August.

September 11, 2022

The summer months have officially come and gone, as has our time here in Montana and Wyoming. This might be the quickest a month has gone by on this trip and although I’m excited for roads strewn with fallen leaves ahead, I feel sad to leave this beautiful corner of the world. I have loved almost every second here. You might find this blog a bit image heavy compared to the usual post, I blame these beautiful places.
Apologies or you’re welcome…

Broad, glassy blue rivers flowing over colorful rocks and speckled with people fly fishing and floating.
Dramatic, rocky ridge lines towering over the valleys below.
At the start of the month I didn’t think anything could be more beautiful than the tall golden grasses blowing in the wind on Montana hillsides, then I smelled the sage after the rain in Wyoming. I think sitting here typing these words out, with the Tetons in view just beyond my screen, I feel the most content I’ve felt in a long time. I think a lot of my most content moments on this trip have been in these two states.

We got to explore three beautiful parks (Glacier, Yellowstone, and Teton National Park) and enjoy the company of two family visits. Geoff got to experience horseback riding for the first time and we even stumbled upon a preserved ghost town on some backroads in Montana. We ate good food, enjoyed landscapes both familiar and unfamiliar to us and saw more wildlife than we thought possible - elk, moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, deer, pronghorn, beavers, otters, martins, marmots, pikas, eagles, hawks, and even two grizzlies playing with a toppled tree by a pond in Yellowstone. On the top of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort we got to watch paragliders leap from the mountain into the wind, the colorful chutes weaving in and out from one another as they made their way down to the valley.

With all of our family visits, we got a break from dirtbag showers in forests off the side of the road. I even got to take a bubble bath in what has to be the world’s coziest cottage. I got lost in stories of imaginary places as late morning sun filtered in through the window above the tub, sipping the last of my coffee as aspen leaves flitted in the wind outside. I still wonder if there’s anywhere more beautiful than sunset over the Crazy Mountains on that back porch in the middle of nowhere Montana. This month we finally broke our fire tower hike curse summiting Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone with my dad on his birthday after 3 failed attempts on this trip. The most dramatic of these was making it all the way to the base of the tower in Glacier only to realize that the stairs were being guarded by a mountain goat the size of a horse.

M O N T A N A .

Y E L L O W S T O N E .

W Y O M I N G .

Emboldened by our time on steep Washington trails in July, we also tackled some of our most challenging hikes yet starting with the Highline trail in Glacier National Park. 14 miles along rock ledges, through valleys carpeted in wildflowers and up to Grinnell Glacier boxed in by steep mountain walls.

18.5 miles meandering as far we could in the Wind River Range to get a glimpse of backcountry landscapes we’ve dreamed of for years. The mountains reminded us a a more jagged Yosemite and we got caught in our first trail downpour of the trip.
Thanks to the nook of pines that sheltered us, especially during the hail bit.

The pièce de résistance of the month was our summit of the Middle Teton in Teton National Park. A 4am start filled with 15.5 miles and 5,900’ of elevation gain of boulder hopping and scree scrambling through the most unbelievable alpine landscapes we had ever seen.

We started the month on the banks of the Flathead river in Montana at one of the best campsites we had found yet on this trip, sipping hazy IPAs under the hot summer sun with our feet in the water and rafters floating by. I now find myself in Wyoming writing this entry at an equally amazing spot perched up on a mountain, tucked into my hammock with a near perfect view of the Tetons. Mountain bikers sail down the dusty trail next to our site towards the valley below and I wave to the occasional car driving by like I would a neighbor on my front porch back in Houston. I close my eyes and I get a collage of beautiful memories from the past few weeks. I feel emotional, but in the best of ways…like I’ve finally broken through some mental barrier that’s been fighting me for the last few years. I felt myself tearing up while painting on this dirt road earlier today. It might be the dust in my eyes, as it’s exceptionally windy today, but I feel teary eyed now just typing about this past month. I’m so damn grateful for so many things…the people in my life, this adventure I’m having, this beautiful, beautiful planet we are on. Leaving my life in Houston behind was the scariest thing I’ve ever done but it’s moments like this that I’m reminded of what I had to gain from pushing past all my doubts and insecurities. I was meant to be here on this windy day in Jackson, watching a squirrel eat a mushroom in the woods alongside me.

I’m exactly where I want to be and so excited about where I’m going.

