wondering on the net

Been looking on tumblr.com for Shnannon, mom said she was there now and not on blogger.com.  story time for shannon on blogger is only showing me posts that are over a year old.  something is not right with that.  i tried to open my own tumblr account.  i did it but i really don't know what to do with it.  so I guess I'll just go run on the treadmill for a while.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

After a long day at work, finishing inspection reports late and then an excellent meal that Vicki prepared, I spent the rest of the evening packing for Colorado.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Left the house about 4:00 am. Drove all day to Durango, CO where I bought my elk tag at wall mart, along with a few supplies from a list I made on the road. As I drove and was thinking about hunting and camping, it would occur to me that I needed this or that and I would jot it down.

I arrived in camp about 5:45 Colorado time and began immediately setting up camp. I camped in Ironton Park, in the Saratoga site, the same site Jeff and I camped in last year. I was almost done when I heard a bull elk bugle. It sounded like he was less than 100 yards to the north of me, just across the creek. A few minutes later he bugles a short scream again. I picked up my bugle call and let loose a soft, high pitched scream and he immediately screamed back a long, aggressive bugle, followed by several growling chuckles. My heart started racing, and I made a cow call and he came right back with a short, scream, like saying, "get over here babe".

I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, but I pulled on a camo hoody and picked up my bow, strapped on my release and headed for the creek. By the time I got to where the bugling was coming from, he was gone. I made a couple of cow calls, but never heard back from the bull. But I had a renewed excitement for this trip. The next afternoon I was talking to a guy from Ohio and I told him my story and he said that about that time, a bull and his cows crossed the highway just north of the campground, stopping traffic on 550 for several minutes.

I got into my sleeping bag about 9:00 pm and even though I was sleeping on the ground, I slept pretty good after a super long day.

Friday, September 16, 2011

I had set my alarm for 5:30 and woke to a pretty nice morning, about 44 degrees and calm. I at some yogurt and a GoLean granola bar and dressed for hiking. The sky was clear, but I packed my rain gear anyway, which turned out to be an excellent idea. I drove up to the first abandoned mine and parked the truck, grabbed my backpack, strapped on my release, picked up my bow and started walking uphill. The road is very steep, and it was just starting to get light. I hiked up to the south upper meadow with full intent of going to the north end of the north upper meadow, but it was 10:30, I'd heard only one faint, far away bugle earlier, but not seen any elk. I stopped to rest, ate some elk sticks and a Cliff bar while the rain subsided for a few minutes. I sat there, watching the meadow for about an hour, and it continued to rain off and on the whole time. I was very fatigued from the steep ascent, and it was now 11:30, so I decided to walk back down.

Once back in camp, I ate my tuna and spinach wrap Vicki made for me and took a nap in the truck. When I awoke, it was still raining and very cold. I tried to call home with OnStar, but they said I didn't have enough minutes. Couldn't connect with OnStar to get more minutes, so I drove out to the highway to glass the meadows up top. That is where I met the guy from Ohio, who also told me that the elk I'd heard that morning came from the west side of the highway with tree branches stuck in his antlers and ran across the highway south of tailings pond and into the forest, screaming ever so often.

I got back into camp about 4:00 pm and gathered my stuff for an evening hunt. It had stopped raining and the sun popped out for a bit to warm me up. I walked from camp, across the creek to the north and up the bank where the bull and his cows had come through the evening before. I sat on a rock in good cover and waited till dark, but they did not use the same route that night.

Back in camp, I boiled some water for a meal of chicken curie and rice, drove down toward Ouray, and called my wife. After dinner, I crawled into my sleeping bag for a rough night on the ground. It rained all night long. I got up at least six times to step outside and it was getting colder.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

When my alarm went off at 5:30, it was still raining so I decided to stay in the sack, rather than dress in the rain and go mountain climbing. I finally got out of the sleeping bag about 7:30 and it was still raining. I ate cold chicken and risotto for breakfast and then climbed into the truck to get warm. It was 38 degrees. I watched X-MEN First Class. By noon it had warmed up to 39 degrees and the rain had turned to a mix of snow and rain. As I am writing this, the snowflakes are big and fall hard onto the truck. Kind of like snow, rain, hail. I think I'll climb into the back seat and take a little nap. Crazy, but I'm truly thinking of packing it all up and heading back home!

