Happy Friday, everyone! A blissful weekend beckons, but a bit of a heat wave is approaching.

With tourism season, visitor season, and just general too-much-stuff-to-do-and-too-little-time-to-do-it season ramping up, the coming warmup seems to be another small indicator that nature has a cruel sense of humor.

This weekend’s sunny and warm conditions (highs of 75 and 81 in Kalispell) are the prelude to a ridge of high pressure forecasters expect to build over the region Sunday and into the early part of next week.

The National Weather Service expects the ridge to allow for temperatures to warm 10 to 20 degrees above seasonal averages, with some of the warmest temperatures expected on Tuesday, when highs in the Flathead Valley are expected to hover just below 90.

An NWS regional forecast discussion notes that “The models continue to indicate that the Northern Rockies will return to a more active weather pattern for the latter part of the work week. Periods of showers and thunderstorms are expected each day especially during the afternoon and evening hours. Temperatures are anticipated to cool slightly, but still remain 5 to 10 degrees above normal.”

While it’s too early to definitively say, that sure sounds like there’s a chance of some rain for the Fourth of July.

I’m Mike Kordenbrock bringing you the weather report, and the Daily Roundup…

While it’s sad to hear of the passing of former Montana Rep. Pat Williams, I have to say I appreciated reading Tom Lutey’s coverage published by our friends over at the Montana Free Press.

I think what struck me the most about Lutey’s story is that it gave a strong historical perspective that still felt connected to the present moment.

In one section, Tom reports that “The Montana Democrat’s willingness to speak critically of the executive branch while defending the powers of Congress would have made Williams an outlier in today’s politics, said Don Judge, a long-time friend and early supporter.”

“‘He wouldn’t sit idly by when things were going south. He would disagree,’ Judge said in an interview Wednesday. ‘I don’t think that’s a fish out of water, that’s a shark circling.’”

There’s a chance I was especially primed to dwell on the links between past and present after finishing a story about the StoryCorps Mobile Tour making its first-ever visit to Kalispell.

I’d talked to Chris Norris, the nonprofit’s Chief Strategy and Program Innovation Officer, a few weeks ago about the place that StoryCorps has in a moment of polarized politics and short attention spans. He made the case that it’s exactly because of those conditions that there’s a need, and a desire, for something like StoryCorps, which tries to humanize people using their own voices.

Speaking to the longer-term value of StoryCorps, which contributes its recordings to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Norris said that “throughout history, there’s always been the need to tell the story of the living for the people who are alive in that moment. There’s something powerful about hearing the voices of people who lived at a time you didn’t, to understand the culture, the cadence, the nomenclature, the flash points, the places of tension, the colloquialisms.”

That direct reflection of the past can be seen in a quote Lutey dug up from the Congressional Record, in which Williams speaks in support of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, which provided workers with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected absence from work for the birth of a child (something Lutey notes failed to pass under eight previous attempts during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies).

Williams declared in 1993 that the previous presidential administrations had been “frozen in the ice of their own indifference toward improving the working conditions, the safety conditions, the income/salary conditions of America’s middle- and lower-income workers.”

In particular, “frozen in the ice of their own indifference,” strikes me as the type of formal, metaphorical language that doesn’t seem to have much of a place in the present political moment, where communication seems increasingly driven by language springing from the short-lived trends and moods of internet culture.

I was ready to give Williams (and just maybe his Butte upbringing) credit for the turn of phrase, but a little bit of research indicates that he was echoing a line that was used by FDR, and later echoed by other Democrats, including then Sen. John. F. Kennedy.

But if all this talk of Williams, and Butte, and history has you craving to hear more from The Mining City’s rich history, you’re in good luck. In 2007 the StoryCorps Mobile Tour made a stop in Butte. If you’re looking to hear a moving, 2-minute tale from Butte, which just might offer a welcome moment of reflection heading into your weekend, I’d recommend this story from David Shea, as told to Alice Doyle. I won’t give anything away, other than to say it’s in part about Shea finding the answer to just why his dad was collecting small coffee cans in the garage.