A terrific review

This author business is still new enough to me that when I get a new review I have a tendency to jump up and down just a little.

http://ndrosen.livejournal.com/416090.html

Anyway, it was lovely.

a new cover

I have a confession to make. When I first published Repeating History last summer, I really had no idea of how to make a cover, very rudimentary knowledge of Adobe InDesign, and not much else. Since then I've learned just a little more, and this is the result:

The pocketwatch is a public domain image. The geyser is a photo of Grand Geyser that I took the day I had the inspiration for the book in question (it's the same photo that's on the old cover, but I lightened the photo for the old cover to make the title stand out). The banner is because the colors in the geyser photo run the gamut from almost black to almost white, and make it impossible (at least with the skills I have at my disposal) to keep it from washing out almost any letter color or pattern I chose. The banner colors are chosen from the photo.

The lettering is two variations of woodgrain, via Photoshop. The font is akaPosse, from dafont.com.

I would love to know what you think of it. Please tell me.

and on to another stop

On the blog tour.

http://romancingthewest.blogspot.com/2012/03/mm-justus-repeating-history.html

Jacquie was a very good interviewer, and on Thursday she will also be posting an article I wrote with some photos I took.

another blog interview!

The Dames of Dialogue are graciously hosting me, with an interview about how Repeating History came to be.

Montana museums

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet.  I hope you enjoy the article.

my first blog interview!

Over the weekend, I was interviewed by L. Lee Scott, a fellow author I met through Women Writing the West, an organization I belong to.   It was a fascinating experience, and she asked me a number of good questions that really made me think about Repeating History and about the writing process. 

If you would like to read it, the interview is here.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being interviewed.

A time to reckon, I guess

These were my goals this time last year

1) Complete my first two freelance museum gigs.

I did. Both well enough to get rehired [g].

2) Find more potential clients and land more gigs.

I found one more new client, which I've been working steadily for since April, plus, as I said, rehired by both my old clients, although one has since gone dormant till spring for lack of funds.

3) Go to more museum workshops and a conference, and continue Heritage League committee work.

I've been to two workshops and taken two classes, but I didn't make it to any conferences. The HL committee I was on finished its work in September, but I've been asked to be on the board, and probably will.

4) Write the mystery house rough draft.

Well, no. I've been working on the Yellowstone trilogy, though, and I will get back to it after I'm done with it.

5) Revise Sojourn, last year's NaNo book.

Again, no, because of the Yellowstone trilogy. It's in the pipeline, though.

6) Figure out what I'm going to do about the rest of the Yellowstone trilogy (which may end up as a duology), and get back to work on it.

I did figure it out, and what I did was do one more edit on Repeating History, create a cover, and format it for Amazon and Smashwords. I self-published it in early August, and it's been selling a steady trickle of copies ever since.
And, no, the Yellowstone trilogy is not going to be a duology. True Gold, the second book, has an almost complete rough draft, and I have begun revisions.

7) Finish piecing the Imbolc Flame quilt, and finish quilting the Yule Log Cabin quilt. Maybe start a nice, simple throw of animal fabrics and the animal cross-stitch patterns I did last summer.

The Imbolc Flame quilt is pieced. I haven't layered it yet, but I'll get there. The Yule Log Cabin, well... It's the disaster I finally ended up giving away partly quilted. First time I've ever done that with a quilt. The throw has just started to materialize (sorry, bad pun). I started piecing on it last week. I've also created several quilted pillows and am almost finished quilting a baby quilt for the great-nibling due in April.

8) Find some good 6" square flower cross-stitch patterns for my Beltane quilt and begin stitching them.

I've stitched half a dozen of them, but I got sidetracked with some other projects, including a cross-stitched pillow. The Beltane quilt will happen. Eventually.

9) Go to Crater Lake, Yosemite, and WorldCon in Reno in August with my friend M.

We went, we had a great time [g].

10) Do more research on Washington history -- find some more good stuff for my writing.

I did some, but I got kind of sidetracked researching True Gold.

11) Blog regularly.

Weell... Regularly, but not nearly as often as I would have liked.

And now this year's goals

1) Complete the new museum exhibit by the end of February, and keep getting rehired to continue the textile collection work.

2) Pursue more collections work as opposed to exhibits work. Only sign with the dormant client if they have sufficient funds to finish what they hire me to do and a concrete objective for that work. Sign a contract with at least one new client.

