We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
If you're set up in the right barley or hay field before 5 am, the Snows will come noisily fluttering into your decoys like this. Hot barrels. Great fun.
You get up at O dark 30, grab a coffee, a Marlboro, an apple and a banana and a handful of granola bars, then drive a while down gravel roads and through vast farm fields and set up early in the chilly field in the dark with the aid of headlights and headlamps. Then you drive the trucks out of the field and hide them behind a distant tree row.
Unlike Canadas with their tough plumage and rugged build, Snows are easily killed. As it is said, "They go down like a prom dress."
The view at sunset with the “second half” held firmly in one hand, a Montecristo #4 in the other. Lord Dundee, who drank his whiskey by the tumblerful, once said, ''A single Scotch is nothing more than a dirty glass.'' We love single malts and single cask single malts, but, for regular drinking, Famous Grouse is the favorite.
I am eager to check out the new outboard motors and the clubhouse from the dock (with drink of choice in hand) when we arrive.
You can ask Bird Dog how much he enjoyed the old Johnson motors. Our duck boats do have oars, just in case. They are also handy for shoving the boats into the reeds.
Driving on highway and dirt/gravel road north and then west, we begin to approach our remote lakeside hunting camp. If you tramp through those taiga woods long enough, you will rustle up some grouse, send some black bears running, and interest some coyotes which resemble wolves.
Enough Ruffed Grouse in those birch woods to make for good 20 ga. fun after lunch if you are not a napper, but grouse are not our primary targets up there:
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature, in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for Music." - Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
Gwynnie is up in Eastport, Maine and learning about the Old Sow whirlpool. According to Wikipedia, Old Sow is the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere, located off the southwestern shore of Deer Island, New Brunswick, Canada, and Moose Island, the principal island of Eastport, Maine.
According to popular etymology the name "Old Sow" is derived from "pig-like" noises the whirlpool makes when churning; however, a more likely origin is the word "sough" (pronounced "suff"), defined as a "drain," or a "sucking sound." Early settlers to the area may easily have mispronounced "sough," as "sow," due to its similar spelling to other words with "sow-sound" endings, such as "plough."
The whirlpool is caused by local bathymetry and extreme tidal range where waters exchange between Passamaquoddy Bay and the Bay of Fundy, combined with the unusual topography of the location's sea floor at the confluence of the numerous local currents.
Old Sow is one of five significant whirlpools worldwide (Corryvreckan, Scotland; Saltstraumen, Norway; Moskstraumen, Norway; and Naruto, Japan are the others). Although the tidal currents within Western Passage surrounding Old Sow compare with faster whirlpools elsewhere, the speed of Old Sow's vortex is considerably slower than Moskstraumen, the world's most powerful whirlpool.
Tremendous water turbulence occurs locally in the greater Old Sow area, but it does not usually constitute a navigation hazard for motorized vessels with experienced operators at the helm; however, small craft — especially vessels with keels (sailboats) and human-powered vessels — are warned to avoid these waters when the tide is running.
Besides Old Sow and its numerous "piglets" (small and medium whirlpools surrounding Old Sow), other area phenomena include standing waves, upwellings (that on rare occasion may even spout several feet into the air), and 10- to 17-foot-deep or more, non-vortexing depressions in the water.
Robert Godfrey writes in Smithsonian Magazine: “The reasons for the Old Sow are several. To begin with, some 40 billion cubic feet of water floods into Passamaquoddy Bay with each incoming tide and mixes with the countercurrents from the St. Croix River to the north of the bay. There's a 400-foot-deep trench to the southwest of New Brunswick's Deer Island Point that continues as a 327-foot trench to the northwest. Bisecting the trench is a 281-foot undersea mountain. All that water flooding into the bay has to negotiate a right-angle turn to get around Deer Island Point, and then it slams into that undersea mountain. When heavy winds coincide with especially high tides, it becomes liquid chaos and disaster for the unwitting seafarer.”
See also It’ll Thrill Y, It’ll Kill Ya in WIRED Magazine... "Chaos isn't just a theory in the Passamaquoddy Bay. Here in the waters off of Eastport, Maine, lurks the Old Sow, the western hemisphere's biggest whirlpool. She shows up wherever and whenever the spirit and tides move her, occasionally opening her maw suddenly in the form of a madly spinning, 40-foot-deep hole in the ocean, several hundred feet wide. Sometimes she's more subdued, creating a funnel-shaped hole roughly 12 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
It's 11 miles up this "road" to our family camp of several generations. A short summer there in the Sierra, inaccessible for most of the year due to snowfall.
1870 barn behind a young Sequoia Gigantea planted in the 1920s.
The barn served a spa hotel where people came for the supposedly curative properties of the natural cold soda water springs on the property, but when the hotel burned to the ground in 1898, the property passed into private hands.
75° yesterday dropping to 44° at night. 70 now at 10:00.
12-20 hummers at the feeders - Rufus and Calliope. The Rufus migrate from winter breeding grounds in southern Mexico to summer HQ in southern Alaska. That's a female Rufus with the little red throat patch.
View from that bed I posted yesterday. Our family camp is at the extreme end of a 40-minute dirt & rocky single-lane road. About 90 hard minutes and 2,500 vertical feet further up that hill, you can intersect the Pacific Crest Trail on the ridge barely visible through the trees. My dad's ashes are scattered on that rock ledge center left.
1870 barn behind a young Sequoia Gigantea planted in the 1920s. 
12-20 hummers at the feeders - Rufus and Calliope. The Rufus migrate from winter breeding grounds in southern Mexico to summer HQ in southern Alaska. That's a female Rufus with the little red throat patch.
