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.