Doc

Yeah, it's true this is the time of year that winter starts taking its toll. You start getting a bunch of teasers of 40 and 50 and even 60 degrees, and then get body-slammed with some very ugly storms and deep-freeze temperatures. Some of the worst storms that I can remember have come in March. However, on those few days when the temperatures do flash up into the 60s and 70s, those days are so darn great. No bushes leaved out yet. No bugs sucking the blood out of you, and everything looking so brand new. No sweat tricking its way down the middle of your back. Just a great time to be alive!

No debate here. I have a lifetime supply of lead bullets for each caliber of rifle that I own. I have enough shot-shells already loaded up to wipe out all the squirrels and rabbits in Ontario County. I am not one to throw out good serviceable products that I paid a wheelbarrow load of money for, and so I know what material I will be shooting until I croak...... It will be the same stuff that people have been shooting forever.

I need some help with that thought. I keep hearing this all the time when they whine about the stock market suffering because of low oil prices. But that is where I get confused. Oil is the primary component of all goods produced ... plastics, fuel for steel furnaces, transport of all products, pretty much everything has the cost of oil factored in at some point in production. So why isn't low oil prices an actual boon to the production of everything but oil? I know I must be overlooking something because low oil prices is universally considered a bad thing. But I'll be darned if I can figure out why.

Such a weird turn this thread has taken. How did a Trump topic become a Papist topic? Is there a severe case of boredom going on here, or simply a wish to say something bad about another member. Yeah, Papist seems to have some rather controversial views, but seriously, we seem to have headed down some weird road that could only be characterized as a personal vendetta. To sit here and argue over stomping or standing-on seems like a hellova strenuous attempt to simply be argumentative. I mean, it really seems kind of silly or malicious or just "strange".

There is something relaxing and peaceful about any body of water. Ocean, lake, river or anything like that has a calming effect. And then there is lure of the unseen. Those giant scaley creatures under water that have always been something that any fisherman thinks about when sees water. For me, there is also a childhood memory comes to mind when I see lakes, of haying season, and how Dad would take us all over for a hot fudge sundae and then a swim at Sandy Bottom on Honeoye Lake when we finally had the hay all in. Great way to get loose of all that chaff that went down the back.

So, I have to wonder. Your walking along minding your own business and all of a sudden a mink pops out the end of a culvert and is looking straight at you. You know he is not going to stand there very darn long.... what? .... maybe a half second or so? So how do you keep your wits about you and make any adjustments necessary, compose the picture and get that shot off in time? That is amazing. Does your camera have some kind of automatic instant focus? I know if it were me, by the time I figured out what was going on and even thought about pulling the camera up, he would be back inside that culvert never to b seen again......lol. It I almost comical to watch me taking a picture. Fuss with this, mess with that. No, not quite right....start over. Oh the light is wrong. Anything that can move will never wind up in one of my pictures.

No shortage of gun-rest in that unit .... lol. I like it!

An uncle and myself did that on weekends when we were in our 20's (he was an uncle, but only a few years older than me. That was our drinking money. We got $10 per driveway to split. But that wasn't really all that bad back then.

From age 6 or so, I had some pretty heavy chores to do around the farm. Feeding and watering the sheep. Water had to be wheeled up to the barn from the house in a milk can in a wheelbarrow. Haying (I was the little guy up in the mow tramping in the loose hay when it was dropped off the overhead hay forks. There were all kinds of household jobs to be done too. For that I got a $1.00 a week allowance. Don't laugh, that financed my trapline which in turn bought clothes. The first off-property job was at age 12, and it was filling and tying bags of wheat on the combine, and picking berries. 1st picking was $.08 per quart. Last picking was $0.10 a quart. I don't remember what I was making bagging grain, but I did ok. Oh, and the farm chores at home were still being done for $1.00 a week.

It sounds like she ha been doing that for a while. Great sound!

Those volumes, and volumes, and volumes of gun laws really worked well there .....eh? I wonder if they filled out all that paper work that we have to fill out when we get a gun....... "Only the outlaws will have guns"

Deer drives are legal.

