Then Just Keep Running

Yesterday I went shopping for Thanksgiving food. I’m afraid I was not as thankful as I should have been.

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was not my problem. My mother cooked everything, or we ate at my grandparents’ house, and that meant the cooking was divided up among a bunch of relatives. Now, it’s all me. Shopping. Cleaning up before the meal. Cooking. Running around frantically during the meal to make sure my dad doesn’t defile anything and ruin it for everyone else. Dishes. Cleaning up after the meal. It’s a drag.

I was reluctant to cook at all this year. I don’t know if my dad would care. By Friday, he will be thinking of other things. In the past, he has suggested going out for Thanksgiving, but that’s depressing. I feel like I have to do something here at the house.

I decided to cut the menu down. My dad likes oyster dressing, which I find disgusting. I don’t know how to make oyster dressing, so I make cornbread dressing and shove oysters into it. It’s probably wrong, but he eats it. I’m all done with it. It won’t hurt him to eat normal dressing like everyone else. I’m thinking of stuffing the turkey with cornbread stuffing containing chunks of sauteed andouille.

He can’t smell anything, and that means his sense of taste is very limited. He doesn’t really taste oysters. He will enjoy my stuffing as much as he would the nasty oyster mess. He just wants oysters because his mother used to use them. Some traditions are well worth killing.

No yams this year. I used to make a dish which was basically yams mashed up with pineapples, brown sugar and spices, topped with pecans fried in brown sugar and butter. Forget that. Takes too much time.

There will be no pumpkin pies. I don’t particularly care for pumpkin pie. I don’t think anyone really likes it. Try comparing it to apple, cherry, or peach pie, and you have to admit, it comes in second every time. I’m making two pecan pies, using crusts from the store. Good enough.

Pecan prices have gone nuts, to use an appropriate adjective. I paid $18 for my pecans. There must be a blight.

My dad insists on cranberry sauce, which is a very weak dish. It’s cranberries, sugar, and water. I’m all done with it. This year, it will be relish alone. Everyone gets relish, and they will danged well like it. I’m tired of making sauce AND relish.

I won’t make fruit salad (or any type of salad), and there will be no rolls. No snacks. No cookies. It will be turkey, beans, potatoes, cranberry relish, and pecan pie. I think I cut four hours of work out of my life.

I have learned to love small turkeys. The store was full of birds the size of toddlers, but I dug out a 12-pounder. I am going to bone it and stuff it. It’s a lot of work, but once you’ve had a boned turkey, all other turkeys are disgusting.

You know the big, dried-out turkey cadaver you end up with every year? You struggle to fit it on a platter, and then you try to cover it with foil, but people never put the foil back correctly, so everything turns into leather? You don’t get that with a boned turkey. You get a solid loaf of pure food you can slice and put in Tupperware. The bones go in the trash on Thursday, not Monday, or you can use them for gravy.

If you don’t know how big your turkey should be, you can find the information on the web. If the raw weight in pounds is 1.5 times the number of diners, you’re good. If you want a lot of leftovers, maybe you need to go bigger. I do not want leftovers. Sharing leftover food with a dementia patient is a bad experience. You go to the fridge hoping to make a turkey sandwich, and then you see that someone else has handled the meat with his fingers. That kind of thing happens.

My dad was never a great person to share leftovers with. He would eat the best stuff right away, and the more there was, the more he ate. No one else got very much. He’s an unusual person. I take him to restaurants for big lunches, and then when he gets home, he eats ice cream out of the carton.

I’ll be throwing out any remaining leftovers on Saturday. My dad hates that, but I hate dealing with the mess. Turkey bits on the counter. Cranberry sauce on the floor. As long as I’m the sole member of the cleaning crew, I make the rules. On Saturday, out it goes.

When I finally gritted my teeth and decided to cook, I invited my friend Amanda over. She has three sons and an elderly parent (not demented). Like me, she has no help whatsoever. None. Nada. I figured things would be easier on both of us if we teamed up. Also, if she wants, she can fill in with items I refuse to cook. I am hoping both of us will do a lot less work than we would have had to do with two separate operations.

My attitude toward the whole affair is not all that positive. I suppose I should think of Amanda’s sons. Thanksgiving was a big deal to me when I was a kid. Maybe if I think of this as a chance to help patch up their childhoods, I’ll feel more motivated. I should focus on that, because feeding my dad is not all that rewarding.

I don’t see the holiday as an opportunity to give thanks. I give thanks like crazy every day. I’m not sure jamming yourself full of food is a good way to express gratitude. I’m also unexcited about the idea of going somewhere and feeding the poor. If you’re only good to other people on holidays, I suppose working at a homeless shelter two days a year is better than nothing, but I want no part of it. I’m not sure how people who do it manage to put any food on their own tables. I expect to be cooking from 9 a.m. until at least 2 p.m., not including the things I’ll do tomorrow and Wednesday. There is no conceivable way I could produce edible food AND spend three hours virtue signaling and posting selfies of myself hugging the poor while trying not to get too dirty.

If you want to freak the poor out, go feed them two weeks after Thanksgiving, and stay all day. Or feed them in March, giving up a vacation day. That will make an impression. Much better than hopping out of your Range Rover and slapping instant mashed potatoes on trays for 45 minutes.

If I cook anything at all for Christmas, it will be rib roast, baked potatoes, and cheesecake. Maybe a Caesar salad. I would fix these things on Thursday if I could get away with it. The cheesecake takes a little effort, but the other things are as easy to prepare as toast. It’s also a much better meal than turkey and dressing.

It looks like the best strategy is to think of the kids. That gives me a little enthusiasm, or at least it makes me feel some obligation. My dad and Amanda’s mom–I think Amanda will forgive me–are not the sort of seniors who make you want to cook special stuff for them in order to thank them for being so wonderful.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get amped up and cook yams.

No pumpkin pie. No way. I hate fads, and for the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing way too much “pumpkin spice.” Pumpkin spice cookies. Pumpkin spice cappuccino. Pumpkin spice pork rinds. Pumpkin spice Preparation H. No; someone must rage against the machine, and as Dean Vernon Wormer said, that foot is me.

Try that boned turkey. You don’t know what you’re missing.

Don’t Envy Your Heroes

It’s a very slow Independence Day here at The Compound. I could have invited people for barbecue, but I have no grill, nor do I desire one, and I no longer have the old drive to cook for others.

I don’t make a big deal of holidays any more. I used to spend Christmas with my mother’s family in Kentucky. A number of my relatives are dead now, and those that remain don’t seem very interested in maintaining contact. When they travel to Florida, they keep it quiet instead of arranging for visits.

I lost a lot of friends when I left my last two churches. I can’t say I lost friends, really. What happened is this: people who only pretended to be my friends got exposed.

The same thing happened when I started going back to church 10 years ago. My backsliding friends stopped calling me. I had one friend who still called once in a while, but he only called when he wanted something. He needed to use my tools. He wanted to fish on my dad’s boat. Is that a friend? Anyway, I stopped receiving invitations to his home. Christians make people uncomfortable.

He had issues. For one thing, he was envious. If you had things he didn’t have, he was likely to “accidentally” damage them when you let him use them, and he was not the kind of person who offered to fix what he broke.

He had a wonderful neighbor who cut his grass and lent him tools. He borrowed a new power saw and left it sitting in the rain, and when the neighbor complained, instead of apologizing, he said something like, “It still works.”

Dude. That’s why you don’t have anything.

He used to invite himself on fishing trips. He would arrive at the dock late, with a hangover. Very bad form. When we got out of the bay, he would go to sleep on the couch. If a fish hit a line, he would get up so he could reel it in, because that’s the fun part of fishing. If my dad had beer in the fridge, he would drink it.

When we came back in, he wouldn’t help the other guests clean up the boat. He would come with me to the cleaning table and snicker at them while they worked in the sun. When he did that, I decided he was never going to fish with us again. He probably has no idea what the problem was.

On one trip, he drank all of my dad’s beer. He was an alcoholic, so this wasn’t hard for him. Next time he fished with us, he proudly displayed a fresh 12-pack. Which he then drank by himself. He drank my dad’s beer, replaced it, and drank the replacement beer.

People always complained about him. He was burning bridges every day, but he could never smell the smoke. These days, I only think about him when I think about former friends who treated me badly.

If you want to find out how much people like you, stop cooking big meals for them, and stop inviting them to fish on your yacht. You’ll learn more than you want to.

I have never been the kind of person who keeps score. Ordinarily, I don’t sit around adding up the things my friends and I do for each other to see if they balance. It takes me a long time to realize someone is running a big tab. When I finally do the math, the results aren’t encouraging! I know a few people who treat me well, but I’ve known a whole lot of users.

I’m off on a tangent.

Over the years, I have gotten used to doing nothing on most holidays, and the habit of doing nothing is hard to break.

Let’s see.

New Year’s Eve is only for drunks. Martin Luther King Day is only for black people, it’s only celebrated in dangerous neighborhoods, and it’s a day of crime and intoxication. Valentine’s Day is an insulting sham, and I have no one to celebrate with anyway. St. Patrick’s Day is only for drunks. Memorial Day is a barbecue day, and unless I’m doing the barbecuing, I don’t get invitations. July 4 is a barbecue day. Labor Day is a barbecue day. Halloween is a celebration of evil, and it’s also a big day for drunks. Thanksgiving and Christmas are okay.

The Fourth of July will pass without much acknowledgement. I’m grateful for America, but I’m also grateful for not having to shop and cook for people who don’t spend a dime or lift a finger.

It’s more blessed to give than to receive, but I don’t want to be TOO blessed.

Happy Steve Independence Day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Feynman and Errol Flynn this week. That’s what I sat down to write about.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel-winning American physicist. He was recruited to work on the bomb before he even got his Ph.D. He was a character. He drank and slept around, and he belonged to a Brazilian samba band in Rio. He wrote several interesting autobiographical books. I read them about 25 years ago, while I was preparing to become a physicist.

My understanding is that his books have become more popular since I read them. They have new cover designs now. That’s always a clue that a book has taken off. People seem to revere him the way they revere Einstein. They seem to think he had the answers to life’s problems, and that he would be a good role model.

Einstein was a terrible husband and father. He was a naive socialist. He spent most of his career trying to disprove quantum mechanics. Letters that were uncovered recently suggest that he was a racist. He was not perfect. It’s unfortunate that people think physicists know about anything other than physics. They generally do not.

When I was young, I liked Feynman a lot. He was funny. He seemed humble and honest. When I look at his books now, I have a different feeling. That’s because I’m growing up.

Feynman slept with lots of women, including married women. He put in a lot of time making bad drawings of nudes. He enjoyed Brazilian culture, which is pretty depraved. I don’t think he was humble, either. He loved saying he wasn’t very smart, but his work is full of anecdotes about his extraordinary mathematical accomplishments. He plays them down, but he still presents them, and the obvious intention is to impress the reader.

I now see him as a selfish, dishonest, treacherous person who loved attention. I don’t admire anything about him except for his brain. I was stupid to think highly of him when I was young. I should have thought about the husbands he humiliated.

Feynman was an atheist. I think about that a lot. I sit and read his interesting stories, and sometimes I stop and try to imagine his current circumstances. He’s almost certainly in hell, being tortured. Whatever cockiness he had in life must be long gone.

Sometimes I think about him when I’m lying on my back, and I realize hell is below me somewhere, with Feynman in it. I’m reading his book for light entertainment, but somewhere behind me, on the other side of a thick wall of rock and so forth, he is still alive, crying out in anguish and despair. If he could scream loud enough, I would hear him every day.

I’m used to having Christian heroes and secular heroes. I think of my secular heroes differently now. How many are in hell? How many people are they dragging down with them through their poisonous examples?

