Den Four, Buddy.

 Oppressive summer weather kept me inside a bit in late July.  And put me onto some tasks only marginally nicer than sweating and breathing the horrid Canadian smoke that blew in for a while.  Closet cleaning and organizing.   Ugh.

But you find stuff.  Here's something I hauled home from the clean up of my parent's house.  It dates to my days as a Cub Scout.  Some of the photos have helpful date stamps and/or scribbled notes.  The cover is plywood, with the letters burnt in with a soldering iron or something similar.  Not exactly safety first back then.  Join me for a jump back in time some six decades.

Scouts were organized in a sort of military fashion.  A Pack of Cub Scouts would be like a Platoon in the Army.  A Den was a smaller group, like a Squad would be.  Oh, not in the cool sense of the word that Squad was used until fairly recently.  Here's Den Four.

Statistically speaking, a couple of those smiling lads are no longer with us.

Below is a moment in time.  February 1967 in the kitchen of my parent's old house.  Making paper Mache puppets.  I have a grandson about the age I am here.  His spelling and penmanship is better than mine. 

A guy in uniform.

This next one is an oddity.  Not the same paper or quality as the other photos, which were taken on an old Instamatic camera with 'flash cubes'.  

I think that's my older brother.  He appears to be just about to step on that model train car and fall on his butt.  These are the stairs going down to the basement.  My recollection is that we had a Scout activity that involved taking pictures with an old school camera - something like a Brownie - then developing them ourselves.  I can call up a memory of swishing moist paper around in stuff that smelled like vinegar.

Just random glimpses of an earlier time.  A time when most everyone had three or four kids.  Heck, the Catholic family across the alley had more.  And there was a solid culture of volunteerism.  My mom was a Den Mother.  Had a swell blue outfit and everything.  She was also president of the PTA and a bunch of other stuff.  This despite having four kids, one with special needs.

Now its much harder to rouse people to any volunteer efforts.  They wanna get paid.  Or they wanna just keep playin' with their phones.

The Siamese Twins of Chippewa Falls

In 1867 the population of Chippewa Falls was somewhere around 2000.  Given the nature of those times the ratio of men to women was quite high.  It's true that families were bigger then, but there would not have been that many babies born per year.  So what are the odds of twins?  (Supposedly 1% if you must know.)  How about Siamese twins?  Well those odds might be as extreme as 1 in 200,000 births.  But, odds or not, this could happen anywhere.  And in July of 1867 it happened at Chippewa Falls.

I ran across this story by accident, seeing it repeated in newspapers across the region.  Papers swiped from each other pretty regularly then.  My quick scan for the name of the parents involved found no mention in the local paper, which I found puzzling.

As it happens, there was a long, front page article, but it was sensitive enough to omit the name of the family involved.  You can read it in its entirety if so inclined, I present it for your perusal. 

The name was mentioned in reports from other newspapers.  John Clemens was a supervisor at the Mill.  His abilities were highly thought of.  Of his wife I can learn much less.

The article has the feel of a "silly season" bit of journalism, as far fetched tales seemed to be circulated widely in late summer.  But the poignancy of the tone, and the direct mention of the other people involved - the physicians in particular - give this credibility in my eyes.

Of the man who purchased the embalmed bodies of the twins to subsequently display for profit, I shall restrain my comments other than to say it's a famous name hereabouts.  He went on to become mayor. There's a street named after him. 

A New Species Caught!

We'll get back to this guy in a minute....

It was a warm early summer day.  Fathers and sons fishing.  Specifically, bank fishing for odd fish.  I wore my Wisconsin's Least Glamorous Fish T shirt for the occasion, and sure enough the first one up was a Freshwater Drum, featured on same.

I'd only every caught one of these before.  I quadrupled my tally in a couple of hours.  In fact that was all we were catching until we moved to another spot.  Then a Golden Redhorse showed up.  I asked this youngster to try and imitate the dopy horse like face of the fish.  He's just too darn cute to pull it off.

My goal for the day was to catch a Mooneye.  It's an odd one, a fish that mostly lives in the top few inches of water.  They spend all day making little ripples on the surface to taunt me.  Eventually I did reel one in.  Here's my attempt at a Mooneye Face.  I know, not much different from my usual look.

