Just sick...

Whenever I'm in a blind or a stand I always think "what if I was here an hour earlier?" or "Yeah it's ocean dark out here, but if I just stick it out another half hour..."

Well, that one really hit home tonight. More than three hours in the blind, plenty warm enough, but but had to pee so bad I couldn't think straight. Finally decided to pack it in.

There is no quiet way out of the blind. Big plastic zippers holding taught fabric, "zzzrrrrrrowwwwwwzzzzzz" I step out, pull the guns through. "zzzrrrrrrowwwwwwzzzzzz" close it back up, head toward the house.   Hear a noise and freeze.

Just in time to hear clomping hooves and see just a white tail bounding away in the dark. 10 minutes longer in the blind, and I'd be slicing up venison right now.

So listening to coyotes all around respond to a locator howl, sitting on the front porch grilling store bought chicken.

Tastes like defeat. 

New blind is set

I picked up a couple of ground blinds on black Friday specials. One is a small 1-man pop-up, I haven't broken that one out yet. The other is a behemoth branded by Brotherhood. Big enough to stand up in, heck, big enough to live in.

I did my best to camo the blind in - by cutting some LFTs and piling them around the base. I tried to toss some on top too, but will have to tie them together to keep them up there.

Mmmm...

I never knew this thing had a plate warmer?

Cold, Holidays, and the Lake House

We had planned to have a visitor for Thanksgiving, but winter storms had other plans. That along with a serious cold snap, made us decide to bug out for the holiday. So we went to our fallback location at the lake.

We miss all our friends in Colorado, and I really miss all our kids. But the holiday was ok and it's always comfortable here at the lake house.

It was a chance to catch up on yard work at the lake house. One of my big peeves from last season was that there were years of leaves that had to be cleaned up. So hopefully getting a jump on that now will save me some work next spring.

Pellets for the stove are much cheaper here, so we'll load up before heading back to the cabin. I got a couple new blinds on a Black Friday sale, and some buckshot, I look forward to getting back up the hill and trying to put some meat in the freezer.

Should be meeting with a guy this week to get serious about putting a roof on the cabin. Then I can get on with the water catchment system. Always plenty to do, if I have the desire to do it.

Movies and other stuff

A good way to look for movies.   I like to peruse Flixter's "upcoming dvd" list, as those are the movies I am likely to have access to.   To find a movie that I will probably enjoy, I look for anything with a viewer rating higher than the critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

If critics love it, I probably hate it. They live to stroke the egos of the Hollywood elite they serve.  Listen to the people,  their reviews tend to amalgamize as they pile up,  and you get a better idea of how real people feel about the flick. 

If the critics rating is higher than the viewers, that's a red flag. There are always exceptions, like when both ratings are very high or very low. But it's a good criteria to get started. 

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Enders Game   
     Two weeks after its release, I finally bit the bullet and went to see this IN A THEATER.  I'm not even sure what the last movie I saw in a theater was - maybe Madagascar 2? - who knows. The house was full of stinky fish smells and Chinese only conversations, so I had to go somewhere.    

It was a great movie, well adapted from one of my top 5 Sci Fi books. I always liked the character a lot, especially when I was young. Strategic and ruthless.  

 Thinking back on it, I could see how those who don't know the book might have found the movie to be flat. I'm sure I was "thinking in" the parts they left out - some big and some small - but memorable enough to me that I subconsciously put them in the story where they belonged.    

I hope they pump out Enders World quick. It'll probably bomb in everyone else's opinion, but I'm sure it'll be great in my mind. 

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The To Do List   
   I really like the star of this picture, Aubrey Plaza (also my favorite strip mall). She was in "Safety Not Guaranteed", which was a brilliant movie. This movie however, maybe less than brilliant.

Girl graduates high school a virgin, and decides she needs to become a complete slut before starting college. Eventually, sort-of realizes the error of her ways, but not really. Ending on the note, "sometimes sex is just sex" which my many years tells me is very rarely true- at least not for both parties.