3) Join the Heritage League board. Take a Photoshop class. Pursue other career educational opportunities including the Washington Museum Association conference, in Seattle this year.

4) Finish True Gold and self publish it by the first of June.

5) Write Finding Home (the third book in the Yellowstone trilogy) and self-publish it, hopefully by the end of the year.

6) Learn better book marketing skills and put them into practice.

7) Redecorate the living room. My living room has had a lighthouse theme for the last twenty years, and it's time for a change. I have picked out some cross-stitch patterns and quilt fabrics with North American wild animals on them, so it's a start.

8) Finish the baby quilt. Finish the animal sofa throw. Make a new table runner for the sofa table. Layer the Imbolc Flame quilt and start quilting it.

9) Make new cross-stitch pictures for the living room. I have eight picked out. We'll see how many I can finish this year.

10) Make my first long car trip alone in five years [sigh]. The plan is to take off for two or three weeks in June and drive east. Maybe a night or two in Yellowstone to scatter bookmarks, but I want to go farther east than that, maybe as far as Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I also want to visit some of the historic sites like Fort Benton.

11) Get the garden cleaned up.

12) Blog more frequently.

So, what are your goals for 2012?

plotting

I have finally restarted work on True Gold, a sequel of sorts  to Repeating History (one of the main characters is the son of the hero of RH, and the book takes place twenty years later).  Things sort of came to a grinding halt earlier this year, but I'm trying something new to me.  Plotting has always been my bête noire.  I love character development, world-building (or, in my case, historical research), writing dialog and description and all the other goodies that go with writing fiction, but unfortunately none of them are any good whatsoever without a plot. 

In the past I've used the process outlined in John Vorhaus's wonderful but grossly-misnamed book, The Comic Toolbox, and it's been a great help, but it just wasn't working this time around.  I had run across Holly Lisle's website a couple of years ago and had read some of her articles on writing.  So when I was casting about for something to help me get past the plotting beast this time, I ran across Holly's website in my lengthy list of links to writing websites, and discovered her Create a Plot Clinic ebook.  What the heck, I thought, it's only $10.  So I downloaded it and read it.

I appear to be getting somewhere now, so it was obviously a case of Right Book Right Time.  I've never outlined a book before -- I've always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person (what the romance writing community affectionately calls a "pantser").  But since that wasn't working this time, well, heck, I'm always open to trying something new.

I'm beginning to hope to have the outline finished by Halloween, just in time to take advantage of the worldwide cheerleading gang that is NaNoWriMo.  And to have the entire draft finished by the end of the year.

Eep.  Did I just say that?  Granted, I've got large chunks of manuscript from the failed drafts that I can use (just because it failed as a whole does not mean there aren't some -- or many -- individual scenes that will work just fine), but still.  I think I just heard myself committing to getting the whole thing straightened out by the end of the year.  Publicly (for whatever values of publicly the couple of dozen readers of this blog consists of [g]).

Oh, well.  As a college friend of mine used to say many years ago, "'S good for you.  Builds character."  I certainly hope it does...

Oh. My.

Today Repeating History received its first reader review on Amazon.  It's by Janet Chapple, who wrote the definitive guide to Yellowstone, Yellowstone Treasures. 

And, not that I'm trying to pull a Sally Field here or anything, but -- she liked it!  She really liked it!

Five stars. 

Wow.

Go check it out:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005E8S8UM

WorldCon, Day 3

Unfortunately, I don't have any cute or clever or pretty pictures of the third day of the con. 

The day's panels started with Lois Bujold reading from her upcoming book.  Ivan His Booke, as she's been referring to it on her email list.  Ivan Vorpatril is the quintessential sidekick from Bujold's Vorkosigan space opera series.  One of his several catchphrases is, "It's not my fault!" but that's not always the case, which is good for him.  Her fans have been begging for an Ivan book for years, but I don't know if that's why she's writing it, or if Ivan has just quit sidling off onto the sidelines and out the door.  At any rate, the excerpt she read was Ivan at his best, and I'm really looking forward to this book.  We probably won't get it till at least next year, though.  Alas.

Another panel was on treating horses and other animals realistically in one's fiction, and yet another on world-building.  Both were interesting and useful to me.  Given that Repeating History features horses (it's rather difficult to write a book set in the Old West that doesn't), it was nice to know that my research on the subject paid off.

