Keys. Goats. Surgery.
I made it. I’m 40.
Let me start this update by telling the most stupid story possible.
It was a week before the day, and Hailie asked me, “What kind of cake do you want to make for your birthday?” I started looking through the various cookbooks that we had, and nothing really stood out as exciting to me. And that’s when I decided to come up with the idea of doing some overcomplicated horseshit (as I tend to do), so I used AI to build an entire cake from the ground up.
A 4 layer brown butter cake featuring a honey vanilla marscapone Chantilly creme, as well as a Swiss meringue buttercream. The interior featured 2 filling layers of honey roasted peach compote, a central filling layer with a white chocolate disk of toasted almonds, crepes, and flaky salt, all topped off with an arrangement of peach roses, raspberries, mint, and 24k gold flake.
This cake took 4 days to prepare for, and around 7 hours to assemble. The biggest joke is that I don’t even like cake all that much.
So why did I spend so much time and money on a cake? It was ultimately a manifestation of the metaphor I wanted to enter into my forties with. A metaphorty cake, if you will.
I didn’t know how to make brown butter. I have never used gold flake before. I certainly have never been in a situation that required me to make a Swiss meringue. The one thing that I do have experience with, is a willingness to take on challenges and learn.
To me, turning 40 isn’t just about entering a new decade of life, it’s about bringing all of your experiences with you. If I meet a new person, they see me as I am on the surface, the decorated cake. They don’t see the failures, success, heartache, and lessons learned that were required to created the total package in front of them. And even though I might look composed on the surface, oftentimes I have a hard time liking myself.
Having said that, I fucking killed it with this cake.
What’s next on the agenda? Oh yeah, we went to Yellowstone to celebrate the emergence past the 4th decade. And ya know what else? I used Claude to build the entire itinerary. I was a travel agent in a prior life, so I wanted to see how well it could work with some interesting prompts.
“I want you to build an itinerary for my trip to Yellowstone. I want to hit the northern loop, I want to see Lamar Valley, and a friend told me I need to check out Bear Tooth Pass. I don’t care when and in what order I see things, but I want to maximize the amount of things I can see in two days, knowing this is a photo centric trip. You need to take into consideration that my wife has slight mobility issues, so we will not be able to do lengthy hikes, and we will be traveling with a dog. Past that, I want you to look at the current migratory patterns of animals in the park, compare it to sunrise and sunset, and build a roadmap that will allow me to be in the best lighting conditions for each area that I am at for the time I am there.”
THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE USING AI. Stop using it to replace your search engine, and get weird with it. Have full blown conversations, let it be your baking coach, let it be your travel agent, let it be your sales guide. Use it in a way that truly benefits you the way it’s intended to, and then spend your life enjoying the process of living.
So, day 1. We leave Boise first thing in the morning to visit family in Eastern Idaho. After lunch with my mom and grandparents we find ourselves passing through Heise, Idaho at the exact time that a large fire was breaking out. For those of us in the northwest, fire season is an unfortunate regularity, and living in the Treasure Valley this year has been extra difficult considering we’ve had days where the air quality index has had levels seeing over 300. However, I am fascinated with fire, and Hailie grew up in a house where chasing wildfires was a pretty regular occurrence, so we went and chased my first fire.
We get evacuation notices on our phone, and even though the fisherman didn’t think the fire was anything to worry about, we left the area and continued onto Wyoming to meet up with my in-laws. While fires can be as serious as a special fishing hole, the one positive that I always look forward to in fire season are the sunsets, and a smoky Wyoming sunset is something extra special.
Day One -
We leave on Monday morning from the small city, just south of Jackson, and we make our way into Yellowstone. The first stop is actually in Teton National Park, and it’s a pull off I had never heard of, called Oxbow Bend. This is one of the stops that my itinerary told me was going to be 5 to ten minutes, but would be worth it if the lighting was good.
Looks like we’re going to be starting off on the right foot. We find ourselves in the park, entering from the southern entrance with the eastern route being our main focus today. We turn at Yellowstone Lake around the West Thumb, and we head up towards Fisherman’s Bridge.
The last time we went to Yellowstone was in 2020, and due to Covid, the crowds were UNREAL. This trip was much more manageable for parking and crowd control. We had the typical pull offs full of cars looking at bison at every opportunity, but that’s kind of the reason we’re all in the park, so it was nice to see the crowds being the expectation instead of being overwhelming. On Day 1, we wound up seeing elk, bison, coyotes, pronghorn, and the basic wildlife you would expect to see in the park, but nothing had been an “OHMYGOSHLOOKATIT!” moment. Having said that, the itinerary was batting 1000% with my lighting and routing to ensure I was capturing some cool moments.
