A weekend off

I get next weekend off. Duck season is over so I don’t have to leave the house if I don’t want to.

I really enjoy duck hunting. Believe it or not I enjoy getting up at 5:30 am and putting on about forty pounds of clothes. Layer after layer after layer.... Drive down the road in the dark and unload the ATV from the back of the truck. Put on your waders. For you ladies that haven’t had this experience, imagine a thirty-pound pair of stiff, loose fitting panty hose that go up to your armpit. Load your shotgun and five pounds of shells (shotgun bullets) on to the ATV. Maybe load three dozen decoys on the ATV, another 25 pounds of stuff. Do you have your license and your duck call? You don heavy gloves, an insulating facemask and goggles. Now you try to “swing” your leg over the seat of the ATV to begin your ride. Your leg has all the coordination, flexibility and dexterity of a piano leg. At 25 degrees, with 80% humidity, and a 25 mph ATV ride, the wind chill is sub-arctic. Don’t forget, I enjoy duck hunting.

You unload all of this stuff at your “hole”. Then you get to place your decoys. Imagine the forty pounds of clothes, the thirty pounds of waders, so much headgear you can’t turn your head from one side to the other and the 25 pounds of decoys. Get the image? Now wade through knee peep water in the dark across a flooded field with 18-inch deep wheel ruts zigzagging across it in an unfathomable pattern. Are we having fun yet?

After flailing through the water and placing your decoys, the forty pounds of clothes and headgear have increased your body temperature to about 110 degrees. Dry clothes keep you warm. Sweaty clothes don’t. You remove a couple of layers and unzip a few others.

Put shells in your gun, get behind cover and watch the sky. The sky begins to lighten in front of you as the earth rotates toward the sun. You hear some shooting from other “holes”. It’s amazing to hear: boom-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-boom------boom. You can almost feel it. Somebody is seeing ducks. But, you haven’t seen one yet. The sky turns to streaky bands of yellow, orange and red on the horizon while still black and starlit above. This is the morning. The ducks will be here, you just know it! You can feel it.

You can hear ducks long before you see them. Some make a chuckling sound as they fly. Ducks doing this are too far off to shoot and typically won’t come any closer. Pintails have a short whistle sound that travels for what seems like miles. Teal have a shrill peep-peep call. Mallards, the duck all duck hunters want, make all the quacking you’ve heard. But only the females; they’re the most vocal of the mallards (sound familiar?). The males make only a low raspy dweek sound. Wood ducks give out a shrill, almost scream-like sound as they zoom through the trees. Believe it or not, you can hear their wing feathers from a great distance. On a quiet morning it can sound like a rush of wind. This gets pronounced as they get closer and maneuver through the air. A group of 15 or 20 teal can sound like a jet plane flying overhead. Many times, you hear these sounds and never see a duck, but you know they’re there. Somewhere.

The sky’s pretty light now and the stars are no longer visible. The wind picks up and begins stinging your face. Your eyes water and the tears roll down your cheeks, making the stinging worse. You’ve seen a couple of ducks but nothing to shoot at. They’re high and on a mission to someplace else. You cool off from your earlier exertion and zip up everything and replace all available layers. There’s more shooting off in the distance. It’s frustrating to hear the shooting when you haven’t seen a single duck within range. Nothing but singles, doubles, and small groups high in the air.

With so few ducks you tend to concentrate on other things. The little songbirds flitting around. If you’re real still some of them will come right up to you. Small and huge groups of noisy geese. Crows, hawks, flocks of blackbirds, woodpeckers, the occasional eagle, and a heron occupy your eye. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.

When a duck does appear, especially one only treetop high, all these other things disappear. You track it as it circles. You follow every wing-beat of a pair as they glide around, hoping they’ll cup their wings and fall into your decoys. You tell yourself, “I’ll shoot on the next pass.” You get ready. Safety off. Line of sight across the top of your gun. They turn.......... away from you. No shot. The adrenaline wears off quickly. You notice your feet are cold. Your fingers are cold too.

After a couple of hours of this you load up everything and head for the house. Your hands get painfully cold as you pick up the decoys and wrap the weights around the keels. The scooter ride back to the truck is mind-numbing cold. The talk is all, “there are no ducks” and “I can’t believe with all the shooting we heard...” You get to the house and warm up, get something to eat and take a nap. After the nap you do it all over again except the color in the sky is behind you. You go to bed at night knowing you’ll do it all over again the next morning. They’ll be here tomorrow, I KNOW it.