July.

August 6, 2022

We crossed over into Montana yesterday and I’m typing this along the North Fork of the Flathead river’s banks. It’s suffocatingly hot by late afternoon, but the dry air and cold river water helps take the summer edge off. Rafters drift by - lounging, fly fishing, paddling - and the dirt road we came in on hums with truck traffic. It’s the last day of July and the end of our Pacific Northwest travels.

I’ve struggled on how to summarize my travels on this blog.

How to I capture so many experiences onto an online blog?
How much detail is too much? Too little?
For whom am I writing this all out and to what end?

A month of traveling has past and here I am at the end of those weeks figuring out how to put it all in words. I type some out, find it cheesy, delete, repeat. Then I question why I’m even writing it out in the first place. This usually marks the start of an unnecessary internal dialogue with myself as to why I’m overthinking something so trivial as words on a screen. Everything that feels like a creative outlet to me has to feel perfect before being shared with “the world”. I use that term loosely here since I’m not convinced that these words have much of an audience to speak of.

Balance. Balance has always been hard for me, as I think it is for many of us. In retrospect, balance was an apt mantra for July considering how opposite the two states we visited felt.

On one hand you had the welcoming forests and whimsical waterscapes of Oregon.

On the other hand there was the wild, more severe Washington.

Those weeks in Oregon make me think of serene lakes of the deepest blue, shades I had never before seen in nature. I got to go cherry picking for the first time in my life (might have gone overboard with 3 pounds, but no regrets). We drank delicious wine on sunny patios and ate maple donuts the size of our heads. I saw waterfall after beautiful waterfall tucked into endless forests. I remember at first feeling unsettled by their uniformity, uninterrupted stretches of spaced out pine. It was beautiful, but hauntingly so. At the right time of day the dust in the air from the gravel roads would do such wonderful things with the light coming in through the branches. One one of these gravel roads on our way up to a biking trail we ran into mushroom foragers. There was something about being out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by towering trees and every once in a while catching a glimpse of a person hunched over and plopping big mushrooms into buckets that made me feel like I was in some storybook. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how fun that subsequent downhill trail was given how whimsically wonderful the name was - Tiddlywinks.

We discovered sno-parks, designated camping and staging areas for winter adventuring like snow mobiling or backcountry skiing. They were connected to one another by these tucked away gravel roads and had wood stoves in rustic lodges for shelter from the snowy winds outside. It was so easy to imagine the landscape blanketed in snow, exploring the quiet, cold woods on a snow mobile and enjoying the gathered warmth in these sno-parks. There were roadside canopies of wild sweet pea so extensive you could smell the perfume in the air. Snow capped giants like Mt. Hood felt ever-present, almost like they were lovingly watching over you as you explored their peaceful valleys below.

Oregon was comforting. It felt like a warm hug on a cold night.

Washington felt more like the energy you have waking up on the morning of a long awaited adventure. It felt full of undiscovered opportunity and exceptionally wild.

Our first few days we ended up lost in seemingly endless miles of pothole filled gravel roads somewhere in the space between Mount St. Helens and Mt. Adams. We had to squeeze our van through tight tunnels of evergreen and battled clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitos (thank goodness for our door screens). When we finally emerged from the gravel wilderness, I saw my first big mountain, Rainer. From the top of the hike we did you could see all the volcanic giants of Oregon we had just left behind and we heard the distant cracking of ice along the mountainside, the sound deep and slow. The rivers were raging and the most beautiful blue-green from the glacial flour carried in their waters. Roads could only get you so far as it seemed most parks and forests we visited skirted around rather than through. Every hike felt like a trailer to a movie being shown in the backcountry. We pushed our legs as far and as hard as we may have ever pushed them trying to get to whatever peaks we could within the endless cascades. There was one day I could barely hobble up and out of the van door.

We also had some quieter days though along the rocky coastline exploring cobbled beaches and colorful tide pools. Eating sourdough toast at dawn watching seals play in the bay out of the van. I had never seen a starfish before Oregon, at the tide pools along Rialto beach in Olympic National Park in Washington I saw them in droves and in different colors, bright orange and deep maroon. There were barnacles of all shapes and sizes, mussels, little colorful crabs hiding among the shells, and scrounging hermit crabs among the green tentacles of the various anemones. Shades of green, pink, and red I have never seen before in oceans. The pools almost seemed as if someone had spilled a bunch of paint on the rocks beneath the water. In short, they were so beautiful.