A very lazy day.  Kids ran around and looked at rocks, dug holes in the sand, basically were just kids being kids.  Dads watched the bank poles.  The can by the way contained soda.  The area does seem popular with folks who "party fish" in the night time hours, if old campfires and the occasional beer can can be taken in evidence.

I believe my life time list of freshwater species stands at 41.  And I have some extra time and nightcrawlers this week, so might go out in search of another particularly tough one.....the Northern Hogsucker!

Mostly for my own records, here's my freshwater fish list.  Yes, the salmon can be fresh or salt water.  

Northern Pike, Musky, Walleye, Sauger, Large and Smallmouth bass, Black crappie, Bluegill, Pumpkinseed, Green Sunfish, White Sucker, Common Carp, Black and Yellow Bullheads, Golden, Shorthead and Silver Redhorse.  Pink, Sockeye, King and Silver Salmon.  Rock Bass, Yellow Perch, Smallmouth Buffalo, Lake Sturgeon, Channel Catfish, Creek Chub, Horney Head Chub, Common Shiner, Freshwater Drum, Round Goby.  Brook, Rainbow and Brown Trout.  Dolly Varden, Mooneye, Log Perch.  Dogfish (aka Bowfin), Lake Trout, Short Nosed Gar, Silver Carp,   (41)  I've also caught a few minnows and some sort of sculpin that I don't have enough evidence to identify.

My salt water list is shorter, and obviously harder to add onto.  I think its around 9.

Things I'm Doing This Summer - Baseball

I have my priorities.  This summer ranking high on the list are ball games.  The grandkids are on, respectively, softball, baseball league and baseball traveling teams.  And the youngest will be doing some sort of T ball when school is out in a few days.  

Not all games are well played.  The weather is not always idyllic.  But when things are perfect, well, there's nothing better.

The bench.

A new puppy, sunk into comatose sleep after hyperactive play with kids.

The parent and grandparent chair array.  We follow each other from game to game, from year to year, from sport to sport.

When my son was the age my grandson is now, I coached him on a traveling baseball team.  I was a good coach.  My son is better.

With Father's Day near, what better sentiments than: "I did my best.  It was pretty good.  You turned out great and will now do your best.  Your kid will turn out excellent."

----------------------------------------

Addendum.  At last report my grandson's two teams - regular league and traveling team - are both undefeated.  The latter just won their second straight tournament when our lad came on in the last inning with the tying run on base.....and put away the batter with three straight strikes.  It's good to be focused and well coached.  It's also good to be left handed.

Fishing Opener 2026

 Remember to follow the rules.  Especially as the kid on the cover is extra cute.

Hockey Grandpa

OK, now that's a role I did not see coming.  But where the grandkids lead, we follow.

I spent last weekend at the State Tournament.  That sounds impressive, but actually youth hockey has lots of state tournaments.  There are Divisions, so large communities and small don't go head to head.  That's fair, some of those Milwaukee suburbs have buckets of money to spend on ice time and so forth.  There's age groups.  These have various names such as Pee Wee, Squirt, Microbe etc.  We are in the 10 and under cohort.  Gotta say, put these kids on skates and add various protective kit and some of them look like they oughta be shaving already.  (Disclaimer, a couple of the larger players with flowing Fabio style hair dos did turn out to be girls.*  So shaving unlikely).  And there are A and B classes.  This seems a bit flexible, and the politics of how kids are put here or there are byzantine.

But it is high quality play, and contrary to popular misconceptions all the Hockey People we've encountered are civilized.  Intense at times, but civilized.  A few random images and thoughts....

One thing I had not encountered before are the Big Heads.  Also referred to as Fatheads after a company that pioneered the concept...and may I say, the name choice was audacious.  Now you can have them made locally, and pretty much every player has one.  They provide much potential for creative photography.

On the ice action is impossible to show with a still photo, its all about the sudden turns of the player, the bounce of the puck, the reaching just that last inch to poke away a shot that would turn the tide of the game.  But to prove I was there...

I'm learning many new traditions of this little subculture.  Vehicles going to State need to be decorated.  Usually with a name and jersey number but sometimes with a broader theme:

Even at this level there are injuries during a game, or more likely collisions where a player is shaken up.  The refs immediately whistle to halt time and both teams get down on a knee where ever they were.