I really enjoy duck hunting. But I’ll enjoy my weekend off.

the collage

This morning I was late to work. Last night I got home late and went into the house through the garage (I can still walk through it via the narrow winding path). I didn’t see the package on my doorstep until this morning. It was wrapped in an unofficial, homemade box so I knew it was something good. It was wrapped REAL good with lots of heavy-duty tape. I tore into it. I had to get a knife. Something in a frame. A collage of cartoons, Mother Goose & Grimm by Mike Peters.

The theme of the cartoons is a Jack Russell Terrier. I own a JRT, Mowgli. Or should I say I share a house with a JRT who owns me? The lady who bread Mowgli calls them Jack Russell Terrorists. A close friend of mine watched him for me while I was out of town over Christmas. She has been around dogs and cats all her life. But never a JRT. I still owe her favors. Mowgli had an embarrassing, eye-opening run-in with her cat before I got out of the house. I figured if she didn’t take him to the pound before I got back it would be a resounding success.

If you’ve never been around one of these dogs, you’ve really missed an amazing experience. Very energetic. VERY! I don’t think he sat still other than to sleep for the first three or four years I owned him. I thought about cutting back on his food but never tried it. One time a friend came to the house to watch a football game. He and his wife had given Mowgli to me as a pup a couple of years earlier. In a quiet voice he pointed to the dog and said, “Look, he’s sitting down.” I said, “Shut up! Don’t bother him. Isn’t it nice?”

He’ll chase a ball until you and your ten best friends are exhausted from throwing it. He follows me around incessantly. I think he’d climb into the shower if I let him. Sometimes I think I should have named him Underfoot. The techs at the vet’s office love him because he growls at the vet. I’ve got a friend who has cats; Mowgli sniffed him once and nipped at him. I heard he nipped at a repairman at a friend’s house once. He goes absolutely nuts when the doorbell rings. He likes all the pizza delivery people. He even goes nuts when the doorbell rings on the Domino’s TV ad. I HATE that commercial and refuse to buy from Domino’s. He considers every squirrel and bird in the back yard as a personal affront.

He’s real smart. I can tell him to sit and he’ll sit. I can follow that with a stay command and he’ll stay. I can then toss a treat to the other side of the room and he’ll stare at it but won’t move other than an excited quiver. He won’t move until he hears, “go get it.” It’s his only trick. I tried to get him to balance a treat on his nose but it didn’t take. Probably because I didn’t have enough patience. He’s most likely smarter than me.

Like most dog owners, I’ve grown really attached to him. I know he won’t be around forever and the thought of his demise and my subsequent life without him is not a cheerful place. My friend who watched him for me made the collage. She’s a real sweetheart! I was late for work because I was trying to find a good place in the house to hang it. I decided to hang it at the office. The thought of being without my friend isn’t real pleasing either.

Thanks for the collage.

econ 101

Be prepared, I’m on a rant again.

The headline reads “$427 billion deficit projected for ‘05”. When I hear this number I hear it in the voice of Carl Sagan. It’s only $100 billion (Carl again) more than the White House projected for the year and, as indicated by an anonymous source, “conservative”. Overspending was not an accident, it didn’t surprise anybody. It was PLANNED!

Lets put this in simple terms. If you make $48,000 per year, you know that each month you can spend $4,000 and break even. This is a balanced budget. You won’t save any money. You also won’t go into debt. If however, you PLAN, on January 1, to spend $5,000 every month you will finish the year with a $12,000 deficit. To reduce this deficit, you’ll have to spend only $3,000 per month in the following year to break even. It’s a really simple concept yet our President and our Congress can’t seem to grasp it.

To make things worse, lets assume you plan to stick with your $4,000 per month expenditure but decide to voluntarily take a new job that only provides you with an annual income of $36,000. Where’s Einstein when we need him? Do the math; this sounds like another annual $12,000 deficit. It also sounds like tax cuts.

