yes... I mean no!

Accomplishments seem so surreal sometimes. We spend all of our time and energy getting through the task...and then when it is finally over we somehow don't want them to end. It is the true dichotomy! The ultimate oxymoron. Come here, go away! No don't go! What a weird way of processing things. To me it seems to be a seasonal phenomenon, normally the spring. I wonder if that is because that is when most of us graduate from school. That is also the time if you have ever been involved in any winter recreational leagues that you are truly ready for them to end as well. Then two weeks later you wish it hadn't ended so soon. I mean it was only thirty six weeks long! We are definitely creatures of habit...even if we can't wait to kick the habit. I don't know if we will ever be able to just live in the moment and enjoy the feeling, even when it is the most hectic. But it has got to be a better feeling then wishing it wouldn't go... after complaining over the last several months that we wish it would just end. Hmmmm???

It's official!

Spring is officially in the books as far as I am concerned. I know this because this is how my spring always looks to those of us who spend time in the Ozarks. The peepers and wood frogs and chorus frogs are in full concert. The Nan king cherry and service berry are in full bloom. Winter flocks of turkeys are breaking up and the morning air is filled with song bird music as they come awake with the first morning blush of light to the east.

The woods have a smokey smell from people in the surrounding areas burning hay fields to encourage the early spring green up, and on occasions that smoke smell is from the woods that have caught fire from untended burns.
The
rivers run full from spring rains so that travel at times is difficult, do to the low water crossings. This sometimes can and does add countless miles to a normally short trip.
Spring has also arrived because that is the time when the stock men and those in the deer management arena make sure that their is plenty of mineral available for our four legged ruminants. To insure a good healthy offspring.
This is spring to me. This is the spring that I know where one stands out on the high ridge points at dawns early light listening for turkeys gobbling , with a warm cup of coffee in your hand, in anticipation of the season to begin. A few snow geese flying north still, heading to their breeding grounds on the Arctic tundra, with the rest of us hoping that we don't get a late spring freeze.

I know it is spring because I just picked the first five ticks off of me. Welcome back...welcome back.

say what?

I never thought that life would be quite like this! I am ever so amazed at how many things that I don't know. I swear that it seems as though I am learning ten completely different things a day this last month. I know I said in one of my early blog entries that if we aren't learning something everyday that I don't know why we are on this mud ball, or something to that sort of thought. But wow I feel as if I am going into sensory overload. The flip side of this is the fact that I absolutely love this feeling...of pushing my grey matter to the limit. The flip flip side to this is the idea that a lot of the stuff I am learning would probably not even get a yawn from most of my readers. Its amazes me how we react to stuff that we already know, or is assumed to know. As opposed to the things that we learn for the first time. I am not sure why we act / react to these things in the manner that we do, but it does strike me as interesting. Why are we not as excited about someone elses learning experiences like we are our own? Does that make us shallow or indifferent or callous? Or could it be that our ego just kicks in to tell ourselves that hah...we already knew that,... to cover up for the things that deep down in our psyche ... we know that their are things in this life that we know absolutely nothing about, but feel as though we should already know these things... at this point in our life. Because we also know that at some point we are going to be at that first time learner level as well. When someone else will be standing their next to us thinking what we are thinking now... that we should have already learned that... Wow, the ego is an amazing thing!

News...what News?

Is it just me that feels that the soul purpose of the news media is to dumb down the people of this country, or what? I'm not just talking the stuff on television, but the print media as well. I know I am not the first person to complain about this stuff, so I will attempt to not,... turn this into some incessant banter, but here goes. We have news casts that are supposedly thirty minutes long. In this news cast their is approximately eighteen minutes of stuff that isn't commercials. Take out the Sports....which isn't news... it's entertainment. Take out the entertainment section because, well.... it's the same as Sports. So now we are down to roughly ten minutes of stuff to talk about. They spend another three to five minutes doing crap like, try it before you buy it, or their investigating report on someone on the city counsel that parked in front of a parking meter that was broken so they wouldn't have to pay! This passes for news? Throw in the other everyday stuff about a house fire, a car wreck, and Paris Hilton doing a photo shoot in Atlanta. That gives you three minutes to talk about the war, politics on the hill, the financial debacle that the nation is in, and a ten second sound bite of the president,.... in where ever he is for the day!
The print media is not any better. The sensational stuff makes the headlines. The rest of the real news gets a paragraph on pg. 12 buried between the Lipitor add, and the Spring white sale at Wal-mart. When as a culture we don't read, and our kid's don't read, and pop culture makes the "news" as the way that we define ourselves in some sort of ego extension. When critical thinking skills become less important than the shoes that we wear, or the car that we drive, or neighborhood that we live in. That to me is the real news! That is why everyone has an opinion on Iraq, but no one can find it on the map. Most people couldn't tell you weather Saddam was a Shite, or a Sunni. It feels that the only place that you can get an accurate report on the news is on your local PBS. station or the BBC. It is definitely the only place where you can listen to two sides, with opposing views, actually talk for more than two minutes on a particular subject without some interruption informing me of some other late breaking news. Like congress investigating baseball and steroid use. It's the entertainment industry. They get paid for putting butts in seats for money. Who cares! When Sit-coms become funny, and reality TV becomes real, and the lobbyist in D.C. have used up all of their multinational petroleum industry's money buying seats in congress, and the White house. Give me a call. That will be news!

