Guess What I got for our Anniversary?

Yep, Barb got me a telephoto lens for the Nikon. I can take pictures of nose hair at 100 yards. It does work well on this camera. I just need a lens bearer to get it from place to place.
MUD

I am Like Mike!

One of the columns in today's paper mentioned that Mike Huckabee's win in Kansas was mentioned three times on meet the press and the fact he had eaten squirrel as a college student was mentioned four times. Barbara laughed at that fact and asked me if I had eaten squirrel. Yes, in that way I am like Mike! That is not to say I like Mike or will vote for him but I have eaten my share of what Ellie May would call critters. Here for your edification is just a list of some of the things I have eaten in my lifetime:

• I have eaten enough pheasant in my life to cause an environmental impact statement to be filed. We would go to Susank, KS almost every year for hunting season and the hunters would almost always donate the birds to my grandparents to fee the masses. I'm sure that in the long run, the beer and whiskey bought and paid for by Curly in trade for the pheasants drove the price up pretty high but I was just a kid so what did I care. Grandma would bake them for an hour or so at a low temperature and then fry them in pork fat. I'm sure that Col Sanders never cooked up a better tasting plate of any fowl. Along with this pheasant mess I probably also ate quail, and some prairie chicken. I know we shot a meadowlark or two but I'm pretty sure we didn't eat them.
• Rabbit. Fried, stewed and baked. Tastes like chicken but without the benefit of white breast meat.
  
• Frog Legs. Tastes like someone stored small chickens in a root cellar until they just started to go bad. With fried onions and potatoes who cared. My frog hunting story is a hoot. Remind me to tell it to you sometime. Barbara has listened to it several times and is probably glad that I will write it so she can skip over it.
• Raccoon. The family up the street from us went "coon" hunting every year. In the early winter months it was legal to take one or two as sport. You could run them in the summer but you couldn't kill them. Mrs Lawrence would clean then and put them in a BBQ sauce. We would eat them on hamburger buns and they were great. Hey, I was a hungry kid what did I know.
  
• Turtle. One year my grandfather cooked some turtle soup and we all ate it before he told us what it was. It tasted like a slightly strange potato soup to me. Ate it anyway!
• Capi Berra. This is a large rodent that was everywhere in Panama. At the jungle school we were given a "feast of wild things we could eat there in a survival portion of the course. I think there was some monkey, some quati mundi (Like a long tailed coon that slept with a monkey) and at least one kind of lizard.
  
• Goat. In San Antonio, there is a restaurant that prides its self on having some of the best goat "al carbon" or grilled. Eat it with flour tortillas like Fajitas and man is that some good stuff.
  
• Fish of all kinds, shapes and sizes. I don't particularly like catfish unless if is farm raised. The "out of the river" catfish taste kind of muddy to me. My grandfather lived on Beaver Lake in Arkansas in his later years and we would almost always have a crappie fish fry at least once when we would visit. He used a batter made from corn, ground at the "War Eagle" mill and beer. My son, who won't eat fish here in Kansas would eat Curly's fried fish. As a kid, we ate a lot of Salmon patties made with canned salmon, bones and all. I also ate a lot of canned Tuna and today I can't abide the smell, let alone the taste of Tuna. I ate shark one time in California and found it very bland and if had not been for the caper sauce it would have been impossible to eat.
  
• In Little Rock, Arkansas there was a place called "SOB's". That was for shrimp, oysters and beer hause. I would start with a dozen oysters, a half pound of shrimp boiled in beer and a pitcher of beer. Then we would hit the sights and sounds of "little pebble" and probably stop for some more shrimp and beer on the way home. I like crab legs but have never really developed a taste for lobster. Got sick after eating a lobster in California and I'm sure that the black russians and rusty nails had noting to do with my being sick. Damned lobster went bad.
  
• Venison. My sister and her husband Ray almost always have some deer meat chili at our family Christmas get together. To me it tastes like regular chili but I'm sure that is part of the point.
  