A coach comes out, and after a moment - likely a long moment for that player's family, he or she is helped off the ice.  Both teams then stand and rattle their sticks on the ice in a salute.  

The weekend had entries in both the W and L column, but the grandson's team finished with a hard fought win in which both teams played well.  End of hockey season.  On to baseball.  Oh, and soccer concurrently.  And fishing.

_____________

* My observation is that the girls while few in number did seem to draw penalties out of proportion to said numbers.  Make of that what you will.

Nimrods Redux

It's been a while since we've heard from the Nimrods Giant Ski team.  Last season they  mentored a younger team of Giant Skiers.  And how did the little ingrates repay 'em?  Well, that and so much more can be found in this fascinating video of the Nimrods setting some sort of Guinness World Record by skiing across (a small part of) Lake Superior.

Family Portraits from the early 1960's

At least I sure hope these are from when I was in roughly first grade!

There are faint captions on some of these.  This is My Family.

Now, I have three brothers but only two are shown here.  I think it probable that I, as the artist, did not include myself.  Yes, mom presumably looked like that when pregnant but the math does not work with regards to when I was in early grade school.  Also, the concept of Conception was still some years off in the future for Young Me.  By the way, my dad  never sported a ZZ Top beard.  I think that was supposed to be a tie.  Also, as brothers we'd occasional tussle but would not kick each other in the butt when our parents were standing right there!

Probably our beloved dog White Tip.  Or an obese cat.  I cannot explain the wheels.

This one is labeled My Mother.  Evidently my youthful impressions were that she dressed nicely when she went to the grocery store.  And that she had huge feet.  Hmmmm, is the tendency for children to show adults with giant feet an inevitable side effect of us growing up down at knee level?  In some respects this image raises more questions than it answers.  What is the meaning of S P on the grocery bag?  I think our family mostly shopped at either Red Owl or Piggly Wiggly.  And, am I trying to be helpful here?  Or does the subtle creative nuance of showing my tongue hanging out mean I am ravenously hungry and trying to grab the bag away from her?

Well this one is clearly labeled My Father.  It's an interesting study, no?

The figure is tall, see my earlier comments on the knee high perspective.  He's lean and fit.  That wasn't dad at all.  He was, for as far back as my memories go, rather round in the middle.

Here he is wearing a blue shirt, something  I never know that he did back then.  It was standard white shirt and tie every working day.  Which was darn near every day!

Yet work is implied.  I've written earlier about the old doctor's bag that came out of the same cluttered basement as all these works of "art".

Well, there it is.  This seems to confirm that he was still using it in the early 1960's.  (for reference I was born in early 1957, and frog marched off to Kindergarten at age 4 in what would have been fall of 1961).

As to details, well, he was certainly bald and wore glasses.  I don't think he customarily had this determined facial expression nor the confident striding out into the world pose.  He was probably up and out of the house doing hospital rounds before we arose, and returned home tired at about 7pm most days.  The garish red lips?  Hey, when you hand a young artist a red crayon you get this sort of result.   Here's what he looked like towards the end of his days.  He's happily talking over Old Times, still smiling at the joke I just told him.  I confess to recycling some of my better ones.  It's the only nice thing you can say about memory loss.  It makes you a great audience!

How Smart was my Father?

Dad grew up on a farm.  One that still was doing things the way they'd been done, well, forever.  There were still a few horses.  The language spoken at home was German.  That's also what was used at the nearby school house for younger kids.  My memory is telling me this was referred to as "The German School".

Maybe some people thrive on the daily routines and the long repeating cycles of farm life.  Dad, not so much.  He had the motivation to get off to the big city and do something different.  And the ability.  He was Valedictorian of his - admittedly small - high school class.  I never asked him, but its my assumption that the student body got smaller as kids decided, or were told, "Enough of that nonsense, we need your help at home."  (Google Translate would put this roughly as: "Genug von diesem Unsinn, Zeit, nach Hause zu kommen und zu arbeiten", but that would be classic High German, they spoke a sort of rustic dialect called "Plattdeutch" 

Going through the detritus of my parent's house I found many artifacts.  Lots relating to my own academic career.  These are sobering.  I clearly thought I was smarter than the record indicates.  Also, a few fascinating things from my father, who appears to have been smarter than I thought.  Or was he just an exemplar of a generation that valued learning more?