And perhaps the DEC is privately saying, "yeah ..... sure ..... and your point is?" I believe the draw-down of deer numbers is intentional. I sense panic in the DEC activities regarding their ability to manage populations. I think they are engaged in a lot of experiments and "what-ifs" to try to control deer numbers with fewer hunters/ lesser enthusiasm. Couple the hunting loss of popularity with the ever increasing demands of industries that are basically anti-deer in nature, and you have a recipe for panic among those charged with deer management. This latest fiasco with the antlerless archery deer season was simply the DEC taking the temperature of hunters to see at what point they get a reaction, hoping that they could find out where the breaking point of such activities occurs for future similar maneuvers when needed elsewhere. Jamming firearms into bow seasons is yet another creeping maneuver to see just how far they can go with that. There are all these little signs that the DEC wants to increase productivity and efficiency of hunters to try to figure out what to do when hunting popularity continues to slide toward inadequacy. Hey, it's just a theory, but does explain a lot of irrational decisions lately by the DEC.

I am impressed that anyone's mind even works that way to come up with such a concept. It is totally unconventional, but fits the definition of art bout as perfectly as you can. But it's true. After all that work and creativity who is going to destroy it all to burn the wood?

This stuff all sounds like a great new topic.

Yeah, perhaps it is more the title of the thread that I disagree with than the content of the artile. Actually hound hunting is quite far along the time scale of hunting.

All this fighting is great until the guy that goes down never gets back up again.

Maybe I wouldn't have dreaded sighting in the old Ithaca 12 Ga. so much if I had been using a Lead sled. Now, I don't have any guns that punish me that much, so I use the open set-up with sand bags for checking out the rifles. As far as repeatability, I have 100% confidence in the bags.

If you had tried to get out of the car, you might have found out exactly what the cranky old bird really had on his mind.

What we have to do is to cheapen up heat seeking technology and self-propelled arrows. Now that would be real hunting ..... eh? Let's take his "anything goes" philosophy to it's logical conclusion.....lol. That would almost be as much fun as that computer hunting they tried to get legalized a few years back. That kind of fits real well into the "anything goes" hunting philosophy.

Yeah, there isn't a lot of compounding going on if the interest is annually pulled and spent.

Probably not too many people here remember putting up hay loose in the mow. I was that 5 year old kid that was up in the mow tramping in the hay. Yeah ...... The kid with hay fever coated with chaff stomping around in the air so full of dust that you could hardly see through it. Oh yeah, I worked for one of he neighbors bagging oats on the combine, choking and sneezing. We were a hard-core farming community with big houses and lots of family members in each house. Yeah everyone up and down the valley had those huge houses with several adult family members and even family units under the same roof. We had my grandparents living with us until they all passed. No, we wouldn't think of packing them off to a nursing home as long as we had a roof to offer. In some ways, that style of life was a lot better than today. We took care of our own.

There was a time in America when most rural folks lived that way. Kids were created as a tool for family subsistence. Why do you think all these big old farmhouses looked like they could house several families. That wasn't because they enjoyed cutting firewood to heat unused space. We didn't always live a lifestyle where kids grew up and then headed for opposite ends of the country/world. There was a time when several generations of people lived in the same house.

Thanks for the info. Years ago, we used to boil sap using one of those big galvanized wash tubs, but stopped doing that when somebody mentioned that it might not be a real good idea. Actually nobody got sick, but that doesn't mean that it was a good idea. Also, I did come across an old broken down sugar shack that had a huge galvanized tank over the fire pit. The outfit was a fair sized operation. I knew the guy that ran the outfit, back in the 40's. However, we used to do a lot of things that have since been proven to be not so healthy .... lol.

I knew this would be an interesting topic. When I bought my lifetime hunting/fishing license a few years ago, I hit the jackpot. I got it for the grand total of $50. The state lost money on me the very first year that I bought it, and I know they haven't made a cent off of me. But of course that was a special circumstance that doesn't represent a whole lot of people. But for me, it was an offer I couldn't refuse.