Ah...fall

It's kinda cold outside. Fall is here! At least for a day, anyway. Back in the 80's today. This really is a great time of year. No, it's not the "best" time of year. Remember, I am your friendly neighborhood storm spotter so I reserve best time of year for the rough and tumble of a Nebraska spring. Fall is the settle back and enjoy it part of the year. Go bike in the country. Take a gun if you really do think there are lots of hungry mountain lions out there.

And if gas wasn't so high, a trip to Nebraska City would be in order. What a gem of a little town this is! The Arbor Day Foundation is there in the J. Sterling Morton mansion. (He had something to do with TV dinners and ended up the hondo of the plant a tree business.) And do they have trees! Lots of them have apples on them. So Nebraska City comes alive in the Fall with caramel apples, apple juice, apple eating apples, apple pie, apple cobbler, dried apples, apple cider, apple fig cake...I just threw that one in there. I am sure the folks in Nebraska City are appled out by Thanksgiving. Have you ever seen a montain lion eat an apple?

If you are into a little color, take your camera along. Wait a couple of weeks though. This is the first cold day so we need a freeze to get some genetic thing to do the color whamo inside of the tree and tell all of the the leaves to change color and well...leave. Any dummy can aim a digital camera at that countryside and get a breath-taking picture. (It will only be breath-taking if you happen to get a mounntain lion eating an apple.)

Besides the color, fall has another REALLY big bennie. The snakes head for the holes. You can stomp around all you want and not worry about a little rattler laying in wait. I hate snakes. Save a bullet for the mountain lion but go ahead and unload on the snakes. They should be in the holes anyway.

Pheasants start to get a little paranoid about now. It won't be long before grown men with bad taste in clothes stumbled through picked corn fields to try and get them. If they do, some wife has to try and fix them. And if she does, some kids try and eat them. All to make a dad feel good about his ability to hunt and provide. These guys won't find the mountain lion, however. They make too much noise stumbling through the fields. The hunting dog might lose a few years growth if he comes face to face with, well you know who.

I used to work for Remington Arms Company. God, that was a long time ago. I could almost be retired and weathly by now but I decided to hunt in different fields. Remington taught me about color because I had a chance to work with the GREAT outoor artist, Bob Kuhn. I even started to paint back then and wasn't too bad. If I had stuck with the paintinng, who knows?

Maybe I could be sitting on a hillside in Nebraska City painting a beautiful fall landscape with a mountain lion in it and add to the apple indigestion.

That was an interesting week

In fact, it may have been one of the most interesting weeks of my life. I went to CERT school which stands for Community Emergency Response Team. We are now the guys that will be roaming the disaster areas that your local fire department can't search, reach, and treat.

No, we are not going to get all that heroics but we are trained in lots of stuff including...small fire supression, first aid, search and rescue, extraction, not the dentist type; and communications. It took 20 hours to complete the course and graduation was a moch disaster in the totally dark basement of the Nebraska Capitol building. Your's truely was in charge and to be honest, I didn't do all that great of a job but learned a bunch. We all did.

I now have a disaster pack full of gear. A green helmet that makes me look like a Pez dispenser. And, lots of confidence that I can help out big time. I also got a day's worth of CPR/AED training from the Red Cross.

Sound interesting to you? I encourage you to take the training. It really is great! Call your local emergency management office and they should be able to give you more information. By the way, it's FREE!

And in this day and age, it's more important than you will ever know.

PS Dannie had her surgery last week. She made it through it. I talked to her and she is improving but has a big hill to climb. If you have some prayer space, please put in a good word for her.

Facing the knife

OK, I have more stitches in me than a cheap Sears suit. I know the routine. I have done a mask full of ether to get me under and the more modern shot with the count back system. (Never made it past 97 I think.)

The being said, I have nothing to offer my favoritest, yes faroritest, non daughter in the world. (No she isn't my daughter but she may as well be.)

She had a tumor removed from her brain. It was the size of a grapefruit. Think about that for a second. Hold a grapefruit in your hands and think about checking it into your head and having someone whack it out and nothing bad happening. Amazing.

But, she is amazing. Got more fire in her than an exploding Colorado fir during a forest fire. She's creative, and funny, and pure hell for the first half of the morning. Animals follow her around like there is a second coming of Noah's Ark and she isthe one handing out the tickets to the first class section. She scuba dives and takes on the gritty challenges of the day like a Jew walking across Gaza. She is a a pretty good writer but doesn't much. That is a loss.

And she grows tumors. Again. Not as big, mind you, but again.

There is a growing hush starting in my mind as the day approaches when the latest little lump will come out. I am worried and I wish I was there.

But I am not and worse, I have to be in school all week while this goes on.

I should be there, really. But then again, she just has to take a look at all of the hounds around her and know the old dog is there, too.

Cowboy up, babe. Let the sun rise in your soul.