Casey Sjolund

February has almost hit its end, which is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because its almost spring, and a curse because, well, it’s almost spring. February is also the time of year that Montana is blessed with an influx of visitors. This year it was a good turn out, although we missed two regular contributors from the West Coast. Mariah And Damien, I hope you enjoy the new digs! We had the Dans from Duluth, high school friends, and John, Josh and Charlie who are all college friends.
The timing could have been better as there was only a day overlap with all of us together at once, and it would have been cool to go riding with everyone, but people get older and turn into wuss’s and some would rather snowmobile than ski/snowboard and blame this on the fact that they have injuries that are long since healed… Yea, I’m looking at you DAN!
We got some quality riding in with the college buds, enjoying both Moonlight and Bridger. Both were good days, but Moonlight was a bit better as the weather was colder and that kept the snow in some good condition. Josh and I both got treed, at different times, but the result was the same; tired, sweaty and cursing the tight trees and waist deep powder. We both thought about giving up and waiting for ski patrol to come find us and haul us out, but figured better to tough it out so that, that story would not be told for years to come over breakfast at the Cats Paw.

After everyone left, I went back to work for five days. Matt sent me some photos of an epic day he had on the (west) Gallatin river, so needless to say I needed to fish after the work week. I called Matt and wanted to know if he wanted to fish, he said that he needed to spend all day studying for a test, I told him that what he needed to do was to go fishing and stop complaining. It took a minute or two but I ended up convincing him that this was a much better plan than 12 hours in the library. We headed out to the Gallatin, after about three hours we gave up and admitted defeat without a fish to hand.

Now I am sitting in the coffee shop, waiting for a reply on a question I posted to my GIS forum before I finish my homework. So I figured what better time to invest in a quick little update.

Had the urge to fish. Drove out to Spains and saw that it was clear, so I jumped in, only to find out that only part of the river was clear, so it was a bit sketchy out there on the ice, not knowing how thick it was and not really being able to tell how deep the water was. I opted to to head up river and went to Penwell. I went up river and ran into a similar problem that I had at Spains, and that was I couldn’t tell how deep the water was since it was slightly off color and the overcast sky did not help seeing the bottom of the river. I ‘fished’ for a while and didn’t catch anything. I don’t know if I am fishing the right areas or the wrong pattern. I think tomorrow I might head to some big water and fish the Madison and see if I have any luck out there.

I just got home and my new wading boots were waiting for me at the door, that and thanks to Netflix I got Clifford Ball disk 2. So now I am going to do some GIS homework and listen to phish in 5.1. Life is good.

It seems that it is always a beautiful day in Bozeman, but today for some reason seems a bit more so. Normally I would be ankle deep in either some of the trout streams, or some of the fresh powder in the mountains… but not today. Today I am stuck indoors. Working on homework at the local coffee shop, listening to Van Morrison and trying to remember anything that I learned in Geometry and trying to learn basic trig so I can finish my homework. Doing this homework makes me love technology. From what I gather about the homework assignment the main take away is to make us grateful that we no longer have to do map projections and the like by hand. So far it is working.

Tomorrow will be a day for the river or mountain, today will be engulfed in sin, cosin, radians and DMS.

Soak it up people.

Matt and I headed out around 11:oo AM on Sunday to fish the East. Since our usual fishing holes are extremely unfishable, unless you have a drill and an ice house, we went further down river and hopped in near Hamline. The day was beautiful, but the fishing was less than. No fish to hand, but a good day on the river none the less. I did hook into one fish on a San Jaun worm (don’t tell anyone!), but he broke off shortly after hooking into it.

So, I am updating my blog out of pure procrastination. I am supposed to be writing a paper for class, but the topic leaves me slightly bored. I feel that the topic at hand is bland, and the authors do a very poor job of explaining the benefit of what they are proposing. I sort of feel that the status quo, while perhaps not the best answer, is an apt descriptive property of digital cartography.. Bored yet? Now you know how I feel.

I have no real other updates to talk about. Melissa is in town, she is almost done with her first semester as a teacher, so she is naturally excited that its down hill from here.

I plan on going fishing tomorrow. I need to do something besides work and school. Fishing sounds like a nice release.

Matt and I decided to try our hand at some winter fishing. We figured the East Gallatin would be the best place to go, but I received a phone call from Matt letting me know that the East would indeed be great if we brought our ice skates. So we opted to head out to the Gallatin where we hoped that the last few weeks of subzero temps would have not had the same impact on this river.

