Smiling Like A Butcher's Dog

I lit the first fire of the season tonight after scoring some seasoned oak from a friend. Feels good on these old bones after 10 days of rain and cold here on SoCal. I'm tempted to curl up on the hearth like a good dog and enjoy the new found warmth. I missed the loud wood crackling and burning wood smell from the chimney when outside. The fireplace smell takes me back to the Ozark hills where I deer hunt, every cabin has a fire lit 24 hours. It's their source of heat and cooking and where everyone gathers each night to share their tales from the day. Some whittle, others chew and spit their tabaccky.

The seasoned oak below in the pic was even split when I picked it up. Can't beat that with a stick. Chopping and splitting wood is one chore I do enjoy. Nothing more manly than that and it's great exercise. There was a time when I was younger and helped a friend run his wood for sale business and I'd knock out 20 to 30 cords of wood a year. Now I'm lucky to cut 1 to 2 cords a year. The wood usage here in the warmer valley of Redlands isn't nothing compared to the mountains above me or back home in Missouri where temps dip down to 0F almost every year.

I don't know if it's me getting old or it was the move to sunny southern California but I used to be able to tolerate the cold better. I'd even take out the trash in the snow in my bare feet in Missouri with my mom hollering at me that I would catch my death of cold the whole time. Now I'm like the rest of of the native Kali-Fornyans, I'm lighting a fire when it hits 60F. 

At 50F the rabbit fur muff is coming out of the back of the closet. 

At 40F I'm stove up. 

At 30F I think we die out here. 

Trying to find a windshield ice scraper in SoCal is like looking for Bigfoot, the trusty old credit card is what I usually end up using when heading into the higher elevations.

The coming of fall also means a wardrobe change around the house when lounging. Gone are the flip flops, t-shirt and fishing shorts worn during the hot summer here. Now it's the fleece lined shoes from Weber's Camo Leather Goods and camo sweatpants from Mossy Oak. When it gets real cold I break out an old Woolrich wool long sleeve shirt I've had forever. I've worn that wool shirt in some nasty weather and never been cold in it. It's my blankie.

Now to finish the mood I need some bourbon or hot hard apple cider with a cinnamon stick in it. Here's Mom from Mom's Country Orchards stand in Oak Glen CA showing how to swig the hard stuff. Mom reminds me of Granny Clampett, they both are firecrackers and fun to talk to.

Who's burning wood already? Who'd doing the bonfires out back in the yard? Who's got their cider and is sitting by a glowing fire tonight? 

P.S. Chimney Safety. Make sure you or a hired Chimney Sweep check and clean your chimney every fall before you light your first fire. Climb up in your attic and roof to look for signs of vapor leakage where chimney sections join, signs of heat damage to the chimney itself, and signs of heat damage to any trusses, sheeting, or other wood anywhere near the chimney.  If you're pretty handy you can buy a chimney brush at the hardware store and make a pole for it out of two10 foot pieces of 3 quarter inch schedule 40 PVC. Put it together to do the job, take it apart to store it. Takes about 30 minutes start to finish to clean out a 20 foot chimney.

Sniping Tree Rats

I guess most country boy learn to shoot from hunting rabbits and squirrels as a child, I know I did. Dad liked to hunt them with a shotgun but I learned real fast that can cause some problems when you bust up the smelly guts with the shotgun pellets. Pop had me stand downwind while we field dressed my first gut shot squirrel and I about blew lunch when I pulled his jammies off.

Our neighbor Thadell used a bolt action .22 and shot every one of his squirrels in the head. This caught my attention and turned me into a rimfire fan for taking sneaky tree rats. To me there's nothing more fun they doing the Mohican Sneak up on a wary squirrel. Once in range you still have to get a clear sight picture to snipe the head and drop it clean to the forest floor without hanging up in a tree canopy or fork in the trunk. Precison work for sure along with a heck of a lot of patience. Some of these dedicated squirrel assassins are known to gather each October near Plato Mo. This is their mark.

The first trick to finding squirrels is to find places where they hang out, den trees are the easiest to spot. The dark circles in oak tree trunks are signs that Mr. Squirrel is close by. Your biggest heartbreak will come if they spot you first as you ease into their back yard and race to their safe hole, leaving you with no easy shot.