• Buffalo. At least once a year someone here nearby has some kind of a fund raiser where they cook buffalo burgers. You pay an inflated price and get a burger that tastes like ketchup and mustard. (Don't forget the pickle, tomato and lettuce) I personally can't taste the difference. They tell me that it is lower in fat but then they fry it with some oil on a grill. (Bet it is pork fat, it rules)
  
• Speaking of pork, I helped my Grandfather kill, clean and butcher a hog in Arkansas when I was about 13. It took up almost all day and man was it messy. After the women packaged up the meat, Grandma Erma then began the task of rendering the lard. She cooked that big old pot of pork fat and alternated between putting in big slabs of fat and taking out lard and pork rinds until they had that hog reduced to nothing more than the oink and lots of packages. They got some sausage spices in town and if it wasn't packaged or rendered, it went in to the sausage grinder.
  

I guess that where and when you grew up made a big difference in what you ate. Kids today have probably not seen a chicken fed like a pet, killed, cleaned and eaten. As a 60 year old, I have had the experience of killing and eating a lot of things. I think that today I have a reverence for wild animals and probably could fill my belly here at Rabbit Run but choose not to. It is lightly snowing and the birds are eating their fill of seeds. There is hardly never a time when one woodpecker or another isn't swinging on the suet block and eating their fill. I'll bet it is pork fat holding those seeds together.
MUD

What a game!

Baylor gave the Hawks 100% of their best. Thank god that the Hawks were up to a 100 point game because it took that much to beat the Bears. Anyone that watched that game probably went away with the feeling that Basketball is one of those games that anyone can win or lose on any given night. I think I enjoyed the end of this game about as much as any I've seen this year. Remember that I saw four home games in Allen Field House so you know this one was a great game.
One of the Hawks, Sherron Collins was the spark plug at the end of the game that has been missing since he hurt his foot earlier this year. He drove to the basket and at the end, Baylor just didn't have anyone that could stop him. That and free throws won the game for the Hawks this time. (Yes, I know the picture of Sherron was from the Nebraska game)

Golly (Borrowed from Mitt)

On February 11th, 1968, the beautiful lady above agreed to marry me in Las Vegas, Nevada. We tied the knot in the Chapel of the Bells and I have been hearing them for 40 years. That means that we will have been married 2/3rds of our lives this coming Monday.
You don't need to do anything to recognize that date. I promise you that we have everything we need and most of what we want. OK, I would like to have a grandchild but hey, I can't have everything.
MUD

Some Things I hate

• 
• I hate it that you can't believe anything you see, or read any more. This Photo-workshop stuff has just made it impossible to tell what is real from what is made up. As the world's best maker-up of things, they are crowding me. Is this a Dog Bird or a Bird Dog?
  

• Stupid Speech. I am an advocate of free speech to the max but I can't abide people that say stupid things and claim free speech. When something is so stupid that at its core you can't believe it, it is stupid and should be not allowed. Especially out in public!
• Telephone calls from a machine. The next thing in line is calls from phony polls that make up stuff and then ask for a donation. The third is the one from some company that calls and tells me they are from some credit card processing center and my card needs some attention. It is a come on for a service that is out there to "Protect me" and my cards from abuse. If they are so damn good, they would protect me from their calls.
• Blogs that just post pictures of their faces with nothing to say. I am looking for a good few sites to read because I like to get different ideas and views. There must be about a thousand young Oriental girls that have some pink background and put nothing but pictures of them and their friends. They also don't have a button so I can just hit next blog and go on. It really pisses me off when I can't do anything because they have the machine captured loading some sappy song.
• Snow after about the third day. In Kansas we normally get a few snows and they don't last long. This winter we have had either snow or frozen ground or mud for most of the time since Thanksgiving. My truck has big fat tires and I have to turn around in the driveway to get out. I want to go somewhere warm, NOW!
• This damn writer's strike. Not that TV has such wonderful programs any way. This damn writer's strike has us watching re-runs and reality shows. I hate reality shows that are so made up that they just stink up the joint. Dancing with the stars had devolved into dancing with your mother. Oh mother, what is the world coming to. Next thing I'll be watching re-runs of programs that Mom likes. (Murder she wrote, any show with Andy Griffith) I do want the last session of NYPD Blue because I missed it.
  