We got there and fishing was extremely slow. I finally had some luck, fishing a softhackle way down deep. The takes were almost non-existent. But at the end of the day I landed three rainbows and one good looking brown trout.

After a while the cold started to get to us and we could barely feel our toes, so we decided to call it a day.

All in all.. pretty nice saturday.

So we have had a string of extremely cold weather here in Bozeman Montana. Today I think it is finally out of the below freezing temps and is now about 8 degrees. Yesterday and the day before were greeted with a full day of below freezing temperature. So today actually feels mild, I am wandering around downtown wearing a hoodie and actually feeling quite comfortable.

Enough about the weather, who cares right? The only people who truly care are the ones who are experiencing it. So this weekend we got a treat coming to Bozeman. Trampled by turtles are coming to town for two shows, both of which are falling on Saturday. One at 6:00pm and another at 10:30. Ideally I would love to go to both, but only got the cash flow for one. It is always a spectacle when Tbt comes to town, they put on one heck of a show and you rarely see the Filler as packed with people dancing and having fun. So if you are Bozeman on Saturday night you should really check this show out. Buy tickets early as they will sell out.

School is almost over. I turned in my final project an hour before it was due. I think all said and done it turned in roughly at 11 pages. All in all I was kind of happy with it. My idea for the project went through many iterations, from extremely awesome and complex to something a bit more manageable. With GIS the truism of “Data is the hardest most expensive part of the project” is extremely accurate. Try finding extensive local data and you run into a bigger problem. If I had my project to do over again, I would do something on a Country or World view, not on a small city in Montana. Either way, its water under the bridge. The assignment is in and hopefully in the works of being graded. Hopefully the professor sees the effort and grades accordingly. With that said, I am looking forward to next semesters class. I am really enjoying the GIS experience and can’t wait to dig deeper.

I think that more or less keeps everyone up to speed on the life of Casey.

Cheers.

So on my four days off this week, I too a leisurely trip down to Gardiner Montana to visit my two favorite women. It was a nice day. Melissa did lesson plans, and I sat around and did some homework. It was good to see her on her turf, rather than when I see her in Bozeman.
The next day I took the dog on a walk, and then headed into the park, hoping that the path to West was open so I could go home via Big Sky; it was not. So I drove around a bit, but being that backtracking is my biggest pet peeve in the world, I turned around and decided to head back to Bozeman.
Upon arriving at my front door, Matt called and said that he had a loaner rod and wanted to go cast some line. Side note, Matt broke both of his fly rods, and they are currently being repaired. So he came and picked me up and we drove out Dry Creek road quite a ways and hopped into the East at a location I have never fished. Found what appeared to be a deep pool with decent flow and hammered that water until a little before dusk. No luck with the fish, tried everything from drys to streamers to small and large nymphs. I did however become extremely frustrated because my fly line is starting to bring to much water up to my guides and about every five casts I have to clean out my guides as I can’t get a cast to load at all. I think I will try cleaning the line see if I can clean it off so it doesn’t hold as much water up to the guides when I strip the line. If that doesn’t work, I believe I will have to buy some fly line, or as PJ O’Rourke calls it, the worlds most expensive clothes line.

Most of you who know me, know that I have a fear of burning down my house by leaving my stove on. I will get to work and go into panic mode about whether or not I turned the stove off. Melissa came up with a great idea, and I am now in the process of implementing it. Live webcam feed to my stove at all times. That way when I start worrying about this, I can get an instant response.

Brilliant.

So I am relaxing at the local coffee shop enjoying a cup of coffee some Van Morrison and working on some GIS homework.  It’s snowing in Bozeman again and the coffee shop is packed, I think there might be some correlation, but it’s hard to say because as I learned not only from stats, but from xkcd, correlation does not imply causality. (http://xkcd.com/552/)

One thing that I find oddly fascinating about our current digital age is the fact that people are more jacked in and immersed in the social network such as facebook/twitter/wordpress/lj/flicker/linkedin/etc etc yet people out and about are more and more isolated from reality.  I look around this coffee shop and there are countless individuals sitting around in front of their laptops working on what ever they are doing, but I can’t help to notice that they are constantly updating their facebook status or tweeting out about something that they think of.

As a side note, I understand the irony of me pointing it out.  I am updating this from the coffee shop.