One of the most interesting parts of the drive on the first day was the fact that my itinerary told me, “Stay in Lamar Valley until 5:30, but you need to leave at 5:30 sharp. The lighting is going to start getting fantastic, and you aren’t going to want to, but you need to do it anyways.” The reason was because our hotel was in Red Lodge, MT, and in order to get there we needed to cross bear tooth pass. If you’ve never heard of it, this pass is the home to the paved road that is the highest in the United States, at 10,900 ft in elevation. There is TONS of sketchy switchbacks on this winding mountain road, and very few barricades preventing you from swerving off into a picturesque demise. The itinerary told me that the mountain pass is dangerous at night because of wildlife coming onto the road, so we needed to be on the other side before the sun went fully down. But as an added bonus, if we left the park on time, we should be at peak elevation at golden hour, and we may run into some of the wildlife known to be in the area.
I can’t even write about this next part without getting straight to the point. I saw mountain goats at golden hour on the top of a beautiful mountain range. And not even mountain goats off in the distance, I’m talking about goats ten feet away from me. I SAW BABY GOATS!
We had stumbled upon a herd that had come to a space that allowed them to gaze and lick the salt off of the rocks. Unlike the day leading up to it, we were in an incredibly isolated location, so there was not the gigantic crowds that were all marveling in the spectacle of the 100th bison that we had seen that day. This was a special moment that was shared with two other photographers and a few locals that had come up for the evening.
We finished the drive through the mountain pass, checked into our hotel, and ended day one with a solid note at a local bar for mocktails and pizza.
Day Two -
After getting the hotel’s free breakfast in the lobby, and filling our cooler with at least 4 yogurts for the road, we got coffee on the way out of Red Lodge and realized we had completely missed an opportunity to spend time in a cool little town exploring by having a day of driving through the northern portion of Yellowstone on our way to the AirBNB. This was going to be the part of the park that I knew nothing about. A few more scenic pull offs, a bald eagle followed by the single most curious raven I’ve ever encountered, and we ended the park at Mammoth Hot Springs before exiting out the park through the Roosevelt Archway.
Two days in Yellowstone, tons of wildlife, lots of great moments captured, and more time behind my camera. It was a fantastic way to spend my 40th birthday.
Once we left the park, we drove to Livingston, where we had booked a night in a geodesic dome. The dome was located just off the main highway, but was set up in a way where you would be woken up by the sunrise coming through the open side of the dome. We found a place called Old Saloon, and realized that it was a bar that had been open since 1902, and the aesthetic had changed very little based on all the turn of the century newspaper clippings that were framed above the bar. We got a great meal, took it back to the dome, and enjoyed one of the most beautiful sunsets of the trip.
Day Three -
We drive into Bozeman, and Hailie was ecstatic to go to a specialty stationary store called Paper & Grace, but while we waited, we found a local coffee space called Roly poly Coffee. They were the one coffee shop that had reviews saying that Tesla was going to be welcome, so instead of getting things to go, we actually sat down and enjoyed some breakfast. Great coffee, great atmosphere, and now we are ready for the day driving back to Boise from Bozeman.
Vacation is over. Back to real life.
Which is perfect timing, because once we got back into town, I signed the renewal of my barbershop’s lease for another three years, and Hailie and I signed the closing paperwork for buying our first house.
While those are the fun parts of coming back to the real world, I also had a consultation with an ENT surgeon. I had been referred by my primary care physician due to my deviated septum being so pronounced, and we’re trying to make it so I can breathe properly. During the consultation, I was informed that my septum is so malformed that I can’t get a normal septoplasty, and I have to get a more invasive procedure called an open septoplasty that combines the baseline procedure with a rhinoplasty to rebuild my nasal passages. I find out at the end of this month when I go in for the surgery, but I’m anticipating it’s going to be a hell of a recovery. My only real hope is that it doesn’t interfere with my ability to work at the Boise Tattoo Convention at the end of October. I guess we can file this under “Future Chris Problems.”
My 40’s have only been around for a month, but a lot has been accomplished, and a lot of it is setting this decade of my life up for a direction where I may finally be able to reap the fruits of the past decade of efforts. I’ll breathe my sigh of relief after my recovery, and until then, I’ll keep you updated.
-Chris