• Computer programs that load themselves. I have Mozilla and the latest update 2.0.11 or something loads aboput every time I turn on my machine and for some reason it fails to load and tells me it will load the next time I start Mozilla. Pain in the ass, I tell you.
  
• I may not be the most organized person or the brightest, but when I can't make sense out of something it is either too hard or not right. If you can figure out how we are holding the primaries and caucuses and how that all adds up to a Presidential nomination, I will buy you a coke. I just shut my eyes for the national Presidential election because the Electoral College makes even less sense. Pile up the votes and the best man wins. How you can win the most votes and lose is just an affront to common sense.
  
• For the first time, I have about had it with the split in the Republican party. Right when we need to get strong and keep the Clinton's out of the White House, we are split between the Conservatives, the fundamentalists and the rest of us. If you listen hard, you can hear Rush Limbaugh tittering in the background as this just has to be driving his ratings up and over. Who the hell is Ron Paul? Why doesn't another Arkansas Governor just go away. Pick one and support the guy. Hell, Mitt threw away 38 million of his own dollars and dropped out. Rudy folded like a cheap tent when the going got rough. Oh well,
• Governments that know all the problems but don't support the solutions. We need some good energy programs and we need them now. Let the taxpayers deduct a few dollars for replacing poor windows and putting in some insulation to cut the expenditure of energy. Put up some solar and wind energy plants. Drill for oil where it is and quit shipping it from around the world at $100 a barrel.
  
• Bushy tailed rats, aka squirrels. They are a royal pain in the butt here at Rabbit Run. They eat the bird food and chew on anything wood. Next spring I will have to replace several boards on the house where they tried to eat their way into the attic. I wil leave their trees alone if they will leave the house alone. No, it will be WAR! They will bring a knife to a gun fight.
  

OK, enough of the rant. It is kind of like wetting my pants in a dark suit. It gives me a warm feeling and no one notices. MUD

Some of My Favorite Things

• Barbara
• Dave and his wife Barb
  
• A big bowl of ice cream.
• Old Chevys.
• Dogs.
• Kids
• good books
• new places
• new things
• no debt (not currently the case but at least very positive on a balance sheet)
• good friends
• stories well told.
• Great pictures of thing and places I would like to see or places I want to go.

I would love to live in a place where I could put the recumbent on the trail year round.
MUD

The Wild Times at Rabbit Run

This is our Yellow Bellied Sap Sucker. He is the only ruby throated woodpecker in our bird books. I love that name. Yosemite Sam couldn't say a more colorful name.

This Male Cardinal just shows up in some of the best pictures. I can't wait until he is in his finest spring color. If he is in the sun it almost hurts your eyes to look at him. His girlfriend is just another brown bird and is hard to pick out.

This was taken about a week ago when the snow was gone for a dayor so. This possum came out and licked the bird seed off the porch. It was the cleanest the porch had ever been.



Have fun out there, MUD

Mo' Sno Pics

Barbara always likes to get out and tramp through the snow and take photos of the place blanketed in the white stuff. It never ceases to amaze me that she see details I would overlook. This is a piece of ken's yard art that I also love. It is a Kansas Sunflower with a suet block feeder right in the middle. I kept a suet block in it one year for about three months and not one bird ever pecked on it. The suet block down below the house last at most three days.

This is the view of our house that almost no one gets to see. You have to sneak up on the joint from the creek side and other than animals few go there.

Barb always tries to get a photo of the creek in somewhere. It is the upper end of Tecumseh Creek. It dumps into the Kansas River just at the town of Tecumseh. It may dump into the Shunga there and it shortly dumps into the Kaw.

This is a birds eye view of our driveway if the bird is a penguin. Thank god the snow was just axle deep and we could get out to the main road without the assistance of a snow plow.

Lets see, I have a three car garage but between the mower, the tractor, boxes, the 57 Chevy and Barb's car someone just has to keep his big round nose outside. So far I have kept the gas tank full and the battery well charged and it has started most of the time. I do have a good heater but the door that jok trashed in the wreck hasn't been adjusted yet and it leaks air big time. Oh well, That's the view from here for now.
MUD

Guess What We Got?