Here's a notebook from what seems to have been his sophomore year in college:

Notebooks were classier back then I guess.

It was from some sort of anatomy and physiology class.  There's detailed, hand written charts describing how frogs respond to assorted stimuli after various parts of their brains have been destroyed.  Macabre stuff, but interesting.  

Also various stuff on human anatomy, bones of the human skull for instance.  In addition to the elegant hand writing it looks as if some of the illustrations - also quite good - were his work.  Examples of my own work from that era would do me no credit.

It's interesting to see where our careers overlapped in time.   I found a few examples of his hospital dictation work.  All of it precise, detailed, and with perfectly fluent thought....

This was from 1987, when he'd been in practice for thirty plus years and I for a couple.  The procedure for this work - it was a discharge summary as it happens - was to sit down with the chart and dictate it.  Later it would be transcribed and you'd sign it.  The point, at least then, was to tell the story, and to tell it in a fashion that would make it easy to follow in case some other physician had to figure out what was going on.  You have to prioritize things.  You also have to include anything that might become important at some time in the future.  It is a difficult form of writing.  

Now of course this is essentially a Lost Art.  I've written in the past about the Pros (able to access and link to other information) and Cons (templates make doctors lazy) of Electronic Medical Records.   As I've said earlier, my dad was never lazy.  If he said - as in this summary - that a patient had "..an indurated saphenous vein in the right calf..."  Then she damn well did.  

What exactly makes one an excellent physician?  Hard working helps.  Smart helps.  In the era my dad was practicing being "Old School" probably helped too.  I remember one of his colleagues describing him as "One of the Great Gentlemen of Medicine". 

It's probably the epitaph he'd be most proud of.  If he probably had the intelligence to succeed in some other field he may not have had the instincts for say, business.  The one mild regret I heard him once express really surprised me.   Evidently when he was stationed in Germany he had the chance to travel around a bit.  At one point he was interested in visiting Vienna, which was then the mecca of the new discipline of psychiatry.  How my father, that smart but in many ways naive man would have dealt with the outer fringe of a crazy world is hard to imagine....

 

How Frugal was my Father?

Hmmm.  This is a tough one.  Frugality has been handed down from generation to generation in my family.  When they came to Minnesota Territory in the late 1850's they bought their farmstead for cash from a guy who got it as a reward for fighting in the War with Mexico.  

My dad grew up on that farm.  My own early memories of the place were that everything needed a new coat of paint.  It was old fashioned to the point that they were still hauling milk around in  big round cans.  Absent a modern, all sealed system they could only sell Grade B milk, for making cheese and such.  I didn't realize it at the time, but the farm was locked into a Great Depression sort of mindset.  When years later we cleaned the place out there were coffee cans with hundreds - maybe thousands - of buttons in Grandma's sewing area.  When clothes got old they were used as rags, the buttons taken off for potential future use.  As if your rate of button loss would use up this stash anytime before the 25th century!

That's how my dad grew up, and in most ways that ethos never left him.  I have early memories of him shaving.  Squeak! turn the faucet for a drip of hot water, turn it off, shave a little section.  Then Squeak! get another teaspoon of hot water for the next bit.  

But he was inconsistent.  He loved cars, especially somewhat gaudy ones with extra chrome.  He paid too much for them.  When I was, oh, 17 or so I went with him car shopping.  The salesman got him very interested in a yellow Ford Galaxy 500.  Not a great car, as if the 1970's had many of those, and the asking price was a bit rich.  "Dad, try offering him $______ instead".  "Really?"  He just had no idea of how the world worked other than charging a few bucks for office and hospital calls.

Yep, something like this.  Ugh, what a pig.

While cleaning out my parent's house we found various relics of fiscal imprudence.  Stock certificates from, iirc, The Las Vegas Gold Exchange.  Of course it, and several other companies whose fancy certificates we ran across, went bankrupt, taking the investors money down with them.  Down to Mexico most likely.

Perhaps the charitable explanation is simply that money did not matter much to him.  Not enough to spend time thinking too much about it.  

