Impressions from the Long Drive Home

Over the past couple of decades, Kate and I have traveled a time or two or twenty to her childhood home, an old stone house by the Skunk River in the southeast corner of Iowa.

This morning

This morning, as I'm driving to a conference in Raleigh, I'm thinking about the lovely conversation I've just had with Mom, and the pitfalls of aging, and yet how well she's doing in spite of it all, and the tragedy of lives cut short, and how much I depend on Google, and when it tells me to turn left on some winding road, when all the lemmings are going straight, but slowly because the traffic is horrendous, and I wonder if I'd be crazy to turn left on the winding road, or crazy like a fox, but I'm already late, because 10 minutes from home I turned around to make sure I'd turned off the stove,

Thankful

A few of the things for which I am thankful:

My blaze organge "Elmer Fudd" cap with fuzzy ear flaps.

Camping with Kate.

The village that raised me.

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Deer Hunting on a Budget

One of the fun things about a new hobby is all the gear you get to buy. But when I took up hunting three years ago, I set an arbitrary goal of minimizing my costs. Here's how I did it.

First, my shooting stick. I chose a single shot 20 gauge shotgun.

OK, are you back now? 'Cause I know you've been rolling on the floor laughing.

I'm no firearms expert, but I suspect this is the least powerful/capable gun you could buy and still reliably bring down a deer. Ninety-six bucks from the friendly local pawn shop.

The Short Season

All summer long "Put deer stand in shed" has been on my to-do list. Using my normal super efficient methods, I ignored that item long enough that I saved myself the time-consuming hassle of writing "Put deer stand in woods" on my list this fall. I may have ignored a few other items on the list as well, but I'm not sure my efficiency model is going to work with "clean the gutters." I'll get back to you.

This is my fourth hunting season, and I'm beginning to find a routine.

Winding Down

Welcome to the latest entry in my "Year in the Woods" series, where I document all the native plants I can find in our woods in one year.

It's been three weeks since my last post, a sure sign that wildflower season is truly winding down.

This first photo is White Turtlehead, Chelone glabra, yet another new find. This makes about 40 flowers I've found for the first time this year (not because they weren't there, but because I hadn't noticed them before).

One Hundred Plants: Isn't that a lot?

No. No it's not.

Welcome to the latest entry in my "Year in the Woods" series, where I document all the native plants I can find in our woods in one year.

With this post, I have reached the one-hundred plant mark. That's one hundred different species of native plants on our small woodlot in Piedmont North Carolina. It sounds like a lot, but I suspect I've only scratched the surface. As I've noted before, I haven't even started identifying grasses, and I imagine there are dozens. There must be ten or twenty tree species and several ferns. And if you start considering insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals, the diversity of life on this small parcel is mind-boggling. And it begs the question, what diversity can you find in your own neighborhood? Likely more than you could imagine, and much of it depends on native plants like these. For information about adding native plants to your own garden, visit http://ncsu.edu/goingnative/.