I watched a TV show the other day about a mountain lion attack on a couple of hikers. It reminded of an experience I had as a young lad. As you know, when I was growing up, my father guided deer hunters in the Fall each year. As a result, the deer season was a big deal for our family. While the dudes were with us, we all focused on filling their tags, but after they were gone, we hunted for ourselves. One year, Jim and I were hunting in the long canyon next to Ebbs Canyon. There were ravines coming down from the highest peak into this canyon and we hunter in them after the first rush was over. There was a lot of country in there with thick rush and the deer would go hide in there.
Well, one morning, Jim and I were riding horses up two adjacent ridges, keeping abreast so that if one kicked out a deer, the other might see it. I think Jim must have gotten hung up in some thick stuff, because I realized we were no longer abreast. I tied the horse and sat on a rock to wait for him. Pretty soon, Jim came into view and I watched him working his way up his ridge. Then I noticed a mountain lion following him, about 50 yards back. Mountain lions are fond of horses, but their riders are often hurt during attacks - a fate I did not want for my brother. So I lifted my rifle and prepared to take a pot-shot at that lion next time it ame into sight. The lion may have seen me move, because it melted into the brush and never came back into sight. Or maybe it smelled the gun Jim was carrying, or maybe it wasn't prepared to take on such a large animal, or maybe it was not hungry - only curious. In any case, Jim entered a large open area about then and the lion did not follow him there.
The thing I remember about this is that I was Jim's protector for a while - a role reversal. I was there, I saw the danger, I had the means to act to save him, and I was interested in doing the job. All through H.S., Jim looked after me and was my protector, but for that few minutes, I looked after him.
It is this role of protector that I've been thinking about lately. It is such a major comfort to have someone to look out for us, but very few of us have such a person with us always. It falls to the Holy Ghost to always be there for us, but there's a catch with that. You have to let him be there. He won't stay if he's not wanted, so we have to have the desire to have him with us. And he won't tolerate the least degree of sin in our minds, so we have to be "in tune" for him to be there. And finally, his constant presence is a gift given to those who have faith, enough faith to repent of our sins, and follow that up with baptism. When we do that, we are given the gift of having the Holy Ghost attend to us at all times - if we remain true.

More owl news

Keith drug me (kicking and screaming all the way) out to the pig-hunting farm Wednesday.  We wanted to see the feeders while there was still corn in them and hopefully see what pigs are coming to them.  I sat in my tree stand again, and I was interested to see if the owl would come back and harass me again.  Along towards evening, I saw him winging along just above the tree tops heading straight for me, but when he got close he suddenly veered away and landed in a tree on the other side of the creek – about 50 yards away.  He flew back to the North after a while and then returned to that same tree, but he never came close to me.  So I think the pressure is off and he is no longer the harbinger of doom.  I find that very reassuring.

  Today, I cut all the rest of the panels I need for the trailer sides, and I started sanding and priming.  I am continuing to make the pieces interlocking so that a single screw might hold 4 or 5 panels securely in place.  It’s a fun way to do it, but it takes longer to do it, this way.  It also makes it harder to paint, because of all the little cutouts and holes.

  I also (reluctantly) applied for jobs at Home Depot and at Lowes.  This is hard for me.  It’s not that I want to quit Clear Sky Handy Men, but we need some steady income.  I hope that I can do both, but there is an excellent chance that they won’t allow their employees to do handyman work on the side, or at least not use the employee discount for it.

Owls

In Harry Potter, owls are just delivery boys, but the Sioux and some other tribes believed that if an owl took notice of you it was a message that you were doomed to die soon. They are equivalent to the Grim Reaper.