To make things even more exciting, assume you’ve stuck with your $4,000 per month plan, your new $36,000 job, and (drum roll here) you decide to visit cousin Vinny in Rome: only $3,000. Can you say, “Just charge it”? Your deficit grows by $15,000 due to new employment PLUS the amount of the vacation. Although nobody got killed on the vacation, this sounds like tax cuts and a war.

I’m not even going to go into the whole mess of borrowing the $15,000 from Thrifty Finance to pay your bills for the year. Yes, Thrifty Finance charges interest for allowing you to use their money. This INCREASES the amount of your deficit.

If you’re making any analogies to our national fiscal process by this point, you win the teddy bear.

I’m sick and tired of our fiscally conservative Republicans dragging out the Tax-And-Spend-Democrat label every election. I’m waiting for some Democrat or Libertarian or Green to start slinging the Borrow-And-Spend-Republican label. Show me someone with the cajones to call a spade a spade and I’ll vote for her or him! At least a tax-and-spend process can result in a balanced budget.

We don’t need Osama Bin Laden to ruin our economy, our President and Congress are doing a fine job of it.

education

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" – George W. Bush, January 1, 2000, Florence, South Carolina

Yes Mr. President, all too rarely.

I was in a fast food place in a small college town yesterday. Being close to campus and at noon, the place was full of students. I knew they were students from the sorority and fraternity t-shirts, book bags, etc. Waiting in line I couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversations. “The only thing I ever eat here before...” “I don’t never...” “He don’t got...” How do kids get into college when they can’t speak English? These didn’t look like recent immigrants either. I hear the same things everywhere.

I remember parts of a Simpsons episode where Bart gets an F in English and Homer asks in amazement, “How can you FLUNK English? You SPEAK English.” Why can’t our education system teach a kid how to match a verb and a noun in an appropriate manner?

My nephew has a borderline learning disability resulting in a reading problem. He and his parents struggled through grade school and are now struggling through junior high. It seems the curriculum is designed to gets kids (and their teachers) through the standardized tests and very little else. Teachers whose performance (and maybe even their salary) is based on the statistics revolving around these tests are willing to let a couple of kids fall through the cracks in an effort to boost the scores for rest of the class. How many kids are we losing?

I hear about kids from one state not being able to get into colleges in other states because their basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills are so poor. Even when they get into in-state schools, many have to take remedial classes in these subjects just to get by. They can score high enough on the standardized tests to get by, but aren’t proficient enough in these skills to survive in a higher education setting. I’ve heard other stories about kids getting teaching degrees in one state but aren’t qualified to teach in other states.

I don’t want to slam teachers. We need to slam the system that trains teachers to forget why they became teachers. When I was in college, if a kid flunked out of engineering, business, parks and recreation, etc., they got into the education department and became a teacher. Not their choice, but a matter of necessity; they had to have a degree. What kind of teacher will these people make? Don’t get me wrong. I also knew kids who sincerely wanted to be teachers. They were driven, called if you like, to this vocation.

Having the deepest pocket or the biggest gun isn’t going to maintain this country as the “world power” we’ve grown accustomed to. Kids from foreign countries have been outperforming our kids in academia for years. A well-educated populace is what will maintain our standing in the world in the future. We’re sinking fast.

aging

A good friend wrote in her blog about things her mother didn’t tell her about aging,

8) Your arms will grow shorter in your effort to read work close up. (I now own three pairs of reading glasses. What's up with that?)

I’ve got her beat. I’ve got at least nine pairs of dime store reading glasses. At the recommendation of my eye doctor I started with 1.25s and have since graduated to 2.00s. I’m sure my matriculation through the halls of failing eyesight have not culminated with the 2.00s, but they work for now. I’m not even going to go into cataracts.

I still have all the 1.25s. Don’t ask why I’ve saved them. Does stacking two pairs of 1.25s, one in front of the other, make a “pair” of 2.5s? I save everything. You should see the two-car garage I couldn’t squeeze a bicycle into to save my life. I have four or five (maybe more I can’t account for?) pairs of 2.00s.

The problem is, and one that my friend failed to mention in her blog, as I’ve aged my brain cells have been killed off, turned to mush, gone on vacation, moved so far apart the electrical impulses don’t make their connections, yada, yada, yada. I seem to have a real tough time keeping track of the 2.00s.