Eventually all those dollars slowly generated by a solo physician practice did add up.  You'd be surprised how much frugality helps in long term financial planning.  I suppose when my mom passes a share of it will come my way.  And I will immediately hand it over to my kids, his grand kids.  Frugality is useful, and money comes in handy,  But I also learned from him that some things are more important.

How Hard Working was my Father?

I've been looking over my dad's ledger book from his first year in private practice.  Prior to this he was in an accelerated Med School track for the Army, then spent a few years as a base physician in Germany.  On return he went back for a couple more years of training, then hung out the shingle.  I still have that shingle btw.

Let's take a peek at this bygone era of medicine.....

Obviously long before the age of electronic office management and accounting software.

This records not the actual appointment schedule, just charges and receipts.  But you can fill in the gaps fairly easily.  At this point in time I think my dad had not one but two offices, in different parts of town.  And did house calls, nursing home calls, minor surgeries, etc.

It makes for fascinating browsing.  Office calls were usually 2 or 3 dollars.  Delivering a baby? $85.

He worked seven days a week.  Saturdays were just as busy as Monday through Friday.  On Sunday he took it a little easy, his office(s) must have been closed.  But even on the Day of Rest there were Hospital Calls ($3) and Home visits ($5).

He kept very detailed records.  In an average month he took in about $1500 and had expenditures of around $500.  

Needless to say this is a world of medicine long forgotten.  Although to put things into perspective a bit, it was a time when as I understand it there were price controls on what physicians could charge.  And, if you take his total profit on the year of $12,813 and multiply it by the inflation since 1953, you get just over $150,000 in actual equivalent purchasing power.  Everything was a lot cheaper back then.  He was still making about four times the average wage for 1953.

Picking through a ledger book you find little details.  His office rent was $50.50.  As I'm only finding one such expense perhaps the second office came later, or perhaps I got that story wrong. At the start of the year he had one employee, a certain Marianne Peterson.  She made about $190 a month.  By the end of the year she was sharing the work load with a certain Mariel Hanson.

Interestingly, M. Hanson became M. Wolter and drops off the payroll in 1954.  But by then I'm sure she was de facto Office Manager!

Dad's generation had a different attitude towards work.  He grew up on a dairy farm, and an old fashioned one at that.  There were still a few horses around when he was a young lad.  He did chores.  Oh, so many chores.  Somehow he found a way to be Valedictorian of his high school class, so there must have been a fair amount of studying after all the work was done.

College-Med School compressed into, I think, 5 years instead of the usual 8.  Then his Army doctor service, most of the time being the only post doctor on a base that was essentially a small town of GI's and their dependents.  Maybe starting out in his own practice seemed easier, as he was nominally his own boss.  

Eventually even he got tired.  He had a well concealed literary streak.  Once he wrote a  lengthy poem entitled "And the Patients Lose their Patience".  He got to where he felt as if the work was in charge of his life.  And it was.  

I did learn from dad, but sometimes learned what not to do. I worked hard, and was no slacker in my generation of physicians.  But I spent more time with my boys.  And I was a much better businessman.  So when it came time to retire I could do so on my terms.   It's been good years since I hung up the stethoscope.  Dad, not so much.  Work was his life.  He eventually joined a group practice that had a mandatory retirement age of 70.  He worked right up to the end, and so did not get the enjoyable decade I've had since 60.  Sadly, after retirement he was idle, a bit lost.   And what he'd lost was the thing that structured his schedule, his days and his nights.  I think he genuinely enjoyed being a doctor; helping people.  To some extent he also used work as his way to avoid difficult things at home.

As is sometimes the case I start out writing one story and end up somewhere unexpected.  

Remembering Dad- Ten Years On...

It's that curious gap between the holidays and the swirling chaos of robotics season.  There's not that much going on.  Perhaps its time for a bit of reflection.  Specifically on the subject of my father, who died ten years ago this month.

I remember a lecturer in Med School saying "It is a wise man who truly knows his father".  Now, as it happens, he was being a bit of a smart aleck at the time.  It was a Genetics course and he was alluding to the question of official vs actual paternity, one that vexed many who studied the field in early days.  Now, heck, a simple swab will show you the twisty branches of your family tree on both sides clear back to Adam and Eve.

I didn't know it at the time, and maybe he didn't either, but he was quoting Homer from the Odyssey.  

