool. (I haven’t checked how many other National Parks are stepping into the 21st century this way — I hope it’s all of them. I found these useful when planning my trip.)

Glacier Sneak Peek

I’ll have much more to share, but I had a great time last week. See?

And Glacier NP is a really good place for viewing wildlife!

The Old Math

This is a ghost post — written a week ago and scheduled to post today. So here’s a morbid thought: what if some tragedy ensues and I really am a ghost when this publishes? I am haunting you….

MMIX – MCMLIX = L

What the L?

Half a century sounds like a LONG time!

I am not the police, but I am Five-Oh.

[yeah/crap]

Issues? I’ve Got Volumes!

This is a ghost post written last week and scheduled to publish later. Not that it matters.

I weathered a self-imposed sabbatical from the interwebs last month. By coincidence I lost my connection at the same time although I did not realize that until I tried to reconnect again. A new modem and a new router [and the requisite hours of tech support] later I finally have everything back in working order [I think].

And now, I’m off to see the glaciers!

Who Do You Trust?

Greetings from Canadia! We made it to Calgary yesterday afternoon. [Turns out it was cheaper to fly to Calgary and drive down than it was to fly to Montana and rent the RV there. We just needed to factor dealing with customs into the plan as far as getting and transporting food across the border. Anyway...] The weather forecast is calling for the hottest day of the year! Thirty-one degrees! Of course that’s degrees Celcius, but it reminds me of a story that I have probably told before. [You don't really think that's going to stop me from repeating it do you?]

A few years ago I was in Calgary. We were going up to Banff and Jasper that time. The morning after our arrival we had the TV on while getting ready and the weather report called for the temperature to be “soaring up to 35 degrees!” To my ear that sounded really odd. It took me several seconds for that to register that, of course, it was 35 C. And another several seconds to make a mental estimate of the conversion. Damn, that really is hot! So today may be the hottest day of the year so far, but it’s no 35….

I am also saddened to hear the news of the passing of Walter Cronkite. I always liked him. Even though I’ve never been a news hound I’ve really come to appreciate how good he really was by contrasting with how bad TV news has gotten since he retired. [I briefly considered selling T-shirts with the caption, "I'd Rather Not," under Dan's face with the universal red circle/slash -- is there a name for that thing? Seems like I should know. Anyway...]

We pick up the RV today and we’re off to Waterton. Did you know that Canada has a National Park adjacent to Glacier NP in the States? Well, they do. And that’s where we are heading first. The rest of the week we’ll be south of the border [meaning back in the U.S.]. Don’t worry, I’ll take notes. And photos, of course. I know that’s what you really want anyway. I’ll shut up now.

There’s no automatic spell-check on this hotel computer and I’m road-weary so be kind if I’ve got mistakes here. Point them out and I’ll fix them later. BTW, “Canadia” in the greeting was on purpose. No offense intended. Look for a couple ghost posts this week; I don’t know whether I’ll have access before I get home. Be well!

All I Want is a Piece of Ice

I’m off [yeah, always a little off] to see Glacier National Park in Montana. I may not be near interwebs access for a week or so. But I may schedule a ghost post or two to publish next week anyway. Hope all is well with you!

I plan to have lots of photos to share when I get back.

Doggy Paddle in the Kiddie Pool

One of my niece’s dogs taking a dip of sorts:

Details, Details…

Obviously I am too critical of what I read. I followed LAWKI with books I chose for pure escapism, Sail by James Patterson & Howard Roughan and now Spy by Ted Bell.

I really like the Alex Cross novels by Patterson. I wonder how much writing he really does on the books he co-authors. It seems he is more of a brand now. All the way through Sail part of my brain kept saying, “This is stupid!” while another part reminded me, “It’s supposed to be.” I need to read things just for fun and after LAWKI anything is an improvement. So I finished Sail and chalked it up to my need for an easy summer read.

Now I’m almost half-way through Spy. Novels often require a suspension of disbelief. Super heroes need super villains and what would be the point if the fate of the entire world did not hang in the balance? So, okay, I’ll accept that a terrorist group has spent years building a huge military complex in the rain forest of South America virtually undetected. Honestly I can let that go much more easily than little things like this: A sheriff breaks up a bar fight on a Sunday afternoon. The next Sunday he is again called to service and thinks, “It had been nine days since the incident at the Wagon Wheel.” Nine days? Damn, that’s a long work week!

And this: Two characters playing gin rummy. One plays a winning hand with “three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight.” He explains that he only drew three cards, “the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight.” Scoring in gin rummy requires sets of cards all with the same face value or runs of cards in sequence (a straight) all in the same suit. So he needed to have all four queens and all four jacks in his hand and the straight would have had to be in diamonds (to use the ace), not spades. If that weren’t bad enough, his opponent was caught with, “two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens….” That puts six jacks on the table. Haven’t the author and editor ever played this game?

So while terrorists amass south of the border, these are the things that get under my skin….