I’m trying to read small print on the label of something in a store and have to do a pat down to find them. I have clothes with too many pockets. I don’t really enjoy the pat down, especially in public. It would be different if my favorite redhead were doing the patting, even in public.

I’m in a fancy restaurant. You know the one. It’s got one brown twenty-watt bulb in a dark frosted globe for every ten tables. I’m seated at the table 30 feet away from the “light”. The menu is printed on brown paper in brown ink in some arcane, scribbley typeface. Can you say, “What’s your special tonight?”

My medications (another aging induced goody) are roughly the same size, the same color, with different letters/numbers imprinted on them. The imprints are way too small to be useful in feeling the difference (yet another sign of aging?). I have to take one in the morning and one at night, so just eating one of each is not going to work. Where are those damned 2.00s? The 1.25s I can find won’t work. Why did I save them and why do I know where they are?

Last November I voted. I chatted with the other good citizens while waiting in line for 15 or 20 minutes. I got to the sign-in table and (pat down in public – where’s that redhead?) no 2.00s. Not even a pair of 1.25s (insert expletives)! I fake my way through the sign-in, get my ballot and head for the booth. While looking for the booth closest to the one brown twenty-watt bulb in a dark frosted globe (was this place a fancy restaurant yesterday?) I spot one of those plastic magnifying sheets and grab it. I laid the ballot down: nothing but gray indescribable shapes. I apply the plastic magnifying sheet: no use. I try craning my head around to get a better angle and make use of that light bulb; all I get is a sore neck. I notice one of the poll workers wandering around the room. I ask her if she knows of anyone who might have a spare pair of reading glasses. She thinks so and heads toward the sign-in desk. She comes back muttering something about some moron who signed in on the wrong line, but has a pair of reading glasses in her hand. She hands them to me and says, “I hope these’ll work”. I say, “Thanks, I’ll make ‘em work”. I put them on. A pair of (insert another expletive) 1.25s. I tilt the earpieces up until they’re sticking out of the top of my head. I tilt my head way back; there goes my neck again. Eureka. Gray shapes turn into fuzzy but legible words. I vote. I think I voted according to plan (don’t ask).

Once I got home I searched for the 2.00s. Found all the 1.25s right off the bat and put them in the same place in the garage. Then I find the 2.00s. All within two inches of one another! What’s with that? Do the shoemaker’s pixies come out at night and gather them up and store them for me? What moron would place them ALL in the SAME place and FORGET about it. Probably the same moron who signs in at the polling place on the wrong line.
I put one in the truck, one in my briefcase, take one to the office, put one on the coffee table (have to have it to read the remote), and put one in the garage for safe keeping. Can you buy them by the dozen?

President Bush apologized for "cowboy" language he hadn't rehearsed. Tom Ridge's buddies benefited from lucritive contracts (why else do we go into public service?). Baseball finally decides to put the clamps on steroids (no more home run records). They caught a nut in Florida with a shoebox full of ricin. Prince Harry is a stupid teenager. Georgia has to remove pro-creationism stickers from text books. The FBIs $170 million computer system can barely play a game of solitaire. Oil spills in Alaska, mudslides in California, bombs in Gaza, kidnappings and killings in Iraq, tornados in Arkansas, and malaria in Indonesia. After a while its, "blah, blah blah, blah, blah."

Have we become callous to news unless it directly effects us? Do we tune out the news unless it's a NASCAR report or a tidbit on J Lo's new heartthrob?

Try something. Sit down and listen to the local and national news. Really listen to it. Take notes. Describe how each item makes you feel. Read a local newspaper. If something pisses you off, write a letter to the editor or to your Congressmen. Become a participant in life, not just a spectator. You're a citizen of the world; pay attention to what's going on around you and do something about it.

Haunted Hotel

I spent Tuesday night in the haunted hotel in the northwest corner of the state. It opened in 1886 and was famous for catering to the carriage trade. In the 30's a charlatans "doctor" from Iowa operated it as a hospital whose specialty was curing cancer. He paid a $4,000 fine and spent some time in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth.