// B A L A N C E //

Steep, treacherous terrain // rolling forests, quiet coastline.
Doing it all // contented rest

I thought having agency over almost every waking hour of this trip would finally get me out of the perpetual cycle of “I’m doing too much” or “I’m doing too little”. Turns out balance is hard to get right even without a job getting in the way. I can do whatever I want on this trip, but I don’t always seem to know what I want. What these months have offered though is glorious space for me to be able to figure that out. Freedom. Untethered exploration of these beautifully wild places and myself. How does one find balance on a trip like this when time seeming limitless is itself a limit. Maybe Montana can shed some light…

May/June.

July 1, 2022

Hey everyone

What a whirlwind.

I’ve officially been living on the road for 2 months now and I hardly know where to begin. Leaving what I’ve known for the last 6 years, May started with a hectic cross-country move followed by a slow and steady progression out from our new home in North Carolina. No art was created in these first few weeks as I was still in the midst of some heavy burnout. Instead I filled my time with long dinners with loved ones not seen for a while, sunsets on back decks watching the wildlife, reading good books, bike rides under tree tunnels speckled with purple phlox and walks over blooming prairie. Getting our footing on the road slowly yet surely through familiar territory and quiet moments.

The coming of June was the start of the westward journey.

We set off from Wisconsin and wound our way through the plains and Black Hills of South Dakota before turning south through Wyoming to meet up with good friends in Colorado. On our way to Rocky Mountain National Park, we camped off of a beautiful forest road in southern Wyoming for a night. The next morning while making breakfast we were visited by a hummingbird who kept flashing his beautifully iridescent ruby red throat at us as he mistook my multicolored hackie sack I had stuffed in a corner for a flower. Not only was it the closest I had ever been to a hummingbird, but it was the first time I had heard one making such a distinct sound. A loud metallic trill, that I had originally thought had to be an enormous grasshopper, filled the van as he flitted to and fro around the backdoor fruitlessly pecking at colored stitching. It wasn’t until I stumbled on a flyer later in the Rockies that I learned that that he had been a Broad-tailed hummingbird migrating back home to the mountains after the winter. I couldn’t think of a more beautifully poetic way to start my own journey back to the mountains after a long season of dormancy in my own life.

When I think back on those weeks in Colorado with our friends I remember the long hikes to cold alpine lakes and the slow trudge of pushing our bikes up mountain sides and the dust clouds of loose dirt through aspen groves on the way down. I remember the sore legs and blistered toes, marmots sunbathing on their kingdoms of boulders, the herds of elk scattered about the valleys, and the family of moose at the entrance to our Aspen campground. I remember the sulfur on the air in pursuit of hot springs, all of the earth tones of ore-rich peaks still littered with old tailing piles and crumbling mining equipment and the rocky mountainsides raging as the remnants of winter melt away. I can still hear my friend playing sea shanties on guitar under a bright moon and still hear the metallic whirring of the hummingbird that first greeted us on that dirt road in Medicine Bow. It was in these mountains, along those dirt roads, that I begun putting paint to canvas again.

After a bittersweet parting with our friends at the end of those weeks, we left their steady presence as they started their journey back east and we headed out into the vast brown of Nevada towards the west coast. We punctuated the drive by hiking among thousands of years old Bristlecone Pine trees and steep glaciated mountains and ended each night with seemingly endless layers of mountains fading into colored skies at sunset.

The last few days of June we spent visiting with friends from Texas who had also left the flatland behind and relocated to just outside of Mammoth Lakes, California nestled between mountains with a rich volcanic history. I found myself unable to stop staring at the peaks outside their kitchen window and we spent many a nights catching up over beers, cooking dinners for one another, playing bocci ball along the dirt road through the aspens behind their house and enjoying being in each others company again. One night we ventured down to the most picturesque hot springs I had ever been to. We lay in those deep, tiered pools smack in the middle of the valley until the sun sank behind the peaks that encircled us and stars filled the sky. It was a wonderful night filled with small pebbles of basalt between my toes, good conversation, and milky way gases above us. It’s a surreal feeling to remember all the humid nights spent biking together along bayous back in Houston daydreaming about living in the mountains only to find that we’re now living those dreams.