That evening the listees (as the members of the Lois Bujold mailing list call ourselves) went out to dinner at an Irish pub-style restaurant with Lois.  I think there were about twenty of us there, and a good time was had by all.  At least a good time was had by me...

Mary and I decided to skip the masquerade that night.  We'd been to the masquerade at WorldCon in Denver, and hadn't been all that excited about it.  We did hear some interesting tales about some of the costumes the next day, though.

And that was my third day at WorldCon.

aw, shucks

According to this article and some scientists in Hong Kong, time travel isn't possible.  Nobody'd better try to tell that to Chuck McManis, though.  Who is Chuck McManis?  He's the hero of Repeating History, my new novel now out on Amazon and Smashwords.

Maybe they should have tried using a geyser.  Or an earthquake.  Or maybe both? [g]

And another small accomplishment

I have learned how to format a book for Amazon.  I'm not the techiest person in the world, so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I seem to have mastered it.  I still have a bit of tweaking to do (a bit of odd spacing in a couple of spots that, now that I look at it, are in the manuscript, too), but soon there will be a real ebook.

In the meantime, here's the shiny new cover:

Making progress.  Moving like a herd of turtles, as a friend back in Ohio used to say.  The photo is of Grand Geyser, which I took during the actual eruption that inspired the writing of the book.  Which is kind of nifty in itself, if I do say so myself.

what's in a name?

I always knew I was going to have to change some of the names in Repeating History, which, if all goes well, will be available for purchase at Amazon or via any of the formats Smashwords will provide, by the end of this month. 

Some of the characters in this story are real historical people.  Those who had only fleeting walk-ons have kept their names, but several -- mostly members of a family in 1870s Helena, Montana, and the man who married the eldest daughter of that family, are central characters in my novel.  I don't want to offend any of their descendants, so I've spent the last several days figuring out new names for all of them.

Speaking as someone who once fictionalized the small town of Libby, Montana, by giving it the name Campbell (okay, the reason is obvious to me, but I may be dating myself if no one else remembers the commercial jingle "Libby, Libby, Libby on the label, label, label"), I needed the names to be similar in ways that may not make sense to anyone but me.  Not just ethnically, although I did take that into account.  But the way they sound, their resonances and associations, and whether or not they come with nicknames were important, too.  For instance, I wanted to give a name that had a nickname to a man whose real name did not come with one.  This would have added some serious unnecessary editing time as I chose where he'd go by his nickname and where he would not, so, reluctantly, I chose another name.  Fortunately, as it turns out, I like this one better, anyway.

Why didn't I do all this at the beginning?  Back when I first started the novel?  Because, frankly, I didn't know who these people would turn out to be.  Generally speaking, most characters who show up in my head come complete with first, middle, and last names, and with entire backstories.  But most of the characters who show up in my head are not in real history books.  I wasn't sure how much they would change from their real lives as the story was written.   

And so this was my last editing chore before I sent the book off to be proofread. 

Now all I have to do is correct any errors found in that process, format the book for Amazon and Smashwords, finish monkeying with the cover image, and upload the darned thing!

I love the whole process of naming, whether it's a cat or a character.  Do you?

Something I never really thought I'd see

On an agent's blog:

Rejections from agents or general trade editors is hardly ever a measure of the quality of your work.  If you've gotten a lot of those, look at other ways of getting your work in front of readers.

This makes me believe that the publishing world honestly is beginning to change.  Speaking as someone who is finally getting up the courage to self-publish my books, that first sentence is the antithesis of what I've been internalizing for the last ten years or so.  To read that in a "traditional" agent's blog validates the route I've decided to take.  Mind, I would have taken this route, anyway, as on a personal level I need more control over my career than traditional publishing would give me (which is also why I am a former librarian and currently an independent curator and exhibit designer in my other life), but it's incredibly good to see this right now.

it's been a long time

Too long, I'm afraid.  I'm about to finish my second gig (the photo curation for the Tacoma Historical Society).  I have finished curating and cataloging over 2200 images, ranging from glass negatives to prints from digital images, and am now in the process of building virtual exhibits, collections of photographs with informative captions, which will be placed online as part of the Society's website.  I will post the link as soon as it becomes available.  The first two virtual exhibits will be about early Tacoma schools and historic personages of Tacoma, respectively.