It's a great stone and wood Victorian structure on the top of the north end of a narrow ridge. Great views of the surrounding ridges and valleys. Massive front lobby full of woodwork and antiques with rich carpeting and subtle lighting throughout. It has an elevator that seems a little out of place, but considering the 21st century "carriage trade" and their loathing of physical exercise it's only natural. Framed prints on the walls evoke Antigone and The Dreamers, perfect for the Victorian aura. My room had a sitting room connected to a space just barely big enough for the king sized bed and an adjoining bathroom. Back in the day, it was probably two separate rooms. The windows faced east toward a giant statue of Christ on the next ridge and the sunrise I hoped would materialize the next day, weather permitting. Lots of old furniture maybe even antique. Considering the place was built almost 120 years ago I was impressed. I'm sure lots of work and quite a few dollars have gone into making the place habitable.

Needles to say, there are numerous stories of ghosts haunting the place. I checked in with full hopes of experiencing the best the old place and its denizens could offer. I have to admit I was a little giddy with expectations. What could be more physically exciting than an encounter with an apparition? Maybe, with a little luck, some Jacob Marleyesque chain rattling at midnight.

The most famous ghostie from the place is said to appear as a nurse pushing a medicine cart along the hallways. Something that might sound like a room service cart with the accompanying clinking of dishes and glasses. Oh to hope.

A friend told me to burn a votive candle with a white ribbon wrapped around it. She said I should put some sage I'd either grown or picked myself in the flame. This would cleanse the room and drive off the spirits. Alas, I'd left my candle, ribbon, and sage at home; the spirits would not be driven away. Good.

Being 120 years old, I expected some noise. The wind blew and rattled the door to the balcony, the door to the room, and the piece of galvanized sheet metal behind the decorative fireplace grate. The people in the room above me paced and paced and paced. It sounded like the short-handed staff of a roadside diner trying to serve a packed house of hungry truck drivers. I really didn't want to use my earplugs because I didn't want to miss any spectral noises. Between the wind and the pacing, no telling what I missed.

I watched the end of the MU-OSU basketball game while reading a Kellerman murder mystery before dozing off. I muted the TV periodically to listen. Only pacing and wind.

I woke Wednesday morning to see the pink and orange sunrise off to the east. Christ was still there, arms outstretched like a football referee signaling unsportsmanlike conduct. Was I unsportsmanlike for believing enough is the spirits to hope to see one or were the spirits themselves unsportsmanlike for not appearing. I'll return to the hotel (without the candle, ribbon, and sage) but I'll ask for a room facing west.

We pay for our mistakes

Nine more Americans killed in Iraq. Add them to the disgustingly growing list. Didn't we learn from Somalia? Didn't we learn from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt?

Tax cuts for the wealthy. Tax breaks for corporations who are contributing very little to start with. Making those tax cuts permanent.

Allowing an increase in the level of cyanide in our air and water.

Allowing mining companies to blow the tops off mountains and foul our streams.

Denying access to presidential records beyond the time mandated for keeping them sealed. What are they hiding? What are they so afraid we'll find out?

An ungodly high deficit with no plans whatsoever to try to reduce it (see tax cuts above). How long will our children and grandchildren be paying for our poor spending habits? What legacy will we be leaving them? Is this, as some talking heads say, an effort to bankrupt government to the point of fiscal unsolvency to shrink it out of existence?

Promising that social security benefits will not be cut while convincing us to vote then turning around and hinting of cuts before the inauguration. Sure, lets put part of workers future fiscal security into the pockets of Wall Street brokers.

Lets cut peoples ability to receive large monetary awards as the result of malpractice suits. Will insurance companies reduce their rates?

Lets drill for oil off the Florida coast. No, wait! The Governor's a relative; that's a bad idea.

My sincere hope is that things don't turn out as bad as I think they will. In not, I'll be the first person to say I was wrong and they were right. However, I want them to be proud of their Bush-Cheney choice if things go sour.

In the beginning...

I really just wanted to comment on a friend's blog. I guess that's not possible without creating your own. So here I am.

I don't know what you'll get here. Maybe some politics. Maybe some hunting and fishing (sorry to all PETA folks - don't even try, you'll not change my mind). Possibly some really bad poetry. A few observations of the natural world around us. Basically, just the musings and occasional rantings of an ordinary, tax paying, mortgaged, working for a living citizen. The truth as I see it.

I'll tell you I'm single, live south of the 36th parallel (the last 20+ years), and grew up north of the 36th. The rest you'll have to guess for yourself.

Feel free to say hey!