The things my secular heroes accomplished are, in the final analysis, excrement. When we are judged, no one will care about discoveries in quantum mechanics. God will want to know who we helped. He will want to know who we introduced to him. What can a Feynman or an Einstein say in response to those questions? “I did exactly what I wanted to do, I made a great deal of money, and I did nearly nothing for other people.” That seems accurate.

As for Errol Flynn, he has been on Turner Classic Movies a lot lately. I never really knew who he was until I started watching TCM. I started reading about him.

Flynn was utterly depraved. He had sex with as many people as humanly possible, male and female. He built a mansion full of peepholes and one-way mirrors so he could watch his guests in their private moments. He was tried for statutory rape, and during the trial, he picked up a teenager who worked in the courthouse. He used to appear at the dinner table, where his mother was seated, fully naked. He exposed himself to strangers.

Flynn had no remorse whatsoever. He wrote an autobiography called My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which was published after he died. He celebrated his sins.

Flynn fell apart, physically. His body couldn’t withstand the burden of sin. He tried to join the military in World War Two, and he was turned down because of an enlarged heart and VD. He would have been about 32.

Flynn dropped dead at the age of 50. He simply quit functioning. The coroner said he had the body of a much older man. A doctor involved with the autopsy was so impressed with Flynn’s genital warts, he sliced them off in order to preserve them for posterity.

Errol Flynn was charismatic. When you watch his movies, he seems noble. He’s inspiring. He’s brave, funny, and self-effacing. It’s astounding how well he played a type which was nothing like the real Flynn.

I decided to buy his book. Curiosity overcame me. I had to see what went on in the mind of a man who had so little regard for others and so little fear of God. I haven’t received it yet.

I think of Flynn the way I think of Feynman. He must be in hell. How could he not be? He practically filed an application. One day he was a declining matinee idol leading a carefree, lecherous life. He was admired and pampered. The next day, he was in a flaming pit surrounded by demons. What must that be like? It’s one thing to die in the electric chair and wake up in hell, expecting the worst. It has to be considerably worse when one of earth’s pampered princes or princesses dies suddenly.

People don’t really die. Their bodies stop working, but human beings continue. Every person ever born is alive somewhere, and only those who accepted salvation or whose sins couldn’t be imputed to them are in heaven. The others are burning, with maggots chewing their bones, and they will never be free.

I have two aunts who are probably in hell. I have a high school friend who probably made it when he shot himself at 25. I have lots of acquaintances who are almost surely feeling the flames right now.

We’re very nonchalant about hell, here on the surface. Many of us choose not to believe, and the rest of us don’t like to think about it. Death will be a real eye-opener for all of us. We will wonder why we weren’t more concerned about damnation.

Feynman. Flynn. Anthony Bourdain. Hunter Thompson. Prince. Michael Jackson. Hugh Hefner. Stephen Hawking. John Lennon. Hell is packed with celebrities many of us envied and emulated. It probably contains a number of popes and televangelists.

These days, I have a new feeling when I watch old movies, and it isn’t good. Hollywood has always been a mess, and I know very well I’m looking at people who have been burning for decades.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m very glad my values have changed, and I hope God continues to improve them. The world is full of fool’s gold, and most of us are diehard fools.

Maybe I’ll review the book when I read it. I don’t expect to have pleasant things to say.

Tree Rat Feast

I had to fry squirrels again today. I had 5 in the fridge, and they were taking up a lot of room. I had them soaking in water mixed with salt and baking soda. The soda was there to kill any gaminess. It works.

The first time I fried squirrels, I had problems. I used shallow oil in a big pan, and it was not that easy to get the meat to brown correctly because some bits liked to stick up out of the oil. Today I did what I should always do. I used deeper oil. I put maybe 1-1/4″ of cheap olive oil in a saucepan. This allowed me to submerge the meat.

I cut the squirrels up differently. I divided them into arms, legs, and torsos. I kept the ribs on the torsos. There isn’t a lot of meat on a squirrel ribcage, but there is enough to make it worth keeping.

I didn’t soak the meat in buttermilk. I didn’t have enough. I drained the brine off with a colander, and then I tossed the meat in a small amount of buttermilk and drained it again.

I used the following seasonings: salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The ratio was about a tablespoon of each per cup of flour, except for the garlic and pepper. I guess I used half a teaspoon of each per cup of flour.

I put 3 cups of biscuit flour (no leavening) in a bag with the seasonings, and I shook it like crazy to mix it all up. As I was cooking, I would throw one batch of squirrel parts in the bag, shake it to coat them, and extract them with tongs. It worked well but made a mess.

I added a tablespoon or so of bacon grease to the olive oil, and I used cheap olive oil with virtually no flavor. I would never fry anything in extra virgin oil or any oil that tasted like olives. It’s the wrong oil for high heat.

I used a thermometer and tried to keep the frying temperature around 350 degrees. This is important because if frying oil gets too cold, breading falls off.

I made buttermilk biscuits. The shortening was half butter and half bacon grease. I added a little cream to the buttermilk, and I put a teaspoon or two of sugar in the flour just for kicks.

After the last batch of squirrel came out, I used some of the oil (plus more bacon grease) to make gravy. I used the seasoned flour from the squirrels. I also added sage, more salt, and more pepper.

How did it come out? It was fantastic. The meat was cooked pretty evenly. The breading stayed on. The seasonings were right on target. The biscuits were perfect. The gravy was exceptional. I poured the gravy on the squirrel pieces as I was eating them. I had gravy all over me, but it was worth it.

The only complaint I have is that not all squirrels are tender. Some cook up like rubber bands. You can still eat them, but you have to work at it.

I can’t tell a tender squirrel from a tough one until I cook it. I don’t know what to do. My plan is to continue eating the tough ones along with the tender ones until I have a solution.

The brining is a great move. The squirrels had no gamy flavor at all. They were better than dark chicken meat. The taste is a little richer, with nutty overtones. Makes sense, considering what they eat.

The sight of squirrels doesn’t bother me the way it did between the end of the season and the day I found out I was allowed to shoot nuisance squirrels. After the season, they paraded around in front of me every time I left the house, as if they were trying to make a point. They ate my blueberries off my only producing bush. I was powerless. Then I got cleared to take them down, and that’s what I did. I took them down to Chinatown. Now I see them as opportunities for hunting practice as well as cheap meat.

I don’t think I’ll work too hard to exploit them for meat, however. They’re a pain to clean, they stink, and cooking them is a lot of work. I will try to train myself to throw their dead bodies out into the woods.

I gave Maynard and Marvin some squirrel arms. I thought they would enjoy picking the meat off the bones, and it saved me the aggravation of heating up their regular food.

The new trigger for the Marlin 60 .22 arrived. I’m going to see if I can install it now. It may turn out to be a much better gun than I had hoped.

I learned something disturbing about the Model 60. It’s hard to install a sling. The tube magazine takes up room in the stock, and that means there isn’t much wood to hold a front stud. You need to start with around 1/2″ of wood when you install a stud. I have about 3/8″. I think I solved the problem. I bought a stud with a nut about 1/4″ in height, and I ground it down to a little more than 1/8″. The screw isn’t very thick, and in order for a nut to work, its threaded height only has to equal the width of the screw that goes through it. I should be able to recess the nut into the inside of the stock and still have 1/4″ of wood below it to provide support for it.

I don’t want to ruin this stock by splitting it. The wood is beautiful for the price. Lots of figuring. Can’t figure out this wood found its way into a stock for a $170 rifle.

I need to make a hole inside the stock, wide enough and deep enough to hold the nut for the stud. The nut needs to fit tightly in it so the knurling on the outside of the nut will hold the nut still while I tighten the screw that goes through it. What I need is a counterbored hole. It has to be 1/4″ wide inside the stock, and then it has to decrease to about 0.090″ across for the screw.

I looked at various solutions for this, and I think a 1/4″ Forstner bit is the way to go. This is a wood bit that makes cylindrical holes accurately centered around a chosen point. I can drill the hole for the screw, put the point of the Forstner bit in it, and open the hole up, to a depth of around 5/32″.

They make sling studs for tube magazines. They have little rings that use the magazines for support. I don’t want that. Tube magazines are weak. They’re not made to hold slings, especially if you wrap your sling around your arm to steady your aim. I want a sling, but I’m not willing to bend the magazine in order to get it.

I’m wondering just how accurate a cheap .22 can be. I was hoping for 2 MOA, but maybe it can do better. We will see. Once the stud is installed on the stock, I’ll be able to use the gun with a bipod, and that will allow me to test its accuracy better than I can right now. It would be a hoot to have a .22 that would hunt at 100 yards.

Squirrels, pigs, and rabbits are the only animals I can hope to cook until the hunting seasons open up again. I could try armadillos, but the thought of handling and eating an animal that may be full of leprosy is not appealing. There are recipes for coyote, but I’m not Korean. I’ve read that bobcats taste surprisingly good. Could I enjoy eating a cat, even if it tasted good? It would be hard to get used to.

My grandmother ate possums. I just can’t. Maybe some day I’ll work up to it.

In the fall, deer season will start. I like venison. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s pretty good.

If I get the new .22 trigger to work, I’ll blog it. I look forward to having a trigger I can pull without wondering if I’m about to break it.

We Have to Call off the Hunt! The Cocoa is Cold!

Because the state of Florida gave me the go-ahead to kill nuisance squirrels near my house (in writing!), today I went out and sat in the blind and dispensed frontier justice. I nailed three of the mangy thieves from something like 40 yards.

This is the right way to hunt! I’m 50 feet from a house with a toilet and refrigerator. I have a nice plastic Adirondack chair under me. I have a cold beverage. I’m sitting in a shady blind under shady trees. The squirrels don’t make me chase them. The present themselves for execution.

The Marlin 60 Remington sent me as a replacement for the one that shot like a musket is wonderful. It has a nicely figured stock, and it shoots great. I used a rimfire scope today, and I popped two of the squirrels in the head. The other one got it in the shoulders. My story is that he moved. You can’t prove me wrong. I killed the only witness.

The trigger is awful. I was trying to shoot today, and for a minute, I wondered if the safety was on. No, that’s just how bad the trigger is. I ordered a trigger kit from an aftermarket company. When I get it installed, this gun should be a prizewinner.

I baited the yard with Mike-Sell’s Puffcorn Delites, which are like Cheetos, only a thousand times better. The squirrels didn’t go for them. I thought it was worth a shot.

I learned something today. You can’t hunt without learning something. I learned I really need to carry my .22 pistol when I hunt.

The third squirrel I shot did not die right away. He was scampering around, so I got up to kill him at close range. When I reached him, I remembered something important: you can’t focus on a squirrel using a rimfire scope if you’re 4 feet away. This was a bad situation. I don’t want game to suffer, and I couldn’t see to shoot this squirrel. I couldn’t use the sights because the scope blocked them. I had to wait until he held still, and then I was able to hold the gun pretty close and finish him off.

I’m sorry it happened, but I don’t feel guilty, because hunting is a good thing, and I did my best. It was a noob mistake. Next time, I’ll have the pistol.

There have been a lot of shots I wouldn’t take. I want to be sure the squirrels drop and die fast. I’m not going to take unnecessary chances on wounding them. But no one is perfect.

I ordered a holster for the pistol, and it arrived this week. Looks like a quality item. I’ll wear it next time.

When you shoot a squirrel through the head, you may think you only winged him. They kick for quite a while after they die. That surprised me.

I got to use one of my hunting knives for the first time. I used my Entrek Beaver. It was not as great as I had hoped. The knife seems like a quality item, but the factory edge doesn’t seem up to the task of slitting squirrel hide. It will do it, but you have to apply pressure and go back over cuts. I will have to see what I can do about putting a better edge on it.

