Dylan celebrates the big 24 from psheehyMSU on Vimeo.

You can watch the whole deal here and it will look OK. But click on “Vimeo” and then on the little icon that has all the arrows pointing out and you get full screen HD. I recorded this with an external webcam and edited in Movie Maker (VISTA version has some improvements).

Birthday Bizarities from Patrick D. Sheehy on Vimeo.

It’s Dylan’s 24th birthday and things get a little out of hand after the birthday cake has been thoroughly enjoyed. No libations are involved (children are present after all) so no one can make excuses for his or her behavior (actually I don’t think there are any “hers” involved in this segment … other than laughing).

The blue line marks the way of the new wall

On the west side of “The Wall” is a teeming community that has been there as long as I can remember. Google Earth shows streets on the east side of the wall but few structures. There are more now, plus two car washes. The new is a work in progress. And it’s actually not a bad development with mixed use and relatively dense concentration.

I don’t know how people on either side of The Wall feel about each other. The newbies are tolerated I expect by the manufactured homes park folk on the west side. The newbies to the east are, I expect, worried about their property values. Neither can do anything about the other. Maybe both are happy The Wall is there. But if it weren’t; what then?

NEARLY ALL of the north side of this block of downtown Bozeman is affected.

A WARM SATURDAY AFTERNOON and a stroll through a busy downtown Bozeman. One block, just west of Rouse Ave, nearly isn’t there except for some ruins. Downtown Bozeman is back in business but up and down the street are stores with boarded up fronts and signs saying “open for business.” Some of these buildings are more than a block away from the scene above. Click on the photo to see it in full size,

What is worrying is the fate of the building on the far right. See the detail below. It seems intact but clearly there is fire damage inside. See detail below:

BUILDING JUST TO RIGHT of the VFW

The news as seen through the keyhole of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle

I AM AWAITING NEWS ABOUT THE EXPLOSION in downtown Bozeman. I can see the thick column of smoke rising straight up over the empty day care center across the street from my house announcing that something has happened. But I cannot find out what because the newspaper has already been delivered.

I am waiting for news about the explosion in downtown Whitehall. I hear someone say in the hallway outside my office on the Montana State University campus there had been an earthquake at 4:10 a.m. centered somewhere near Whitehall and maybe that is the cause. But I cannot find out how serious the damage has been because there is no story about it in my morning paper.

IN MY FREE MOMENTS I scan the news websites. The Bozeman Chronicle doesn’t update very much and then with scant new bits of information. The Billings Gazette yawns a bit because this is happening to someone else 140 miles away. The Montana Standard, in Butte, seems to update their online site less often than the newspaper itself. Radio? Nope. TV. Nope? Old news. What in God’s name happened to that poor woman who disappeared? Wendy goes to The Academy of Cosmetology on Mendenhall Street for her seven dollar haircut in downtown Bozeman on Saturday and learns a number of things. One of them is that the remains of the still unnamed missing woman have been found across the street from the blaze. This seems most gruesome and I begin scanning my sources, even trying to resurrect a Twitter account I had opened long ago and abandoned because it didn’t make any damned sense to me (being not under 40 years of age). There is nothing. When the newspaper plops on my doorstep Sunday morning I brush the snow off of the plastic bag and pop the paper out of the rubber band (seems a bit extravagant to have a rubber band AND a plastic bag) and the news is … the missing lady is still missing. All resources are focused on finding her. Fire suppression still going on.

MAYBE THE ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER Who Used to Be the Fire Chief whose daily quote appears each day within the first three paragraphs will spill the beans. But there are no beans to be spilled and I keep wondering what the actual Fire Chief is doing while the Assistant City manager is telling us this is the worst disaster he has “worked.”

The news from Whitehall is not as grim but still involves at least four historic buildings in the center of town going up in smoke. There is a bit of speculation now about the relationship between earthquake and gas explosion. When a story does finally appear in The Chronicle I can feel the collective yawn coming from the staff. Whitehall is 60.1 miles away from the Academy of Cosmetology representing a strain on the editorial resources of the Chronicle. Hardly something of interest to readers in Bozeman caught up in the biggest story of the century. They can let the Montana Standard cover it being just the other side of Homestake Pass. That is, if the Standard can find anything located on the east side of the Continental Divide.