Aubrey's eye rolling and tongue and cheek demeanor help keep it light and a little better than tolerable. 

Red 2   
     Forced myself halfway through this one. Ugh,if only star power could make a movie. But it doesn't. It really doesn't. 

Killer Joe   
     Phew, where to start on this one. Imagine a spooky and nuanced Matthew McConaughey, a cool and scary character. Surrounded by a a cast you want to fail - except for a cute and cuddly Juno Temple. Very cool movie, check it out. 

The Last Days on Mars   
     Still trying to get back to this one. It looks like a soft scifi:  guy on Mars may have discovered life, falls in a hole. Dat-da-daaa.. skipping along...  He arrives back at the station, takes off his helmet and HOLY CRAP IN A CAN!!!

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Revolution season 1   
     With a couple of Startrek movies under his belt and a new Star Wars flick on the way, I'd like to say that JJ Abrams has the necessary Sci Fi cred to pull off a show like this. But some of his other projects like Lost and Fringe are unwatchable to me - and we can't let him off the hook for Felicity. He does however have a knack for spotting talent (Like Keri Russell, Jennifer Garner, Sonya Walger, and Elizabeth Mitchell), and brings that to Revolution.  

Real quick - because as you know, I hate reviewing the story line - I assume you already have an idea of what that's about. Lights go out, couple people knew it was coming, jump ahead 15 years to the mess we have become.    

At times the plot was a bit tedious, I struggled to stick with it when it was stretched week to week and mired in commercial interruptions. However, sitting and watching episodes rapid fire - it's a great show and flows much better. A big cast where all players are important makes for a more multidimensional experience, and plenty of back story is included to allow you the opportunity to care about the characters (or hate them as the story dictates - hate is a form of caring right?).   

The season wrapped up great, with plenty of surprises. I enjoyed it and will be digging into the next season soon. 

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Banshee  season 1   
     Still not sure where I come down on this one. Ex-con ends up sheriff in a small town (by killing the actual sheriff).  All hell breaks loose from there. Good enough, but some things I struggle with:   
    
One is that every fight lasts 478 minutes during which each contender should have died a dozen or more times. I've seen trained people fight. Fight for their lives. One is always better than the other, even if only a tiny bit. The fight ends quickly, and someone dies horribly.  
    
The other is that every time our protagonist arrives home there is someone waiting in his apartment. As a con and a sheriff, you'd think privacy would be paramount and he'd lock his friggin door. Sometimes it's some misc baddy there to rough him up. More often it's one of three town bimbos come to screw his brains out. Both scenarios seem ridiculous.    That said, they've left us with great set up for season 2, so I'll have 10 or 12 more episodes to decide if I like the show. 

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Modern Family season 4   
     I thought it would be nice to " lounge" a bit and get away from all the serious stuff. You all know the show, and it's 20 minute blurbs will usually evoke a chuckle or two. That held true through the season. Oddly enough, I found myself wanting some intrigue and drama. Will have to be sure to blend candy coated stuff like this with more substantial fare in the future. 

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Caprica   
    It's been a couple years since I've watched Caprica. This BSG prequel is really well done, though a bit laborious mid season. I found that fast forwarding through anything with "Amanda Greystone" Paula Malcolmson for several episodes helped to avoid the mindless tedium of her character wasting time doing nothing. Seriously, she plods along doing nothing that forwards the plot or her character episode after episode -most of that tied to the shows stupidest character "Sister Clarese".    

     More holo-program stuff and a better focus on the Zoe Greystone character would have helped (imho), but it was a cool little spin off. Too bad it never made it past the teaser for season two.

How "off the grid" are you?

We get a lot of suggestions of how to be "off the grid".  My feeling is that off the grid means no government regulated power, water,  or utilities. Other ways to be self sufficient are a bonus, but not a necessity.

We still have cell phones, and actually had to get another since there is only one local company that has service up here. We have satellite internet.  I quit watching TV over a year ago, and don't miss it a bit.

