Winter Walk

Went for a short walk up in the Pattee Canyon Recreation Area here in Missoula. I'm looking forward to doing some cross-country skiing up there, maybe in a few weeks. The trails didn't look groomed yet, although I did see a few skiers out. I haven't cross-country-skied since around 1999 and I'm delighted to be living in a place with so many cool places to go!

Anyway, a few pictures:

The start of the trail


Sign pointing out where the heck I am


A mountain visible through the trees


Baby trees!


From the parking lot


On my way back down


Still on my way down

Almost Forgot

Apparently I've been doing this blog thing now for one year!

Well, a year and a day if you count my first post, which was all of one line. One year if you start counting from the first post that actually says something.

It's actually kind of amusing to read this post, where I described some of the topics I planned to write about. One of those topics was Montana, but I didn't really give any hints that I was planning on moving here. This move was in the planning stages at that point (we've been planning this since around April or March of 2004), but for a variety of reasons I couldn't really talk about it yet.

At any rate, it's been a year. Hard to believe!

Compare and Contrast

View from my house last Thursday:


Approximately the same view today...it has been like this since Saturday.


It is a good thing I have pictures so I can remember what the sky looks like!

Official

My Montana voter registration card came in the mail yesterday. I completely missed the most recent election since we were literally in the process of moving, but I'm all set now for the next one!

Slowly all the little things have been coming together to make my move more and more official. Last Friday we went in and picked up the new Montana license plates. Montana has a huge selection of specialty plates that cost a little extra and benefit various groups. I know Illinois had these, too, but I don't remember there being so many! We picked the plate for the Montana Wilderness Association. It looks like this:



The other plate in the running was this one:



It looks odd to see something other than Illinois plates on my little Civic!

Paint!

Drove by the new house today. They've finally put the first coat of paint on the outside!

First, our half of the townhouse:


Then, the whole thing:


I suspect it will be a while before they get to the trim, since it has to dry enough for a second coat first.

I absolutely love the color! I will be glad when the exterior work is done -- at this time of year, weather could really delay finishing the house. The longer I live and work in this tiny rental house, the more anxious I am to move!

Winking dog!

Winking dog!
Originally uploaded by SaraS.

I just thought this was too funny not to post. I've never seen Cricket wink before.

Tormenting the Pets

Visited Petsmart today (hence the comment about horses in the previous post) and decided to solve the problem of the dogs shivering all the time:

First, Cricket:




Then, Bailey, who always seems to look crabby:




No, we didn't get a sweater for the cat. I don't think I want to try and put one on her!

Things that are Different

There are the big, obvious differences since moving here of course -- particularly my view of mountains right out my window:


But then there are the little things that don't jump out quite so much, like these:

• Radio ads for hunting supplies (ending with the tagline "The buck stops here." Groan).
  
• Radio ads for car service places mention hunting ("get your rig ready for hunting season!").
  
• Radio ads for ski stores.
  
• Radio ads for horse supply stores.
  
• Petsmart has a whole section for horse stuff.

I'm not in Chicago any longer!

Quick House Update

No pictures, though. We drove over and took a look last night after work. The front walk has been poured and was apparently dry, because the plastic that had been covering it the previous day was gone. This was nice because we could get to the porch without walking through muck!

We peeked in the windows with a flashlight to see the new appliances. There is also a big stack of interior doors in the living room waiting to be installed.

The best part, though, was when we drove down the alley to see the back. The garage and back of the house have been painted! I've been very anxious about when this was going to get done given the cold and wet weather lately. Hopefully they'll get the rest of the house painted soon as well. I am very excited to see the "fireweed" paint color on the house for real. Laura picked out the colors back in September (with my input over the phone), and I have been looking forward to seeing them for real ever since. I love the fact that I'm getting a red house.

From what I could see with a flashlight, the color looked great. I'm looking forward to going out there again this weekend so that we can see the color in the daylight and get a few pictures.

Telecommuting, Day 1

My first day in my home office went pretty well. I will be very glad when the new house is done, though. At the moment, my "office" is just a desk pushed up against the back wall of the living room:


Note that I had to expand some of my supplies onto the window sill and the pass-through to the kitchen. Also, this is extremely neat for me -- my desk is normally strewn with papers and files. I just don't have the room here to really sprawl out.

Since my office is in the living room, I discovered today a need for noise-canceling headphones to block out Laura's activities (particularly the TV). We made an emergency run to Best Buy after work today, so I should be set for tomorrow. They'll be handy when traveling on airplanes, too. At least that is what I'm telling myself to justify the expense. Laura is looking for a job (she applied for several today - go wish her good luck!) so presumably eventually she won't be around while I'm working, unless she ends up with a job with irregular hours or something.