I have started a third, curating textiles, beginning with a collection of wedding gowns running the gamut from late 19th century to almost modern, for the Fife Historical Society.  And I am in discussions with yet another local historical society for the creation of another exhibit this fall.  So the freelance museum curator business seems to be keeping me in cotton gloves and acid-free tissue, at any rate.

Today I had the wonderful opportunity to go behind the scenes at the Washington State Historical Society research center, where I attended a workshop about curating baskets and other textiles.  The first part of the workshop was standard lecture/question and answer (and very informative), but the second part was touring several of the textile storage rooms, including one that housed over 1500 Northwest-made Indian baskets, many of which were over 100 years old.  I wish I'd brought my camera.  The baskets ran the gamut from thimble-sized to one I could almost have sat in, and included materials from bark to reed to beads.  I think my personal favorites were the one woven to look just like a china cup and saucer, and the collection of thimble-sized baskets.  I felt about those the way I do about miniature quilts at quilt shows.  Wow, that's impressive.  Man, they must have been insane...

One other piece of unrelated news:  I am in the process of editing, creating cover art, and formatting my historical with a whiff of fantasy novel for the Kindle and Smashwords.  I hope to have it up and for sale by the end of July, and I will announce it here (and everywhere else I can think of) as soon as it becomes available.

And I'll try not to disappear into the ether on you again any time soon, too.

11 years ago today, Day 44

You've already gotten my esteemed colleague Kathleen Ernst's take on Harpers Ferry.  Now you'll get mine on both Antietam and Harpers Ferry.

I drove to Frederick first, though, to find a library to do email in, since the last time I had was in New Hampshire.  Found out that one of my best friends had become a grandmother again, which was exciting.  After I left Frederick, I headed towards Antietam National Battlefield, and spent a while there.

Across the fields

A detail of one of the monuments

Bloody Lane from the top of a viewing tower

"The feeling wasn't quite the same as Gettysburg.  For one thing, it's not nearly as touristy.  For another, my feelings about the battle were tempered by my reminiscing about the MacKade stuff (the Nora Roberts books set here) and by the fact that I've been listening to the [Disney] Tarzan soundtrack on the way over.  Kind of hard to hear battle noise over jungle drums.  Part of me is now thinking I might have done that on purpose...

"It's still a very solemn place.  It was hard to read the signs and know that over 20,000 men died in one day there.  The single bloodiest day of the war (or any American war, apparently).  'Owls hooting in the trees, ghosts walking on the air.' (The Pride of Jared MacKade by Nora Roberts)  For me it was hawks (migration season) rather than owls, but still.  Odd feeling."

The end of the Antietam auto tour is at the Harpers Ferry Road I'd been looking for and couldn't find the day before, so I took it.  The road winds along the Potomac River through the woods, and was beautiful. 

This took me to Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, where I attempted to get lunch and finally succeeded.  After that, I wandered around town:

And visited the many and varied exhibits.  The one about John Brown kind of spooked me.  That man had the most intense blazing eyes.  The town itself was fascinating.  I wish I'd known at the time that the National Park Service's historic preservation headquarters was there, but they're not open to the public, anyway. 

On my way back to the hostel, I crossed the Potomac River:

And read my guidebooks that night as I prepared to tackle Washington, DC, the next day.

11 years ago today, Day 10 -- waiting for things to go off

My third full day at Yellowstone was spent entirely in the Upper Geyser Basin, waiting for things to go off.  In order to really get to see the geysers properly, you need a couple of things, plenty of patience, and plenty of time.  I had the latter, or at least a whole day, and I helped myself out with the former by loading my daypack up with a picnic, a book, my journal, and my camera, and then stopping by the visitor center to collect eruption predictions.

Oh, and good walking shoes.  I must have walked at least six miles that day.

The first thing I did was walk down to Morning Glory Pool:

Morning Glory Pool isn't as blue as it used to be because of vandals throwing stuff in it.  How can people be that stupid?

Riverside Geyser was due to go off next, so I stopped there and waited:

Riverside erupts out over the Firehole River, and afternoon eruptions (which this wasn't), often have rainbows in the steam.

Next was Grotto Geyser.  Ahem.  Okay, this is a G-rated blog, so I'm not going to make the obvious comment, but honestly.