But I'm certainly not talking about knowing who my father was in the sense of DNA.  No, as I get older, and as I pass the same way posts he did, I wonder if my image of him grows blurrier or clearer?

Obituaries are such terse summations.  I have creative offspring, and do expect a better effort.  In whatever format exists at that point.  Perhaps I'll be in the last generation who will have eloquent obituaries and eulogies.  It will just be easier to have AI write them all before too long.

Anyway, bear with me for a few memories of dad in the weeks ahead.

Christmas Comes Early and Oddly

Sometimes the complexities of sharing your kids and grandkids with other tribes means that the Trad Christmas schedule won't work.  This was one of those years, so we got everyone together a bit early.  The grands are either old enough to know that Santa does not get 'er done in one night, and/or have grown up in a world where Amazon can supply anything at anytime.  So it was for most of the world still a regular kinda day.

We watched a grandkid play hockey.

We got together for presents.  The theme this year was "Hand Made or Hand Me Down".  This of course is us being environmentally conscious, NOT us trying to get the kids junk out of the attic and given back to them.  Among the hand made stuff was this clever game called "Smoorsh".  Not sure of the spelling, this was just invented last week.  It involved taking squiggly aspen trees cleared off our hunting land, cutting them up into various highly irregular sizes and angles, then stacking them as drawn randomly from a bag.  The youngest person in attendance - over on the left - had a particularly aggressive style.  Grab, Slam Down, Admire.

Not only a remarkably tall and serpentine tower, but he was actively eating Christmas cookies with the other hand.

I got some nice hand made stuff from the grands too.  Knit garments for Bill the Taxidermy Squirrel, and a wall mount for the silly little antlers from the spike buck I got this year.  Hey, it was a nice sized deer despite the.....teeny antlers.  

Of course there were also dogs.  This one is rather a bad influence on Hank.

She's brazen about Occupying human spaces.

And this is one ferocious rabbit chaser.  So after a bit, when things had settled down, I let the dogs out.  I did take the precaution of peering out into the yard first, making sure the gates were closed.  Oh, how well we remember the Great Dog Escape of 2022

(Only my wife and I remember the Great Dog Downfall of 1993 where our then elderly mutt walked right into the Christmas tree and knocked it over).

But I did not see the rabbit.

Out the dogs went, in hot pursuit.  The great huntress dog pursued it back and forth before the bunny zipped under the thankfully locked gate.  Hank on the other hand yipped and ran to the door, clearly shaken.  I figured, well he's a big creampuff, guess that bunny told him off.  Only then did a guest notice that The Hankster had a big laceration on his side.  Guess he ran into a projecting bit of metal on the fence, although a comedic Monty Python rabbit is an outside possibility.

So its off to the after hours vet for sedation, sutures and a very drunk and confused dog returning after the grands were in bed.  Not ideal, but would have been worse on actual Christmas....

Giving Thanks - 2025

Still on this side of the now snow covered landscape.  Everyone growing.  The young generation upward, the older generations perhaps a bit outward.  We also generally grow wiser, each generation starting to see things as their parents did.

A good day.

Not so good to be a turkey of course, or in the case of our celebration, quail.

An Indifferent Student

I seem to recall myself as being a rather clever student.  I learned to read early and was a voracious consumer of, well, anything.  Big stacks of books from the branch library at Jordan Junior High.  But....was I as smart as I remember myself being?  A case study, based on artifacts dredged from the basement of my parent's house.

Looks promising.  It contains among other things my report card from 3rd grade.

Now, back in that era you got either an S for satisfactory or an N for needs work.  That's it.  No Excellent or anything like that.  Opening it up I find that I got Needs Work for:

First half of the year, Works Well with other Children, Follows Directions, Works Well Independently, Begins and Finishes Work on Time, Uses Time Wisely, Listens Attentively, and Reads Independently for information and Pleasure.  OUCH.

The only thing I got an "N" for both halves of the year was for Writes Legibly.  Hey, I was destined to write prescriptions, gimme a break!

A bit of a come down.  I did get recommended to move up to Grade 4, and to my credit only was absent 1/2 a day, while turning up to be a mediocre student a full 176.5 days.