The rental house does have a second room that used to be a porch before it was enclosed. I considered setting up my office there, but the house only had one cable connection, and we really didn't want to string a huge piece of cable across the whole house. Since we're renting, we can't exactly ask the cable company to install additional outlets, either. So, that extra room currently is our storage room with the bicycles and empty boxes.

At any rate, so far I'm liking this whole work-from-home thing. My high-speed Internet connection was solid all day and I had no trouble getting to stuff at the office. I didn't miss my one-hour-each-way commute at all, although I do have a whole pile of unheard audio books and podcasts on my iPod. I need to figure out exactly when I'm going to actually listen to those now that I don't have that drive!

In other news, it has been snowing ever since afternoon. Real snow, not rain! Laura is thrilled. I am not used to snow quite this early, but I'm kind of liking it (especially since I don't have to drive an hour to the office in it!).

Back to Work / Snow

So, today will be my first day back at work since our move...telecommuting from my very small temporary house. I spent much of yesterday organizing my desk space so that I can actually function here. I'm hoping the new cable Internet doesn't go out at an inconvenient moment -- it was solid yesterday, but somewhat flaky Saturday morning.

Woke up this morning to a dusting of snow on the porch and some flakes coming down. You can't even see the mountains that are normally visible from the front porch.



Bailey didn't like his morning walk much. He has been pretty crabby ever since we moved.

In Missoula!

We've been here, in Missoula now since Monday around noon. I don't yet have Internet access at the rental house, so I can only blog/surf from the hotel. Why are we staying in a hotel? Because our stuff has not yet arrived. We tried sleeping on cots the first night we were here, and it lasted all of thirty minutes. The animals find the cots comfy, though:



My welcome to Missoula was less than great, as it was raining when we got here. According the locals, it had been beautiful the day before. Go figure. Then we drove by the new house, and I panicked a bit because the siding was the wrong color, and not the cool red we expected. Apparently, it comes from the factory white and they paint it after it is up, which makes perfect sense. I was thrown off by the fact that the base white color is very similar to one of the trim colors we picked, so I worried that they had flip-flopped the colors somehow.

I was a little concerned Tuesday morning when we woke up to more cold, gray, rain. Laura said "I warned you that it is gray in the winter here," to which I responded, "yes, I thought by 'winter' you meant, like, January, not November!" Fortunately, it did clear up a bit. The last few days it has been drippy and rainy in the morning, and then a bit more clear in the afternoons. Possibly snow by the weekend. This morning it was obvious that it had snowed up in the mountains a bit -- you could see the line on Mount Sentinel where the snow stopped.

Overall things are going pretty well. We've been to Target just about every day since we got here. We're hoping that we won't need to go back at least for a few days now. It is pretty odd living in two places -- the Comfort Inn and the rental house. Waiting around for our stuff to arrive is making me very anxious, especially since I need to setup everything for telecommuting by this weekend so that I can start work on Monday. I was hoping to spend these last few days unpacking and organizing, not running errands and sitting around on camp chairs in an empty living room! It also doesn't really feel like we've moved when we're staying in the hotel -- it feels just like so many other vacations. I don't think the fact that we've really moved will sink in until we actually have our stuff at the rental house.

The new house is looking great and coming along fast. I'm really hoping we can close early in December and get settled well before Christmas. We did a walk through yesterday, which was nice for me since I never got a chance to see the inside of a unit like ours when we bought it.

A few pictures:
The tiled entry:


The back of the house from the detached garage:


Master Bedroom, with a view of the backyard and garage:


View from the room that will be my home office (I am SO looking forward to working here!):


And a few pictures from our drive:
Crossing the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Minnesota. I like the shadows of our bicycles on the roof of the car:


Cricket getting bored in South Dakota:


Arriving in Wyoming after the very long trek across South Dakota:


Arriving in Montana at last!


A view of the Tobacco Root Mountains on the final leg of the trip:


Climbing Homestake pass:


Crossing the divide!

Exhausted in Mitchell, South Dakota

So, I haven't posted in a week, but I have a good excuse. By the end of the weekend, everything was mostly packed up. The movers came Tuesday afternoon and cleared out all our stuff. We kept the laptops, of course, but I only spent about 10 minutes in the house Tuesday night, loading the car-items up before driving to my parents' house so that we could stay in some place with a bed (not cots on the floor!)

Wednesday I was busy at work wrapping things up and making sure my laptop is all set up for effective telecommuting.

Thursday morning we closed. It took a long time because the title company had to wait on some other form the buyers needed to sign. We were all done except that, and had to sit around for about half an hour chatting until things finished up and I got the big check in my hands.

