I am excited about spending the Fourth in Butte.  It might be the last best small town to celebrate it.  Check out what a fellow blogger has to say about Independence Day in the Mining City, comparing it to Mayberry.  Not a bad assessment! 

To add fire to the bottle rockets, Barack Obama is spending his holiday in Butte, too.  Someone must have told him how much fun it is.  This news has generated a lot of fury and excitement in the comment section of the Montana Standard.  I for one am thrilled.  At the moment I don’t identify with Democrats OR Republicans.  I’m starting to feel more like a Demuplican, or perhaps some flavor of Republicrat.  Either way, this is big stuff for my hometown, and you can bet I’m going to be clamoring for a sighting of the man.  That is, if he isn’t completely blocked off with CNN cameras and secret service MIBs. 

Let me assure you though, that the biggest issue that Butte will have with Mr. Obama’s visit will not be whether or not he’s demonizing Christianity, secretly a Muslim, or <insert Obama flaw you read about online here>.  The BIG issue will be that due to security protocol, Butte-ians are banned from parking on Harrison Avenue in certain stretches of the parade route.  Oh, heavens.

You see, part of the allure of the Fourth in Mayberry Butte is that people park their rigs and trailers, assemble their bleachers, set up their favorite seating along Harrison Avenue every year, thus marking their terrority. Every Butte family has a ”parade spot.”  If you want to meet so-and-so, they will always be found in front of Arby’s, or the Met, or the biker bar, year after year without fail.  And now the Secret Service is putting the kibosh on this practice.  You just can’t get away with this, people.  Not even if you have the whole government backing you.  Not in Butte. 

So my mom called me, laughing, to inform me that people are setting up their trucks and trailers anyway.  Yes they said that these people will be towed.  I somehow am guessing that there is strength in numbers, and that the residents of Butte who will claim a spot will greatly outnumber the dudes with tow trucks. 

My guess is that the morning of the parade, the SS will determine that Harrison Avenue is unsafe (sheesh I could have told you that and saved a LOT of taxpayer money) for a presidential candidate to mozy on down.  I say, put him in Gilboy’s tow truck’s front seat and have him wave out the side.  Or better yet, the pirate bus.  Or hey, he can ride in one of the Shriner’s mini-cars.

Yeah, you Butte people know what I’m talking about.   

The evenings here in Bozeman have been great for bike rides.  I stopped on the side of a road to take a picture of thad Madison Range in the late afternoon (8 PM+). 

Ah, the serenity, the peace!  I really needed it, because later that evening, just as I was settling into blissful sleep…

BAM!

Oh yes.  FIreworks season are upon us.  Bozeman has some pretty rigid fireworks policies, according to the letter of the law.  You get about 24 hours to shoot them off.  However our close neighbors do not seem to care.  I wouldn’t particularly care either, except that I have a five month old who is already having a horrible time getting to sleep due to teething and other baby maladies.  So when she gets jarred awake from the M-80s they are firing off, I get pretty pissed off.  Is it wrong that part of me hopes they blow their fingers off?  Nah.

I’m very excited for the upcoming National Folk Festival.  Besides the fact that it looks like a lot of fun, good music, and tasty treats, it’s taking place in my hometown of Butte Montana.  Now I am not sure what you’ve heard about Butte, but it’s quickly becoming Montana’s Festival City (if it can’t claim that title already.) 

The folks in Butte just know how to have a good time and throw a good party.  I believe it all started with it’s legendary St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.  From there, the An-Ri-Ra Irish festival evolved.  Evel Knievel Days winds up July with a bang…or perhaps with a flaming lunatic. 

Even the Fourth of July celebrations beat every place that I’ve ever been, including Washington D.C.  D.C. puts on a great fireworks show to be certain, but it’s hard to replicate Butte’s scampering children, cheering spectators, honking horns, old men in flag pants, delightful kettle corn, bagpipers, and every other celebration item required by a town in the 1950’s.  You can still light bottle rockets in Butte all night long. 

This weekend brought an end to the seemingly ceaseless rain we’ve been having.  The clouds parted, the sun appeared, and it was good. 

Then the season’s first mosquitoes made their appearance.  Hey, who invited you guys?  Then this evening I pulled a woodtick off my son’s shirt.  I hate woodticks. 

Just more proof that you gotta take the good with the bad.  And DEET is there to help when the bad gets really bad.

Did I mention it’s cold?  It’s hampering garden progress for sure.  Thank goodness for the greenhouse…but even with it, hopes for lots of tomatoes is dwindling.  Yet still there is progress.

Wonderboy puts peas into the dirt.  Note the winter coat.

Potatoes aren’t skeered of winter.

Onions are cool, too.

The Jefferson River is deep.  That thing in the middle is usually an island.

