Timestepper

Glad to see that Ernie is doing better! I can certainly relate:   Had my gallbladder yanked back in '09 after several bouts of pancreatitis and that was supposed to take care of things. It didn't and I've ended up in the hospital twice since then - most recently last Saturday morning (got out Christmas Eve afternoon). Chronic pancreatitis isn't any fun, whether in people or pups and sometimes there's not a hell of a lot you can do to prevent it. A low fat diet, with little or no alocohol consumption is good, but (as I've discovered twice) no guarantee. Went through a boat load of tests with this last round, including an hour-long MRI and they can find absolutely no reason whatsoever for the flare-ups. Sometimes life just sucks.   Give Ernie my best and tell him he's got a two-legged big brother who understands exactly what he's going through and sympathizes with him to the max!   :up:  :hat:

Looking good! Welcome to the wonderful world of bedroll camping!   Coldest night I ever camped (-16 degrees plus a 10 mph breeze, on the high plains of Western Kansas - we had to sleep with our canteens to keep them from freezing solid) I stayed warm with the help of a scout pit, 3 wool blankets and a canvas groundcloth.  Worst part was next morning when we (my best friend and I - we were on a primitive trek) realized that we hadn't made as many miles as we thought we had and still had a four mile hike to true shelter. Thank God for wool!

Oh gawd! Reminds me of one of my favorite "oldie but goodies." (And, if it were true, would certainly fit this thread.) True or not, here it is:   So I’m driving home driving home from dinner last night with my wife, it’s like 16 degrees out. Cold as hell. Icicles on your balls kind of cold. So anyways we’re going around a slow corner and she (my wife) spots a baby skunk lying on the side of the road. Being the animal lover she is, I get yelled at to pull over and help the little guy. “Fine, I’ll stop but you gotta get out and help it.” I say. So she jumps out of the car and picks up this baby skunk. Poor little guy is half frozen but still alive. She says, “What should I do?” “Bring it in the car” I tell her and we’ll “warm him up”. So she gets in with the skunk and asks, “How should I keep him warm?” I tell her “Put it between your legs.” She replies “What about the smell?” So I say, “Just hold his nose!” The doctors expect I’ll make a full recovery, but the skunk she used to beat me with died during the incident.   :leaving:

"Do you carry at all times, even at home?"     Gosh, I dunno'... Show up some evening uninvited and unannounced and find out.  :whistle:

If I were to combine all of my smaller sets, I'm pretty sure I'd have one complete BIG set... minus, of course, one freakin' little odd sized bit. :surrender:

Well, if he/she is anything like ours, it probably comes from all the blue language they use. (Told my wife the other day that we have the only chihuahua in Tennessee with Tourette's.) :lol:

I pretty much agree with what everyone else has said. Only possible upside would be if the new employer offered something in the way of AFLAC accident insurance (sure wish I'd had it earlier this year!) where it pays out pretty spectacularly if you become disabled and have to miss work.

Watching our little Banty rooster, earlier this year, stand up to and chase off a squirrel that was stealing sunflower seeds from the feed bin and then, seeing a big Tiger Swallowtail butterfly 10 minutes later, squawking in terror and hauling @ss into the hen house.  :rofl: 

Aw man! I feel for ya' brother Dave!   Had a friend who found a paper wasp nest about the size of a soccer ball one winter and thought, "hey that'd make great wadding for the ol' black powder shotgun!" So he took it home and tossed it under the bench in his shop. Couple days later he went out to the shop to mold some balls and fired up his wood stove because it was chilly... About 30 minutes later a "cloud of hornets" (his words) rose up from the far end of his bench and chased him out of the shop. I guess he got nailed about 8 or 9 times before he hit the door and couldn't get back into his shop to unplug the lead pot until the next day after the stove had burned out and the temp had dropped again.   With great pride he reported that he went out and fired up his wood stove again about 4 days later after a cold snap sent the temps below zero... and one of the first things he put in the stove was the wasp nest. :pleased:

Depends upon hair color. FI, if the chihuahua is primarily black or dark brown, then it might show up in just a few years. If it's tan or light brown, it likely won't start turning white until about 7 or 8 years.

I like how you did that - switching the 't' for a double 'l'. Well done, Sir!  :hat:     :whistle:

Had a driver quit this morning because he wants to make more money - so he's going to a company that doesn't pay deadhead (empty) miles, extra stop pay or tarp pay. BUT they start at 40 cents per loaded mile! (He was making 36 cents for ALL miles here, plus extra stop & tarp pay.)  That ain't right! (The math just doesn't work out.)   We figure he'll be asking for his job back by about mid-December...

Yep. Top four favorites are: .54 Mowrey - Jessie 1851 Remington 'Buffalo' .44 w/14" bbl. - Yard & Half (If you ever shoot this pistol you'll know why.) Savage 24 over/under .357mag/20ga. - Dirty Maggie, a take off on DRT (Dead, right there.) Winchester lever action .22 - Little Miss (Because she's light weight and misses very little.)

