26 August 2007

Skunked

Well, I'm back in the land of the grocery store shoppers after a weekend of livin in the wild.

Had a real good time, and nope no drinkin and shootin. Unless ya count the mornin after when we hunted the very elusive Bud light cans emptied Friday night. Makes me feel good to recycle beer cans into targets.

I thing some of the greatest times I've ever had have been at the lease. A place where men can gather, relax and just be ourselves. Plenty of practical jokes occurred, stories swapped, and insights into life shared. It's nice for this good ol' boy to be surrounded by his own kind.

On a hunting note, the animals won this weekend. Z.H. just can't shoot, I was lookin the wrong direction, and Tater was laughin too hard to fire a gun. I was alerted to the commotion by six rapid shots at what appeared to be dirt and weeds. They swear there was a Grey fox there, but the jury is still out.

Least I brought home souvenirs from my trip, several cactus spines in various parts of my body. Gotta be careful where ya sit.

23 August 2007

Call of the wild

I am so lookin forward to this weekend!

On friday a few buddies and I are headin to the deer lease for a weekend of drinkin, shootin, chainsawin, BSin, and hopefully killin.

The plan is to leave after we git off work, head west and set up camp. A night of coyote/fox/bobcat callin. Sleep thru the heat of the day and hopefully scare up some feral hogs.

Wife, clean out the freezer, I'm bringin home the bacon!

(But please don't throw out the fox head, I swear I'll git it cleaned on of these days)

20 August 2007

I am sofa king we todd did.

Sorry y'all that it's been a few days, had to help my wife git over part of her yuckyness and work is kickin my butt.

On Sunday we went to a "Harry Potter party." My girl was super excited, kept askin my how they were gonna turn the pool into Hogwart's lake. She had several excellent suggestions, but unfortunately all of them would have been death to a pool pump.

CB had been tellin me how obsessed this group was with The Boy Who Lived, so I thought it would be great fun to dress as a wizard tryin to look like a muggle. Tacky t-shirt, dress pants, polka dot tie tied wrong, polka dot scarf as a belt, camouflage Boonie hat and flip-flops. CB wore her graduation robes with the crazy master's degree flappy bat wing lookin thingy on the sleeves. My girl dressed as a student in uniform, and I whittled her a wand usin a branch from our Crape Myrtle.

Imagine my dismay when we got there and nobody was dressed up. I felt like a doofus. They all just looked at me like I was insane. The party itself was great, they really went all out with the games and tests, and had just about every kinda wizard food ya could imagine, was pretty impressive.
The best thing about this event was that they had muggle beer which is way better then butterbeer any ol day,help ya git over the fact you are dressed worse then a teenager.

14 August 2007

I once met Chuck Norris.

They came to film an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. Durin the pre-filmin they taped a red line to the fire station wall at 6' high. If you were over 6' tall you couldn't stand with-in 10 feet of Chuck Norris while filming.
Bein 6'4" I was kept away. Course the producers wanted me to give my red helmet (Captains wear red to stand out) to one of my volunteers. I kindly told them where they could go if they expected me to give up my brain-bucket.

That havin been said I must say Chuck Norris is a force of nature. Please go to this website, and if y'all have any doubts afterwards let me know. www.chucknorrisfacts.com

13 August 2007

Cry me a river.

Sometimes in life we make compromises.

Last night was one of those instances. My sweety and I struck a deal, if I ran over to Gander Mountain to buy a new rifle, I would sit down and watch a chick-flick with her when I came home.

So, the gun was bought, dinner ate and it was movie time. Typical chick-flick material, story about three daughters with an insane mom.

When I was younger I'd have made snide comments like "Chick-flick huh? Better pass the kotex and Kleenex." or somethin along those lines.

Well, last night was different, I found myself enjoyin this movie, and recalled I liked the last few chick movies I saw. Made me so worried I went into the bathroom and checked myself from head to toe for one of my wife's hormone patches that must have gotten stuck to me.

So, what I'd really like to know is am I alone here? How many guys also enjoy these movies?

08 August 2007

Always put the seat down.