I improved my squirrel-skinning technique. When you have three animals to clean, you learn more than you would if you only had one. I learned the techniques I’ve seen on Youtube won’t work on the local squirrels. The skin is too tough, and it sticks to the squirrels too hard. I wonder if the squirrels north of Florida have looser skin. When you skin a Florida squirrel, you can’t just make a cut above the anus, step on the hind feet, and yank the tail. Nothing happens. You have to make cuts down the legs, shove your thumbs under the hide, and loosen it around the thighs.

Another thing: you don’t want to gut a squirrel before you clean it, unless you have to. When you gut it, poop is likely to go everywhere, and various types of goo will coat the fur and make life difficult. You skin the squirrel first, and then you cut his head off with poultry shears. You shove the shears up the servants’ entrance and cut him all the way to the neck, and then you pull the guts out and throw them as far as possible.

Shears are even better than a cleaver for cutting away all the nasty bits in the crotch.

I plan to kill the bejeezus out of these things until I quit seeing them around the house. They’re terrible. City people think they’re cute. They’re not cute when they’re eating your fruit or ripping the insulation out of your attic. It would be lots of fun to feed them and give them names and keep track of their offspring through the years. And live in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, squirrels don’t know how to behave, so it’s breading and hot grease for the lot of them.

It’s great to learn these skills. Nothing is worse than an urban pansy who can’t do anything. And it’s terrible to live in a state of delusion about wildlife. Most people in America get their knowledge of wild animals from Pixar. You come to see animals differently when you have to fight with them all the time. Life in the country will turn a vegan into a stone-cold killer. Well. A SANE vegan.

Oxymoron?

I have to kill mice. I have to kill squirrels. I have to kill coons. I have to kill coyotes. I have to kill moles. I have to kill gophers. I may have to kill crows. I may have to kill pigs. I have to kill these things just to be considered responsible and not helpless.

Butchering warm-blooded animals is disgusting. I need to get over that. Butchering fish always made me hungry. Squirrels feel sort of like puppies, and they exude a musk which makes the whole animal smell like a huge crotch. When I cut them up, part of me wonders if what I’m doing is normal behavior. It’s irrational, but it’s hard not to feel a little bit like Hannibal Lecter. It’s healthy, though. I’m more in touch with the reality of predation. This is where all meat comes from. Animals don’t unzip big pockets in their sides and hand us steaks.

It has never bothered me to cut on raw pigs or poultry, but they always arrived cold and hairless!

I used standard velocity ammo today. The nominal speed is 1070 fps, I think. Anyway, it’s subsonic, so it’s not as loud as regular .22 ammo. I thought the neighbors might like it. I ordered some ammo which is even slower: CCI Quiet segmented ammo. These are very slow, very quiet rounds that fly apart inside squirrels and kill them fast. They’re supposed to be very accurate, although the low velocity limits the range. CCI claims you can use them without hearing protection. That would be great. We’ll see how they work. They’re twice as expensive as regular ammo, but I wouldn’t expect to use a lot of them.

If the Quiet rounds work, I will have to consider selling the air rifle. I won’t need it. It’s nice to have something that shoots 3-cent ammo, however.

I used Primos shooting sticks today. These are sticks joined at one end. You cross them and put their tips on the ground, and they form a bipod. Much more stable than a monopod. They’re also very compact when you fold them up. I like it.

I will clear the yard of squirrels, or they will reproduce so fast I will have squirrel meat all the time. Either way, I will be happy.

In my Family, we Don’t Bicker

I did a better job with McMuffins today, and I came up with a hot zero-caffeine beverage I can stand to drink.

I gave up on making three muffins at once. I settled for two. This made it possible to put Canadian bacon in with the eggs in one skillet. I also put a covered dish in the oven and got it hot before I toasted the muffins. When they came out, I buttered them and put them in the dish. The humidity in the dish took a lot of the hardness out of them. A reader suggested applying the cheese to the muffins before putting them in the warming area, and if I make McMuffins again, I’ll give that a shot. It would surely increase the humidity.

As for a beverage, I put about half a teaspoon of true cinnamon in about 1-1/2 cups of milk with a tablespoon of sugar, a little salt, and some vanilla. Nuked it until hot. It was not bad. I would say it’s 90% as good as decaf, and that will do.

I used true cinnamon even though I like Chinese cinnamon better. There is a chemical in Chinese cinnamon which can affect the liver.

Things worked out okay, and I didn’t completely wreck the kitchen.

I barely cooked the bacon. I put it in the hot pan for a minute or less. It comes pre-cooked, so you don’t have to do much.

It’s still kind of small. A decent type of ham, like Serrano, would be better.

Ordinarily I don’t get out of bed until I’ve prayed for a couple of hours, but today I decided to eat first so I don’t have kitchen conflicts with my dad. He will stroll in when I’m cooking something and start running appliances as if I weren’t there. I would blame dementia if I could, but it’s just his way. Other people have never been fully real to him.

I don’t want him emptying the dishwasher, either. I don’t like eating off of things he has handled.

I ate breakfast with Youtube healing videos. I used to go to church and watch people talk ABOUT God, saying things that weren’t true or useful. Now I watch someone exercise God’s power. I used to hobnob with people who pretended to be saints on the weekends yet who knew almost nothing and lived pretty much as they wanted as soon as they got off the property. Being alone with videos of a sincere Christian is better than being in a crowd of 1500 hypocrites and willful ignoramuses.

There are a lot of ways to find out whether someone is ignorant about God. One quick way is to say, “What’s your sign?” If they don’t tell you astrology is demonic, you’ve smoked out a superficial Christian. Another way is to ask them about their political views. Having no views isn’t all that bad, but leftist views indicate a lack of familiarity with the Holy Spirit. Leftists have been working to undo God’s work for centuries.

I went to church with a lot of leftists who loved astrology. Women were the worst. They love turning the government into a husband/sugar daddy, and women are suckers for idolatry. Satan knew what he was doing when he went after Eve. If you want to hear about astrology, tarot cards, crystals, or yoga, your best bet is to talk to a woman, because most men don’t pay much attention to such things.

It makes sense that women would be more open to temptation, because a husband or father is supposed to be a shepherd of the family. Shepherds are supposed to keep sheep from straying.

I love watching far-off Christians on Youtube confirm what God has told me. For years, I’ve been telling people, “Everyone is spirit-led. The only question is which spirit they’re following.” The other day I watched a Tom Fischer video, and he said exactly the same thing. I have never heard anyone else say it. Not once in my life. But he recited it as though he were reading my mind. Why? Because God said it to both of us. Man, it’s nice when Christians have Holy Spirit harmony. But it’s so rare.

I knew a very arrogant man at my last church. When he gave his opinions about God, which were sometimes complete foolishness, he would say, “My revelation about this is…”, and he was clearly indicating that the things he said were opinions. He thought that was acceptable.

Revelation comes from only one source: God. Does God have opinions? Does that even make sense? Imagine God saying, “I could be wrong, but…”

God doesn’t have opinions. He has the truth. Only the ignorant have opinions. Revelation isn’t opinion, and opinion isn’t revelation.

I got a neat revelation from God, about the curse of illegal immigration. The Bible clearly states that a rebellious nation will be cursed with powerful aliens. I shared this publicly, and the arrogant man I’m talking about started rebuking me. He was a former illegal. It didn’t occur to him to ask God if I was right before he got in the face of the Holy Spirit. He was an emotional person, and he was not a listener. Dealing with him was like dealing with a rebellious woman with a short fuse. Men are supposed to be stable and level-headed.

I was sharing a genuine revelation with someone who had a poor prayer life and a lot of ambition, and he got in God’s way instead of assisting. This is normal, all over the world. The problem is worse than usual in Miami, but it’s bad everywhere. We don’t hear the Holy Spirit, so we think debate is a good thing instead of the curse it really is. If the body of believers is the machine, the Holy Spirit is the oil, and when the parts aren’t oiled, they grind against each other.

Being a Christian in Miami is like trying to farm on a rock mesa with little pockets of soil. There are very few opportunities to plant or grow anything. Miamians are the smartest people on earth, regardless of what their test scores say. They know absolutely everything.

It’s wonderful to turn on Youtube and see a few Christians in agreement with each other and God. I can’t tell you how strange it is to see it.

When the Holy Spirit is behind something, and people yield, things go smoothly. I see this in the evangelism Fischer and his friends do. They go up to some of the least-promising people imaginable–Jews, Europeans, and Muslims–and the first thing you know, those people are healed, and they’re accepting Jesus. Like it’s completely normal; not extraordinary in the least. I’ve done evangelism, and I’ve seen other people do it. Almost always, it makes people uncomfortable or angry, and they take off. When the Holy Spirit is with you, he shows you which fruit are ready to drop, so you get remarkable results when common sense says you should fail.

You have to stay away from pursuits God hasn’t prepared for you. They don’t work. It’s like trying to march into a wall of briars. The other day God told me something neat: you have to stay within your anointing. God will anoint (authorize) you to do certain specific things. If you do those things, he will help you and make it work. If you do other things, you are likely to fail. Worse, you may get success from Satan so you will become arrogant, lose your connection to God’s guidance, and keep wasting your time.

When Benny Hinn and Morris Cerullo started telling people God would make people rich for tithing and donating money, they went outside their anointing. God never authorized it, and he doesn’t back it up. When you give too much money to churches, it vanishes, and God doesn’t return it to you unless you repent. You can tithe yourself poor. Satan gives prosperity preachers success, even though their followers wither and go broke. He’s fattening them up like beef calves.

My last church taught the feel-good gospel and the money gospel, and Satan got free rein to destroy it, as I predicted. The man who got in my face with opinions was the pastor’s brother-in-law. He was a huge supporter. He was ambitious for God, which is always disturbing.

He was what you might call a Kool-Aid drinker. He kept his foot on the gas no matter what happened. He and his wife went from mere relatives to top authorities in the church, fast. Then the pastor got caught up in a sex scandal, and the church dissolved.

There should have been some self-examination, as well as some examination of the pastor and his doctrine, but the brother-in-law did what conceited authorities always do: he shot the messengers and abandoned the victim. “The corrupt priests aren’t the problem; Yeshua is the problem, because he criticized them in public.” “Jeremiah is the problem.” “Isaiah is the problem.” “Micaiah is the problem.” “Elijah is the problem.”

I am not planning to go to a bricks-and-mortar church yet. I ask God about it, and the message seems very clear: “NO.” I don’t know why he says that. I would like to be among Christians, even if I have very low expectations of the teaching I would receive and plan to ignore it.

It’s not, “No,” with a small “o.” It’s two capital letters!

Thank goodness for Youtube, the solid friends I have, and God’s presence. I assume I will someday be part of a group that meets to pray. Until then, I will be taken care of.

Can’t Compete with Minimum-Wage Chefs

I have embarked on a fool’s errand. I tried to make my own Egg McMuffins. I have done this before. Guess I didn’t learn my lesson.

A long time ago, I bought myself a couple of synthetic clamshell-looking dishes. You put eggs in them and microwave them, and then you put the eggs in your fake McMuffins. You get nice round eggs. They work okay, but nuked eggs aren’t as good as fried eggs.

This week I picked up some English muffins, Canadian bacon, and cheese, and I gave it another try.

Here’s my conclusion: McDonald’s deserves more credit. These things are hard to make.

To create a McMuffin, you have to fry eggs and Canadian bacon at the same time, because they have to go on the muffins simultaneously. This means two separate pans. It does for me, anyway. I wanted three McMuffins. You also have to toast multiple muffins at the same time, and before you put the eggs and stuff on them, they have to be buttered. You have to take cheese slices out and warm them up, because if you put cold cheese on a McMuffin, it stays hard.

You also have to cut butter slices and soften them in the microwave, unless you want to mash cold butter into your muffins and ruin them.

Making round fried eggs isn’t hard. You put them in the skillet gently so they don’t spread out much, and you fold the edges in so they stay round.

I tried making McMuffins two days in a row. I am not happy with the results.