When I left Texas back in May I felt emptied. My jaw was perpetually clenched, I was anxious about trivial things, and I honestly barely knew who I was anymore. Days had started to run into one another so I was excited by the the reality of something I had been dreaming about for so long finally falling into place, but also confused by the person I had become by the time I left. As I type these words half a days journey towards Oregon, arms sore from yoga, heart full from so much time in mountains with friends, and near bursting from the anticipation of a whole month exploring the Pacific Northwest, I can feel the shift from who I was in my air conditioned office in Houston to this woman I don’t yet know sitting in the passenger seat of a camper van. I’m excited to get to know her.

Wake Without a Watch.

March 17, 2019

Cold and smooth my fingers rub together for heat
in the dewy winds of early morning.
The light is soft
as it falls upon the rich green
of outside.
Obscured through thin nylon.
A dull ache on a bony shoulder
that had pressed into
empty inches
through a night of undecided rest
and some crusted bits
of the woods in my eyes.
Gentle trills
broken
by the occasional
resonance of a caw
all dissolving into the rippling leaves
of trees weighed down by the
abundance of summer.
The barely warmed flesh of my fingers
reaching to unzip and
waft in the chilled stickiness of dawn.
Unaware of the meaning of time
besides the need to move
up
and
out
towards the day.

New Year, New _____

January 2, 2019

Resolutions.

With the coming of a new year comes new resolves.

Results.

Solutions.

That’s a lot of expectations,
a lot of weighted hopes and promises.

I feel the weight of the past year,
clinging to my skin like a plastic wrap

Sticking in all the wrong places.

I feel the gaze of it
[[ the past year ]]
looking down on me from a darkened corner.

I can also,
however,
feel the lightness of the new year.

Like an encouraging friend willing all the best for me, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. I want to believe 2019 when she tells me that it will be so grandly full of adventure, newfound success, and self transformation. I feel like she’s right. Why not me? Why not this year? Last year was one of the first, that I can remember, that I really followed through on goals, albeit small goals, that I had set at the start. I’m meeting 2019 as a slightly better version of myself than when I met 2018. Let’s not underestimate slight. For all of you ambitious folk, and I say that as one ambitious individual to another, let’s greet the new year with more of this incremental aspiration.

I feel the novelty of it
[[ the new year ]]

Coursing through my thoughts.

I feel the artistry of the new year
coloring my intentions with the warmth of a sun dappled path.

[[ Photograph of the wistful young women, as seen above, was taken at the beautiful Schloss Hellbrunn nestled in the woods just south of Salzburg, Austria. ]]

Playlist // DEFINEchristmas.

December 23, 2018

I’m not quite sure how it’s already the eve of Christmas Eve, but I hope you all are soaking in all these gloriously warm and fuzzy holiday feels. I wanted to share a piece of my Christmas with you guys, so here’s a list of the holiday songs near and dear to my heart that I’ve had on repeat this year. Insert a Balsam scented candle, furry slippers, a hot mug of tea and you may as well be painting next to me right about now…

Happy Holidays, from my easel to yours!

-Chase

We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

"Elegance."

November 2, 2018

                 Filtered illuminance
                              flowing
                              sinuously
                          uninterrupted
                           embracing an
                           accumulated
                     muffled energy
reserved
ever so
cool
to the
feel
in a
way that
   delicately
    rejuvenates
                 from within, outward.

"Whatever."

September 25, 2018

What would it feel like

to just

s t o p

letting
the inevitably out-of-control, incessant chattering chit of inner monologue chatter, outsider perspective, and weight of what could or might not be, dictate the emotions, reactions, inactions of

your

life.

Letting

everything unnecessary

fade

into the background.

Letting

yourself

take the foreground.

Painting with Letters - A Synesthesia Collaboration

September 13, 2018

The idea that my view of the world, it's shapes, sounds, geometries, and colors, might not be shared by others has always fascinated me.

To me, the big Magnolia tree in my yard has a rough, splotched brown trunk framed by long, curved branches and their glossy green leaves.
To me, the sound of violins is soothing and evokes soft, gentle emotions of longing and beauty.
To me, wood and brick evoke feelings of warmth and contentment.
To me, letters and numbers are whatever color someone writes or types them out to be.