After about one inch of rain, it finally got cold enough to snow overnight. We found about seven inches of new snow on the ground this morning. I went out and put some seed on the porch for the birds and it has been as busy as Grand Central Station out there.
It is still snowing but not anywhere as hard as it must have been overnight. They are saying it will stop by noon and be about 30 degrees for our daytime high. Probably will get a little warmer late in the week and add to the muddy mess we call our driveways.
I should go over to the house on Valley Brooke but the last time I ventured out in fresh snow I got sideswiped so I probably will forgo that pleasure today. I really wish I had worked on the roof the other day when the temp was near 70. I have a darned leak on the back porch and can't find it when it is warm and dry.
Oh well, back to my book. MUD

Life Imitates Art

One of the columns in the local paper, you know the one that is replacing Dear Abby or her sister, is running a column about “what is wrong with America”. Yes, I have my own ideas and here are some of them.

• Ease – Somehow it has got too easy to get into debt and not to feel responsible. I guess it is the amount of money we owe as a country and how little our personal debts seem compared with that. We don’t want what we have enough and need too much of what we see. Personal responsibility, is the root of this but more of this later.
• Lies – It is easier to lie about things than tell the truth. It makes life very complicated if anyone really looks at what we say but who cares enough anyone else to keep score. Our President looked us in the eye and said he didn’t have sex with that woman. He lied and now we accept that he is reformed and won’t lie to us again. He is out on the campaign trail for his wife who told us that Bill was the victim of a “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” and not personally responsible. She didn’t chuck that idiot out on his ass so now I don’t trust her either.
• Future – Somehow we have either lost faith in the future or forgot that the future is generally the result of what we do. Life isn’t Las Vegas. At least there you know that the glitz and glamor is paid for by the money lose by gambling. Sure, there are sometimes bumps in the road but mostly hard work, education and loving your family result in better things. I guess the solution of the world’s problems in 60 minutes (less commercials) as we watch on TV has given us a false view of life.
• People – We need to love people in spite of their weaknesses. Value what they are and let that be enough. I don’t want you to think we need to put people up on a pedestal or to put them under the bright light if an interrogation. C’est La Vie.

MUD

Now I Am Confused

This morning the local paper, fit to cover the bottom of a bird cage, covered a topic I found interesting. They said that infections picked up in Hospitals killed 90,000 people and that is twice the number killed in car accidents. I went on line and looked for more information and I was led to believe that a third leading cause of death was malpractice by doctors and because they report the deaths/statistics, it goes unreported. The article I found on line indicated trends in the causes of death and it is changing to old age related causes over accidents and infections.

Well, crap, is anyone awake out there not aware that as a society we are having a bulge in the top age group because people are living longer? Doesn't it make sense that people are sick when they go to the hospital and more susceptible to getting a disease there? I'll bet that if you looked hard enough, you could link going to Bars to death by traffic accidents. Well Duh! I thought I would enlighten myself and all I did was further muddy the waters of that subject. More young men age 20 die from gunshot wounds than any other age group. Combine young people and guns and there is a high likely hood of getting shot. Old people can't remember where they hid their guns or have had them taken away by their children/caregivers/keepers so they don't get shot as often. Young men go hunting more often because as we age, walking 10 miles carrying a weapon just doesn't make sense.

There was a French study that tied vegetarianism to long life. They said people that do not eat meat over the two decade study lived 3.6 years longer. I'll bet it just seemed longer. I also say, well duh! people that watch their diet tend to be slimmer and trimmer and they live longer for what it is worth.