Then we opened a new bank account at a bank that has branches in Montana, ran a couple other errands, and spent the rest of the day vegging out at my parents house. The cat was somewhat traumatized by spending the day in a strange place -- my parents' sunroom, but she did seem to relax by evening.

This morning, Friday, we were up by five A.M. and on the road by 6:16 (yes, I noticed the exact time, but forgot to set the trip odometer). We gave the cat a tranquilizer. She fretted in her crate for a bit, then relaxed and dozed the rest of the way. The dogs all behaved well, but they have always been good travelers.

It is a very long drive from Batavia, IL to Mitchell, SD. And now I am exhausted. I have to say, though, this is the first time I've been in a hotel that has a notice informing you that if you leave your gun in the room out of a case, the housekeeping staff will not clean the area around it. And leave your dog in its crate, or the staff won't enter the room at all!

It appears to be pheasant season here. Several guests arriving at the same time as us did indeed have gun cases with them. I remember driving to Montana last November and being taken aback by the site of dead deer and elk in the backs of trucks on the road. I suppose this is something I will just get used to...

Home Stretch Weekend

So we're getting down to the homestretch here on the packing and cleaning. The movers come Tuesday to haul our stuff off to Montana. The other day, I finally finished transferring really old files from my old Macintosh to my current computer. Afterward, I discovered how easy it is to disassemble a Macintosh LC III:


Today is our last trash day while still owning this house, so we wanted to get as much garbage out as possible. Laura overdid it yesterday while I was at work, hauling so much stuff that she is very sore today. I helped when I got home. We have to put a garbage sticker on each item. We went through about 25 stickers:


The dining table alone took quite a few -- six chairs, the two base parts, and the top. We had intended to donate it, but no one wanted it because the top needs refinishing.

Anyway, I took a vacation day since we're down to the homestretch...although everywhere I look I see so much stuff to be packed! How did we end up with all this stuff??

What Do You Need?

I don't usually do these things, but this was pretty funny. From David at Better Living Thru Blogging, type your name and "needs" into google and see what comes up.

So, here's what I got:

1. Sara needs...a loving, playful home (hmm, playful?)

2. Sara needs to discover the experts in the area. (Experts in what? In what area? Why?)

3. Sara needs...you (that's rather vague)

4. Sara needs...your vote (I cannot imagine even wanting to run for office)

5. Sara needs to hand him one of those weapons (I don't have any weapons, unless you count pocket knives)

6. Sara needs...something more than the well-established love of her companion (I don't think Laura would like this one)

7. Sara needs...a caesarean section (I'm wondering what they would find in there. Does someone know something I don't?)

8. Sara needs...further surgery (More surgery? After the caesarean? OK, I am staying away from people with knives for a while!!)

9. Sara needs to quit whinin (I'll quit "whinin" when you learn how to spell!)

10. Sara needs to shut the hell up (Um, no. Sorry. I will NOT shut the hell up)

I did 10, but there were a few more down the list that I found funny:

Sara needs...insoles (well, my feet do tend to hurt a lot. I hate buying shoes)

Sara needs...sleep (always!)

And let's end with the most bizarre:
Sara needs...to mate with a comparable alien, not human, to keep her new perfect species alive (er, what?)

Taxes, Domestic Partners, Marriage

Conservatives like to claim to be all in favor of tax breaks, except of course when those breaks might benefit gay couples. Likewise, they are all about getting government's nose out of private business, except for when private business wants to actually help out gay couples.

See, I'm currently in the process of enrolling in my medical benefits for next year, which is a great way to get a "nice" reminder that, while domestic partner benefits may be a lot better than nothing, they are not anywhere close to "marriage." I should probably point out that my company was acquired last year, so this is the first time I'm enrolling in the new company's plan.**

So, I go to add Laura as a dependent and I get a reminder that I need to provide additional documentation on our relationship. Funny, I strongly suspect that the married folks don't need to fax copies of their marriage certificate to someone two states away, but OK, whatever. We'll fill out the form and track down a notary public.

Then there is the tax issue. Most people don't think about the portion of their health benefits that the employer pays--they only worry about the amount taken out of each check. In our case, we need to worry about both.

First, the payroll deductions that cover MY part of the benefits are all nicely pre-tax, thus lowering my overall tax burden a smidge. The deductions for Laura's part, however, are not. They will be deducted post-tax. OK, it isn't a huge amount and it isn't as though it would put me in a different tax bracket, but still, it is a difference. I suspect this difference would become even greater if we were to throw a kid or two into the mix.