To my friend, Mel, these same letters and numbers have their own unique color associations. M-E-L isn't just Mel, it's magenta-”really really light sea foam”-red/orange. While letters have a wide assortment of colors, numbers are more saturated, vibrantly different. Well, all except the off-white 1 and 8. [[Why?!, Just why?!]] These involuntary associations are a result of a rare condition known as synesthesia in which an individual’s unrelated senses are activated with another and can take many different forms depending on which senses are mixed and to what extent

Out of curiosity one day over lunch we both mused what would come out of a color-by-letters/numbers experiment? Would there be enough coherency between the colors to make art? What would that art look like? Would any interesting associations spill out onto the canvas? Taking a landscape near and dear to her heart, Greenland, we spent a few afternoons exploring these questions. I’d sketch something out and assign the various shapes with letters or numbers and she’d mix the colors that belonged to each. We did three variations of this…

1.] This was the most thought-out piece. The main components of the landscape used letters that identified what they were. The rocks in the foreground were colored with B [[boulder]], P [[pebbles]], and R [[the cracks between the rocks]], the water, W and the ice I, C, and E. Once we had finished this portion of the painting, we were astonished at how well all of those letters recreated the scene. The ice looked like ICE (?!)…the rocks, though a bit saturated, could pass for rocks (?!)…and the water looked like a calm, glassy body of water(?!). Since I didn’t want to repeat the C that had already been used in the ice, I labeled the sky with O and N for open sky and not open sky. The results were a bit less realistic than the rest of the piece, but an interesting contrast to the more explicit labeling, nonetheless.

2.] In contrast to the first one that had used only letters, this next one used only numbers. The technicolor sky was a mix of 1, 2, and 3 while the mountain was shaded with 8 and 9.

3.] This final one was randomly composed out of an assortment of letters. The X and Y ice is floating on a sea of G beneath a J and H sky.

Once these colors were mixed and blended into the landscapes they represented, we realized we hadn’t been as thorough in our documentation as we had set out to be. We figured it’d be easy to guess after the fact what color had been what letter. However, Mel found it hard to recall exactly what letter some things had been labeled as. She intuitively wanted to associate the numbers/letters with colors, not colors with their respective numbers/letters. Through this process, we also realized how similar some of the colors were to one another. The blue sky between the peach clouds in the third piece became hard to distinguish between the more starkly contrasting blue of the water below. Were the blues different? Did they appear different to Mel because of the colors that surrounded them? Were they different, but only subtly? If they were different, were they A, G, or J? Why were those letters all so similar in Mel’s mind?

I’m curious if any of you readers out there (whoever you are) have some form of synesthesia yourselves. I’m fascinated by the idea of doing a similar artistic collaboration with another person’s associations to see how differently they manifest between individuals.

If you or anyone you know would like to take this collaboration further reach out to me at definechase.art@gmail.com

Let’s explore this deeper!

Clouded.

August 13, 2018

Wandering thoughts lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces

places

place

A deep and steady beat for something else

Glazed vision staring out into the metallic ocean of routine

Where are they

Where is the sky above the clouds

The blue of yearning

Presently smeared with whips of forgotten grays

Fogged onto a pane too thick to open

Shut but not sealed

Weighed down by suppressed expectations

of what is to come

if it comes

fear

of it never arriving.

Porcupine Mountains.

June 27, 2018

[[ Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park // Upper Peninsula of Michigan ]]

With a belly full of pancakes and a mind buzzing from caffeine, I stared out the window as we passed lake after lake. The blurred green of dense forests contrasted the stark blue of the speckled lakes and the smell of birch wafted in from windows we had cracked to let out the Wisconsin summer heat.

By the time we [[myself, sister Cameron, and husband Geoff]] arrived at the ranger station to check into the park, the sky was full of dandelion fuzz clustering in the wind and in scattered clumps along the grass. Everything felt fresh, vast, delicate.

We set up camp and caught up between the swings of our hammocks, Coronas in hand in honor of the array of fresh vegetables that were to be chopped and piled in tortillas for dinner in the not too distant future. By the time the sun was setting our picnic table was cluttered with stoves and pots, Geoff was off somewhere being contemplative, and a fire had been started. The first night I fell asleep to the sounds of crashing waves and a light breeze the rustled the tarp infrequent enough to take pleasure in.

The morning brought what seemed like a never ending sunrise. The gradual waker of the group, I cozied into the sleeping bags while watching my sister and husband enjoy the color on the rocks. Every time I'd fall back asleep and say my goodbyes to the sunrise, and every time I'd wake back up and be gratefully surprised by the saturated sky awaiting my gaze.