The Report Card was signed by my teacher, Mrs. Schwaub, and by both my parents.  My M.D. father's signature was very poor penmanship indeed.  The card was also marked with a stamp from Arthur T. Nelson, the Principal.  I remember him being chased down the hallway by a kid with a knife, who actually lived on our block.  Ah, the idylic 1960's.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  In faint red ink up at the top it says "Please use your pencil".  Was this an instruction from the get go that I impudently ignored?  

I gotta say, in black Crayola crayon my penmanship, or shall we say penchildship, was pretty darn good.  You can see through the paper to some black crayon math that young "Timmy" as I then styled myself, absolutely crushed.

More stuff from "Timmy" age 6 1/2.  Now that I have a grand daughter about that age I can say, hey, that's outfit's a bit much, don't ya think?

 

Geeze, I hope this was from high school.  Geometry was the only math I every actually liked.  I got 18/20 on this page.  The preceding page was more word problems.  For example: Consider two simple closed curves which intersect at points A and B.  Consider a point C which is in the interior of one of the curves.  Various options were given, to each of which I had to respond True or False.  

21/30.  Guess I never really got to the Truth of Mathematics.  And for what it's worth I got out my pen and paper and tried to puzzle this thing out.  I think the teacher marked me off a couple of points incorrectly.

Subsequent finds of report cards from other years of grade school and Junior High did not, alas, show any sudden flourishing of academic genius.  And high school?  Lets not talk about high school.

Deer Hunting 2025 - Symphony of the Seventies....

Perhaps you thought my last hunting related post was a bit hard on the "gals".  Does are really quite excellent creatures.  Highly devoted to their children and generally sensible.  It's just during that one week of hormonal insanity that they are, well, floozies.  But what about the bucks? Am I letting them off too easy?

Nah.  They are plenty foolish in their own ways.

In general you want to sit and wait in total silence for deer to mosey past.  But for bucks, you can try to fool 'em.  You can for instance clack together some antlers.  This suggests to them that other bucks are duking it out somewhere in the area they plan to claim for their own little harem.  They sometimes come over to take issue with this.  Allow me to demonstrate:

Alas, this is a bit hit and miss.  Early in the mating season they are very territorial.  My son lured his large, albeit distracted, buck in this way.  Shortly after my virtuoso performance seen above a buck did appear in front of me.  For about ten seconds, running fast, and at the upper limits of my accurate range with a crossbow.  I clacked and clacked but he never reappeared.

You can also make sounds allegedly similar to bucks grunting.  Same general theory.  My grandkids gave me this device.  I think its legit.  But the little stinkers may have simply handed me the equivalent of a Whoopie Cushion to make flatulent noises.  I'd not put it past 'em, and if so, well played.....

I don't think this device - for the grandkids I dubbed it the "Buck Tooter" did anything.  Oh, and there's also a little noisemaker said to mimic a doe saying something like "Hey there, sailor!"

As I've mentioned before, bow hunting this year has been frustrating, but also a learning experience.  I've put in lots of time.  I've seen deer.  I'm learning quite a lot about the acreage that we bought specifically to develop as hunting land.  But despite those exciting moments when a deer is oh, so close to stepping into the right spot, there's a lot of time just sitting.  My brain goes to odd places when idle.  I started wondering if the three musical instruments above could be used to compose, well not a song, but a little melody.  Something inspired by the rather racy stuff that was on the radio back in the 1970's.  Thinking Marvin Gaye and "Let's Get it On", although that particular song lacks any clacky parts.....

Here's my final word on "Bucky" the insolent 6 pointer who keeps turning up near my cabin base.  You may notice a bit of white stuff in some of the above images.  Yes, snow.  So when Hank and I were out for walkies he was very excited and distracted.  So much so that he did not notice Bucky standing in the driveway of our next door neighbor's cabin.  Sigh.  Apart from the inconvenience of three or four laws I could have just stayed in bed until 9, rolled over, pointed a rifle out the bedroom window and bagged him - a la Groucho Marx - in my pajamas.

Hank remained oblivious.  This was perhaps my last outing with medieval weaponry.  I've been in rifle range of about a dozen deer over the last few months, so eventually they shall Pay for their Insolence.  I think.....

 

Oh, Deer!

