He's in love with rock-n-roll, whooaa.He's in love with gettin' stoned, whooaa.He's in love with Janie Jones, whooaa.

But he don't like his boring job, NOOOOOOOO!
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I am well on my way to acheiving my lifelong dream of becoming a slumlord. One of my very first court cases was evicting someone a few days before Christmas, from a trailer court, no less. (And people actually ask, "You quit your job? Are you crazy? Why?)

And after that, I wanted nothing more than to have a trailer court of my very own, so that I could evict people on all the major holidays. It's the stuff of dreams, really.

Our offer was accepted yesterday to purchase a condo in Bozeman.

It will close next month. Everything works out financially. As with the rental house a couple doors down, the rent will cover the mortgage, and we can sit back and let the Bozeman real estate market do the rest. Belgrade, the town adjacent to Bozeman, had a 23% increase in population last year, and property values are escalating rapidly here.

But we're not in it for the money.

We want to be slumlords.

Why, you ask?

To inspire poetry like this:



Dark and lonely on a summer's night.

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Watchdog barking. Do he bite?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Slip in his window. Break his neck.

Then his house I start to wreck

Got no reason. What the heck?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

C-I-L my land lord!

Two of us, riding nowhere, spending someone's hard earned pay.Two of us, Sunday driving, not arriving.On our way... back home.

Today was a little excursion up to Fairy Lake, which is the place I spent my first night in the Bozeman area when J-Ho, a/k/a Uncle Jesse, and I rolled through here in '02.

You leave town through Bridger Canyon and skirt around the east side of the Bridger Range, which is quite picturesque.



You drive about 20 miles out of town, pass several multi-million dollar homes, continue past Bridger Bowl, a ski area, and turn on to this raggedy-ass Forest Service road. There are only two or three people who read this blog who understand just how shitty this road is; Uncle Jesse and Nessie, who have both probably been on this road. (UJ- it was even worse and more washed out than when we took it.)

It is four-wheeling at its finest. This bouncy trip had a pretty damn good payoff.




I wanted to recon the area, because, later this week, I am going to scramble a couple thousand feet up to the saddle between Sacajawea Peak and Hardscrabble Peak, and then another thousand or so up to Sacajawea Peak to take some photos of the valley for y'all. (How I suffer for thee, sitting comfortably inside climate-controlled steel and concrete structures, bathed in the glow of flourescent lights, keeping tabs on your swingline staplers.) The trailhead to get up Sacajawea Peak is up near Fairy Lake.

This is Fairy Lake.


That is Hardscrabble Peak, looming over the lake.


In this one, you can see the saddle. Hardscrabble is on the right, and Sacajawea is on the left, at the edge of the picture.


We saw some cutthroat trout swimming in the lake, but P-Diddy took a dip and scared them off.


Awfully unsightly, innit?




There were some free-range cows, flirting with disaster on the road home.


Peace out. I am going to go eat something. Perhaps my left arm, as it does not contain sugar, alcohol or white flour, and has limited utility, really. I probably won't even miss it. Perhaps with fava beans and a nice Chianti.