Liars figure, and figures lie. Go Figure! MUD

Did you notice that no matter how organized you are, you always get home from Wal*Mart and find you forgot something. I think the open spaces and over abundance of crap causes you to forget what you came for. Yesterday I made a trip to Lawrence and while there, Barb went to J. C. Penny's and I went to Wal*Mart. I spent over $40.00 on stuff to feed the animals. This morning I looked and found that I need some feed for the Cocateils and the black peppercorns I went for in the first place. Oh well, going to the local store will give me a chance to check my lottery tickets.
Talk about your waste of money! Lottery tickets are a total waste and a gamble that just has no reasonable explanation. Your chances of winning are worse than being bitten by a Great White Shark. You stand a better chance of getting hit by lightening. I think there is some appeal in thinking about what you would do if you won the lottery. I think my first move would be to build a big building to store the additional crap I would buy. I have about filled everything here to the max and need another space to store "stuff". Oh well.
This morning my son Dave and his wife Barb, brought her nephews over for breakfast. Keiler and Austin are two great little guys and they just wear me out. We had chocolate chip pancakes and ham. We also had some fruit to round it out. Dave will make a great dad when it happens but he doesn't have the energy to keep up with two of the little guys. I think they went home because Barb's computer is so old that it doesn't have any cool games or graphics. I'm sure that Dave's does.
It is in the mid 30's and lightly raining. Thank god it is above freezing or we would have mre snow or a coating of ice. Neither one is much to my liking but hey, I'm not in charge.
Better get my stuff together. MUD

Colorado Dog Goes Crazy

OK, this is really Grissy eat'n a KU pillow given to us by my mother-in-law. Every once in a while the orneriness just leaks out of that little dog and she has to eat something. I think it is because she doesn't get to eat a squirrel now and then. KU beat Colorado today and didn't look great doing it. At least Missouri beat K-State when they didn't look well. MUD

Random Things (not sure how much thought is here )

MY favorite soldier in Nevada sends me jokes and funny things that are often related to military things. This past week she sent me a funny story about a chicken, specifically a rooster, that won the no bell piece prize or perhaps it was the pullet zer prize. I told her that a friend of mine in Ottawa convinced me to invest in a chicken farm. We damn near went broke in that deal. Couldn't tell if we were planting them too deep or too close together.

This past year Ken and I were going somewhere in the truck and he asked me if I noticed that at an idle there was a misfire. Being a little deaf (Barb would say a lot deaf) I really didn't. I'm sure that it was a gradual thing and it probably wasn't much. It continued to get worse and with all the cold weather I just didn't want to get out on the drive and check it. It continued to get worse to the point it was completely missing on at least one cylinder. Yep, two plugs were fouled so bad they didn't work. I guess I don't get it out on the road enough to warm it up and "blow off the stink" as my dad would say.

When I asked the kid at the parts store about hotter plugs he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. All he could tell me was if they had them in platinum and in stock. The manager was tied up with another customer so I just moved on smartly. Or, would that uninformed position be dumbly? Oh well I'll save the hotter plug for the next time. I did save the old plugs as they are a double platinum and at least six looked pretty good.

It looks like the tax information is starting to roll in. I always worry until I get it loaded in Turbo Tax. As I load it, a small screen shows me how it looks overall and always scares the hell out of me. I don't load the property tax/deduction stuff until last and without the deductions it is kind of scary. One year it didn't deduct the Civil Service retirement pay from the State Taxes and it scared the hell out of me for a while until I went in and manually loaded the information. Actually I subtracted it from the Adjusted gross at the State level.

It will be interesting to see how the Hawks respond to their first loss today. They play Colorado on the road and I'm pretty sure they will have some anger or spirit to show how they respond after a loss. K-State has a fairly good road for the rest of the season and I'm sure they want to be the Big 12 Champs. I'm pretty sure the winner won't have more than two losses in the league play, if that many.

I will need to make a trip to Wallyworld (WalMart) today to stock up on animal food. Seems like the bags and cans all have run out at the same time. I would be ok if the cat and the dogs would eat sunflower seeds but alas, I'm pretty sure they would just go hungry. Well, Taco might eat the seeds but he will eat about anything at a gulp and probably couldn't tell the difference until it gave him the runs. I do need some suet blocks for the woodpeckers. They just peck their way through those things like grease through a goose. For some reason our "tufted Titmice, mouses" don't seem to be here in as large a number as most years. They really eat the sunflower seeds in quantity and I haven't had to make as many trips out to fill the feeder this year. Might be they went further south because of all the snow in December.

