Banging with Gramps

The Great Annual Clan Pheasant Shoot-At is history, and Camp Jiggleview has reverted to its genteel semi-squalid quietude.  It is  now inhabited by a mere six legs (one biped plus New Dog Libby) compared to about 40 at the peak.

This gathering of armed citizens and their aristocratic dogs has been going on for close to 20 years. Its motto is something like search and destroy prior to grins over unhealthy food and a certain small ration of good whiskey. 

Every annual session leaves a special memory. This year it came from our friend Dan who shared the Camp J Transient Officers Quarters with my son, grandson, and four-leggers Ruby and  Storm. Dan suffered a minor thumb cut Thursday -- something about a small mishap with the action of his OU gun. Over Friday morning coffee he told me he would be leaving early because the wound had been badly exacerbated. I asked for details. 

Well, I was rearranging dogs in the sleeping bag and ...

And if that doesn't  perfectly capture the flavor of these things, nothing does.

---

One more, almost as good.

I have an intricate range  box, the product of my late father's creative mind and careful workmanship. When my youngest heir and assign, age 17,  opened it he found a three-screw Ruger Single-Six, a Colt Huntsman, and a GI Colt 1911A1.

I allowed as how we still had enough daylight to run back out to the countryside for a spot of handgun practice and asked him to pick a pistol. Whereupon: "Let's just take the whole box." 

Is that a well-trained lad or what?

And yet another crisis in the our current Age of Ineptitude:

The Senate has scheduled an early evening procedural vote Tuesday for a sportsmen's bill that will decide the fate of 41 polar bear carcasses that hunters want to bring home from Canada as big-game trophies. Hunters killed the bears just before a 2008 ban on polar bear trophy imports took effect, but were not able to bring them home before the Fish and Wildlife Services listed them as a threatened species.

A small suggestion: Whenever an issue of this magnitude rises above the decision-making capacity of a clerk-typist, turn it over to a smart GS7.  Give him or her 30 seconds to say yes or no, or to order a coin toss.

Fer krissakes.

---

AP characterizes the bill as 19 measures "favorable to sportsmen." Okay, but I'll bet my second-best rifle that at least 17 of them -- including the bears -- do nothing more than fix idiocies previously created by by presidents, congresspeople, or the unelected regulators of national life.

The Second Four-Year Plan

TMR has been politics free since the Tuesday sadness, and it's still not quite ready to add it's mite to the national noise except in a brief and general way. The election left the TMR feeling like a different Travis McGee, suffering from  "...a bad burger, too quickly eaten."

Freedom lost ground. We can look forward to new dictates which will have the primary effect of making us apply for more permission ships and hall passes as we try to go about our productive -- or at worst harmless -- daily business. The de facto devaluation of our currency will continue and probably accelerate.

it is quite discouraging.

Prepping for a Sandy

There's nothing contrived for a  photograph here. That's where and how the lanterns and the atlas live. It's a corner of the big, libertarian bay window installed some years ago.

( Libertarian" in the sense that the project required, but was built without, a permission slip from the Regulators of the village of Smugleye-on-Lake. The sheriff has not been around with a warrant yet, illustrating that you sometimes get away with egregious anti-social behavior.  Part of the secret is just doing it while keeping your mouth shut until the statute of limitations runs out.)

Our power grid is quite dependable out here, even in the land of the tornado and the fierce blizzard. But sometimes the lights do go out, and when that happens at night I am in Room 101. The Worst Thing in the World is boredom.

Here in just a couple of square feet is an escape, illumination and information.

It isn't everything a fellow needs for survival, just a start. But, funny, it just seems to lead to other units of self-sufficiency. A few more lanterns, several feet of books, candles, LED flashlights, stashed lentils, rice, canned food, and so forth.

I tend to identify this attitude as "country," but I'm probably wrong. Even in Manhattan, Hoboken, there must be thousands of citizens of common sense and the ability to think ahead. We're led to an opposite view largely by the electric television industry which finds it more dramatic, and hence better for the Neilsons, to point their cameras exclusively at the bleaters.

"Don't nobody come to help me yet. Whattem I gonna do?"

I dunno  for sure. I suppose you could try hanging another picture of President Obama or Governor Chris your wall.