Used to have a homemade tallow lamp made from two halves of a large clamshell that I'd cleaned up and put a <90 degree> hinge on. Kept the bottom half filled with tallow with a cotton wick and to extinguish it simply closed it up. A leather thong kept it closed in storage and occasionally did double duty serving as a hanger. The top half worked (somewhat) as a reflector. Wasn't a great light, but it was easy to use and care for and (best of all), it looked really cool.  B)

Reminds me of a practical joke I pulled several years ago at a mountain man rendezvous out West. Going through my shooting box one afternoon, I realized I had several empty No.10 percussion cap tins. Without really knowing what I was going to do with it, I stuffed one of them into my possibles pouch and forgot about it for the time being.   Later that evening I grabbed my "little brown jug" and went to off to visit various and sundry other camps for the purpose of passing the jug and swapping tales. At one point, while fumbling in my possibles for my pipe, I re-found the cap tin (my best friend says he immediately knew I was up to no good by the evil gleam in my eye) and in a moment of pure inspiration, I reached down and picked up half a handful of pea gravel, put it in the tin and put the lid back on.   At a particularly loud and boisterous camp where we stopped to "shoot some breezes" I rather absently pulled the cap tin out of my possibles and stood there just kinda' tossing it up and down while we visited and passed the jug. I guess we'd been there maybe 45 minutes, enjoying the tales and the other jugs that were so graciously passed around (with me just sorta' absentmindedly tossing the cap tin up & down the whole time, with every now and then a shake back and forth to make it rattle a little bit) when my buddy stood up and stretched his legs and said something about heading back to camp whilst we could still find it. I agreed and stood up and we said our so longs... As I turned to follow my buddy, I glanced down at the cap tin, as if really noticing it for the first time, shrugged my shoulders and just sorta' casually tossed it into the fire...   Never before or since have I seen that many bearded, intoxicated men hit dirt that fast or sober up that quickly!   After the dust had cleared and I'd been called everything unflattering they could think of (which was considerable given the average experience and nature of the group) I let them in on the joke. Unfortunately, my originality was highly lauded and the cause for much celebration, with the end result being that I became so polluted that I only made it about half-way back to my own camp before crawling off the trail and passing out under an aspen tree. Fortunately for me, one of the other celebrants, making his way back to his own camp sometime later, heard me snoring and, upon seeing me laying there passed out and shivering, graciously covered me with his buffalo skin coat. (About noon the next day, he showed up at our camp and offered to trade me some "hair of the dog and an empty cap tin for a buffler' skin coat." ...How could I could I turn him down?) :cheers:

Done

There's any number of old saws about good judgment coming from experience and experience coming from bad judgment or how "experience" is what you get when you don't get what you wanted... and you probably don't much care to be reminded of them right now. Can't say as I blame you. And please, please forgive me for chuckling right now, but there's a hole in a window about 30 feet from where I sit typing this. My wife put it there with my little Winchester lever action .22 a couple of years ago about 10 minutes after her 30 minute "safety lesson" concerning the safe operation and handling of the aforementioned rifle. She thought she was an asshat, too, although I don't think that's the word she used...   Long and short of it, I don't think she was an asshat and I don't think you're one either. The fact that I'm pretty sure that neither of you will ever do it again enforces that opinion. Life happens, sometimes it's a little embarrassing. You learn from it and move on and eventually laugh about it... unless you choose to sulk and play the blame game and beat yourself up to the point of giving up something near and dear to you - in that case you really are an asshat. (I still really doubt that's the case!)   Oh, and ''Mrs. Timestepper'' says, "Welcome to the club!" ;)

Actually our mechanic has several of them... they're homemade, radio controlled and most of them have a wingspan of between 30 and 48 inches. I like them best when they're just sitting on the ground being quiet and perfectly good. :pleased:

We have bantams and let them free range until the leaves drop. After that the hawks and eagles have a field day and a couple winters ago we lost half our flock in one day thanks to my wife forgetting to close the door to the run. Oh, that's the other thing - besides having a nice roomy henhouse with enough room for chickens, roosts, nesting boxes and feed storage, I also have a completely enclosed 12X16 chicken run so they can get "outside" 365 1/4 days a year. An incandescent light (soon to be non-existent in this increasingly moronic nation) in the henhouse, besides providing heat, ensures that egg production doesn't drop off overmuch during fall and winter months.   At last count we had 16 hens and three roosters and we love 'em to death! Our experience has been that our bantys are tamer than the full sized varieties we've had and we've got a couple "favorite" girls who actually come when we call them and then fuss at us until we give them black oil sunflower seeds.   And the exceedingly rich little eggs we get can't be topped anywhere this side of heaven!   Yep, we do love our little chickens!

Back '90/'91, I had bi-weekly run hauling salt from Hutchinson, Ks. to Ralston-Purina in Sparks, Nv. While I never had occasion nor inspiration to patronize the Mustang Ranch, I was in the area often enough to become reasonably familiar with what was going on:   Iirc, the story I read in the Reno Gazette-Journal about that time was (short version) that the feds had planned on keeping it open and running it until it could be auctioned off, but a U.S. judge refused to allow the <bankruptcy> trustee to take over the business license, so the IRS foreclosed on it and sold it at auction a few months later. In other words, they (the U.S. government) "couldn't keep a whorehouse open in a state where prostitution is legal."   And I'm still not a bit surprised that website has had as many problems as it has.

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the surprise. I mean, has everybody forgotten that this was farmed out by, to be developed for the same government who couldn't even keep a whorehouse open in a state where prostitution is legal?!!   I used to wonder why we never see any good Keystone Kops/Three Stooges type movies anymore, then I realized that everyone who could make nincompoopery and incompetence look flawless and natural was already employed on Capitol Hill...

Now THIS is the kind of guy we need in Congress!

Well, if he'd been a state trooper maybe... :leaving:

Man, have you ever missed out! Was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and EVERYBODY hated going to the field during armadillo mating season - between the clacks and squeals and grunts coming from every dry creek bed and coulee and the fng troops laughing, we could never get any sleep... 

Dang! Sorry to hear that, Jordan! On the rare occasion I have to leave my pickup, I usually pick one of the liquor store lots to park in just because of the extra activity. And the one time I had to leave it for a while at Wally world, I picked a spot right up near the entrance where I could see the cameras. (Might've inconvenienced a person or two, but my sh....stuff was all still there when I got back!)