Seven Sunny Days

We've had fun this month. There's been lots of snow, rain, clouds and fog. I didn't mention sun, and thats because there hasn't been much of that. I saw tonight on the news that Missoula has only seen SEVEN sunny days in the last 90 days! The NWS calls any day with less than 30% cloud cover = Sunny. La Nina has been snow and wet, my skin is ultra pale. But with about 1/2 of the winter gone, Snowbowl has a huge base, 96" as of today. But I can actually say that I skied in the sun this week. At least I think that's what the yellow ball in the sky was? A few rays of rare sunshine hit my face while day dreaming of warmer climes. Views expanded all the way to the south end of the Bitterroot valley, crystal clear.

We've had the girls out several times on the rope-tow and they are doing great. Their last outing, P was able to use the french fries-pizza technique with control. Stopping on her own. My bribes with Skittles at the top of each run earlier this month seemed to have paid off. G made a huge improvement from the last outing, no longer crumpling like a wet noodle the second you let go of her. Both the girls really want to ride the chairlift, great incentive to improve. I think a trip over to Discovery's magic carpet and kiddie lift is forthcoming.


I finally finished my european mount for the bull. It was a great learning process and time consuming as well. I started out by skinning out the head right after I got it home back in November. A few days later I boiled the head in a giant pot for a day. After scraping off the extra flesh, I boiled it again for another 1/2 day. The next step was to apply the peroxide (40%) for 24 hours. I pasted it on, wrapped a wet cloth around it, and saran wrapped it. I also wrapped the antler bases with foil to keep them from getting whitened. The last step was creating the european pedestal to hang it on the wall. Over at local home resource shop, I bought a 10ft piece of 1"x10" barnwood for $4. I traced out the pattern off one that a buddy had made for my antelope. Then cut it out with a bandsaw, used a blowtorch to distress the edges, added some mounting hardware and it was complete. In hindsight I should have made the base where the skull sits several inches better.

Missoula got 6" of snow today and tomorrow looks like it will be a good one up at the Bowl. they got 7" last night and the report is that at least 4 more inches fell throughout the day.

Thanks for reading. Click the below album to check out the rest of the pictures.

January 2011