Well, the sun came out and the mountain tops were white with snow. In camp, everything was wet and white with a "dusting" of heavy wet snow. I drove up to the pond (Jeff will know where that is) to look around. The ground at that elevation (just under 12,000 feet) was covered with 4 to 6 inches of snow and it was about 34 degrees up there. There were a couple of deer grazing above the pond and I sat and watched the does. 2 fawns appeared and then their mother and another doe. They meandered up and over a little ridge. In the mean time, I walked a bit, sat a bit, took a few pictures and blew on my elk bugle call a couple of times. After a bit, all of the deer came running back into the valley of the pond and stood alert with ears and eyes turned from whence they'd come. My thinking was that my elk calling had interested a bull and he was on his way to our sanctuary. I hustled to a stand of brush, bow in hand and ready to cow call him over for a shot. One hour later, nothing. The deer had returned to grazing and only occasionally glancing back over the ridge. Eventually, they even returned to the high point and lost their urgency to flight. The sun began to creep toward the western horizon, so I climbed back into the truck and made my way back down the mountain.

 

 

  

That evening I feasted on freeze-dried lasagna. It was amazingly good and I ate the whole bag, while I watched a Dirty Harry movie in the truck. I decided that the back seat of the truck was much more comfortable, so I grabbed my pillow from the tent and pulled a blanket over me in the back seat for the night, rather than sleep on the ground in the tent. It was warmer in the truck, and I turned the truck on with the heater on low for short periods of time during the night. But my knees began to ache because you cannot stretch out and I tossed and turned most of the night. The sky cleared though and the stars and the moon lit up the woods as the temperature dropped into the 20's that night.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Finally, it was morning, and I was so sleepy from the rough night that I didn't really want to get up and go hunting ... but I did. I went back to the road I started on Friday morning and started walking. The only problem was that my stomach was torn up, rolling and aching. I didn't get far before I had to stop for relief. In fact, my walking was interrupted 4 times that morning. Freeze dried meals may be convenient, because of the light weight, and they may be delicious, but they run through you like ... well ... after a couple of hours I decided to head back to camp. I'd planned on hunting all day Sunday, sleeping in the woods that night and heading back home on Monday morning, but after thinking on that a bit, I decided that I'd rather sleep in a bed that night. By noon I had everything loaded in the truck and was on the highway, headed north.

The drive home was pretty un-eventful. Apart from having to stop quite often during the first leg of the trip. I made it to Raton, NM where I got a pizza from Pizza Hut and an excellent night's sleep at the Holiday Inn. In bed by 10:00, I slept nearly 10 hours! Got a cup of coffee and headed home. The only elk I saw on this trip was on the way home, 500 yards off the highway in southeastern Colorado. They had buffalo too. Still, that was kind of cool, but it would have been so much nicer if the elk had walked into my hunting area while I was sitting, waiting and watching. Oh, well, I'll never tier of seeing the mountains, breathing the thin mountain air and seeing those star-lit skies. The rock formations, waterfalls, snow on the peaks ... it is all so amazing.

I thank the Lord for allowing me to enjoy that part of His creation one more time.

Da Gym (per Amanda's request)

I have been going to Fit Together for the past, I don't know, 6 years? When I first started, I was over 255 lb. and always feeling wore out, achy, sluggish ... I lost about 50lbs. in 8 months or so, was doing my cardio regularly, got up to running for an hour on the treadmill. When I started I was walking for about 20 minutes at a time. I actually won the cardio challenge and won a new pair of tennis shoes. I bought all new clothes, even some new hunting clothes, and went to the mountains elk hunting. That was my goal, to get in shape for the "elk hunt of a lifetime". So, after the elk hunt, I let the diet slide, stopped the cardio, but still did my 5:15am work outs every MWF. Gained a little weight back, but called it "lean mass". I built back up to 3 to 5 miles 3 or 4 times a week on the treadmill and ran in a 5k that spring, 30:52. I was 50 years old. The cardio thing is what really gets hard to keep up. The next February, at 51, I ran another 5K with Ange, and finished in 36:21. Lost a little endurance I guess. Last year, I tried to get in shape for a half marathon. In August I ran a quarter marathon in like an hour and 6 minutes. I was at 235lbs, still not where I wanted to be, but my foot started hurting all the time. Plantar Fasciitis I guess. Really, I had to stop running. I still went elk hunting with Jeff and when we got back from the mountain hiking trip, I was down to 225 and feeling pretty good. Late fall is the hardest time to stick with the program. Since then, I have slowly crept back up into the 240's and have been as heavy as 250. I've been riding my bike since the late spring, up to 20+ miles, no problem. But running still seems to be a problem for me. I've tried swimming laps in the pool, but have a hard time staying consistent with that work out. Tyler asked me if I wanted to do a triathlon with him on Oct 2, and I've been trying to get into condition to do the 500 meter swim, 21 mile bike ride and 5 mile run but I'm not sure that I'm going to be ready.