A good three generation hunt.  My son actually got this nice buck, but there was a fair bit of tracking in the dark and hauling out of the woods to do.  My grandson is the best tracker in the family, while I take pride in having a durable back well suiting to dragging deer, including this really big one, out of the dense underbrush.

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I had of course planned a "below the fold" addendum called "Oh Deer Me!", but the critters have thus far outsmarted me.   Grumble, grumble.....

Second Hunt - 2025

I've been dutiful in getting out to hunt this fall.  Sometimes at the cost of aches, pains and not enough sleep.

Here's the crossbow ready, well still needs to be cocked and loaded with an arrow, for action.  And the blue tub???

Unless you are a hunter you likely have no concept of how much of an advantage deer have.  Sight, smell, hearing courtesy of those big bat like ears....they have every opportunity to detect our presence.

Odor control is a big consideration. Hank the Dog has been banned from the hunting land for about the last month.  And as for other smells, well, there are all sorts of scent blockers and laundry soaps.  Also sprays, I think toothpastes, etc.

But once you have your camo garb all de-scented, how to keep it that way?

Pack it into a tub full of leaves!

I won't bore you with the many photos of me peering out of a blind or stand looking at, perhaps, a few frisky squirrels.  So far no deer has wandered into what I would consider reasonable crossbow range.

The other evening we had a three generation hunt.  I sat in a ground blind with my grandson.  His eyes and ears are better than mine.  A lot better!

Excellent camo and a fairly good job of being quiet were not rewarded.  This time.

My son was hunting on the other side of a river that was less than knee deep.  But when he got a deer just before dark we had a problem.  The deer was evidently not that bothered by an arrow stuck into it from about 3 yards range, and ran off into the night.  The next morning we spent a long time tracking it.  Two observations:  The sumac and maple leaves were actively turning red as we scanned the ground for drops of blood.  And, we figure the deer swigged some sort of video game Potion of Healing, because after a quarter mile or so the drops ceased entirely and the deer was Gone.

We'll try again this weekend.

The Black Bag at age 75. Or thereabouts.

My dad was an Old School physician.  Although he practiced in Minneapolis, his approach to medicine was not much different than that of the country doctors he saw in his youth, showing up at the various farm houses with a horse and buggy, carrying the traditional black bag.  He still did house calls in an era where they were becoming obsolete.  And he carried a black bag when he went.

I remember it.  Mostly I remember its presence, not it being used all that much.  By the time I was actually paying attention to such matters I think his house call days were nearly over.  But he still toted it when he visited his patients in the nursing homes.

Here's the bag.  I of course found it when the duty fell to me of clearing out the room at my parents house that had a high percentage of his medical stuff.

It looks a little less "black bag" now.  That's partly the lighting and partly the underlying leather showing through after all this time.  How much time?

There's a little name plate on it.  When you look on ebay and such places you'll see claims that this is a "Vintage" item from the 1920's or 30's.  But no, the patent date is from 1940.  My older brother claims that there was actually an even earlier bag once, but it got really beat up and was discarded.  I'd guess this item was acquired in the 1950's when he was back from military service and starting out in practice.  He had two different office locations I think, and also did many home, nursing home and hospital call.

The contents of the bag were sort of a time capsule.  Lots of stuff for treating migraines.  More injectable vitamins than you'd expect.  Some sort of under the tongue asthma medicine I'd never heard of.  And this stuff:

As you can guess from the name it was an anti nausea drug used to treat morning sickness.  I looked this one up, it was discontinued in 1969 for causing liver damage.

That sort of fits with the overall contents of the bag.  I think it was in use early in my dad's career then just set aside in the late 1960's.  If I remember it after that it was either as something sitting in my dad's office, or perhaps just my imagination.

Black doctor bags used to be a thing.  They still were when I graduated medical school in 1982.  Every graduate got one for free, courtesy of a drug company.  I didn't use mine much, just a bit in residency.  I have not seen it for a while but its probably around here somewhere.  In keeping with my new one item in, one or more items out policy I will probably ditch it next time I run across it.

The medications that were in the bag were all so old they were likely inert, but I still took them down to the medication disposal box at the local police station.

My dad's old black bag I'll keep.  I cleaned it up and aired it out on the porch for long enough that the nasty medicinal smells have lessened.  I'll pack it up with various mementos from his career and leave an explanatory note in it for when my kids run across it someday.....