The brutal winter and the deer dance

January 18, 2009

This has been a brutal winter; cold, snowy and a lot of wind. This past week saw temperatures hardly above zero. It's about 61 days till the first day of spring.
Couple updates since the last post. The section of the local newspaper which I wrote for on a weekly basis, Crawford County Neighbors, shut down. The last issue was the last Friday of November. Since then I have been out of work, like a lot of other people. Finances are starting to get tight and there is no work in sight.
Perhaps, we are on the brink of the second Great Depression. Hope not, but it doesn't look real good. Here in northwestern Pennsylvania, it seems every day brings more plant closings and more layoffs.
I am continuing to write some, mostly on helium.com. Perhaps, I can make a few bucks on that Web site. At least it keeps me in practice. I am also checking out a few other sites to see what might happen.
The one bright spot is that Obama is set to become the 44th president this Tuesday. He has a mess on his hands with the economy and no one believes things will be able to turn around shirt term. But, the common belief seems to be, he is the right person to lead the country out of this quagmire.
Deer season which opened the first of December was pretty good in this neighborhood with several nice bucks taken during the two week harvest. There are still some nice bucks which remain. So I would suspect next year will be just as good, if not better. The snow was very deep throughout the hunting season and it was difficult to even walk in the woods. Would have been a good year to have a pair of snowshoes.
One other hunting note—all of us have been seeing some nice flocks of turkey. One flock must number almost thirty birds.
Today are two major playoff games which will determine which teams meet each other for Superbowl.
I am going to post two photos; Mike doing a little dance with Jeff's seven point buck out in the driveway. Jeff got the deer in Hatch Hollow and he wanted to save the head mount. So we got the head after we picked up the rest of the deer from the butcher.
Mike (well and Jeff too) has been spending a lot of time here and helping out quite a bit with wood splitting and snow shoveling. We always seem to have a really great time whatever is happening, even when I win at rummy (course he beats me all the time at chess). It's good to have close friends like that.