My trainer at the gym has had me doing cross fit workouts, lots of core and cardio stuff. One day, at the end of my circuit he put the weighted vest on me an I got on the treadmill. He set the incline at 15 and I started walking at a 3.2 ... 3.5 ... 4.0 (jog) ... and then 4.5 and then up to 5.0. Running up hill with a weighted vest on for 2 minutes had me sucking air so hard, I sounded like I was an asthmatic. I tried to grip the handles and get a heart rate reading, but I was sweating so profusely that it wouldn't register. When It finally did, my heart rate had slowed a bit, down to 161 bpm. 55 year old hearts aren't supposed to beat much faster than that.

I had my blood work done the other day and my cholesterol is too high (220) and my triglycerides are above normal, which means I have too much fat in my blood. Everything else was OK, blood sugar, Billy Reuben (I know that's spelled wrong, but that's what it sounds like) was OK, liver functioning OK. But how do you get the fat out of your blood? and how do you get your cholesterol down? Diet and exercise.

So, you might say, it sounds like your exercise is going OK, but you still need to do cardio 3 or 4 times per week, 20 to 30 minutes of jogging or fast walking ... OK, but 1 hour of bike riding 3 times a week is what I've been doing pretty regularly. So, what about the diet?

Well, it is hard to generalize the diet. I mean, we eat healthy. We seldom eat red meat. Mostly fish and chicken, and more fish than chicken. We eat salad almost every evening. Vegies are steamed or raw, maybe grilled, never (hardly ever) fried, and then stir-fried with very little oil. Only EVO or grape seed oil when we use oil. I have to admit, we have had ice cream as an evening desert snack several evenings this summer, and we got on a popcorn kick earlier this summer, but have recently cut both of those out ... for the most part.

This next week I am going to keep a food journal (again) as that seems to help in reminding me where I'm messing up as far as caloric intake.

I have found that after age 50, it is very hard to loose weight. I'd really like to be going to St. Louis next month to participate in the triathlon with Tyler, weighing in at under 200 pounds. To paraphrase the lyrics from an old Eagles song, 'we haven't seen that since 1969'. Well, anyway, it's been a long time. My thought is to starve it off, but everybody keeps telling me you have to keep the calories up to keep the metabolism up. If you starve your body, the metabolism shuts down and you gain weight just by thinking of food. So I say, what the heck, I need the calories, so I eat it or eat a little more, and then I get on the scales and you guessed it, the weight is the same or a pound more than last time.

I'll keep the journal and see how it goes in the next few weeks.

The Next Karate Kid

The next karate kid is Hillary Swank! 1994. I only remembered that it was a girl instead of Daniel-son (Ralph Machio) it is Julie-son, Hillary Swank.

How forgiveness works

Vicki kinda snapped at me this afternoon, and I barked back at her and she got her feelings hurt and I kinda bit at her and told her she snapped before I barked. We were both a little cranky, I'd just finished about 4 hours of weed eating and was pushing myself the last hour to finish and not quit, like a long distance run or something like that. She'd been cleaning all morning and was doing something on the computer that she thought I should have done already.

Anyway, after a few minutes she said, I'm sorry you barked at me and I forgive you. I appologized to her for her snapping at me and forgave her back. Now we are all happy and luvy-duvy.

Rules Y’all

Rules Y’all

There are rules and then there are rules. If I told you baseball bats were bad, you’d probably laugh at me, especially if you played the game. You may not know what I know about baseball bats. I may have seen someone beaten to death with a baseball bat or I may have been hit and injured severely as a kid. As a RULE, however, if you get hit hard enough in the nose with a baseball bat, your nose will be broken. Now here is a more broad spread RULE, Blunt-force trauma can kill you. You should protect yourself from blunt-force trauma.

