Stranded semi tractors on the Happy Jack Road outside of Cheyenne. Yes, my window is cracked.
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: It's broken. Or at least its fr...: A man, woman, their horse, and dog. Tanana, Alaska, prior to World War One. I published this item last week: Lex Anteinternet: It'...
So, last weekend the kids and I went deer hunting.
Deer season this year is very short for some reason, I don't know why, but it is. Or maybe it seemed that way as I had no opportunity to take a day off from work to go, and the kids of course had no opportunity to take a day off from university. So I actually missed the better part of it before I even went out.
We didn't draw into limited area tags, so our options were limited to local general areas. There's been some changes in them recently and the area that we generally go to, when we go to a general area, is antlered deer, three points or better, now.
I'm not a game biologist and I'm not a head hunter either, so I don't quite get the "antlered deer only" thing. I probably should study up on it, but I don't get it. Particularly in the area where I went which has been infested with Chronic Wasting Disease in recent years, and I'd think they'd want to cut the numbers of all deer down a bit. But, as noted, I'm not a game biologist so I can't say the reasoning isn't solid.
Anyhow, we headed out on Saturday and saw a lot of deer, and hiked a lot of ground, but we didn't see any bucks at all until the afternoon. About that time, finally arriving after hours as the spot that I intended to check in the first place, we saw a single deer.
And quite a deer he was. He looked like the deer on a bottle of
Jägermeister, a German liqueur I've never tasted, in part because it's one of those odd liquors that in the United States is associated with stupid behavior. But the label is impressive.
The label features a deer with a large rack with a cross in between its antlers. The image recalls St. Hubert (which I knew) and St. Eustace, both of whom had profound religious conversions after encountering deer while hunting which had the image of the cross blazing between their antlers.
St. Hubert encounters the deer.
Or at least according to Wikipedia the image on the bottle honors St. Hubert and St. Eustace. I suspect its only meant to recall St. Hubert, who would have been better known to Europeans in the 1930s when the liquer was first created. St. Eustace is remembered more in the Eastern church and was a Roman general who converted after such an experience while hunting and who was ultimately martyred in 118.
St. Hubert lived more recently, post Roman Empire, having been born in 656 and living until 727. He was born in what is now southern France into a noble family, but was sent north to Paris at an early age. Due to political turmoil, he was one of many who ended up it Metz as sort of a noble refugee and we need to keep in mind that France, as a solid political entity, didn't exist at the time. Anyhow, he married one Floribanne,
daughter of Dagobert, Count of Leuven, and the couple had a son, Floribert, later the Bishop of Liege. In this fluid political time, therefore, fate had taken Huber from Toulouse to Liège in an onward northern migration.
Hubert was not a religious man and that condition was amplified when his wife died giving birth to Floribert, a not uncommon fate for women at the time. After that, Hubert took entirely to hunting in the Ardennes, living a solitary hunting life. On a Good Friday, however when the faithful were gathering in Church in honor of that day (which is not a Holy Day of Obligation) he encountered a great stag and the it turned on him, cross between its horns, and spoke, saying:
Hubert, unless thou turn to the Lord, and lead a holy life, you shall quickly go down into hell.
It's hard to ignore a thing like that, to say the least, and Hubert dismounted from his horse and immediately, according to tradition, replied; "Lord, what would You have me do?", to which the reply came "Go and seek Lambert, and he will instruct you." Hubert entered the priesthood and rose to the rank of Bishop of Liege, which he occupied until his death, at which point his priest son took over that position. Both are saints.
According to the legend of his encounter, the deer also lectured St. Hubert on having higher regard for animals and engaging in human hunting practices, including taking old stags beyond their prime breeding years, and also to take sick or injured animals even if it meant passing up on a shot at atrophy. There's more to it, but St. Hubert is accordingly still held in high regard in Germany, Austria and France among hunters and ethical hunting principals taught in European hunting societies are attributed to him.
Anyhow, the deer was like that one depicted, but lacked of course the cross. That would have been life altering to say the least, but at least day altering was the fact that I rose my rifle up, shot, and missed.
Now, I'm a good shot and this totally perplexed me, as did missing a second shot from a greater distance. After all of this, I shot at a couple of rocks at varying distances to see if something had happened to my rifle's zero. Nope, it was right on.
I have no idea what happened. Suffice it to say it was frustrating.
We stayed out but never saw another buck deer. Only does.
On the way in, when we hit the junction with 287, it was like a parade. Vehicles coming home in the dark from UW's Homecoming Game. Something I've never seen, not even when I lived in Laramie.
It was also getting a lot colder and it was clearly going to snow.
It wasn't in the morning, however, and therefore the plan to get up and attend the 8:00 a.m. Mass across town seemed a solid one. "Across town" was now the required option as the Priest at our parish changed the Mass time at the downtown church from 8:00 to 9:00, also moving the 11:00 to 11:30. This is part of a demographic change I understand, but it also means that those of us long habituated to 8:00 (at one time it was 7:30) now have to find another parish.
On the way out of the church after Mass, it was snowing. And on the road home, it was snowing heavily. By the time I checked the WYDOT site, the roads in and out of Laramie had closed. They'd closed in fact pretty early.
This proved to be particularly problematic for my daughter who had academic matters at UW she could not miss. By noon it appeared it was not going to change and I decided to head back out hunting (I don't mind hunting in bad weather), but Long Suffering Spouse informed me that "you better wait until you see what they're going to do", which amounted to an instruction not to leave in anticipation of having to do something.
