Great Weekend

Sometimes you have no plans for a weekend. Sometimes you remember about an invite from a friend to a destruction derby in the small town of Lipton, Saskatchewan. Sometimes you get in the truck and drive on out there. Sometimes it is just as awesome as you would imagine. Sometimes you head back to the local watering hole. Sometimes dinner comes and you need to grab a bottle of wine to take to the barbecue. Sometimes you ask for that bottle of wine, and the only thing that comes out is Royal Red cooking wine. Sometimes you buy that bottle of wine. Sometimes the cap doesn't come off while your driving to the party in the back of a pick up. Sometimes you have to cut off the cap with a buck knife. Sometimes you head back to that friendly local watering hole. Sometimes you witness someone take a bottle to the head. Sometimes your friends follow the commotion outside. Sometimes your friend somehow ends up in cuffs in the back of a cruiser. Sometimes you wake up the next morning and his parents make you all a delicious breakfast. Sometime your friend shows you the old wind up gramaphone and puts on that old Hank Willams 78 just for you......

Sometimes life treats you pretty good.

lazy river floating

Well heres a good trick! But watch out because this is a limited time offer. You will likely never be able to do this again. Right now the Qu'appelle is still almost at flood hight, which means it is deep enough that you can swim in the river and not touch the bottom. The only other time this would be possible is in the spring time, but everyone knows melt water is far to cold to swim in. So anywho, me and my good friend Brett put on some life jackets friday afternoon in the blazing sun and jumped in the river with Brett's bird dog. We lazily floated around, letting the current take us until we got back to his jeep. Tons of fun, I wish I had pictures to share.

Rescue team

The family was out at the cabin today celebrating fathers day. While we were there a couple of neat little things happened.

My pops spotted something in the water, thinking it was dead, he picked it up only to realize that it in fact was not dead. It was a baby warbler that had fallen out of its nest above the shoreline. Dad took the soaking creature into the sun where it began to shake and shiver uncontrollably. Things did not look good, but slowly the sun got stronger and the cute little guy started to warm up. Finally he started chirping and his eyes began to open after his truamatic experience. After about ten minutes of crying you could hear his folks begin singing up a storm in a nearby tree. We decided it was best if we skedaddle and watch the proceedings from afar. The adult birds came down to him and started hootin and hollerin and jumpin this ways and that. Down from the barrel the little birdy went, opening up his wings for a short second to try to reach mom and dad. A little further the next time he went. With mom and dad still hootin and hollerin encouragement he made it a touch farther this time. And finally on the fourth attempt the little ball of down made it into a tree. In one short hour the little guy went from the brink of death to making his very first flight.
A pretty cool sight to see


Second cool thing was that with all the rain we have had, the water in the lake is very clear, especially when brother lent me his expensive polarized sunglasses. A school of Perch had decided to make home intermitently underneath the dock today so I could drop down my hook and literally watch about 30 fish investigate my bait before finally one would try his luck at dinner.

Down In The Valley Below

If all this rain is good for anything besides pushing us towards our generation's Atlantis, it is paddling. While a person can do the Qu'appelle at any time in the summer, the fun increases with the rise in water. Normally at this time you would be scrapping muddy bottom on every third paddle stroke, but not so this year. I failed to touch the bottom even once with my fun stick. This weekend i picked out a portion of the river I had done before knowing that it held a zip line somewheres along its length. However when we got to the line it was clear that it had been taken out in the spring time by log jams mixed with raging torrents of ice. Not one to be dismayed, I kept my eye out for other sorts of fun. stumbling upon a tree that had been overtaken by the river, I got the light bulb in my head that it could be used as a diving board.

Other sights seen on this excursion- owls, pelicans, baby geese, ducks, herons, carp, raccoons, cedar wax wings, normal deer, angry deer, deer with velvety antenna, fat beavers, lazy beavers, beavers that think they can fly, oh and even a couple bovine.

Broody Hens

So I have a broody hen. What does this mean? It means it is trying to hatch its unfertilized eggs. Why are chickens so stupid? I am not sure. A broody hen poses a number of problems. In a coop like mine with only one nest box, the other chicken is never able to get to the box to lay because the other hen is being a stubborn bitch. The broody hen also greatly slows down its food intake as well as neglecting water because it is busy being lazy. So what do you do? You keep tossing it out of the nest box while avoiding pecks from every which angle. Google also told me to try dunking it in water to cool its body temperature down, making it uncomfortable to brood and hopefully waking it from its predicament. We will see how it goes. Up until now my hens have been excellent, producing just about one egg a day each and keeping very silent. I sure as shit can not be complaining about four egg skillets on lazy sunday mornings. Could be better if the skillets were brought to me in bed by cute girls with loose morrals, but I'm better at dreaming than convincing. The city also has not caught onto me yet and hopefully we can keep it at that. I'm sure the city workers are all just to busy working hard... right?

This

Is a methane digester. If it does what I have been telling it to do, it will run my barbecue. The idea is simple. I'm not a scientist but basically this is what is happening. Inside the white bucket without the presence of oxygen the chicken poo and garden scraps are breaking down and one of the main byproducts of that is methane. The methane will bubble up and become trapped in my upside water cooler tank. then when I figure there is some methane in there I can hook up my BBQ hose to... you guessed it.... a BBQ, open the valve and light a match. If it works this will rule. If not, it was a solid way to spend a rainy day with no work and no play.

This redneck here was my inspiration

row row row your boat

So last summer I wasted 800 bucks buying a metal boat with a motor and all the fixins. It's nothing special really and it was fun for the 4 hours that the motor was happy with me, but after that it seemed to become displeased with my pleasant disposition. Now the motor sits in a corner of the shed, I have neither the patience nor the know how to figure out such mechanical devices. I may have been born to work with my hands but they were meant to play with wood and not metallic objects.

Anyway... So I decided that I still love my boat so I went over to Canadian tire and bought a set of oars, and now I have myself a cute little row boat. Life rules!

cute

Well it was the middle of the day so they were not coming out to play. So we stuck a camera into the culvert and here is what we found.

Foxes!

Probably make the cutest animal. On the way home from work yesterday out in Boggey Creek valley I stumbled upon a fox den not ten feet from the road. Screeching to a hault I pulled over to have a gander and there were three of the cutest most curious little foxes you have seen. I was able to get within ten feet of them because they have not yet learned to fear humans. Tomorrow I am going back with my camera so hopefully I will have some pictures for you.

tis the season

For dandelions that is. For most folks, dandelions are the most pesky of weeds, hard to pull up and they are fucking everywhere(this is true, I picked enough flowers within 40 feet of the back porch. And lets face it, they really do suck when they are crowding your garden. BUT! they also serve the greater good. Dandelions can be put into salads, used for herbal remedies, made into a tea, the roots dried as a coffee substitute, and in this particular case, they make everyones favorite wine.

For price of chicken scratch(15 loons) I was able to make a little over 2 gallons of wine. This should give me ten bottles of wine after all the sediment is left over. A buck fifty a bottle eh? NOT BAD. I would say from start to finish I probably put in about 2 hours of work, but it was enjoyable work, and it would have either been that or twidling my thumbs wathing the evening roll past me....and I prefer to do things.

I used the second recipe off of this interwebs site here except that I doubled it and added some cloves when I tossed in the orange peelings.

This is also only the start. Hopefully this year will yield more saskatoon and apple wine and hopefully will see me try a sand cherry wine for the first time. But these will have to wait. Maybe by the time fruit season rolls around I can get good and sauced for the pickins off of this dandy goodness.