Then there is the matter of the premium that the company pays for our benefits. You know, the part that you never see, that you don't even think about. Can you even name the amount your company spends on your health benefits each paycheck? Anyway, for my part of that premium, all is fine and I can pretend it isn't there. But the amount my employer pays for Laura's benefits will be conveniently tacked on to my taxable income and reported to the IRS, so I get to pay taxes on it. How exciting. At the present moment, I have no clue how much this will amount to, but given the rising cost of healthcare I keep hearing about, I suspect it won't be a tiny amount. If my employer's share of the premium is equal to my share, it will be at least $1,500 for the year. I strongly suspect that my employer and I are not splitting the cost of the benefits 50/50, so it will probably be more than that.

And all the "small government conservatives" out there are perfectly happy with this arrangement. More taxes! From certain people, anyway.

Oh, and the part about the government's nose in private business? While poking around to figure out exactly what the DP benefit requirements are, I stumbled across a page indicating that DP benefits were not available in certain states due to state law. That is, the same insurance company that is perfectly happy to cover domestic partners in Illinois is forbidden by state law from providing those benefits to employees in, say, Virginia. There were four or five states on the list -- fortunately not including Montana where we will be living in less than a month. It did look like some of the plans could still be used in those states, but not others.

What do you want to bet that the people behind those particular state laws call themselves "small government conservatives" (also sometimes known as "republicans") when they're not busy passing legislation forbidding insurance companies from selling insurance to certain types of people?

**I should also point out that my complaint here is NOT with my company. I do appreciate the DP coverage and I'm glad it is there. My employer isn't trying to be unfair, they are just constrained by this:

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that domestic partners cannot be considered spouses for tax purposes. Thus, employers are obligated to report the fair market value of the domestic partner coverage as income to the employee. The employee must pay income tax on that money.

Although I did not know until visiting the above FAQ that legislation was introduced to fix this inequitable situation in 2003. It appears to have been referred to the Ways and Means committee. I've no idea if it ever has hope of seeing the light of day. I do find it interesting that the vast majority of co-sponsors are Democrats. I thought Democrats were the ones who want to make us all pay more in taxes. They must have been confused to co-sponsor a bill that would reduce my taxes!

I am also amused / horrified / saddened by this description of the bill from a so-called "pro-family" site (emphasis mine):

Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act of 2003 attacks the institutions of marriage and family. Current federal law excludes the benefits of employer-provided health coverage for spouses and children from being included as taxable income. However, if those benefits are offered to someone other than a spouse or child, they are taxable. H. 935 seeks to provide special rights for homosexuals by amending the Internal Revenue Code to treat homosexual partners as married spouses so that an employee whose company is providing health insurance for a homosexual domestic partner is no longer taxed on the value of that insurance.

Did they really write that with a straight (ahem) face? They describe (correctly) the inequity in taxation, then state that removing that inequity is giving homosexuals special rights? They have a funny definition for "special." And I don't even want to think about how self-centered you must be to see a change in taxes that doesn't affect you as an "attack" on yourself.

No, I won't provide a link. Just google the full name of the bill ("Tax Equity for Health Plan Beneficiaries Act") and I'm sure you can find it.

Sometimes I Wish I Could Write Poetry

But, since I can't, I'll just recommend this.

We Must Be a Stop on the Migratory Superhighway

There was a bit of a ruckus in my neighborhood this morning.

This was the view out my back door. The roofs are my neighbors off our alley.


This was the view from my front porch of the houses across the way.


The pictures don't do it justice. Stepping outside was to step into a cacophony of noise. The birds were gathered on every single roof I can see from my house.

Ten minutes later, they were all gone. Not a single one left in the neighborhood.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love autumn? So much better than the hot, humid summer.

Does it Look Like Someone Might be Moving?

A small sampling...

Boxes in family room...they are taking over...creating a wall between the living and family rooms


Breakables waiting to be packed


Boxes in the loft

Snow!

Didn’t I just comment about getting used to winter in Montana?

Laura was talking to her parents this morning, and apparently it snowed in Bozeman last night. As I’ve now confirmed at bozeman-mt, thanks to the tip from Big Sky Blog.

I’ve been told by Laura that snow this early in the season usually melts with a day, but still.

My various friends and co-workers here in Chicagoland think I’m crazy for looking forward to living in a place where it snows in October. Although I would have preferred to move during the summer, I’m still looking forward to this. I have a couple pairs of old cross-country skis in the garage that haven’t been used in years. Once we move, I plan to get new boots, replace the bindings, and find some good cross-country trails in / near Missoula. According to this, it shouldn’t be hard to find a few good spots.

I’ve never done downhill, and Laura doesn’t like it, so I don’t expect to do much downhill skiing. We’re thinking of checking out something like this, though.

This site seems to be a pretty good starting spot for finding Montana weather. The web cams of the various mountain passes are cool, too.