We responded to a triple structure fire one august. This was in a rather fancy neighborhood where they had wooden shingled roofs, so the fire kept jumpin from roof to roof catchin everything it touched ablaze. Needless to say a single fire is a feat in incident command, and that day our problems were tripled. We try very hard to keep abreast of the situation and highly discourage men from freelancing or wanderin off with out a plan. We came to realize we couldn't find one of the other captains, so a search was mounted.

I grabbed a flashlight, radio and two rookies and was gonna show them a rapid V.E.S. (Ventilate, Enter, Search) We headed down the block to the most involved house and ran around back. I smashed the window, got a boost up and slid inside. I stepped down and realized my boot was stuck. Bout this time one of my two newbies got a runnin start and came crashin thru the pane onto me. I started hollerin for #2 not to come in since we were a jumbled pile of gear and body parts. Luckily he stopped short. We untangled, but I realized my boot was still stuck. The fire conditions were rapidly deteriorating, we just got a radio call my fellow captain had been found down the street unhurt, and my rookie was on the verge of panic. I was squintin, try to tell what had ahold of me.

The heat was tremendous, and I had to drop to the floor on my back since my foot was caught about two feet off the floor. My trainee kept feelin round, tryin to figure out what I was stuck in. He kept sayin somethin bout how smooth it was, what could it be? etc. Bout this time I was really startin to git nervous myself. Finally, he bumped somethin, and it made an unmistakable noise. Y'all have all heard it before, the sound of a toilet tank lid scraping on the tank. That's right Capt. KB was stuck in the toilet. We used an axe to smash the pot and jumped outta the window. I hit the ground and looked at my rookies and just said "Damnit" They were afraid I was mad at them, so they started apologizing.

I finally let em know I wasn't mad, just surprised my Mom was right.

You should always put the seat down when you were done usin the toilet - Never know who is gonna fall in!


05 August 2007

Practice run

I've been tagged by Coffeypot since I'm obviously in need of practice here in blog land.

Guess what ya do is go to Wikipedia and type in the month and day of your birth. Then you write down three events, two births, one holiday, then you tag five others to do it as well. Well here we go:
Events:
1859 first conformation dog show held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. (Leadin to a dog havin to look like something instead of just bein a good dog.)
1914 Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie assinated in Sarajevo, leading to the start of WW1.
1919 Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris, France, formally ending WW1.

Births:

1243 Emperor Go-Fukakusa of Japan born. (Somethin bout this guy's name just pisses off the Red-neck in me)

1891 Carl Panzram, American Serial Killer (Dadgum, and ya always hear how much safer and kinder the olden days were)

and of course in 1973 KB

Holiday:

Religious holiday commerating St. Vitus (Who also has a dance named after him, resembling the neurological disease Chorea, and a song by Black Sabbath)

My chosen victims are :

Cindy Dianne, cause she is here lookin at me
Biddie, Her indoors, Tod, and Angel, cause I don't have or know too many readers here.
Thanks Coffeypot, this has been fun.

01 August 2007

Measure of a Man

I can distinctly remember the first time somebody I really looked up to called me a man. I was 19 and a Captain on a big city fire department, we were workin with, looked me in the eye and called me a man after a particularly hard fight. Sure it sounds like a small word, but it ain't.

I had been called a man for quite awhile, like when the ol' boys at the feed store I'd go to as a kid would ask me how "Little man" was as I walked in with my grandpa. There were countless other times as I grew up, but this time I had earned the title.

It felt really good, made me walk a lil taller, and mosey a lil prouder, mostly made me think of my Grandpa. Because of him I knew how to be a man. (My Grandpa & I will definitely be a whole blog or three.)

I couldn't wait to git back to the station and call him, like I often did when the day was long. We were deep into our conversation, when, in that quiet voice my Grandpa said "Well, today you are a man, welcome to it." At the time I didn't really know what he meant, just was thrilled to hear those words again.

As the years passed I learned. Bein a man has absolutely nothing to do with age. It is an awesome responsibility that you earn. I, for one, can think of nothin better to be.