The sun eventually rose and camp got taken down, our food supplies were divvied up amongst our packs, and we had begun the first of our two day loop along the Big Carp River Trail [[11 miles]] within the park.

The route was an endless tunnel of trees meandering along a babbling river, occasionally stepping down into shallow pools. The leaves were the color of spring, light green not yet deepened by summer. Our boots stomped for 11 or so miles on speckled sunlight and through the cold, clear water of the river. The trail was cobbled with glacially smoothed stones packed into the soft dirt and framed by ferns spilling out from both sides.

By the time we arrived at our campsite we had all convinced ourselves that we were cast aways washed up on a deserted island somewhere far, far away. Driftwood had been piled up as a wall blocking the wind from the fire pit and our strung hammocks looked, for some reason, ragged along so vast a shoreline. It was the most remote I had felt in a while and that was exhilarating. Juxtaposed to my current reality in and out of meetings, collaboration rooms, happy hours, backed up traffic lanes, and continual social interaction, this isolation felt like a sigh of relief...like I had been holding my breath without realizing it, and it finally dawned on me to exhale.

While the more mentally unstable members of our company [[not me]] decided to swim in the frigid waters of Lake Superior, I slept off my post-hike weariness. To mitigate the Great Lakes chill we started a fire before the sun begun it's descent. My sister's backpacking specialty, Ramen Mac N' Cheese, was on the menu and while we sautéed some mushrooms and shallots to jazz up the 30¢ noodles, we chilled a few cans of beer in the same waters that had frosted Cameron and Geoff's bones an hour prior. This night's sunset was gentler. As the clouds gathered we watched lightning rip fissures of light in the gaps between the gray. We made sure to have our rain tarps pulled down tightly before we closed our eyes to sleep.

Luckily, the morning showers were both light and brief and we were able to enjoy mugs of coffee with warm bowls of oatmeal before beginning the 10 mile trek back. The first part of the trail hugged the shoreline as we ambled along rounded cobbles and fallen trees. The trail eventually wound itself back into the forest and rocks beneath our feet gave way to muddied roots and sporadic planks of wood. The next few hours evolved into a game of who-could-keep-their-socks-dry and we learned quickly that each of us had a different approach. While Geoff nimbly executed his thought out routes, Cameron sloshed through the muck with sheer brute force, and I hybridized the two approaches. Turns out my lack of commitment led to damp toes before the end. By the time the mud gave way to dry ground, the intermittent rain dissipated as well and before we knew it the forest opened up to the park road and we had finished the trail. We hoofed it the rest of the way back on the side of the road since the trail stopped short of our car. Turns out, this stretch was the steepest terrain of the trip. As we trudged up the hill we mused amongst ourselves how many of the cars that passed by thought we were lost or dumb hikers that didn't realize there were plenty of good trails to carry our packs on rather than scenic byways.

- > - > - > - > - > - > > - > - > > - > - > - > - > - > > - > - > > - > - >

Resources for your own UP adventure: Porcupine Mountains State Park Map // http://www.michigandnr.com/publications/pdfs/recreationcamping/porkies_unit.pdf

Ramen Mac N' Cheese Recipe -Top Ramen [[ # of packages of this will depend on how many people you're cooking for ]] - A little Olive Oil or Butter [[ whatever you prefer packing ]] - A package of Cream Cheese - Cheese of your choosing [[ I recommend something sharp like good Cheddar or Harvati, which was the cheese of choice this trip ]] - Fixings of your choosing [[ For this trip it was a thinly sliced shallot and various sliced mushrooms ]] In a pot over your stove, heat the butter or oil. Add shalllots or onion and cook until translucent and fragrant. Add any other chopped/sliced veggies you packed and cook to your desired tenderness. Meanwhile, boil some water and add the Ramen noodles (without the seasoning packet). Cook for a few minutes until done.* Combine the noodles and veggies into the same pot and stir in the cheese chunks and a dollop of the cream cheese. Add as little or as much of these ingredients as you prefer. I, personally, am under the impression that you can never have too much cheese. People have been known to disagree with me on this. Enjoy!

**If you only have one stove available, cook Ramen first and set aside while you cook the veggies, when the veggies are almost done, add in the noodles to reheat them.