Yesterday’s batch was better than today’s. I didn’t burn anything, and everything came out more or less as it should have, but they weren’t as good as the real thing.

1. The muffins were hard on the outside. McDonald’s puts its muffins in wrappers, and the steam is confined in the paper. This, I am guessing, softens the outsides of the muffins. Because my muffins were hard, when I bit down on them, it took more pressure to bite through, so the contents of the muffins were squashed.

2. My Canadian bacon was small and tough. it was also a little dry. Somehow, McDonald’s manages to make its Canadian bacon cover nearly the same area as the egg, and when you bite through the bacon, it cuts cleanly, because it’s not tough. My Canadian bacon was considerably smaller than the eggs, and it was hard to sever. It tended to pull out of the muffins in one piece.

Today’s effort was worse. I blew a circuit breaker and interfered with the toaster cycle, and when I started it again, I got a muffin that was too dark. If McDonald’s did that to me, I would be pretty critical. It’s unusual. I also threw a buttered muffin on the kitchen floor. That was not intentional. I was handling hot food and moving as fast as I could, and it happened. I ended up with two full McMuffins and one topless McMuffin.

I fried the bacon just enough to get it hot, and I put the bacon and toasted muffins in the oven to keep them warm until the eggs were done. The bacon was still very small compared to McDonald’s. I suppose the brand at my grocery store is unusually small.

What’s the answer? It’s probably best to give up and use ham, and I need some way to take the hardness out of the muffins. Maybe I should toast them and put them in a small covered dish in the oven. And making three McMuffins is just too hard. The toaster can only cope with two muffins.

I should also quit using real cheese. Real cheddar doesn’t melt and get gooey the way McDonald’s fake cheese does.

It’s a real production, no matter how you do it. McDonald’s has an assembly line, a method, and multiple personnel, so they have a big edge.

Breakfast is a meal that requires time-management skills. Everything has to be presented nearly at once. If your toast gets cool, you can’t reheat it without ruining it, and toast gets cool fast. Eggs that aren’t cooked hard will be very hard indeed if you reheat them. Making breakfast food is very simple, but if you can’t get it to the table on time, it’s not going to be good.

I have a warming area above my range, with heat lamps. I’m going to have to learn how to use it.

Most meals aren’t as fussy. Consider a big Thanksgiving dinner. Mashed potatoes can be nuked to warm them up. So can yams. So can beans. Doesn’t hurt these foods at all. Consider steak and potatoes. A baked potato can sit for 15 minutes, waiting to be joined by the steak, after you take it out of the oven. Or you can leave in in the oven at 200 for an hour. That’s a lot of slack.

My hat is off to McDonald’s. I can make McMuffins much more cheaply, and unlike McDonald’s, I don’t serve stale decaf coffee or decaf which is really regular coffee (and stale), but I can’t make them better.

I may have to forget about decaf as well as my other coffee alternative, hot chocolate. A long time ago, God told me, “Caffeine destroys peace.” I am very sensitive to caffeine these days. I got that way after I started praying in tongues a lot. I can’t drink real coffee. Sometimes I can get away with drinking tea, if I take a Benadryl before bed. But last night I kept waking up, and all I drank yesterday was decaf.

I looked it up, and decaf has something like 20 milligrams of caffeine per cup. When I was in law school, I would have laughed at that. I started every day with a quart of coffee. Now things are different. Twenty milligrams may be too much. And chocolate has enough caffeine and theobromine in it to cause problems, too.

What am I supposed to drink at breakfast? No coffee, tea, decaf coffee, hot chocolate, or decaf tea. I don’t want sugary drinks, including fruit juice. I might have to look into chicory.

I like having something hot to drink in the morning. I’m old. It shocks my body back to life.

Today I tried a crazy idea: hot vanilla. It’s like hot chocolate, only you make it with vanilla. It’s pretty lame. Better than water, though.

Incidentally, Benadryl is not a great answer to my problem. It makes you feel funny after you wake up.

Here is what I suspect. Drugs open doorways in the spirit realm. It’s very obvious when you look at hard drugs like LSD and psilocybin. People taking things like that see demons, angels, and (they think) God himself. They have visions. There are religions in which the use of psychodelic drugs is a requirement.

Maybe you don’t need to see demons and angels to be affected adversely by a drug. Maybe boring drugs like nicotine and pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) are more dangerous than we think. One of the most popular cheap drugs is dextromethorphan, which is found in cough syrup. Take enough of it, and you will trip. There are people who trip on diarrhea pills.

Caffeine is a drug. If you don’t think it’s a drug, eat a tablespoon of instant coffee and then see if you change your mind. I suspect that God wants me to stay away from all mind-altering drugs. Sort of a Nazirite thing. Remember how he forbade Samson to cut his hair with a razor or to drink wine and strong drink? Those were special laws, just for Samson.

I don’t have any problems with alcohol. Not yet.

I think God is trying to shut my doors to the enemy. Maybe he’s giving other people the same message, but if he is, it’s not well known.

Chocolate! Can you believe it? I didn’t see that coming! I hope pizza isn’t next. I don’t care much about coffee, but chocolate is incredible.

I’m not sure about any of this, but I know what God told me about caffeine, and I know I’m having problems when I consume it.

I think it’s time to give up on McMuffins. It was a fun experiment, but I don’t want to throw food on the floor every morning.

Seven Months of Rest for Insolent Rodents

Today was the last day of squirrel season. Technically it’s still on. I can run outside and spend the next few minutes trying to kill one in the dark.

I didn’t really expect to get anything. I went out with 2 shells in my gun and a grocery bag in my pocket. My main objective was to check the trail camera to see if it had filmed whatever is crawling under my fence.

I wandered down the fence line, and when I got near the camera, I saw two squirrels playing grab-ass in a tree, maybe 10 feet from the tree the camera was strapped to. I was not all that game for squirrel butchering, but the season was ending, so I decided to look for a shot.

Here is what I THINK I’ve learned about squirrels. If you really want to kill them, put up a feeder and give the squirrels a few months to get used to it. Then get yourself a lawn chair and a cooler and have fun. I suspect that the second-best method is to get a portable blind or a ghillie suit and sit in the woods like a stone. They show up eventually. My method, which doesn’t work very well, is to walk around until I see a squirrel make a mistake. Then I plug him.

The squirrels I saw today made mistakes.

The first one fell out of the tree. That’s kind of pathetic. Squirrels are known for their agility and coordination, so watching one miss a jump, plummet 40 feet, and hit the ground like a ripe coconut was an odd experience.

It ran to another tree and positioned itself around three feet up, halfway concealed. I was not going to shoot at half a squirrel. I pictured three pellets going into it and leaving it thrashing and generally being upsetting on the forest floor. I moved around toward it to get it to move, and it disappeared. I found there was a big hole in the base of the tree, so I knew where the squirrel was. I wished him good day and went after the other one. I was not going to sit out there for an hour waiting for him to come out.

A real hunter would have plopped down and waited, but this is me we’re talking about.

The squirrel’s buddy was still upstairs, thinking I couldn’t see it hiding behind a skinny branch.

I kept thinking about the nervous lady with the neurotic horses. The one who called out to me and asked me annoying questions about shooting. I really, really did not want pellets landing anywhere near her farm. There would have been an international crisis. I kept walking around the tree, trying to make the squirrel show me more fur. Eventually I got a good angle and popped him. Down he came.

He flopped and kicked a bit. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering, but I also didn’t want to be bitten by an enraged squirrel with hot shotgun pellets in its butt, so I gave it a few seconds, and he stopped moving. When I looked him over, I saw that at least one pellet had gone through his eyeball. He probably died instantly. That was good news.

I truly need a .22 sidearm to help squirrels drift off to happy land. The 10mm would have left a gaping hole in the ground surrounded by fur.

I like hunting, but the lady next door has taken some of the shine off of it. I would have a whole lot more squirrels but for her. I think I work way too hard and give up too many opportunities to keep her quiet.

Today I realized there was good news. Squirrels live high in trees where shooting them without dropping rounds on the neighbors takes effort, but everything else I plan to shoot stands on the ground. That means this lady can blow it out…it means she will no longer have any reason to converse with me regarding ballistics.

I make her sound like Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched had a baby with Rosie O’Donnell, but she may be a nice person for all I know.

Too many granola-heads get involved with horses. My grandparents and their siblings rode horses and mules for transportation. They didn’t enter them in ridiculous shows or confuse them with unicorns.

Now that squirrel season is done I have more observations about hunting.

I am now aware that hunting season interferes with life. When it’s 7 a.m. and I have a choice between doing something responsible and killing a rodent in a tree, I will generally choose the latter. In this regard, I have sunk to the level of sports fans. I don’t want to be like the annoying men all over America who keep the TV blasting during every sports season and never talk to their wives or kids. But I may be headed that way.

I wonder how many lawns in my area will, tomorrow, be mowed for the first time in several weeks.

Also, I now look at just about every living creature I see as though I were trying to shoot it. I think about distance and whether I could make the shot. I wonder which weapon would work. AK-47 for a dwarf donkey, or just a .22 behind the ear?

I am not actually interested in shooting, say, a yippy little dog with pink toenails, standing next to a heavyset lady at Home Depot. Hmmm…maybe I am. No I’m not. But once you start looking at animals with the intention of shooting them, you develop a habit.

I guess this will be disturbing, but I can see how hunting would prepare someone to shoot people. When you aim at a squirrel, you have to get over a sympathy hump before you can pull the trigger, and presumably, the ability to get over that hump would carry over to people if you were in a situation where you had to shoot. Also, butchering warm mammals probably lowers your resistance to inflicting harm on people. I don’t mean these things make you heartless or cruel, but they would help you control yourself in certain difficult situations.

Today I shot a cute little animal through the eyeball, and then I made a big cut over his anus, grabbed his tail and feet, and pulled his fur and head off. After that, I slit him down the belly, split his sternum, reached in, grabbed his esophagus and windpipe, and pulled his heart, lungs, intestines, and whatever else out. Things like that are not easy to do the first time around. It’s not like preparing a nice, clean, gutted, hairless pig from the slaughterhouse.

I’ll tell you what. If society continues to get more polarized and city dwellers start oppressing the rest of us, they really REALLY don’t want to come out here and challenge us physically. Nothing short of full-blown military action could save them. People out here are ready for trouble. Concealment. Long-distance marksmanship. Tracking. Trapping. Silent weapons. Automatic surveillance that works at night. Night vision. Night scopes. There are a lot of people in the country whose skills are dangerously close to those required by guerrillas.

In reality, may of the skills are identical. And people are not as tough, elusive, or aware as game.

I am not the greatest marksman on earth, but I was thinking about it the other day, and I feel better about my skills. I am now capable of shooting rifles with roughly 1 MOA accuracy. I didn’t feel like it was a huge deal when I crossed that threshhold, but I’ve been considering it. It’s not bad!

Imagine you’re in the end zone at a football game, and someone draws a circle around a quarter in the other end zone, and you shoot 5 holes in it without missing. That’s what I did the other day. In the movies, you see make-believe-playing Hollywood fops shooting small targets hundreds of yards away in difficult conditions, but that’s all BS. Those things don’t actually happen. Shooting well is hard. In real life, hitting a quarter you can’t even see without a scope is decent marksmanship.

If you take 50 average guys out of a crowd and give them their choice of the finest rifles on earth, most would be lucky to hit a dinner plate one time out of 10 at that distance. I remember shooting next to a guy in Miami. at 100 yards. He was a good shot, and he had a high-dollar .308 with all the Magpul doodads and whatnot, and he was proud as he could be to shoot 2 MOA. He was bragging about it. I got that beat.

At the time, I thought he was great, but that was before I got it together and bought a gun that worked.