Global Warming?

I don't profess to know much about anything real or imagined, but here is what I do know without a shadow of a doubt. I have been going down around the Lake of the Ozarks for over thirty years now, and the one thing that has been more than blatantly obvious is the fact that the armadillo has begun a more than subtle push northward. Upward from it's more southern climates of the southwest and the deep southern states. Until around ten years ago the only place I ever encountered these opossums on the half shell was south of Springfield, Mo.

What gives? Could it be that the little critter has finally morphed to the point that it can tolerate, and even survive a colder climate? How can it do that when its primary diet is insects / bugs, grubs and other little invertebrates? I understand during our milder winters that it could be possible for the insects to remain realitivily active, but how does this explain how they ( the armadillo ) can survive the two to three weeks every winter when we get the Alberta clippers, that blow in artic air, and freezes everything solid enough that kids can ice skate on the area lakes? Have they developed the ability to somehow go into a sort of suedo hibernation? If this is true.... then we as humans have probably just witnessed one of the most amazing feats in nature that happened so effortlessly that we didn't even notice. And we consider ourselves the developed ones......shoot we can't even take care of our own young in the richest country in the world! Go figure !! p.s these photos were taken in Climax Springs, Mo. by yours truly,... in January 2008. I have also witnessed dead Armadllo's on 50 Hwy. in Lee's Summit MO.

THE END!

Hoppin down the bunny trail

With Easter on our door step it just seems apropos to look at where we are and, where we are going. Seeing how Easter represents a fresh start, or a new beginning from our longest days of winter, I am always excited as the vernal equinox approaches. It is the balance point between winter and summer when you need your heater in the morning, and a T-shirt in the afternoon. When you can still get hypothermia, and sunburned all in the same day! When upland chorus frogs call in the after afternoon, and get quite in the evening. When tom turkeys gobble,.. but are still in winter flocks. It is still neat to watch everything try to reach a homeostasis. As the year ramps up into full speed ahead we are often given the opportunities to take a new path or direction. I am thinking that we shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying whether a certain path is the right one, but to just follow our instincts for a change. After all... it has been working for us for thousands of years, and so far so good. It all balances out.
If following your instincts is good enough for the birds, bee's, bunnies, and bison, it ought to be good enough for us! It's just the fear of the unknown that screws us up. Heck... we ain't gettin off of this mud ball alive anyway. So if we aren't afraid of dying, why should we be afraid of living?
For those of you who recognize where these pictures are from, you know these roads are completely different...and coming from different directions, but the destination still ends in the same place....where it all began.....home.


Have a great spring, we deserve it! Yohon.

You see it... we saw it !

As some of you may have heard we are into another round of selective logging. Things have been going pretty well, and it appears that the loggers may be finished in another couple of weeks with their part of the operation. Then we plan on having them smooth out the logging roads, push the tops to the side of the ridges, push in a few ephemeral pools for the amphibians, and ground nesting,... (aka: Gallinaceous birds. ) In the mean time spring is fast approaching as always. Per usual it is hell trying to get everything done, and get out of the woods before the bluebirds start their thing.... with the turkeys right on their heels. What I wouldn't give for another month of winter! After twenty some years of doing this the feeling is the same every year....never enough time. :( On a brighter note we did seem to uncover where the inordinate amount of rust was coming from on the skidders though,....I believe that the pictures will do most of the explaining. This is a wilderness shot. The guys are whizzing on the equipment again...could not find a tree because we chopped them all down!

One of them got their zipper caught...the others looked around to see who would help. Priceless!