 

This year I was able to enjoy a warm evening hunt with Doc and his young son T-Bone. T-Bone has the eyes of an eagle so us old dudes let him find the grays and reds for us. Doc was using a H&R 12 gauge signel shot shotgun and I had my trusty Marlin 25MN .22 WMR bolt rifle out for a walk in the timber. The leaves were late in turning colors and dropping so it was tough to see anything low in the dense ground cover. The evil wind also fought against us, blowing the huge oak and hickory treetops around all afternoon. I've found on windy noisy days like this that most animals lay up, they just don't like keeping track of all the motion and commotion.

 

The population also seemed a bit low in the area where we normally hunt around Plato MO with Doc ending up with one gray for the pot at camp.Try as I might with den trees all around me I never even saw a squirrel.

Here in SoCal we're not allowed to hunt tree squirrels, something that just made me scratch my head when I moved here. Some "Save The Squirrel Society" always blocks any attempt to start a season for them here. I could travel a few hours north to be able to hunt them in the next county and I may do so again this year, it would just be so much more convenient to hunt them here. I can't imagine being a kid here in this county and not being able to get home from school and head out for an evening squirrel hunt.

How's your squirrel season going so far?

Well Hello Harvest Moon

Yesterday was the first day of fall and the the first Harvest Moon in 20 years. Neil Young sang a song about the Harvest Moon way back when. I knew it was time when my friend Kellie from MO posted on her Facebook wall that the morning smelled of damp oak trees and smokey chimneys in the Ozarks Mtns where she was working. My mind shot back to near Cherokee Pass Mo where I grew up hunting. Those early fall mornings with the thick fog rising off the pastures and the fireplace smoke curling up from the old cabins along the hollers.

The harvest moon from last night, I missed it rising from the horizon where it's at it's best.

 To me the fall season is the best one of the four. How can you beat apple cider, pumpkin pie, bonfires, ripe persimmons and Halloween? Hockey also starts up and this Blues fan is always glued to the radio or TV watching the coolest game in the world. And we can't forget the hunting season either. Our annual ADSH squirrel hunt is always the first weekend in Oct. It will be 33 years and counting for our gathering near Plato MO this year.

The last harvest moon I can remember I was bowhunting deer near Swan Lake NWR in MO. I had stopped by the refuge to film some big bucks one evening. The local farm boys where running combines all day and night trying to get the corn in on the refuge land. I came out of the marsh along Yellow Creek after dark had fallen and there across the moonlit cornfield was the harvest moon, perched perfectly on the horizon. The big lunar orb was so large it felt like I could reach out and touch it. I paused to take in what I was seeing, the combines running in the foreground against the moonlit timber in the background.

So what are your fall memories and fall traditions?

Dove Opener 2010, Cibola AZ & Blythe CA

I spent 6 days in some of the hottest dove hunting areas along the Colorado River in Southern CA. Here's some video of the fun and sights.

Part 1



Part 2

Hello Tokyo, Is This Thang On? New HTC EVO Phone

Got my grubby hands on a new HTC EVO smart phone last week. In and out in 30 minutes at the Sprint Store. Took my old cell company AT&T about 30 minutes to activate the new Sprint account. Pretty easy to figure out the functions, the battery life seems a bit weak at first look. Audio does have that underwater sound to it on calls sometimes. Surfing the Interwebz, sending messages, posting pics from the camera to Facebook all worked perfect.

The best part of the whole deal was working with Clarisse. She was 3x hotter in person than in this pic. Lord have mercy.

First week with the HTC EVO smart phone. The GPS app with say location and go is slick, only screwed me once out of maybe 20 trips (bout 1/2 mile off).

The 2.2 Android OS has a root hack finally posted over on xda-developers.com but sweet jeebus it's 3 pages of DOS commands. WTH? I need that WiFi hotspot tether bad for the laptop. Not to fret, a one click root process is about done.

The flashlight app is the shizzle in rattlesnake and scorpion country. Email, Twitter and Facebook was easy to set up. This is my first touch screen phone, it does take some getting used to for typing and not hitting the wrong link or icon on a screen. Size and weight are good for my tee shirt or surf shorts pockets.

The 3G WiFi screams in town, out in the boonies not so much. It's workable for the Internetz and email. YouTube videos are a joy to watch on the big screen with no stoppages to buffer or herky jerky playback. The EVO has 4G  (4rth generation) capability which rolls out here in SoCal in the fall of 2010.