Oh well, keep in touch and keep warm.
MUD

Denny's Thoughts Part 2

Yep, these blogs post funny. Part one is below part two because I posted One yesterday. If it were in a book, I could have posted two after one and word processed the crap out of it. I'm sure there is some way to shuffle the posts in a blog but you will just be stuck with the order I put them. This crap is free so read it or don't.

• A bird in the hand will probably bite you or poop on your fingers. Even if they are very costly and worth a lot of money at "Pet Land". Try to get one of the nasty little buggers to fetch a stick.
• He who dies with the most toys, dies!
• A penny saved isn't worth very darn much. Talk about dollars and you might be on the right track.
• You are your own worst critic. The other guys just get under your skin!
• If the going is easy it probably is an ambush (Murphy's rules of Combat but who the hell was Murphy?)
• Kids learn to read until about the end of the second grade. After that they read to learn. Reading is the most important thing a parent can do with their children. Make it fun and good and they will continue to read and learn. I can't imagine a house without reading material. A child ought to want to go to the Library as much as he/she wants to go to the DQ.

Do you know how to get out and stay out of debt? Want the things you have rather than wanting the things you don't. If it is important enough to have something, save up until you can pay cash. Get out of debt and stay there. Most people don't appreciate having a budget and living within it. You aren't the US Government and can print money. It sure a hell isn't worth anything if you don't have any! Why don't schools teach more about money as important as it is to us?
MUD

Denny's Thoughts part 1

The following is just some of the thoughts that invade my life from time to time. Some of them are from others and some are mine. I would give credit to the authors if I could just remember who the hell said them. You will just have to slog through them for a grain of truth (if you want) and put your own credit on them if you do. Here they are:

• Everyone at least once in a lifetime should have a new car. That's it, only once. The cost of depreciation the first year can be as much as $5,000. Add the taxes ($1,000), insurance ($1000) and financing ($1,000) you can see why at the end of the first year you owe more than the car is worth. Ask yourself if a one year old car on the lot at $12,000 is as good as a new one at $20,000? Those first 20,000 miles are a costly bitch. (divide $9,000 by the 20,000 miles) It makes the cost per mile for that first year at .45 cents per mile without the cost of gas, oil or further replacement. I estimate the cost of a new car at somewhere about $1.00 a mile. Like I said, everyone needs a new car once in a lifetime but after that you need transportation.
• Why doesn't Super Chevy magazine care about the cost of gas and mileage? They talk about an engine that generates 455 horsepower but don't care that most of the hot rods get around 10 MPG (at best). I want to get at least 25 MPG with my daily driver. I'll let the 57 stay stock at 13 MPG and just not drive it on a daily basis. HELP!
• If you want to know what is going on in your schools, don't look at the budget, look at the expenditures. That's where the money really goes and is the important thing. A budget is at best a "guesstimate" of what they are going to spend it on. The expenditure list is where it really goes.
• If you think the quality of our educational system is a risk, get off your butt and go there to see. Every parent needs to spend at least one day a year in the classes with their student. Yes, learning is inspiration, but it sure as hell is a lot of perspiration. Been there, done that!
• You'll miss your mother and father when they are gone. It doesn't matter how close you were or how old you are. You'll miss them.
• There will come a time when your description of friends will include the terms “He or she died”. The older you are the more it will be used. As the member of a class that graduated right when the Vietnam War was building up and I already use it a lot. I don’t even begin to count the people hat died in car crashes I didn’t read about.
• When old people say, “I hate it when people say I’m, such and such, because of my age” they really are not looking at the alternative to old age. The leading cause of not having people “arm pit deep” is death. If we really want a solution to the population problem, we need to issue everyone cigarettes and fast cars for their 60^th birthday.
• People talk about the “perfect game” in sports. Duh, it is a game and that’s why people play them. You win some and you lose some and next year everyone will be different and a different group will lose and a different group will win.
• Why does childhood seem so great in our memories? We remember the times we got ice cream and presents and forget the times we learned lessons the hard way. I look at the scars on my hands and know I was one, learning son of a bitch. The problem is we get distracted and often overlook some of the best lessons we learned earlier.
• The rule of unintended consequences should be a class in college and everyone should have to take it. We have some of our best minds “working” our economy and the things that are happening just seem to pop up when if looked at with an open mind it would be apparent that things happen equal (and sometimes greater) to any other action. For example: NAFTA should equal out the jobs in the Americas and make everyone come up to the same level of pay and lifestyles. No stupid! What it really means that the Mexicans making $1.00 an hour will make $1.50 an hour and a lot of our good jobs will flow to Mexico. If we build a fence and deport all the illegals, we will have to mow our own yards and our labor costs will double.