A few weeks ago, Keith and I went pig hunting. I sat up in my favorite tree stand and enjoyed a very pleasant evening. A boar even came in, although he came in behind me and I didn’t get a shot. But that’s beside the point. As it was getting dark, an owl flew in and landed in a tree right over the feeder. There are lots of owls in that wood and we see them and hear them hooting all the time, but not usually that close. I enjoyed watching him and he quickly started watching me, too. Then he flew to a tree just behind me. I had to lean way back to watch him, but it was way cool to have him so close. Owls are interesting birds. They have exceptionally large heads to support their extra large eyes that enable them to hunt at night in the woods. Their wings are bent further forward than most birds’ wings, and their feathers have fluffy trailing edges. Those two odd wing attributes make it so they fly silently and it is kind of eerie to see them flying around against the night sky. So that’s why I was studying this owl in the tree behind me. I looked back towards the feeder finally, mostly to give my neck a rest, when the owl left that tree breaking off a branch as he launched. That is really odd – remember all that about how they fly silently? They are all about stealth! He only flew a short ways and landed in another nearby tree, and when he left that one he again broke a branch. He did that for 20-30 minutes before he finally moved off. He landed in trees all around me, watched me for a bit from each perch, then broke a branch off as he flew. I guess I was encroaching in his/her territory, but it was extremely odd behavior for an owl. I enjoyed it all, but it did remind me of the Sioux and their version of the GR. So far, though, I’ve been OK. I haven’t died, yet. Knock, knock.

Who's the worst BLOGger?

I would probably be in line for that honor if it wasn’t for Mark, whose last BLOG was back in the olden days when a young couple bought a bicycle built for two. Still, I have reason for shame with my own. Oh well.

Joe kindly offered to weld up some reinforcement on my beat-up old trailer, so I could put nice, wooden sides on it and make it a thing of honor. He said something about a day or two, about 2 weeks ago. He did a TON of welding on it and it still needed work, so I asked him for some pointers and endeavored to undertake the task myself. Now, back in the olden days when I last welded, the equipment was a bit simpler. In fact, in those days, the Harbor Freight solution to welding was to take a used-up D-cell battery apart to remove the carbon core. You’d sharpen one end of the carbon rod in a pencil sharpener and hook the other end up to a car battery. Ground what you want welded to the other battery terminal and you’d get a welding spark. If you needed to add steel, you’d grab some baling wire. It took a lot of practice to get a decent weld with that level of equipment. But that was then. Joe has a neat, updated welder and it is a lot easier and more forgiving than back in the day. After a few minutes of instruction I took off welding and was able to finish it up. Now, some of my welds are ugly, make that UGLY! But they have steel where they need to be and none of them have broken (so far). So, the trailer is now about a thousand times stronger than it was, it has metal tubing to keep the tail-light wires safe as they run along the bottom, and it isn’t much wider than my Jeep (reducing the chances of collision), even though it has just as much floor area as it did before. I paid $200 and change for it and I bought about $200 worth of steel and parts, but it is now worth something over $1,000. Joe had some MDO which is a weatherproof, high quality plywood used for highway signs. I am making sides from that material and when I’m done it will have arches in the large side pieces with my company logo on it. I have gotten several jobs from people who have seen me at home centers, so I figure if it is easier to see my sign, I will get more of those.

In the photo of the back of the trailer, where I don’t have the deck mounted, yet, you can see the steel tubing we used to build the frame. It is all welded up tight and a coat of primer paint has been applied so it won’t rust if it gets rain on it.

The photo of the front shows how the front panel is arched above the frame. The two sides will also be like that, and I’ll have signs made up that say “Clear Sky Handy Men” and my phone number right under the arches. That way, it will match my Logo.

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t look like much with all the excess MDO piled in the back and the used signs looking like - well, used signs, but paint covers many ills and it will be looking awesome very soon. I’ll post more photos then.

Winter in Texas is just getting weirder and weirder. Saturday it was 84 degrees and so humid the sidewalks stayed wet all day, and I turned on the a/c upstairs. By Sunday morning there was a cold wind blowing and it was very uncomfortable to be outside. Today we have had freezing rain all day. Fortunately, the ground is still warm enough that it can’t get much of a hold on the roads, but the overpasses are treacherous. I took some photos just for grins.

It’s not just that ice is hanging under the branches. There is a thick coating of ice over the entire tree. Sometimes, I get free wood when it gets thick enough to break the trees down.

This is a nice look. I wish it looked like this when the water is flowing. In the summer the girl holding her umbrella looks happy as a clam. In this photo she just looks cold.