If I can shoot well at 100 yards, I can shoot well at 1000. I just need to find places to shoot and do my homework, so I can learn about wind and other problems. I may never make the Olympics, but with a little effort, I can become a very bad person to mess with. And rural areas are full of people who are way ahead of me.

I used to shoot at pistol ranges, and most people have a hard time keeping all their shots on a target two feet wide. Most people shoot rifles so badly, I seriously feel they should not be allowed to hunt at distances over 50 feet, in order to keep it humane. But that was Miami. A city full of people who came from countries where their grandparents didn’t know one end of a gun from another. People in rural America have been shooting well for hundreds of years.

Next time I get the .17 HMR out, I need to move back to 200 yards and get to work. I have nothing more to learn at 100 yards. If it were in a clamp, the rifle would only shoot slightly better than I shoot now. I need to move back until my groups open up so I’ll be able to see what needs to be fixed.

I almost wish I had used the shotgun all season long. It really brings the squirrels down. I have only missed with it once, and that was a long shot. I didn’t now how much the pellets would drop, and I guessed wrong. The .17 HMR will kill them at greater distance, but it tears them up, and the bullets travel too far. The air rifle is hard to shoot, so I’m not ready to use it full time.

I have a lot to learn, outside of the gun stuff. How to sneak up on game. When to hunt. Where to hunt. How to read poop and tracks. How to bait game. How to get a full cooler of beer into a tree stand.

Fun stuff. I look forward to it. I guess I need to start studying turkeys YESTERDAY and look into decoys or whatever else I need to fool them.

There are special seasons for bowhunters. Is that worth getting into? Sounds like an exercise in self-abuse, but it would be good to have longer seasons. I can’t believe there are people who kill squirrels with bows. I’m lucky to get within 50 feet of one, and they’re very small.

I’m glad I’m learning these skills.

My knife never arrived, so I had to dismantle today’s squirrel with a filet knife and Fiskars pruning shears. It should arrive tomorrow, exactly one day after the last day when I needed it for squirrels. I think it’s safe to say I will never buy anything from Knife Country again, unless I develop an irrational fear of receiving things quickly.

As of tomorrow, I will have to walk right by disrespectful squirrels and do nothing. As if they have some kind of right to exist. That will be tough. But I’ll be installing a squirrel feeder ASAP, so as Mr. Burns said to Homer Simpson, “We’ll see who eats WHOSE shorts.”

Enjoy the grub, boys. It’s going to end up feeding me, too.

Take Popcorn to a New Level

Let me change your life forever.

You love popcorn, right? But it’s boring. You can put butter on it, but it makes it soggy. You can put grated cheese on it, but it falls off goes under the couch cushions. I have the answer: popcorn popped in bacon grease, covered with powdered cheese. You will not believe how wonderful it is.

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup white popcorn
3 tablespoons bacon grease
1/2 teaspoon salt or flour salt
1/3 cup powdered cheddar

You’re wondering where you get powdered cheddar. I found a pretty good deal on Amazon. The company is Hoosier Farms, and they sell a 1-pound jar for a reasonable price. This is pretty much like the powdered cheese from Kraft macaroni and cheese.

Oh, boy. I just realized I should add this to my homemade macaroni and cheese, to cheat.

Anyway, you just pop the corn in the grease, and when you’re done popping, toss the powder in it. Add the salt to the corn and fat before you pop. It won’t look as pretty as factory-made cheese popcorn, but it will taste 3,000 times better.

Flour salt is fine salt that sticks to popcorn better. You don’t really need it if you add the salt before you pop, though.

You will not be able to stop eating this, so don’t try it and then say I didn’t warn you.

You can get other types of powdered cheese if cheddar isn’t your thing.

Shoo, Squirrels

Every time I hunt, I learn something new. Today I learned that you don’t always want to bag anything.

I have live oak trees, and they never stop dropping leaves. I bought a lawn sweeper to remove them. Live oak leaves are highly resistant to lawn sweepers because they are heavy and flat. They suck on the ground when the brushes of the sweeper pass over them. Also, for some reason my yard contains a lot of Spanish moss. I mean the grass itself, not the trees, contains Spanish moss. It winds around the sweeper’s axle and stops the wheels, and every so often I have to stop the garden tractor and hack at the moss with a knife. I tried removing it with a torch, but it bursts into flame.

Anyway, it takes about three minutes to fill the sweeper with leaves. This removes about 0.001% of the leaves in the yard. I then have to drive to the burn pile in the pasture, dump the leaves, and return. Today I made about eight trips, and I would say I dumped 400 pounds of leaves.

When it was over, I was tired, but it was mostly from aggravation, not exertion. The tractor does most of the work. I wanted to get some exercise, so I picked up the shotgun and headed out.

I kept thinking about the stench and effort of cleaning squirrels, and I realized I would probably be happier if I didn’t kill any. I needed a shower. I had some butchered squirrels I needed to cook later, to keep them from spoiling. I wasn’t all that eager to spend half an hour pulling out squirrel guts.

At first, things went the way they usually do. I saw two squirrels very close to the neighboring house which is three millimeters from my land. I don’t want to be the guy who shoots a shotgun outside their house every day, so I kept walking.

After I had looped back toward the house, I heard a bark, so I started toward it. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. I had taken my ear plugs out so I could hear squirrel activity. The barking squirrel wised up and shut his piehole, so I turned to continue toward home. There in front of me, three feet off the ground, 20 yards away, staring at me, was an enormous squirrel.

I had two choices: shoot without hearing protection or take a chance on losing him while I fumbled with ear plugs. I chose the latter course, and he ran up the tree as soon as I was ready to shoot.

I know how to deal with squirrels hiding in trees, so I sat down to wait him out. I didn’t see him again, but a bunch of new squirrels started leaping their way toward me like the Flying Wallendas trying to make a dramatic entrance. They ended up nearly overhead. I could have shot one without getting up. But the angle was such that it was conceivable that some of the pellets would have ended up on someone else’s land, so I let them go. Man, I hate a squirrel.

Up side: no butchering. No funky squirrel smell on my hands and cutting board.

I went in the house and fried the squirrels that were waiting in the fridge. I think I know how to do it now. I put together a likely mixture of flour, salt, pepper, chipotle, sage, and garlic powder. I wet the squirrels down with buttermilk. I coat them with the mixture and fry them in half an inch of fat. It seems to work.

Treating them with baking soda (my prescription for gamy meat) must work, because now they taste exactly like a chicken leg. They’re not quite as tender as chicken, but they’re okay.

The frustration I have with shooting angles makes me feel like I will need more land in the future. I keep thinking about Tennessee. Ocala is wonderful. Compared to Miami, it’s like heaven. But I can see a neighbor’s house from my front porch, and I can’t hunt without worrying about where the projectiles go. If I could find 300 acres in Appalachia, I would be in business.

I could live here the rest of my life and be very happy, but now that I’m hunting, I know I’d be missing out on a few things.

First, the trees here are all live oaks. Literally 90% are either live oaks or some other kind of trashy oak which is even worse. They’re rotten inside and full of huge roaches. The wood is worthless. They don’t produce nuts. I remember the neat trees in Appalachia. White oaks, red oaks, black oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, locusts, black walnuts, dogwoods, redbuds, cedars, poplars, plums, maples…you name it. If you have your own woods up there, you can cut trees and dry the wood for woodworking. You can eat walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and cherries. And you don’t have to worry about every fourth tree on your property falling over if the wind blows.

Second, the dirt up there is real dirt. Here, it’s grey sand. In some places it’s white, like the beach. It’s not very productive. The grass in my yard and pastures is Bahia, which is very long and thin. I thought I would be able to have it baled and sell it, but I found out it’s not worth baling. My grandfather had a farm in Kentucky that produced beautiful bales of hay so heavy it was tough to throw them up onto a wagon. A guy I know entered one in the state fair and won a prize. I don’t think you can grow anything like that here.

Third, it’s hotter than I expected. It was in the high 80’s today, in February. In Tennessee, it was in the 60’s.

Fourth, and this is related to the heat: this area has a major mosquito problem, and any day now, three months before I expected it, they will be back in full force. When you go outside in bug season here, you have to wear repellant all the time. I don’t mean when you go to the mall, but on my property, you will get eaten alive. We also have tons of spiders in Marion County, and they build gigantic webs in the woods. You can’t walk 50 feet without getting wrapped in a web containing a spider the size of a grape. In Appalachia, they have ticks, yellowjackets, and hornets. That’s about it.

Fifth, people…keep…moving…to…Florida. Yankees, as always, and since Irma, Puerto Ricans. Florida is now considered a purple state. Our conservatism is fading. I can hear traffic noises when I walk in my woods. I expect it to get worse, and I’m afraid a lot of the new traffic will be cars full of people who vote for socialism, perversion, and authoritarianism.

Sixth, the game here is not that great. If I really tried, I could bring home 20 squirrels a week, but they’re smaller than squirrels up north. You have to be very determined in order to eat them. I haven’t seen a single deer or hog. I heard one turkey call, but I’m afraid it was a neighbor getting ready for the season. We have bears, but the freaks and hippies won’t let us hunt them, because they’re cute.

I sound like I’m knocking this place. I love it here. But I might love it more somewhere else.

I am starting to miss Appalachia badly. I have learned I can live in the sticks and be happy. I don’t miss people or cities at all. I don’t have to have the Guggenheim Museum or the Helen Hayes Theatre five minutes away. I could enjoy Appalachia. I miss the scenery. I miss the waterfalls and creeks, which are things you can’t have in Florida. I mean, yes, we have creeks, but they’re actually sluggish warm streams. Not like the beautiful creeks in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky.

I almost wish I had my grandfather’s old farm near Rogers, Kentucky. It was big enough to get lost in, and the back side was high cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. But I could never live in Eastern Kentucky again, because of the Defcon 1 racism and the widespread aversion to self-improvement. When I think about that, I always remember my cousin Byrd, who was a judge and an erudite individual. He said, “Just once I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

Also, people would know me there. They know my family. For that matter, I still have relatives there. My family has never respected me at all, for reason I can’t fathom. I’m the most educated person in my family, by far, and I’m the closest thing my family has produced to a sophisticated person. Nonetheless, they never pay any attention to anything I say. I’ve changed a lot; I’m not the same person they used to know, with the same willingness to put up with nonsense. When you change, and then you go back to people who knew you before you changed, they pressure you to accept the treatment they used to give you, and you may give in and revert. I’m not doing that.

Here’s a story. My family owned a piece of land, by inheritance. We owned it in common. We sold it to another family. Political friends of my late grandfather. They found a problem with it, and they wanted to rescind the sale. I’m an attorney, and I don’t mean an attorney who practiced in the woods in Eastern Kentucky, against people who charge $75 an hour. I practiced with some of the sharpest people in a major market. I practiced intellectual property law, which is the most difficult field. I don’t have any lawyer relatives who are qualified to do that. I told my relatives to take the property back.

We had sold it for $40,000, which is not much money, and it would have been relatively inexpensive to take it back and auction it again. I thought our defense was weak. We would have kept our friends, and we would have moved on. They wanted to hire a lawyer and go to court. Over what probably amounted to $4000!

Guess what they did? They hired the lawyer, and we ended up paying him. My relatives kept quiet about the final result. When I finally got them to tell me what happened, they said we lost the case. Of course we did! Hello? Who predicted that? So we paid the lawyer’s fee, we gave back the money, and we wasted a ton of time. We also alienated people who had always been in our corner. This is an example of how my advice goes over up there.

It’s fine that they disagreed with me, but they didn’t even consider my advice. I was 100% correct, and they could not have been more wrong, and they didn’t have the background I had. They could at least have thought my advice over.