Grotto Geyser.  'Nuff said.

Those are supposedly trees that have been coated with sinter over the last few thousand years.

Next was a geyser I'd wanted to see ever since my ex absolutely refused to wait through its four-hour eruption window thirteen years before.  I've talked about Grand Geyser here before, how it's the tallest predictable geyser on the planet, and how it was part of the inspiration for my novel Repeating History, and just generally how amazing it is.  So I won't go on and on and on, even though I could, quite easily.  But I will tell you that my first-ever eruption of the Grand was a five burst eruption, which is quite rare, although I didn't realize it at the time.  I do remember the gazers with their walkie-talkies going practically ballistic, though.  Anyway, here's one of the first photos I ever took of Charley's geyser:

Isn't it Grand? (sorry)

After that, well, everything else, while wonderful, was something of an anticlimax.  Still, I also saw Giant Geyser's crater, which looks like an enormous hollow tree stump:

Giant is not a regular eruptor, and while I saw an eruption on a later trip, it was not cooperating today.

I saw Sawmill Geyser, which erupts much of the time.  It's one of my favorite smaller geysers, mostly because of its sheer exuberance.  But I could say that about most geysers -- I've never seen an eruption where the geyser in question didn't look like it was having one heck of a good time.

Sawmill in the distance.  Grand's pool is just in front of the hillside to the left.

And Castle Geyser, which is, of course, named after its cone, which from many angles does look kind of like a ruined castle.

This is Castle's steam phase, which is incredibly noisy.

All in all, my best, if most footsore, day in the park.  Not least because of my epiphany while gazing raptly at Grand, when I suddenly thought, wow!  Wouldn't that make a terrific time travel device!

11 years ago today, Day 7

Eleven years ago today, I began a love affair that hasn't ended yet. 

But I'll get to that in a bit.  My first stop that morning was in Virginia City.  Now, I know of at least two Virginia Cities that started out as mining camps and ended up as tourist traps, which may be a bit more derogative a term than I intend.  I liked Virginia City, Montana.  Most of the town is on the National Register of Historic Places, and many of the buildings date from the 1860s, when gold was discovered nearby, including the Wells Fargo office:

And the courthouse:

After Virginia City, I kept going east, and soon enough was back on familiar ground.  I'm told that my first visit to Yellowstone was when I was four.  I don't remember it, unfortunately.  When I was 19, in 1978, my parents and I came to this part of the world to camp and go trout fishing.  When I was 26, in 1985, my ex and I visited Yellowstone on our way from Oregon to Colorado to visit his parents and fought the whole way, which was par for the course at the time since it was less than a year before we got divorced. 

Anyway, my parents and I had stopped at the Forest Service Visitor Center that tells about the Hebgen Lake earthquake, the largest earthquake that ever occurred in the state of Montana, and, at the time, the third largest earthquake ever felt in the lower 48 states.  I didn't realize when I revisited the site on this trip that it was going to become fodder for my fiction, but I'll get back to that later.

It was far too windy to picnic at the visitor center, so I went on down to a forest service campground, where I was about the only person there, and watched over my shoulder for bears while I ate my lunch.

I didn't stay long, and not just because of supposed bears, but because I was eager to go on to what has since become one of my favorite places on the planet, Yellowstone National Park.  I arrived in West Yellowstone, a small tourist town on the western border of the park, about mid-afternoon, and found myself a hostel, which was in an old log hotel that was one of the first buildings in West, back around the turn of the last century, across from the then brand-new railroad depot.  Movie stars like Gable and Lombard once stayed in that hotel.  As I found out a few years later on another visit, it's also haunted.  But that's a story for another time.

I couldn't wait to go in the park, so as soon as I had my bed paid for I headed out again.

One of the first things I saw on my way in was a herd of elk, bedding down for the night:

They look rather like tree stumps, don't they?

I got as far as Old Faithful that late afternoon, but the only other pictures I took were at Biscuit and Black Sand Basins. 

This is Biscuit Basin.

And this is Black Sand Basin.  I'm almost positive that the geyser off in the distance is Cliff Geyser.

These pictures were taken 11 years after the Yellowstone fires of 1988, and the evidence of them is clear, in all the dead trees looking like snaggletoothed combs on the ridgetops and marching down the hillsides.  But there were literally millions of new young trees springing up around them, at the time all just about my height.  It really was a most encouraging sight.