In Oklahoma, some things are bit more difficult. We had planned to plant at least 50 fruit trees on our property. But we've learned that doing so may be more difficult then we thought. What people don't realize is that deer eat everything. Not just the fruit.

We've seen wild persimmon trees better than 20 feet tall and have 3 persimmons at the very top. The tree is reduced to 1 main branch. All of the lower limbs, not just the fruit, but the branches have been eaten by dear. They will stand up on their back legs and eat everything they can reach.

Those trees will bear nothing next season, they may even die.

So planting small trees it's just putting out fresh feed for the deer. Whole trees will disappear overnight. Put a 6 foot fence around each tree? Not out of the question. But eventually they will be big enough to stand on their own, and the deer will trim them back to nothing.

People always say to us you should plant this, or you should plant that, and grow some of this. But they don't understand, we're not just off the grid, we're in the wild. We are competing with raccoons, skunks, dear, birds, and even rats out here. If you plant seeds the seeds are dug up and eaten. Any fruit or vegetable becomes food for the wild animals. One guy we talked to had to put up an electric fence to keep coons out of his strawberries.

So gardening and orchard planting becomes a game of building a fortress to protect your plants.  A game you'll probably loose. The blog is called More Bears than People - but it could be called Thousands More Coons than People.

I also thought that getting meat would be pretty easy.  We're surrounded by tasty critters here. All you need is a gun and you've got meat on the table.  But as I mentioned in earlier posts, that hasn't been as easy as I thought.

I still think there will be successful hunts, when I get the formula right. But we're still eating store-bought meat.

Lots of people turn to livestock to fill the need for protein. Goats for milk and meat. Chickens for eggs and meat. Rabbits, cattle, hogs, and whatever. But then you get into several tough tradeoffs.

Chickens, rabbits, ducks, turkeys and other small defenseless animals out here are BAIT. So you build them fences and fortresses and they get snatched and eaten a little slower.

Coons are near impossible to keep out, and you'll contend with fox, coyote, bob cat, owls and hawks, and potentially even bear and mountain lion.

Bigger livestock LEAVES. So again you're constantly fencing and fortifying - only now to keep them in. And with any of them, you're now trading your time and the cost of feed, medicine, and vet bills for meat. On the small scale, your hand raised meat will cost more than store bought.

The biggest drawback of livestock is that you can never leave. You can't just lock the chickens in the coop for two weeks with a bag of feed and a bucket of water.

Heck even fruit trees require year round watering for the first year or two.

Who wants to be chained to one place for a whole year?  Forget it.

Now and then someone will ask something like "how are you going to be really self sufficient?  You still have to buy clothes and stuff."  Yeah, no shit, what am I going to do - grow cotton, comb it spin it, weave it, and sew clothes out of it?  Screw that, I'll go to Walmart.

So the goal is to be reasonably sufficient on electricity, but we'll still need to supplement with propane. Though the pellet stove requires the purchase of pellets, and wood would be more abundant and free, it's also a hell of a lot of work. Wood piles have also proven to be homes for "special friends" like rattlers, scorpions, and spiders - near the house is bad enough - but carrying them in with the fire wood on a cold night is a bad thing.

I think we can get there on water, but there is more work to be done. If we can get the roof on, than a catchment system follows. If done before Spring, we could conceivably gather enough water for a year.

Getting back to Roots

Roots music, in my understanding, is that early Country and very early Rockabilly which in time became the pop-country and rock and roll we hear on the radio today.

I've never been a fan of modern country music. Some of it's ok, but it's tough to listen to the radio for hours on a country station. Same formulaic composition you find in pop music.

Here in Oklahoma/Arklahoma we have Big Country 107.3.  It's kind of the "oldies" station for country music ('cause there's already 9 generic country channels).  Big Country is awesome. 

I'm hearing songs I remember from when I was a kid, and yeah, I'm singing along - loud!