81 months

Jess and I have now been married for 81 months. For those math challenged (like me) that’s a few months short of 7 years. Jess keeps track of the months way better than I do. Regardless, I feel pretty good about 81 months of marital bliss.

It’s the time of year for the annual Payne/Burson family NCAA bracket challenge. It’s way entertaining for me because I probably know less about basketball than any of the guys in the group. I made my bracket picks based on who the guys on Sports Center talked about the most. In the first round, I won. The second round? I picked it 100%. I’m currently ranked 203 in the overall ESPN rankings. Unreal. I’m kicking butt! That’ll probably all change in the next round but I can only imagine what my bro-in-law is thinking about me doing so well.

I’ve got 2 weeks of skiing left. That kind of sucks. I’m trying to make the most of it though. Friday was seriously spring skiing. Lots of slush, super soft snow. It’s a lot of work but it’s so worth it. As long as there is skiing, I’m going to do it.

Next weekend, my other bro-in-law, Jeremy is graduating from the police academy. That makes me related to 3 different cops now. Who knew I’d end up being surrounded by the man! Maybe if I ever managed to get into politics our family can rule the world.

I spent Saturday cleaning the house and trying to get caught up on laundry. I came up 1 load short on the laundry. Not a bad effort though if I do say so myself. I also managed to get the dusting done and got the floors clean. It was the first deep cleaning work I’d done since ski season started. Now that it’s coming to an end I’m going to have more time to clean. Perhaps that’s one reason I like ski season so much.

That’s about it for now. I know I’ve been super sporadic with updating. I’m going to make a concerted effort to be a little more regular.

Pretty boring life

Every night I sit on the couch, watching TV shows on the DVR and thinking about what I could put on my blog. I have a lot of thoughts during the day about things I’d like to rant about but when it comes time to go sit at the computer and type them out… I lost steam. I think the demise of the laptop has contributed to that significantly. Blogging now involves going and sitting in the office. Hard to do when you’re tired after a long day at work.

I’ll get the laptop back up and running in a month or so after ski season. For now it’s fine just sitting in the office waiting for a new battery and a new power cord. I could use an ALL new laptop but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. I could also use a new desktop and/or a new monitor too but that’s not going to happen either. The computer I have now is like 5 years old. That’s pretty old for a computer. At any rate, it works and I guess that’s good enough. Getting the laptop back will be a nice re-addition.

Things are going well and I continue to drop weight. I’ve lost between 8 and 9 pounds so far. I’ve still got about 20 to go before I’m where I want to be. If I can drop another 10 I can wear a few more clothes that I haven’t worn in a while. That’ll be fun too.

Anyway, there’s just not much going on lately. I get up, go to the gym, go to work and then come home. Maybe one of these days I’ll get my rant on about the ugly partisanship going on in our country lately. (And yes, I’m very aware that both sides are guilty)

My kind of weekend

That right there is a picture of part of Whitefish Ski Resort, conveniently located in Whitefish, MT. It’s where I want to live. Jess does too but not as soon as I do. We took last weekend and went away to get some good quality time together. It was awesome.

Friday we left a little after Jess got off of work. It’s a good 3.5 hour drive to get up to Whitefish so we had plenty of time to chat and get caught up on life. When we got to Whitefish we got checked into our hotel and headed into town for dinner. We had a nice dinner and then headed back to the hotel. After giving our food some time to digest, we hit up the pool and the crazy indoor waterslide. It kind of hurt. We had fun though and then went to bed…

Saturday we got up and headed for the mountain. We got our tickets and headed up the lift. What an unbelievable view. It was gorgeous in pretty much every direction you look. The resort overlooks Glacier National Park. By far my favorite national park I’ve ever been in.

The resort gets some cool snow and they end up with these cool things called “Snow Ghosts.” The trees get totally encased in show and they look like little frozen people. They’re pretty cool. That’s what the picture above is. Little snow ghosts. These are only five or six feet tall. They had some that were 20-30 feet tall. Way cool.

That night we moved to a hotel on Flathead Lake. Very nice place. We really enjoyed it. We also ate at their restaurant. We had, THE BEST food we’ve had since moving to Montana. I had a nice New York Strip steak with a peppercorn rub. So good. I also had fried bread. Apparently, when you fry bread instead of baking it, it takes on a magical quality and tastes like heaven in your mouth. I could get very fat if I had that available on a regular basis.

Sunday we slept in, had brunch and went to see “He’s just not that into you.” It was a lot better than I expected it to be. It was nice to go to a movie with Jess. We haven’t done that in a while. It was also nice to “pretend” that we lived in the Flathead Valley, which is our goal. I love it there. After the movie, we came home and enjoyed the last few hours of our weekend.

Now we’re back to the usual routine which is fine… but boy do I miss the Flathead Valley.