The water flows over the leaves and into the icycles.

Fall -> Winter --> Christmas lights ----> PIGS!!!!

Certain members of my close personal family made light of me when I mentioned that we have had an extraordinary fall with colored leaves and the whole thing. So, while licking my wounds over the last couple of months I have occasionally stopped to take a photo proving that we really did have Fall leaves. Fortunately, I’ve lost most of them and winter is really, truly here so there is no chance to enhance my collection. Still here is the proof.

This the one that started it all. I took it out in front of our house, looking North. It actually has some nice colors in it, but they are down the street a ways and the low resolution makes it a little hard to see, much less jump out at you.

Yes, I know. It is a pale shadow of the Fall leaves in Utah, but then Utah’s Fall colors are a pale shadow of places like the Hudson River Valley, too. Well, I thought that first photo showed some nice color, but a couple of weeks later we still hadn’t had our first frost and I took this one. It was taken from our front porch, looking NorthWest.

Our tree is blessedly leafless so you can see those bright maples across the intersection. The tree on the right is that most-odd of the conifer family, one of only two deciduous evergreens, a cypress. This is more like it – real Fall colors in anybody’s book. It’s a shame they’re not on a breathtaking mountainside, but hey, we don’t have those round here.

About that same time, I was working on installing cabinets and countertop in the laundry room for a nice young couple over in Murphy and I stopped to take this photo of a Bradford Pear tree.

Yes, I know, the tree is pretty, but noways spectacular. But take a little peek at the valleys in those rooftops. Is that snow? Well, no. This is Texas and we had spent the wee hours of the morning huddled in our hastily-emptied downstairs closet between the leaves from the dining room table, waiting for the tornado warning sirens to signal the all-clear while I fiddled with our expensive, self-winding AM/FM/Weather Band radio that doesn’t seem to actually do anything weatherwise, trying to get a better clue on whether we were in immediate danger of visiting the Wicked Witch of the West or not. That white stuff on the roof is hail.

Well, in spite of our obvious handicaps, we do try to have seasons round here. Not too long after the tornado scare we had our first hard freeze. We got in a couple of ice days after that. We don’t do snow days, we only close the schools when it ices over. Yup, so now all the leaves are off the trees and piled up in that dead-air spot on my back porch, and most everything is all dead looking. But we do get into Christmas lights. You know how there are people who go all overboard with their Christmas lights and computer program them to flash to music by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra? Well, Planet Christmas picks the best display each year, based on videos of the displays. This video is of this year’s winner and it is just up the street a short ways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szLmAPW39uE Yep, that’s 67 storage cases full of lights. If you look closely you might notice that the lights reflect off the back wall of our local Lowes store. In my new line of work, I average about 2.3 visits to Lowes and Home Depot store each and every day. It’s kind of like Heaven, but costs more.

But the real news of 2008 is that after nearly 2 years with very few pigs out at the farm – only a couple of cagey old boars – we finally have a residence herd of sows and juvenile feral pigs again. I first found sign of them last Saturday morning and Keith and I have been taking turns carefully putting out bait and cleaning off the trails so we can sneak around to check on them without alarming them every since. We want them to get real comfortable, thinking they’ve found the Big Rock Candy Mountain, free food Paradise, Garden of Eden, hog heaven before we commence slaughtering them again. I mean this has been a real loooong dry spell and we don’t want to blow it by blowing any of them away while they are still exploring and checking out the natural pantries.

I hope everybody has a great New Year!

eashurst@tx.rr.com has a new email address

Earl Ashurst has a new email address. Old Email Address: eashurst@tx.rr.com New Email Address:earlashurst@att.net Hello, eashurst@tx.rr.com asked us to shoot you a quick note about this new AT&T email address. It's earlashurst@att.net and that's where to send all messages to earlashurst@att.net from now on. Be sure to update your address book now. Thanks, Earl Ashurst Check out AT&T Internet. AT&T includes the most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools such as advanced spam filtering, virus protection and Parental Controls. Also, get the best of online content including free access to millions of videos, music, games and more.