I WANT TO GRAB the nearest editor I can find (of course I know nearly all of them since I studied journalism in Montana, uh, about 30 years ago) and shout … DOES THE FACT THAT TWO DOWNTOWNS OF TWO CITIES A MERE 60 MILES APART HAVE HAD TWO DISASTEROUS FIRES CAUSED BY GAS EXPLOSIONS WITHIN A DAY OF EACH OTHER IN ANY WAY SPARK A BIT OF CURIOSITY?  But these guys are my friends and I can’t say anything so rude to them.

The Whitehall story has disappeared from my newspaper today. Coverage of the Bozeman debacle is shrinking rapidly. In Billings the hot story is the rescue of Duke the St. Bernard after two days being stranded on a frozen lake. Humans rescuing a St. Bernard … GET IT? Not dog bites man but man saves DOG?

My sister, who lives in Ontario, can find photos of the Bozeman mess on CNN. Looking back I may have been very wise to simply get into my car and drive in the direction of the column of smoke so that I can SEE with my actual eyes much of what is happening. I learn that one of my work colleagues is standing on a street corner a quarter block away from the explosion and she can describe the loud boom and how she is still a bit shaken. Ron the special education consultant calls the teacher in Wendy’s classroom in Gallatin Gateway to say he’s OK, has been evacuated from his office, the flames are still shooting up into the air and he’s afraid there is loss of life judging by the size of the explosion. The teacher then has to call her spouse whose office is in the bank directly across the street from the blast to make sure he is OK.

IT’S DAWNING ON ME that I should simply send my son down to the Academy of Cosmetology with a note pad (he always needs a haircut anyway) and he can bring back firsthand reports of the latest rumors. The truth is hardest to accept. There just ain’t a lot of media here. Not a lot of news. And when there IS a lot of news, the pipeline for getting it to me is like a drip, drip, drip and I have my mouth positioned to catch every splash.

Tables turned

Jean gets a closeup from the "Blue" standing area

NOW THAT HE’S GONE, I suppose we can begin reflecting on the eight years during which George W. Bush was our President … of the United States … of America. It really happened, right? All of those images flash by at warp speed. Mission Accomplished. Clearing brush down on the ranch in Crawford, Texas. As I review these things I can’t help but ask myself a very simple question: WHY?

Why did the compassionate conservative immediately get the poor into a vice grip from which they cannot escape until well into the Obama administration? Why did Bush listen to certifiable nut cases such as Paul Wolfowitz and Ron Perlman? Why did people in the Bush administration believe that if you have a football game but tell the referees to stay home, everyone will still play nice because it is in their best interest to do so (see Gordon Gecko and Adam Smith)? Why did our beloved Senator Ted Kennedy allow himself to be bamboozled into co-sponsoring what is now fondly known as “No Child Left a Dime”? Why did Bush do nothing in regard to the Middle East until his final week in office? Why did the American People elect him to a second term after knowing full well what they had got from the first?

The musical sound of helicopter blades spinning

SOMEHOW I DOUBT there will be a Bush version of “Nixon Frost” so I’m not optimistic I will ever have an answer to these among my many questions. The people who voted for Bush the second time probably aren’t talkin’. I know I wouldn’t. So I don’t think I’ll be eliciting any explanations from certain people most responsible for the mess we’re in – the people who voted for GWB in 2004 and the people who didn’t vote at all.

What liberal isn’t happy about the ascendency of the first real minority (other than Irish Catholics) into the American monarchy. We rejoice in the take-over of Congress (we can expect results from the Franken-Coleman race in Minnesota no later than next summer) by politicians who are more progressive than, well, the people who were in charge before. We breathe a collective sigh of relief as we contemplate the retirement of the handful of liberal voices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Just in time politics. A bit too close for comfort.

It’s easy to be happy that a smart, even-headed, even-handed guy like Mr. Obama has finally managed to become “the leader of the free world.” But what a mess he has to clean up. After so much promise and the enormous good will following September 11, so crudely squandered on a simplistic right wing agenda. The good news is people beyond our shores can’t possibly hate us more than they do now.

I won’t get my answer. But at least, now, I no longer need or want to ask the question.

Musical sound of helicopter blades growing softer with time and distance.

Ahhh. The quiet sound of a new Pres. Obama signing legislation into law. Probably the one that extends health insurance to little kids that was vetoed by that other guy.