The Friends Stream is nice to combine Facebook and Twitter feeds into one screen to ease the boredom in the airport.

So far Sprint's coverage has been good, even out in the empty desert south of Cibola AZ.

I went with the Aliph Jawbone Icon ear bud, The $39 hardwired ear bud the Sprint Store had sucked and the salesman warned me not to even try it. If that is so why even have the crappy non functional one on the rack to tempt suckers like me?

The one big beef I have is the lame AC/DC micro USB charger plug that plugs into the bottom of the phone. It doesn't lock into the phone so it's constantly having to be plugged back into the phone when you move the phone around in the car or on the table. I guess many of the new phones are using this type connection for power and data but some engineer needs to rethink this weak link FAIL.

One other minor bitch is my older IBM laptop doesn't have USB 2.0 so I can't sync the phone to that older laptop.

The camera is pretty good, I'm shooting 1 meg high quality pics that are stored as .bmps. Video worked fine to record the neighbor's drunken wife swerving all over the road on labor day weekend. The one small nag is close up pics sometimes are not in sharp focus, not sure if that's me or there is no macro mode or what.

Low light pic wasn't too bad on auto setting.

Fast action (30 mph) pic was okay, some overexposure in upper right.

I know, you're wondering "Why not an iPhone"? Well, to be brutally honest I'm tired of all the "Network Busy" errors from AT&T's overloaded network. The iPhone is just too popular right now. I like the bigger display of the EVO and the fact their apps are catching up to all the iPhone apps. Add in that Sprint has built their network out a lot better than AT&T and you have my vote. The Sprint phone bill is also cheaper, $69, if you need unlimited data and messages. I made my new phone decision after putting a Droid X, Samsung Captivate and iPhone through some testing. The one biggie I wanted but didn't get was the Super AMOLED screen which works better in bright sunlight.

Bottom line, if you need to take your office on the road so you can read email, share pics and video on Facebook and Twitter, surf the wild wild Interwebz, find addresses in the dark, this is a must have tool. 

Oh yeah, almost forgot, you can also make phone calls with it since it's also a cellphone. I almost forgot to add that part in from all the fun I'm having using the other features.

Blogger & Forum Ripoffs You Should Know About

If you write a blog or run a forum you need to know about the corporate snoop/spy bots that crawl your website or blog. These bots scrape your information then strip off your link and any info that is not relevant and sell the pertinent info to companies tracking their key words using social CRM platforms. According to the sellers of these platforms they allow companies to listen, engage, and act on their customers’ conversations across the entire social web.

This stripped and packaged info IS NOT available to the public unless they pay to get it. This unauthorized use of your website content also violates your copyright since they are using your work product without your permission. These bots also suck huge amounts of your bandwidth on your server as they crawl your site night after night looking for changes or new content.

Two of the bigger snoop bots are Radian 6 out of Canada www.radian6.com/crawler and Scout Lab. Using robot.txt to block the Radian 6 bot DOES NOT work, you have to email them to be taken off their crawl list. You can block the IPs Radian 6 bots use. Radian 6 uses the IPs 142.166.0.0/16  and 207.179.0.0/16.  You can block them using your IP block on your server admin panel or htaccess. If you're not sure how to block IPs contact your website host and they can do it for you in most cases. If you pen a blog you may not have control over this. I believe Word Press has a plug in for blocking IPs and stopping scraping.

More and more of these scraper sites are popping up around the world. Google is reportedly penalizing these public scraper sites in their search index ranking for having duplicate content but I wouldn't leave it to Google to watch my back. The sites like Radian 6 that charge for your content should also not be allowed to make money off your hard work.

Yo-Yos For The Troops

My friend Albert over at The Rasch Chronicles is in the sand box and he's found the perfect item to alleviate some of the boredom among the troops. Yo-yos. In my day it was Frogger, the hand held electronic game, where you had to jump the frog from pad to pad to keep him alive. That game kept us from going insane on many DZs and airport ramps.



Take a peek at Albert's call for yo-yos and see if you can help out. If you can't afford to mail them overseas just holler at me here and you can send them here and I'll ship them over for you.

http://trochronicles.blogspot.com/2010/07/yo-yos-for-troops.html

1st yo-yos arrive.

http://trochronicles.blogspot.com/2010/08/first-yo-yos-arrive.html

Thank you Albert.