And now, here at the end of this entry, I must make a confession.  I spent the next five days in Yellowstone, and took more pictures of steam than I'm willing to discuss even here.  I will try, very hard, not to inflict any upon you where you can't actually see what I was photographing through that steam.  I promise.

today

Is the 51st anniversary of a day that changed my life.  Although it didn't actually do the changing until eleven years ago...

The Hebgen Lake earthquake was the largest earthquake ever to hit Montana.  It struck just west of Yellowstone National Park, and changed the landscape of the park forever.

It also was part of the inspiration for a trilogy of books I've been writing on ever since.  I don't know why I combined it with Grand Geyser to make a time travel device, but that's the way my brain works.

I don't mean to trivialize the devastation this quake caused -- it killed 28 people and caused over $11 million in damage in 1959 dollars, which was a terrible thing.

But my fictional hero learned to bless it for the changes it caused in his life.  And I have to say I appreciate the inspiration it has provided in mine.

"Yellowstone is my happy place"

Days 7 and 8.

All good things have to come to an end.  L and I packed up a week ago this morning and headed out of the park.  We did make several more stops on our way out towards West Yellowstone, that I'd saved to the end of our visit.

The first was at Black Sand Basin, where we saw Cliff Geyser erupting.  This geyser has significance in True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History that I'm working on right now.  It's also one of my two favorite lesser geysers, the other being Sawmill in the Upper Geyser Basin near Grand.

Cliff Geyser

Biscuit Basin was closed because they were rebuilding the boardwalks, so we didn't get to walk out there, but our next stop was Midway Geyser Basin, where we walked the boardwalks in the company of a busload of tourists, and peered down into the steam of Excelsior Geyser Crater and across enormous rainbow-tinted Grand Prismatic Spring.

Excelsior Geyser Crater -- in the cool morning you can barely see the

Caribbean turquoise water for the steam.

Grand Prismatic Spring, with its rainbow in the pool and strikingly-shaded algae mats surrounding it.

We made one last stop at the Fountain Paintpots, where Clepsydra Geyser was doing its usual thing (Clepsydra, which means water clock, really isn't a geyser, which implies periodic eruptions -- it's a perpetual spouter).  This is where, on another trip to the park several years ago, a woman, who did not appear to speak English, stepped off the boardwalk so that her companion could take her picture, while everyone around them stared in dumbfounded horror waiting for her to fall through and boil herself to death.  I know that couple went home to wherever home was telling stories about the crazy American woman who freaked out when all they wanted was to take a picture, but I yelled at her until she got back up on the boardwalk.  I did not wish to see another entry in Lee Whittlesey's book Death in Yellowstone, thank you very much.

Clepsydra Geyser

On this trip Fountain Paintpots is where I saw a wildflower I did not recognize (this doesn't happen very often [g]).  My friend M helped me identify it from this picture when I got home.  It looks just like a harebell, except that harebells a) don't have foliage like that, b) don't bloom this early in the season, and c) don't come in bright yellow, or indeed yellow at all.

Yellow bell fritillary, aka Fritillaria pudica

I'd never have guessed it was a fritillary, but it is.  A new-to-me wildflower is always a bonus.

On our way west from Madison Junction to West Yellowstone, we saw some elk cows grazing alongside the road.  They didn't look nearly as healthy as the ones we'd seen up at Mammoth.  The grazing along the Madison River is excellent during the summer, but it's much better at Mammoth in the wintertime.  The one I got a picture of looks pretty sad.

Cow elk

Tuesday was the first overcast day we'd had in the park, but the rain really didn't start letting go until about the time we got to Butte, on our way home.  When it did, though, it came down with a vengeance.  It poured on us off and on all the way home.  This last picture was taken at a rest area near Deer Lodge, Montana, and shows some of the huge clouds and rain we dealt with all the way home.  You can't tell from the picture, but it was pretty darned windy, too.

Clouds over Montana

We were incredibly lucky, though.  The day after we got home, it snowed not only over Snoqualmie Pass (and, I suspect, Homestake and Lookout Passes as well), but in the park.  And that's the way it's been all week, while it's been cool (10 degrees below normal averages) and rainy here in western Washington.

I miss the park already...