Dylan can crack a bubble out of a piece of Dentine

HOW ABOUT A SHORT HOLIDAY LETTER. The tone of things gets set in January when Patrick flys to Bozeman, Montana for the first and last job interview of 2008. Montana State University it is and we begin a really complicated move that involves five or six car trips and now, in the waning days of 2008, a U-Haul truck. Three guys and a truck. Dylan, Malcolm and Patrick. In between these bookends we have a story of transition. Wendy performs her usual miracle and manages to get an offer in response to the first resume she sends out. So now she’s working in this drop-dead-gorgeous setting in Gallatin Gateway (named for the debarcation place for train-traveling Yellowstone tourists). A small school with about 20 employees. She’s doing virtually the same thing as in St. Paul.

Dylan (the guy with the bubble above) is studying computer science in the College of Engineering at MSU. Results from his first semester a tad mixed. For spring semester we’re pulling our households back together into a three-bedroom fourplex not far from campus. We must give up our stellar view on the seventh floor of a graduate housing tower. We gain more space and a way to keep our vehicles out of the winter weather. Patrick, you probably know, is the fundraiser for the College of Education, Health & Human Development. This is his first professional venture into “a public” as we call it in the biz. Very different. But this is a great cause. This College is hyper active in the State, doing a whole lot of good. A major constraint to in-state travel is an over-abundance of Mule Deer and other critters that tend to show bad judgment when it comes to motorized traffic. Winter will, of course, present its own interesting challenges. 

Mariah remains on the home front, holding down “the fort” at 1636 with her friend Dan. Not the ideal time to have one’s house on the real estate market. And besides, we anticipate the arrival of light rail within five blocks of the place. Meanwhile this is an ideal setup for Mariah and Dan. 

The new address and other contact info are in the e-mail that transmits this link to you. Let us hear from you. 

Summer sunset from apt in the sky

At "The Motel" in St. Ignatius

Wendy with a few curios in Helena

A short cut in Judith Gap

I have always known that some day the Republican Party as we know it would bring about its own destruction. Implode in a large cloud of dust like the demolition of the giant Montgomery Wards building in Saint Paul. It was only a matter of the right conditions. That awareness dates to 1995 when a moderate Republican friend of mine in Dubuque, Iowa, said to me: “I want my Party back.” What she meant, of course, is that she had been marginalized by extreme, doctrinaire, right wing religious fanatics who had taken full control of the Dubuque County Republican Party apparatus. They became a party of only a few very narrow issues. Of course, fiscal responsibility wasn’t one of them. This phenomenon occurred in Iowa before most other places in the United States. I was starkly aware of it because I was battling the same extremism as a candidate for the local school board. In those days the fanatics imagined they could take control of government by first electing their people to school boards — in Iowa separate elections to which very few people paid attention. Once elected to the school board their people could matriculate upward to higher office — city council, state legislature, Congress and, well, who knows.

Sarah Palin - the future of the Republican Party?

IT WAS A CHILLING notion but one we in Iowa quickly discovered was a largely overblown concern. Yes they could quietly get some of their folks elected by mobilizing church members through “stealth” campaigns. We would wake up one morning and find ourselves represented by people who didn’t believe in public education. People who were home schooling their kids. In Dubuque, where two of seven school board members were of this ilk, they would take the reins of power over a $60 million a year enterprise. In other Iowa cities, Davenport, and I can’t remember where else, the products of this sinister strategy were popping up.

But their plan didn’t work for very long simply because the people they got elected couldn’t be cool. They started ranting and raving on all manner of issues, alienating virtually everybody. Eventually the electorate got sick of them and kicked them out. This gave me some confidence that right wing crazies couldn’t take over our government. Turned out I was right and wrong and maybe now right again. They did manage to capture the highest office in the United States and from there proceeded down a path so destructive that hundreds of thousands of people were maimed or killed, hundreds of thousands more pushed out of jobs, public debt in the stratosphere and, in a final flourish, managing to bring the American economy to its knees. It took all of that and a very smart guy who may be our next FDR to finally get the American people’s attention.

We might ask now, wither the Republican Party? I suggest they go to my disillusioned friend in Dubuque and ask her what it will take to get her back. I think she might say that all of the single-issue crazies have to go. That the Republican Party has to reach out and find those soccer moms they’ve pushed aside for failing the wacko litmus test and convince them they have a future as a Republican.

So I submit that it is not Sarah Palin who has a future with the Republicans because if she does, there probably won’t be a Republican Party pretty soon. John McCain, at his core is a pragmatic moderate, is the future of the Republicans. But I’m not optimistic anyone will see that. To be truthful, I don’t care a whole lot because I believe that after eight years of hell the right people are finally in charge.

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