Now, Long Suffering Spouse has a unique manner of speech in which, when she wants somebody to do something, or somebody to correct something they are doing, rather than address the person directly, she comments on "People". For instance, rather than say "Please take out the garbage" or simply command "Take out the garbage", she'll say "People need to take out the garbage". This is something she comes by naturally as a learned behavior and its not going to be possible to break it, but it can be baffling if you are in a group. When she directs the comment to "people", there's only one of the people who it's being addressed to and she knows who it is. That's not so obvious to other people.
About 2:30 she came into a room where I was reading and somewhat dozing and announced that "If people need to really get to Laramie they may need to go to Cheyenne and up through Ft. Collins". As a little earlier in the day the possibility if me driving my daughter to Laramie if the roads opened up was discussed, while allowing my son to wait until the next day, and as I was the only one in the room, it was pretty clear to me that I was the "people" and this meant, "You need to drive her to Laramie and should plan on going through Ft. Collins". She then went out to shovel snow.
I addressed my daughter on the topic and she was wanting to go for the aforementioned reasons so she packed right up, we loaded up in the
old Dodge diesel truck and turned it on. Long Suffering Spouse then came to the driver's window and asked "what are you doing?" I informed her we were leaving, just as she'd instructed, and she disclaimed having done that. I dismissed it and we headed off.
That may seem odd, but part of the "People" line of speech can be accompanied, if there's a decision to be made, by a long deliberative process. This gets into our
Ninth Law of Behavior, but Long Suffering Spouse really likes to debate options prior to making a decision, and if at all possible, to have somebody else make them. It's not uncommon for options to be presented, for me to make a decision, and then still find options being presented well after the decision has been made.
This is a process that makes people who have that inclination comfortable and its hardly unique to her. I've had at least one employee who was so extreme on it that absolutely nothing the employee did wasn't subject to a request for input, no matter how minor it was. That's not the case here, it's just her decision making style.
That style, however, doesn't lend itself to making decision that need to be made immediately and I simply dismissed her question as being the typical one we'd have, in which a decision has been made and now we're getting extra options. We even do this on the way to dinner when we eat out. Options are presented, I'm asked to make the decision, I do, and then on the way there, additional options are added. Given as it was 3:00 p.m. and I was off for a long ride down and back, I left before additional options could be added, as there did not appear to be any.
The roads down to Cheyenne weren't great, but they weren't horrible either. By the time we got to Cheyenne the Happy Jack Road was open to local traffic only, but by my reasoning Laramie is local. So we turned off to take it.
But not before a Highway Patrolman stopped me on I80 on the portion of the road where it was closing. He whipped around with flashing lights so I pulled over. He then announced on his bull horn that I couldn't stop on the side of the road.
I was only stopped on the side of the road as he'd pulled me over. He never even got out of his patrol car.
Anyhow, we found Happy Jack Road, which I haven't been on for more than thirty years, and started up it. The road was in excellent shape. . . until the top.
The ten or fifteen miles on the summit were horrific and were among the worst roads I'd ever been on. But we made it to Laramie without incident after a white knuckler up on top.
By the time I made it to Laramie, 287 and 487 were open, so I headed home the normal way. Roads weren't awful, even if stretches weren't great, and I made it home about 10:00 p.m., much earlier than I expected, but late for me.
It turned out I'd totally misinterpreted Long Suffering Spouse's "People" instruction and in fact she had only brought the topic up as an interesting topic of discussion with no intention whatsoever to send anyone off on such a trip. Indeed, it turned out she was horrified the entire time and didn't think anyone should have hit the road at all.
I'd been up since about 3:00 a.m. and so when we got home, about dark, I was pretty tired. That evening, however, my son suddenly recalled that he'd meant to tell me that there'd been a little water on the floor down at my mother's old house. He attributed it to condensation from the water heater as the thermostat had been set low and it had turned cold. I feared something else.
I was right. The bottom of the gas water heater had rusted through. This was confirmed the second I saw the water heater, which was at about 11:00 p.m.
In my son's defense, he hadn't experienced this before and he's been fortunate to grow up in a house with very few plumbing problems. Thinking back it seems to me that our home when I was a kid was constantly afflicted with plumbing problems. I suspect hat this is one of those areas in which the march of technology has made things much more reliable, as it has with automobiles. When I was a kid, the man of the house working on plumbing at least once a year was pretty normal, and I'd experienced prior water heater failures. Now, this is pretty rare.
It took us about two hours to get the tank drained and the water turned off. The plumbers came the next day and installed a new one.
Going to bed at 1:00 a.m. doesn't mean I get to sleep in the next day and so it was off to work at the normal time. Before that, however, I got a text that our ceiling was leaking at work.
And indeed it was.
Very recently the air conditioning system was worked on and it was immediately and ocrrectly suspected that this had something to do with the leak. The leak was quickly addressed once somebody came to work on it, but that wasn't until about 3:00 p.m.
So during the day, it became leakier.
It's now fixed.
On the way out of the building in the evening, which was on my way to an evening meeting I had scheduled, the young Asian woman who is always very friendly asked what the floor sheet on the elevator was for. She's among the very best dressed people in the building and was wearing either a white fur or faux fur. "Ceiling leak" I replied. "Old building", she replied back in her very thick accent (I've never been really sure where she's actually from, I'd like to ask, but I don't want to appear rude in doing so).
Well maybe. But sort of just one of those things, recently.