Here’s another story. Kentucky condemned part of a piece of property that belonged to us, to build a highway ramp. When this happens, you need an attorney to negotiate. At the time, my dad was a top-notch lawyer. He was sharp enough to be on the Supreme Court. He told the family he would handle the job for nothing. I said I would work with him for nothing. They turned us down and hired my cousin. He charged a 33% contingency fee. Contingency fees are for poor people, not people who can pay. Anyway, I forget the figure, but I believe he got over $100,000 for an easy job. It’s almost as if they thought it was worth paying six figures in order to avoid trusting my judgment.

I will never understand that.

Anyway, you can tell I am greatly respected.

I suppose there is a good chance I’ll run into racism in a place like Tennessee or Georgia, but I would hope it wouldn’t be as bad as it was in Eastern Kentucky, where it seemed like every tenth word was “nigger.” Even if it was, at least I would be around fresh people. I love my relatives. Don’t get me wrong. But I had a dysfunctional upbringing, my relatives were peripherally involved, if only as witnesses. There is a certain stubborn dynamic among us, and I am not going back.

Visiting? Fine. I hope I eventually get to visit them again, and I like talking to them on the phone. But living in the area where my mother grew up and dealing with certain expectations people have of me and my family…I’m not doing it. I’ll tell you something else. My family has enemies up there, and I don’t even know who they are. For all I know, some of them hate us for good reason. Now that I think about it, the ones my sister alienated have plenty of reason to dislike us. I’d rather go somewhere new and make my own enemies.

I was talking to a friend about this last night, and I put it this way: when you work for a company and get a promotion, they don’t let you stay where you are and boss your old friends around. They move you across the state to boss new people around. Why? Because of the existing dynamic between you and your pals. Your buddies won’t respect you or produce for you, and you won’t assert yourself. If you do assert yourself, they’ll tear you down. People function best where they’re respected and appreciated. I can’t imagine being respected or appreciated in Wolfe County or Powell County Kentucky.

It sounds nuts to talk about moving, right after leaving Miami, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I don’t want to be morbid, but my dad is 86, and he has a condition which has a certain expected end, within a period of time doctors say is short. It won’t be long until it’s just me here, and when that happens, my life will be very different. I won’t be a caregiver any more. I won’t need hot winters or a city geared to the care of old people. I won’t have to hire a sitter if I decide to travel and look at land. If I move, I’ll just hire movers, watch them pack, and drive to the new place. I won’t have to do all that while looking after someone who can’t drive, take his pills correctly, shop for food, or be left alone.

It would be nice if I had a wife to move with me, because moving is a chore, but I haven’t made any friends here or met much of anyone. No prospects whatsoever. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe someone will fall from the sky next week.

I haven’t written about it, but God has made real changes in my life over the last week. This will sound weird, but I feel he is telling me I’m finally one with him. It doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a good person. I just feel that I am more closely identified with him now. I am getting faith like nothing I’ve had before. Before I developed supernatural faith, I would try to believe, quit, and fail. After I got faith through prayer in tongues, I felt something in me pushing and holding my faith up, and I believed pretty well. Now I feel insistent faith that doesn’t come from me, and I feel like responding, “ALL RIGHT! I GIVE UP! YOU’RE RIGHT! YOU’RE RIGHT!”

I believe things that weren’t possible before are going to start happening now, so I’m not afraid to think about a final destination north of here.

This farm is great, but I now think I would be better off with less cleared land and more woods. Cleared land requires maintenance. I would love to have 300 acres, including 10 acres or less of pasture, without fancy fencing. Just barbed wire.

Here, the woods require maintenance, but this is a special situation. I’m in a hurricane zone (another issue I would like to leave behind). A rare storm came through and knocked over dozens of big trees. I think they’re still falling. My memory isn’t good enough to recall every tree, but it sure seems like I find more horizontal trees every month. Maybe Irma weakened them, and I’m still seeing the effects. I have the world’s only self-clearing agricultural tract.

Anyway, GENERALLY, woods require no maintenance at all. You just walk in once in a while, shoot some things, and walk out.

A little place in the Blue Ridge region would be really sweet, if I could just find an area where the people were okay.

I’m going to make the best of it here. When my dad’s situation changes, I’ll sell and leave. Then I’ll stay wherever I am until I die and leave this wretched world behind. At the moment, this is my plan.

Life here is really good, so I can’t complain while I’m waiting.

Wish me luck with turkey season. It’s right around the corner, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

Squirrel Hunting Success

I had a wonderful squirrel outing today. I chased a number of squirrels, fired on two, and dropped two. Excellent. I think I can now say I’m an okay squirrel hunter, and since hunting squirrels is as hard as hunting deer, I must be an okay hunter, period.

That’s my position.

I’ve decided that hunting squirrels is not hard. It may be hard to do WELL, but doing an okay job is not tough. Here’s what you do: walk around in the woods. When you see a squirrel, shoot it.

The first squirrel was hanging onto the side of a downed tree. I have no idea why. He was just hanging there, doing nothing. He was in an area where I didn’t want to shoot. One neighbor has a house maybe 25 feet from the property line, which is ridiculous, and I want to be a big person and avoid shooting within 150 feet, but this squirrel was taunting me, so I walked up, got in a position where I was shooting onto my own property, and blew him to squirrel kingdom come.

I have spared other squirrels in that area, but if they insist on congregating there, I am not going to let them sit there and smirk at me.

I circled around the woods and came back, and wouldn’t you know it, I heard a squirrel barking near the house. It was farther away, but not too far. It was sitting on a downed tree, all curled up, so I went to my left until I had a safe angle, and I blew him off the trunk. Blammo!

There were a couple of other squirrels I could have annihilated, but I want to take safe shots that are highly unlikely to wound without killing, and I prefer not to be too close to other people, so I let them go. I also chased a few squirrels that vanished.

The second squirrel I blasted may have been responding to my squirrel caller. I took it with me today and used it a few times. For the most part, the results suggested that instead of “Squirrel Buster,” the device should have been named “Squirrel Offender” or “Squirrel Repeller,” but I heard the barks of the second squirrel while I was using the call. I tromped in the direction of the sound and saw him waiting for his ticket across the River Styx, and I obliged.

My best guess is that the caller is a sad hoax, but I will continue testing it.

I don’t wear camo or use a blind, and I am too impatient to sit for 45 minutes in one place, so I am probably not doing the best job possible. I don’t know what the general rules are, but I can tell you this: MANY squirrels don’t give a crap about your clothes or the fact that they can see your face. MANY will sit and stare at you while you walk up very noisily and point a shotgun at them. MANY are too stupid to hide properly when you get close. MANY will let you shoot them not long after you shot a friend of theirs a hundred feet away. Squirrels are not particle physicists. They are not that hard to outsmart.

I suppose the difference between an okay squirrel hunter and a good squirrel hunter is the ability to kill the 30% of squirrels who aren’t utterly stupid.

I feel good about my results. I can say I’m a hunter now, without too much concern about being exposed.

Tomorrow my BugBuster scope arrives, and hopefully, I will be able to use the air rifle on squirrels and increase my take.

I’ve been reading about the gun I’m using (Browning Sweet Sixteen semi-auto shotgun). Apparently, it’s a very nice gun. The Remington 16 gauge is built on a heavy 12 gauge frame (the 1100), so you get all the weight of a 12 gauge without the power. Sounds like a stupid gun to me. The Sweet Sixteen is light and pleasant to carry. I appreciate that after lugging it around for an hour. The air rifle is much heavier.

The 16 gauge shotgun has lost popularity in the US because of some dumb rules in competitive skeet shooting, but that won’t prevent me from hunting with it.

It works great with #6 shot. Squirrels plop right on the ground. I had to shoot one twice, but he came down instantly after the first shot and couldn’t run off.

I can’t wait to try the air rifle scope. I love scopes. With an accurate gun at the proper distance, you can literally see the exact point of impact, +/- 3/8″, while you’re in the act of shooting. With iron sights, you have to be right up against the target to do that. When I use iron sights from 100 feet, all I know is that I’ll be somewhere in a 2″ circle. That’s not good enough for shooting squirrels with an air gun.

I’ll post a shot of the squirrels. Cleaning them was horrible. I read that you’re supposed to cut them under the tail, stand on the tail, and pull on the hind feet, but these little squirrels are very attached to their coats. I had to fight like a tiger to get them skinned. The boot method didn’t work.

My squirrels are not big. I saw a Youtube squirrel-skinning video, and the squirrels the guy was skinning were like 1.5 of mine. Maybe smaller squirrels are harder to skin. Anyway, they’re in the fridge.

It’s funny, but anti-hunting journalists (there is no other kind) are saying mass murderer Nikolas Cruz demonstrated is propensity for killing by putting photos of dead squirrels online. What a ridiculous, narrow-minded thing to say. A murderer is probably more likely to hunt than other people, but hunting doesn’t make you more likely to murder. Why not go back over Jeffrey Dahmer’s history and post a photo of every trout he ever caught?

It occurred to me that I’m posting squirrel photos at a time when squirrel photos are in bad odor, but I don’t care. My people have been killing squirrels since firearms were invented. I can’t be responsible for the provincial notions of hypocritical, ignorant people who think barbecued ribs come from a rib factory.

I will report on the scope after I use it.

Victory is Sweet

My hunting adventures are proceeding well. Today I bagged a third squirrel, and later on, I fried her along with her friends.

The last time I had an opportunity to eat squirrel was probably in the late Seventies. My grandfather either shot some or received some as a gift, and my grandmother fried them. I thought they smelled funny, so I passed. Today I remedied that mistake.

I made a mixture of flour, salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The squirrels were all treated in a solution of baking soda and salt, and then I soaked them in buttermilk for a short time. I dredged them in the flour mix and fried them in olive oil (which is what I happened to have) and bacon grease.

I screwed up the first batch and had to re-bread them. The second ones came out much better. I made gravy with the grease, and I also made buttermilk biscuits with half butter and half bacon grease. Then I made gravy.

The squirrels were very nice but not much of a meal. I would say a grey squirrel contains about as much meat as a chicken breast. The meat tastes like the meat you find on a chicken breast alongside the backbone. It’s dark, but the flavor isn’t very strong. It was surprisingly tender.

I think you would need to have two squirrels to make a decent meal for a man.

I’m happy about the results. Squirrel meat is tasty, and it’s rewarding to eat something you killed.

I’m looking at air rifles now. One corner of my property is loaded with squirrels, but it’s close to neighboring houses, and for all I know, some of the neighbors are liberal yankee retirees. I don’t want to get into it with ignorant people who moved here from Long Island. It’s perfectly legal for me to shoot near their property, but northern retirees are idiots about firearms. They wouldn’t know the law, and they might think they were in their rights to waste my time and the time of the local LEO’s. An air rifle will avoid the whole question. No noise. They wouldn’t know what I was doing

It’s hard to choose a rifle. I want something with some power, but I don’t want to spend $700. And if it’s too powerful, it will be an awful lot like the .22 I’m trying to supplement.

The neatest rifles are PCP guns. I forget what PCP stands for, but it means the air is pre-compressed. You don’t have to pump them up every time you fire. You fill them before you go shooting, and you get a large number of shots before you have to pump again.

I don’t want a PCP rifle because it takes forever to pump them manually, and they fill up with moisture that eventually rusts them out. You can drive to a dive shop and get them to fill a scuba tank for you, and then you can use that to fill your gun with dry air, but the pressure in the scuba tank will drop each time you fill the gun, so every refill gives you a different velocity and trajectory. What a pain.

PCP guns are powerful and convenient to use, but who wants a product which is designed to rust out? And I don’t want to spend all day pumping a rifle with air.

You can get around the water problem with desiccants, but it sounds like a hassle.

It looks like the best choice is a spring-powered air rifle that shoots .22-caliber pellets. It will be powerful enough to kill squirrels and even coons, and I won’t have to fool with the Rube Goldberg pump business.

A company named Diana makes a nice .22 that gives a lot of velocity, but it is said that this particular gun ruins scopes. The recoil is too much. Apparently you have to be careful which scope you use with it.