Now some might make rules, teaching their children to stay away from baseball bats. “Don’t go near people with baseball bats”, they say. They may make them wear protective clothing or even stay in the house on pretty days when people might be outdoors playing with baseball bats. Others step out against such silliness and make their kids play baseball or softball when they are little, even buying them expensive bats to play with. The first think, “maybe these people don’t understand how dangerous the bats are”, so they write curriculum to teach the dangers of baseball bats. The folk who play the game look down on the legalists, thinking “Don’t they see how safe the game is and how foolish it is to make rules about bats. No one is getting hurt by a bat”. Yet the ‘legalists’ keep seeing the problem. One of them probably works or worked in the ER and saw blunt-force trauma injuries every day, many of which may have occurred with a baseball bat. But the folk who play baseball then make their own rules, such as wearing a helmet while playing baseball, and if you are on deck, you must stay in the on-deck circle, and if you are not batting or on deck, you must stay in the dugout. Even unwritten rules, such as “if you see someone close to you swinging a bat, duck or get away”

There are rules and then there are principles. I do not intend to research and document all of the rules, but like blunt-force trauma can kill you, water in your lungs makes it hard to breath. The acceleration of gravity can cause blunt-force trauma. There are laws of thermodynamics, so if you put your hand in boiling water, it will burn you. That doesn’t make boiling water bad, you just have to know the law and obey it. Don’t put your bare hand in boiling water. There are laws of physics, so don’t jump out of an airplane without a parachute. There are laws of mathematics … they must be understood and obeyed. They can make you rich or poor, like in the case of compounded interest on your savings account or on your credit card. There are dietary laws and principles that follow. I’m no nutritionist, but if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight, I think. Kind of a mix of dietary and mathematical laws. Dental laws, or principles, such as if you eat a lot of sugar, your teeth will rot, (a mix of dental and dietary law). So, laws can be blended, I guess.

The Lord gave us laws; they are called the 10 commandments, or the ten words of the Lord God. The rest of His testaments are also His Words, as Jesus is called His Word. The word was, the word is, and the word will be. The rules are simple and simply stated, but they are far reaching in principles, as are the rules in physical life. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your might. Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Simple. Now, if you love God, you will obey him. Obedience is the evidence of your love of the Lord. OK, but what do you obey? His law? Which is summarized in Love God and Love Your Neighbor. So, really simply put, if you love God, you will obey him by loving your neighbor. Now here is where it gets complicated. Here is where man starts messing up and “keeping his kids away from baseball” or buying them baseball bats in excess.

The good news is that we have the good news, the Gospel of Christ to tell us the right way to deal with “baseball bats”. We have the entire Old Testament full of history, poetry, and prophesy to show us what was done right and wrong by the people. Better still it is a revelation of the Person of God whom we are bound legally to love. The New Testament then is also the history of Love in Christ, the poetry of Love and the prophesy of Love in Christ. It is, it was and it forever will be.

I had a dream this night, about my older kids disrespecting me. Oh, it was just a dream, so you don’t have to think it was about you, my child. Anyway, in my dream it was like we were about to play a game of some kind and there were many people involved. Besides my own kids, there were relatives, church members, movie stars and sports figures. It was like I was a coach, or maybe just a chaperone or something. I wanted to teach them a lesson, to communicate to them some principles that would help them in life and in the game and they walked away. I got some more insight and wanted them to come back to me and learn from my wisdom, but only three of the five of them came back, while the others stayed away. The ones who came back to hear what I had to say did so with reluctance and with arrogant disregard. I was crushed. In my dream, they looked down on me as a legalistic fool. They did not realize that I was just trying to teach them some principles that would save them from pain. It woke me up, so I have tried here to put it into words, but the thoughts I had when I first woke up did not make it to this little Blog. I don’t know what I have written, but it is not at all what woke me from sleep early this morning.

I think I would like to go back to sleep now, but not before saying, following rules and principles in physical life and in spiritual life is not always a bad thing. These laws are meant to be blended. One must test the rule against the base rules, the Ten Words of the Lord God and their ultimate purpose, to glorify the Lord God Almighty and All Gracious.

Praise Him for his Grace and Mercy, for otherwise… well wow. Otherwise, I have no idea what or where I’d be, but praise him for I find myself tonight ever blessed by his presence in my life. Praise him for His rules and regulations, but praise him for he took the blunt force trauma in my place, and in Him I am alive and breathing the fresh air of His Word, His Law.