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.

Halloween Snake -maybe a red belly racer

Hallooween wood part two

Halloween Wood

The snake

Yesterday, Halloween, was just a nice day. The weather was perfect. I planted about 100 black walnuts in the big garden. It was warm but I still had to hoe a couple of inches of snow to make a row. Now, if they grow...spring will tell.
The rosie reds were in schools swimming in the new pond enjoying the warm sunshine. It was the first time I saw them swimming in schools (about three groups of them). It was neat.
Mike and John showed up and we went up back in the woods to begin cutting up an old beech tree that fell down one day in July almost a year and a half ago. I was walking up the foot path that day with the Yaw. It was warm, sunny, clear blue sky and very calm.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash and the woods became brighter. The tree, likely well over 100 years old, was on the ground hardly 75 feet away.
Last winter I cut some of the branches for firewood but my chain saw wasn't able to really cut the larger branches or the trunk. When Mike and John saw the tree a couple weeks ago, they decided it was worth the time and effort to harvest the rest of the wood.
We spent most of the afternoon cutting and splitting that tree. It was a great afternoon to be in the woods. During a short break, we saw the snake in the sawdust. It was a small snake, maybe eight inches. I am thinking maybe it was hibernating in the tree and we woke it up. It didn't have a real good attitude.
We got to thinking about seeing a snake on Halloween and shortly we were back in my kitchen eating a loaf of bread I made in the bread machine. It is a day, an afternoon actually, I'll likely never forget.
I think I might have close to enough wood for the rest of winter. Yesterday, Jeff also split quite a bit of wood, maybe upwards of a chord. That is in addition to the other chord or so that I had cut and stacked over the last couple months. Once I get the Halloween wood down here, I am thinking I have close to four chords of firewood. It will be a warm January and February and some memories of some good times.

The first snowfall

Halloween October 31st 2008

It has been some time since I have had the time to collect some thoughts and write here. I guess the scariest part of Halloween this year would be a Republican victory on Tuesday, election day.
But I don't think that is going to happen. Far from it, the Dems and Obama are on the brink of a victory of perhaps landslide proportions. The end is in sight, whew! Eight years of the Bush Disaster and 21 months of the McCain campaign's sleaze has raised the misery index for millions of people.
In the last two months, the economic meltdown on Wall Street has been a big focus, and even now, the future of the economy still looks bleak. Everyday I am meeting people out of work or who have had work hours cut back. There is a lot of worry about how to pay the bills and a lot of creative thinking about how to raise extra cash. I've found myself doing the same.
The weather changed quickly. October 19th was the first hard frost and on October 27th the first snowfall of about six inches. Today, however, it will melt- sunny skies this morning and temps will reach into the sixties.
On September 26, I had the Frog Bog, a small marshy area, dug out and deepened on one side. Within the week, it filled after some heavy rains the first week of October and Jeff, my friend and I, added some rosie red minnows.
I also spent a lot of time planting some things around the pond, mostly native wild flowers. It should look pretty sharp in the spring when winter breaks. More on this later. The project kept me pretty busy.