–PAUSE–

I stopped writing last night, and now I’m back.

Yesterday’s squirrel came with an unpleasant lesson. I had learned that I should leave squirrels on the ground after shooting them, to draw out others. This is what I did yesterday. I walked around a bit and came back to get the squirrel. When I looked at it, I was surprised to see movement. It was still breathing.

New lesson: check your game as soon as you shoot it, to make sure it’s not suffering. This won’t prevent me from leaving a squirrel where it lies. I can check it and move on.

I wish I had understood this before I let a live squirrel lie on the ground for 5 minutes. I don’t think it was conscious, because it didn’t react to me, but there is no reason to take a chance. I had to blow its head off.

I have been trying to find out whether I can carry a .22 pistol for the purpose of finishing game off. Game laws can be stupid. In some states, it’s illegal to use a pistol to euthanize a wounded deer. Shooting a wounded deer with a rifle round doesn’t sound smart. It would mess up the carcass, and I don’t know how safe it is to fire a high-powered rifle at the ground at your feet. I also have to wonder if flying bone fragments would be an issue.

Again, air may be the answer. Or at least CO2. A CO2 pistol would finish a squirrel off just fine, and it would be quiet.

I am trying to obey the law, but I can think of 3 illegal things which would have been illegal had I done them. Not saying I did these things. Always the lawyer, and there are at least two people from my past who can’t get over rejection, and who probably read my blog every day and would be happy to try to have me cited. Some people never move on and get lives. I’m not saying I did the illegal things. But I did consider them.

I thought about putting some peanuts down to see if they would attract squirrels. I had done my best to research the law on baiting squirrels, and I had found nothing. I eventually turned up an applicable law. You can’t shoot animals near food (other than crops) unless the food was there 6 months before the season opened. What? I don’t understand it, either. Anyway, I will not be putting peanuts out in the future. At least until March 5, after the season closes. Then I’m putting up a permanent feeder!

I plan to put it at a nice distance from the back of the house so I can sit in my yard and make 75-yard shots with a scope. In Florida, it’s perfectly legal to shoot from your house. You can put a sandbag on your dining room table and shoot deer through the window.

There was an incident in which I could have fired some shotgun pellets over some woods belonging to a neighbor. In Florida, you can shoot in your front yard in the suburbs if you want, but you can’t send a projectile onto someone else’s property. I’m sure no one would care about a few spent pellets up here, but I don’t want to get in the habit of ignoring the hunting laws.

The third thing, well, why talk about it?

Game laws are often counterintuitive, so you almost have to be a lawyer to know what you’re doing. I am a lawyer, and I made mistakes, even after reading up.

The other day I shot at a squirrel and stunned it, and it came down and stared at me from maybe 10 feet up. I was out of rifle rounds, so I just stared back. I had a pistol in my pocket, and it would have been easy to draw and kill the squirrel, but I didn’t do it. For one thing, it didn’t occur to me. For another, the pistol holds 11 rounds. My understanding is that you are limited to 5 in Florida. But what if it held 5? Would it have been okay to shoot? I don’t know.

I am wondering if I should get camo or a blind. Sometimes the squirrels hide, and sometimes they pay no attention to me at all. Do they really know what I am, or is their behavior random? Hard to say. I thought about getting a ghillie suit just for fun. Easier to move than a blind.

No hunting yet today. If anything happens, I will update you.

Rodent Genocide Continues

I nailed another squirrel today, right in my yard.

I went out at around 7:15 this morning. Yesterday, it was gloomy at that time. Today the sun was fairly bright. I think I should have been there before sunup. Anyway, I only saw one squirrel on my tour of the property, and it lost me.

I decided to try something a website suggested. I sat as still as possible for half an hour, hoping the squirrels would emerge from hiding. Absolutely nothing happened. There goes that idea.

On the way back to the house, I had a funny notion. I got out my phone and played squirrel noises on Youtube. No dice, but it was amusing.

When I got near the house, I heard a squirrel screaming at me. It was really giving me the business. There is something creepy about shooting animals 50 yards from home, but this thing was provoking me, and I had no bodies in my trash bag. I saw it about 10 feet up on a live oak. I walked around it to get an angle that would keep stray pellets away from the neighbors, and I blasted it from maybe 60 feet.

Taking a clue from a reader (and the same website that told me to sit still) I didn’t pick up the squirrel. I walked around, and sure enough, I heard another squirrel screaming from a nearby tree. That one refused to come out, so I picked up the dead one and headed for the house. I am getting blase about touching dead animals. As I was walking, I heard other squirrels yelling in the front yard. I wondered if the sight of their buddy hanging by her tail got them agitated.

I tried to locate the new noisemakers, but the only one I saw was across the fence on another property, so I went back in the house and cleaned the new squirrel.

I noticed a few things. I used #6 shot in the 16 gauge, and it didn’t mess the meat up much at all. I found a few pellets, but no major damage. Also, this squirrel really did not want to give up her fur coat. It was like it was glued on. I have to go watch some squirrel butchering videos.

I was less grossed out this time, although this squirrel smelled worse than the other one. I felt like shampooing it with dishwashing liquid, but I restrained myself. I skinned and halved it, and I put it in brine. Today I plan to fry 2 squirrels and make biscuits. We’ll see if they’re any good.

I think I should add baking soda to the brine from now on. It kills gaminess.

Sitting still does not impress the local squirrels. I think bait and getting up early will change things. I may get a bag of corn and start dumping it in the woods.

The shotgun is wonderful. I love the .17 HMR, but the results are not as good. It tears squirrels up, and it’s hard to get a good safe angle for shooting.

Should I feel bad about killing yard squirrels? In a word, no way Jose. It seems opportunistic and sort of mean, but the truth is, these are the squirrels I want to get rid of. They are not pets. I want to grow berries and things in my yard, and I don’t want squirrel vandalism in the buildings. If I leave the yard squirrels alone, I am responsible for whatever misery they cause in the future.

The squirrels out in the woods are not the ones I have to worry about. In truth, I should be killing the ones near the house first. The people who sold us the house put a bird feeder in out front, and it has a skirt on it for the purpose of keeping squirrels out. That tells you how intelligent people feel about squirrels in their yards.

Squirrels are cute and all that, but so are mice. Some rats are cute. They still have to go. Killing them takes some getting used to, but I have an obligation to do it. It’s the correct thing to do.

I plan to go out again tomorrow (every day I can, until the season ends on March 4), and I hope to dispatch more than one squirrel. I think I can do it, if I get up early.

What will I do when squirrel season ends? All is not lost. First of all, it’s legal to shoot nuisance animals all year on your own property, so if I have some berries and tomatoes growing in the yard, I will have every right to sit on the back porch and kill squirrels. I won’t be able to go out in the woods and shoot, but that just means I get to rest and keep a cooler beside me.

Second thing: squirrels aren’t the only targets.

As I mentioned, an animal dug up one of my blackberry plants and left a giant turd in its place. If my research is right, that animal was a coyote. Either that or someone collecting for Greenpeace. Guess what the restrictions on killing coyotes are? Basically, you’re not allowed to use nuclear weapons. That’s about it. You can kill them all day, every day, with no bag limit. You can use any weapon you like. Kill the puppies, too. Make interesting hats from the hides. Do as you please.

I am reading up on coyote hunting, and it should be doable. We will see.

A coyote serves no purpose here. They are not native. They cause all sorts of suffering. They tear up calves and kids, and they kill dogs.

There are also wild pigs in Florida. Again, no restrictions. Big ones. Little ones. Mommy pigs. Daddy pigs. They are all legal targets. I have not seen any pigs here, but I am told I will eventually run into them.

Coons are nuisance animals under the law, so you can kill them all year. Nothing is worse than a stinking coon. They throw garbage all over. They poop. They kill chickens. They spread rabies. I made the mistake of saving a little coon in the past, and I have even driven them to the Everglades and released them alive. No more. Like the comedian Robin Harris said in his routine about the death penalty, “Gotta go, gotta GO.”

Nuisance animals are bad news. They are extremely annoying. Anyone who kills them is doing the world a big favor. Relocating a nuisance animal just makes it someone else’s problem.

Coons are edible. Not sure I want to try that, but it could happen. My grandmother ate them. Coyotes, being related to dogs, probably taste good, but I am not hungry enough to try one.

Here’s a nice thing about killing nuisance animals: you don’t have to clean them. It’s perfectly okay to leave them for the buzzards. Coyote pelts and coon tails might be fun to take, but the carcasses can rot or go on the burn pile.

I pickled my squirrel tails in salt water. Why not? You never know when a squirrel tail will come in handy.

I have a very, very strong sense that God wants me to get good at hunting. Fine with me. Shooting targets is fun, but if you never take game or varmints, you never use guns for their proper purpose. Guns were not invented for shooting targets. Their purpose is to kill. A man should know how to kill pests and bring meat home, and it doesn’t hurt to have lethal skills that can be used against entitlement-minded looters who might want to visit rural Christians and conservatives if the economy tanks.

Times are good right now. We can’t predict the future. Your typical urban victimhood junkie knows nothing about firearms, except how to use them on weaker people at point-blank range. They would fare poorly against hunters. You should see the things people on Youtube are doing with night vision and scopes. I’ll post a video that will give you new respect for your rural friends.

Cleaning game may never become fun. I have a super-strong sense of smell, and dead animals are pretty fragrant. I washed thoroughly after cleaning today’s squirrel, and I cleaned the kitchen well. I still smell the squirrel on me. Luckily I haven’t showered yet. Soap and shampoo will kill the aroma.

I like hunting. A lot. Wish I had started sooner. I hope the squirrels fry up nice.

I have to go get this smell off me.

I’ll Teach You to Eat my Acorns

Success at last. I bagged a squirrel this morning.

I got the idea that late afternoon was not the best time to shoot squirrels, so I went out a few minutes after 7 a.m. Squirrel activity was considerably higher. In an hour and a half of walking, I saw maybe half a dozen squirrels, stalked about 4, shot at 2, and nailed 1.

The squirrel I shot was maybe 50 feet up in an oak tree. That’s where he was when I shot him, I mean. Prior to that, he was moving around from tree to tree, in the canopy. I tried to shoot him in the head, but from the looks of things, the bullet went in the upper rib cage on one side and out the other shoulder. The exit would was ragged. It was pretty exciting to watch him drop. It was my first shot of the day. First shot of the season, for that matter.

He gasped once or twice on the ground, but I didn’t have to shoot him again.

After that, I stalked other squirrels. I learned a few things.

I don’t think squirrels get spooked by human beings or guns. Not to the point where you can’t kill them. In fact, they don’t seem very bright. I nearly got a couple of other squirrels very close to the one I shot, within a few minutes of shooting him. They didn’t seem concerned at all.

I also learned that squirrels drink coffee. I can tell because they don’t seem to be on top of things right after sunup. They wander around up there, looking for the Keurig, and while they’re still waking up, they’re easier to kill.

My ideas about weaponry are changing. The .17 HMR is great, but it cost me some shots. I was only willing to shoot pretty much straight up, to prevent misses from sailing horizontally into other people’s houses and cars. That meant I had to get very close to the squirrels. Had I been able to shoot from farther away, I would have more than 1 squirrel brining in the fridge right now.

I like electronic hearing protectors. I bought my dad some Peltors a long time ago, and he can’t use them now, so I took them with me. You can turn them up so your hearing is better than normal. It helps you hear squirrels. Nice.

I had to say it, but the shotgun is a better tool then the .17 HMR right now. I can shoot horizontally with it, and I’m more likely to hit squirrels because of the wide pattern. An air rifle would also be nice, because I could shoot horizontally, from farther away, but I’m not sure it’s humane, because I would be more likely to wound squirrels without killing them right away.