The cycle of life is interesting. As a small child I wanted to learn to read. I then wanted to do adventurous things. For a while I did a lot of those things and now I want to read about adventurous things while my eyesight is still good enough to read.

Say IT Ain't So!

KU got beat? Can't be. We own Bramlidge Coliseum. It is a bad dream and I'll wake up and find out it was all in my mind. No? OK, K-State played one hell of a game and beat the hawks.

Birds, Birds and more damn birds

Right in the middle of transferring pictures to this blog, the power left. My notebook kept working because of the battery but the connection to blogspot.com went Phhhst. again! This blue Jay only stood still this long because of the snow.

One old Black bellied buzzard showed up for some reason.

This is a female Downey Woodpecker and they are pretty.

This Cardinal is eating seeds opn the ground and I have played with the picture several times to sharpen and make the color better. Oh well, The power is back and I'll save this while I have the chance.
MUD

Free Speech and Political Incorrectness!

The other day I was riding with my son and a truck passed us with something hanging from the hole where the trailer hitch should be. Not driving gave me a lot more time to look around and I finally figured out what it was hanging below the bumper. Truck Nuts.
After a good laugh I started to wonder why would someone put such a thing on their truck. Is that a form of free speech? What does it mean, other that you can and someone made them so you could. Is stupid speech in the category of free speech? I guess the coffee cup that was shaped like a breast and you could drink through the nipple was in that poor taste but free category. That cup got passed with laughter at our family white elephant gift exchange until some lady in the family finally "dropped" it. I'm sure that was a literal and figurative drop. Whatever she did, it failed to come back after about three years.
On one of the blogs I read (It is a Canadian and man do they have trouble with the free speech issue) the issue of Jokes about other people, races, places and things was discussed. They said that must contain a grain of truth to really be on point. Kind of like the old KKK joke that we need to do something about the blacks because they have so many children and they'll outnumber us soon. Guess what Bubba between the blacks, the Mexicans and the Muslims we are soon to be the minority here in pick-up land.
I have been re-reading a book by a long lost cousin, Mark tiger Edmonds, called "The Ghost of Scootertrash Past" He rants about a lot of things including the smoke free issue. Our morning paper had an opinion column where some guy was pissed that people could drive SUVs and not not be allowed to smoke in a restaurant. Guess what guy, if you drove your SUV inside the restaurant you would be banned from there also. Why is it so hard for people to realize that what they do does effect others if they blow columns of blue smoke in the air while I am trying to eat? Hell, the EPA should step in and make it illegal for bar workers to be expose to the kind of air they suffer. I'm sure that if it were an assembly plant they would have a million dollars worth of fines or would have to install air scrubbers to keep the air clean. Mark does his best to look like a 60's biker but he rides a BMW. "Kerist on a Crutch" how can anyone who rides a motorcycle that cost more than my first house complain about what anyone else does. For what his bike cost, he could have bought a good truck. He could have traveled in all kinds of weather and had a place to get into out of the rain and sleep if he wanted. He spends a lot of time complaining about the cost of Motel rooms and the fact that they are all run by Pakistanis.
Oh crap, I'm starting to sound like tiger. Oh well, it just started to snow.
MUD

Its Windy Out there!

I awoke this morning hearing a growl outside. The wind has been very unsettled all day. It has been between 15 and 25 MPH from the South all day. Must be some really big front headed this way. Almost always as a big Low comes down from the north, the warm moist air from the south rushes up to greet it. That is why this part of the world is called Tornado Alley. Several years in a row, I-70 would be closed by a blizzard in western Kansas and a tornado would visit SE Kansas.
I hope everything near Tulsa is OK.
MUD