Pumpkins desperately want to go into the ground.  Next weekend’s project.

A big pile of dirt, really.  There are four gardens in progress, all at least this size. 

This week is forecasted to be “wintry.”  You have to love Montana.  You also have to love winter to live here.  Winter is most here, as my son would say.

Yet there are flowers to be seen…the brave ones who aren’t afraid of a little June snow.  And cold rain.  And highs in the 40s when it’s a mere two weeks from summer.

Columbines

Larkspur

Siberian poppy

Wild lookin’ tulip

An amazing rainbow drew itself over Bozeman tonight.  Thanks to the hubster’s wide angle lens, the whole thing is right here so you can enjoy it too. 

I love rainbows.  Who doesn’t?  Probably just communists.  But I can’t remember the last time I saw a complete rainbow.  We stood outside in the cold rain with some neighbors for a while, watching in fade in and out with the sunlight. 

This one really did look like there was a pot o’ gold on one end.

My husband grew up in the ‘burbs of Kansas City, where sports meant going to Arrowhead Stadium to watch the Chiefs, or seeing the Royals play baseball.  He also frequently enjoyed “Big 12″ Jayhawks sports.  Later he moved to Colorado, where the Broncos, Rockies, Nuggets and Avalanche ruled the sports scenes.  He’s an ESPN junkie.  And forget about trying to have a conversation with him in March, when madness over some kind of orange ball seems to take over his brain. 

Now that he lives in Montana, professional sports withdrawal is affecting him.  The local news here is all about high school sports, and full coverage over which senior is getting recruited by which small college.  There is the Bobcat-Griz rivalry that he may discover one day, but until then I may have to put up with the deep sadness that he endures from having no one to root for. 

Perhaps growing up here is the reason I don’t care for sports on television.  I never had a team to instill camraderie in me and my neighbors of other Montana towns, and I never had a reason to paint my face or dye my hair the colors of a football team.  I know lots of people in Montana like either the Seahawks or the Broncos, apparently because those are the closest pro football teams? 

I used to watch the Copper Kings in Butte.  Whatever happened to them? 

We braved the very rainy weather for more outdoor goodness.  We even had a Memorial Day picnic, though it was mostly spent inside the cabin, next to a wood-burning fire.  I like to call our family’s picnics ‘Meat Fest’ because we pretty much cook enough meat to keep a third world country nice and fattened.  The menu was steak kebabs, elk steaks, and hamburgers.   Mom brought homemade potato salad and corn, so it wasn’t entirely a meat massacre.

Here’s Wonderboy standing next to a newly-planted tree.  We keep the fence around them for the first couple of years so the deer don’t tear them to pieces.  Oh, and yes we do let him dress himself.  His shirt says “My parents are exhausted.”

Here we have huckleberry blossoms!  It’s too cold for bees at the moment but we are hoping they’ll make themselves busy this week.  Perhaps we will have some huckleberries after all?

Next we see the wonderfully-scented blossoms of a honeysuckle…my photographer husband says that cloudy days are best for shooting flowers.  I do like the dusky hues of the background.

A sad looking strawberry flower.  Sad because he wants the sun…or because my son threw dirt on him.  He was “helping.”

My son discovered an egg on the cold ground.  Perhaps a bird got scared while she was hopping along, and literally laid an egg.  Either way, Wonderboy held it and asked me when a bird was going to hatch. 

Since the dead egg conversation wasn’t that fun, let’s leave this post with some spring-pink apple blossoms?

My poor, poor husband is sleeping in the back of his vehicle tonight, somewhere near Yellowstone.  I say “poor, poor” because he sacrificed a lot of his Colorado goals so we could move back to Montana.  Or perhaps he just got sick of my whining.  Anyway, he is a really talented landscape photographer and he’s been waiting patiently for summer to arrive so that he can go out and take photos.  And here we are on Memorial Day weekend, and the rain is here.  He’s hoping for some sun to peek through the clouds, hoping to get a photo of a mountain.  I keep telling him Montana has really nice mountains…he thinks they look an awful lot like clouds.

Q:  What do people in Montana like to do during the summer?

A:  If it falls on a weekend, they have a barbeque.

The news last night said that the Glacier/Flathead area could see as much as three feet of snow.  It’s been pouring in Bozeman for three straight days, and across most of the state.  Add this to melting mountain snow, and you’ve got ripe conditions for flooding.  It hasn’t rained like this in years. 

Once when I was little, the Jefferson River flooded.  We were staying in a house near there.  My parents put the furniture on the roof.  It was very exciting.  I’m sure my parents were glad they were not homeowners at the time. 

Here is a link to flooding alerts for the state.  I sure hope Jesse doesn’t wake up in the back of his truck to find that he’s floating down the Yellowstone.