This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Sweet Home Montana

Posted by ehren

I spent the afternoon working and puttering in a few downtown coffee shops and restaurants. The most interesting looked like the inside of a cluttered shaft mine, and was a combination soda fountain, intrernet cafe, coffee shop, postcard emporium, and...theater with balcony, I think. All the shops offering WiFi in Helena have rustic looking signage in Frontier fonts. I shouldn't have left my camera battery behind, otherwise I could show AND tell.

Helena's not a big city, and we were able to park two blocks away from the main drag on top of a residential hill. While preparing lunch in the afternoon I heard someone outside saying into a phone "And I got home and there's this... blue and yellow THING in my yard...well not in my yard..." I went out and introduced myself and set aside fears that we would be permenant residents. I asked for parking advice, but eventually she (Susan?) said that we could just stay put. She warned against moving over the property line to the house on the corner. "They're...just so radical, you know? They'd definitely...do something." Finally she parted with "Well, I got laid off today so I'm going out drinking. See ya!"

Helena seems to provide some kind of municipal WiFi, though I have yet to see the connection stay alive for more than 10-15 minutes without needing to re-confirm. Since it only takes a few minutes to get updated on work having a longer connection only helps me waste time anyway...

Met up with Miro, saw "War Of The Worlds", we decided to hit the nightlife, I stopped outside "Bert & Ernie's" to call SPECTRE, and was on the phone just shy of a half hour. During that time Miro met, charmed, and was invited to play shuffleboard with four Montanans, local students or recent grads of Carrol College. There were six of us, Lisa, Jody, Raquel, 'Tina, and we two dudes, so we played a short round-robin team game. It was fun to play the game on a working table, unlike in N'awlins when McBean and I invented half a dozen games to play on half a table. Before you get any ideas, we next caravaned across town (bus included) to a bar called Hap's, where we met most of their boyfriends, who comprise the Carrol College 3-time defending football champion D-line. Nice guys, one was a bartender (it's good to know the bartender) we played pool with a guy named Justin for a while who had just graduated and is headed for dental school in Omaha. The scene at Hap's devolved into a rotating door of people who wandered in, out, got introduced, yelled at the bartender, were yelled at by the bartender, etc. A solid time.

In the morning I had a very mild hangover along with an increasingly painful sore throat and headcold. At first I thought it was just a sore throat from the smoky bar, but no such luck. I wandered downtown and spent about 3 hours in an internet haze before heading to the YMCA for a $2 shower (score). By 3 I started a 6 hour block of slow and steady progress with work. I took breaks for dinner and for a band set up on the street outside Bert & Ernies. I left too soon... Miro came back to the bus around 11 to inform me that the second band to go on totally rocked. We went to Hap's to end the night and discussed end-of-the-trip plans, and also I tried to poke holes in his rapidly coalescing schemes for what he'll do afterwards.

Today, still a little sick, still working.