I nearly nailed a second squirrel today. I took a shot at him, and it stunned him. I guess I “barked” him, which means shooting near a squirrel and dazing him. You can shoot a tree beside a squirrel and knock him down, unconscious. This squirrel reacted by running around the trunk in circles and then climbing down to stare at me. He perched about 10 feet from me, staring at me. I don’t think he knew what was going on. I had only brought 5 rounds with me, and I barked him with number 5, so all I could do was stare back. I was afraid he had been wounded, but he looked fine. Maybe he’ll drop dead from a concussion later.

I sighted the .17 in from too far away. I think I’m shooting a little high. I had assumed there was no real drop at 60 yards (my zeroing distance), but I’ll bet I’m wrong, because I missed 4 times today.

Cleaning the squirrel was not pleasant. I’ve torn a million fish apart, and it never bothered me, but cutting up cute, warm-blooded animals is a little gross.

I didn’t want to hack his head off with a pocket knife. I thought about it for a few minutes, and then I saw the pruning shears. Perfect.

I tried poultry shears on his legs and tail. Worked okay, but the pruning shears put them to shame.

I really did not want to gook up a pocket knife. They’re hard to clean. I found a Forschner filet knife in the kitchen. Of course, other people had abused it since I had last sharpened it, so I had to spend a long time fixing it with diamond hones. When I finally got it working, it worked just fine.

It seems like squirrels are very tough around the collar line. I had to cut some crap away in order to free the skin. I slit him down the belly, which was a bit nasty, and then I peeled his skin off him like a jumpsuit. His man bits went with the skin, so I didn’t have to yank them off with my bare fingers. I was not looking forward to that. His guts and other organs went down the disposal, and after that, I cut his anus out with the filet knife. I washed him down and stuck him in a lidded container full of brine, and now he resides in the fridge.

I would say I got something equivalent to one large chicken breast. I think it will be worth eating. I may go out in a few minutes and see what the shotgun produces. It’s foggy today, so I don’t think squirrels will be hiding from the heat. In fact, I know they aren’t. I went to McDonald’s for breakfast, and coming up the driveway to the house, I saw EIGHT EIGHT EIGHT squirrels. Makes me so mad.

My hands smell like dead squirrel, even after washing them and having two McMuffins. Guess I’m stuck with that.

This has been a great experience. Standing around failing to shoot animals is not that rewarding, but when you kill one and butcher it, it makes you feel close to nature. Many times, I’ve seen people write, or heard them say, that hunting made them feel like they were one with nature. I never experienced that until today. I figured it was hogwash, but it’s true.

I like animals, and it’s impossible to feel completely comfortable, blasting cute creatures with hot lead, but killing is part of life. It’s something a man needs to confront and deal with. A man should hunt and fish, if he has the opportunity. You have to confront the ugly parts of life in order to understand it. You can’t cower in the house and whimper like a woman in a Bambi T-shirt all the time. That’s not love or humanity. It’s shirking. You don’t want to admit you’re part of the cycle of life and death, so you sit back and criticize people who man up and accept their responsibility. Meanwhile you wear leather and eat fried chicken, as if they grew on trees.

Farm animals have it harder than hunted animals. A hunted animal does what it pleases for most of its life, and then it feels something briefly and expires quickly. Farm animals have tags shoved through their ears. Chickens have their beaks cut off with shears. Cattle get dehorned and castrated. Pigs get castrated while screaming their lungs out. Farmhands routinely beat animals with sticks while herding them. Slaughterhouses are only as humane as the law can make them. I don’t have much patience for self-righteous people who complain about hunting, and people who criticize fishing are just plain insane. Fish are so insensitive they will continue to try to feed after you cut them in half.

People should also think about the consequences of not hunting. Prey and nuisance animals overpopulate and starve. They destroy crops. They invade attics and do all sorts of damage. They kill pets. Right now, southern states are being torn up by wild hogs that reproduce at a phenomenal rate. They need to die, plain and simple, and hunting is one of the best ways to get it done.

I feel surprisingly good about hunting tiny ratlike animals. Think about it. Any idiot can shoot a deer, which is as big as a house. A squirrel is very small, and it moves around constantly. If I can learn to shoot squirrels, deer and hogs will be cake. How can you miss something that has a kill zone a foot across? Maybe I’m wrong, but to me, killing squirrels is much more impressive.

On the walk back, I found something disturbing. I planted some blackberries recently, and I found one of the plants sitting beside a neat little hole containing a huge…turd. There is no other word for it. Some filthy animal carefully moved my plant and moved its own project into the hole. I can’t figure that out.

Because of the size, I can’t believe this is a coon turd. I’ve seen those, and they’re about like poodle poo. Coyote, maybe? I think I need to get me a blind and put some meat out for bait.

Why on earth would it dig up my blackberry? Can’t figure that out.

I’m going to see if I can produce a meal instead of an hors d’ouevre. I’m going to get out my grandpa’s Sweet Sixteen. Wish me luck.

Forget Bobby Flay; Eat This

Several typos made it into my cookbook, potentially crippling anyone who tried to use certain recipes. In order to make amends, I will let you know how to make the dynamite dinner I just had. This info is in the book, but it’s slightly wrong.

I made navy beans with ham hocks, plus cornbread.

I learned something interesting this week. A friend of mine works at the University of Florida, where they have something called the Meat Lab. They sell meat to the public. They sell ham hocks. I got ahold of some. They sell them shrink-wrapped, so you can pop them right in the freezer.

Until this week, I had been unaware that some ham hocks were better than others. I would grab whatever they had at the store. The hocks were very nice. But they can’t compare to UF’s hocks. The flavor is better. There is more meat. The fat is delectable. Wonderful things. If you can find top-quality hocks, it will elevate your ham hock game to a new level.

Here is what I did.

INGREDIENTS

2 lbs. dried navy beans
2 big garlic cloves, sliced
2 tsp. pepper
1 very large yellow or white onion, not sweet
1 tsp. prepared mustard, like Mister Mustard or Gulden’s
salt to taste

Wash the beans and soak them overnight. You need a couple of inches of water over them. They will soak a lot of it up, and you don’t want them to go dry. In the morning, dump the water. Supposedly, a lot of the flatulence goes with it. Rinse the beans. Put them in a pot with two big hocks. Add the other ingredients, except for the salt. You may not need it.

Cover everything with water, get it boiling, and keep it on a very low boil for a few hours. The meat will tell you when it’s done. You should be able to cut the fat on a hock with a fork. The beans will be tender, and they will break down a little. Check the saltiness during the cooking process and adjust it. Some salt will leach out of the hocks and season the beans, so don’t go throwing salt in at the beginning.

Boil a few more hocks in plain water, in another pot. You will need these. You can add pepper and garlic if you want. You don’t want a whole lot of water. Cover them, but don’t use so much water you suck the flavor out of them.

When you’re done boiling them, the water will be a divine, aromatic pork broth you can probably use for something.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups self-rising white corn meal or Martha White cornbread mix
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup bacon grease (you can replace half of it with butter, but I wouldn’t)
1 1/3 cups buttermilk
2 large eggs

Preheat your oven to 450. Throw your #6 cast iron cornbread skillet in there and get it hot. Meanwhile, mix everything but the bacon grease in a bowl. When the skillet is hot, add the grease and let it get hot enough to smoke. You want the skillet so hot it browns the cornbread when you pour the batter in.

Pour the hot grease into the batter and stir it in. Pour the resulting mixture into the skillet. Bake for about 22 minutes. Invert the cornbread onto a dish or something. Turn it right-side-up. Cut in wedges.

Serve this with sliced tomatoes (heirlooms are best) and vidalias. A mix of red and yellow tomatoes is good. You can have a big glass of buttermilk or iced tea with it.

If you’re really hard core, you can also make collard greens, also with ham hocks.

This is one of the best meals on earth. Butter the cornbread and dip it in the beans. You can also get sorghum syrup and put it on buttered cornbread.

I don’t have any typos this time. You can trust me.

This cornbread is not sweet. Sweet cornbread is for Yankees. Also, black people like it. If you’re determined to ruin it with sweetness, I guess you can add sugar.

Don’t stray too far from your bathroom after you eat this. Don’t make me explain.

You could also make fried apples with this. Slice up some Granny Smiths and fry them with butter, brown sugar, a little salt, and some cinnamon or nutmeg. You could cheat and add a tiny bit of vanilla. Just throw everything in a skillet and fry it. Get the apples to brown a little.

This is so great, I can’t describe it to you. And it’s very easy to make. And cheap. Also, the beans will keep getting better in the fridge, as long as they’re not rancid.

If You Were Drunk Last Night, Don’t Read This

Happy new year, I guess. I don’t get excited about this holiday. I hate staying up late, I don’t like noise, and I don’t get drunk any more. Also, it’s depressing to be reminded that everything we do here on earth is fleeting. I’ve been watching Turner Classic Movies, and some of the films had New Year’s scenes with people singing Auld Lang Syne (an annoying song that makes no sense). It was disturbing to realize all the people in those songs were dead. “Let’s think of all our great memories! Enjoy the moment! Get drunk and enjoy yourself, because we’re still young! Oh, wait. It’s 2017, and we’re all under the ground, rotting in wooden boxes.”

It seems like Americans have a talent for ruining the beginnings of things. We ruin weddings with bachelor parties and prostitutes. We ruin Sundays and church by getting drunk and fornicating on Saturday nights. We defile Lent with Mardi Gras. It makes sense that we would screw up every new year by starting it with a hangover. Nothing says “hope” like waking up next to someone you don’t know, wondering if you have VD, and having to vomit in a wastebasket.

But I do hope the year turns out well for everyone.

Instead of talking about the worst holiday of the year, let me give you a belated Christmas gift. I have been working on my biscuit recipe again, and today it paid off. I read up a lot to get a better idea of exactly what each ingredient does, and I came up with some new ideas.

INGREDIENTS

1 3/4 cups biscuit flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 tbps. bacon grease
2 tbsp. butter

The starch is there to reduce the gluten.

I wanted to add flavor to the biscuits, so I tried a cheat that works with croissants. I burned some butter in the microwave, and then I poured it off of the burnt milk solids and chilled it in the freezer. A lot of the flavor in baked goods comes from butter which has started to burn. Store butter is generally low on flavor, so it needs help. Even the fancy European butter is disappointing compared to fresh-churned.

I put some butter in a Pyrex cup and covered it. Then I nuked it until it started to burn. I poured off 2 tablespoons of the liquid and froze it, and I added it to 2 tbsp. of chilled bacon grease from really excellent bacon.

You mix the dry ingredients (well), and then you cut the fat into them. You can use a hand pastry blender or a fork, but it seems like it works out to be less aggravation if you use your fingers. Start your sink running before you cut the fat, and then you won’t have to get fat on the faucet handle when you wash your hands afterward.

Mix the buttermilk in. You may not need all of it. You want a dough which is wet enough to roll out and so on, but you don’t want it mushy and sticky. As far as I know.

Roll the dough out so it’s a little over half an inch high, and cut out your biscuits. Bake for 14 minutes in a 425-degree oven. I put a sheet of foil on the rack below the cookie sheet to keep the bottoms of the biscuits from burning.

When they come out, brush the tops lightly with salted butter. McDonald’s does this. It’s one of the reasons their biscuits are so good.

These were great. I think part of the reason is that nuking the butter removes the water. Water takes the flakiness out of biscuits.

I used the top of a Mason jar to cut the biscuits out. I need a bigger cutter, but a jar is acceptable.

Preparing the fat is a pain. If you make biscuits a lot, I suppose you could prepare portions of burned butter and bacon grease and freeze them in foil.

I suspect that 450 is a better baking temperature than 425.

I made biscuits several times this week, because I had been having biscuit failures, and it was bothering me. Now maybe I’ll be able to forget about biscuits for a while.

On December 31, bake a bunch of these instead of getting drunk.