He is trying to decide if he should fly away or keep eating the dead possum.

Since Erin Burnett had a story last night on buying guns as Christmas presents I must fess up. I bought my wife a hand gun for Christmas. I told her my Christmas present idea a few days before Thanksgiving. My wife was enthusiastic. My son just rolled his eyes.

My wife started the process by calling one of her friends who is a gun enthusiast for advice. About a week later we went to a local gun store. The store has a gun range and instructors. After about two hours of asking questions and trying various handguns she settled on the Beretta M9. Since we are novices they highly recommended they we go through a training course. As part of the deal they gave us a couple of coupons for time on the range. She was happy.

Tonight we are going to the handgun training course at the gun store. This should be fun.

Here is my newest toy, a 2009 Subaru Forester. The car in the background is my 2000 Subaru Forester. It has 195,000 miles on it but still runs nice. My wife has been bugging me to give my old Forester to my son. I had been saving up for a new car but I only had enough money for a used vehicle or an inexpensive new car. Since I live on a farm I consider All Wheel Drive or four wheel drive to be a necessary requirement. Driving down our driveway after a snowstorm can get a little dicey. This Subaru was the best AWD/4WD value I could find in my price range.

A couple of weeks ago Amazon offered a very good price, $20 off, on the Roku HD Player. Since I live on a farm and our house is more than a quarter of a mile off the road, my options are limited. We have DSL but it is relatively slow and occasionally erratic. Recently our service has improved but YouTube videos still stutter. Recently my son figured out that NetFlix works just fine with our DSL connection. So I took the chance and bought the Roku player. I figured that this device is simple enough for my wife. It worked great. I watched two movies without a single stutter. The Roku channels that depend on podcasts or YouTube are still problems but Netflix and the audio channels work great. I am still working on the wife training.

Blogger Alert! Ann Althouse is in the neighborhood. 😉  I pass the sign in the picture below when I go the back way to the grocery store. I don’t know why the sign has always fascinated me. Maybe its because it reminds me of a short friend of mine. O’Bannon Creek flows in front of our farm.

Musical accompaniment actually playing on the radio when I was photographing signs yesterday. It proves God is watching over me, right? The sign I really wanted though was for this guy…

… this very fish to poke his smiling face up out of O’Bannon Creek.

But life is not so magical, and it should be enough that there are creeks and, presumably, somewhere in them, fish.

Give me some kind of sign.
[email protected] (Ann Althouse)
Sun, 17 May 2009 15:39:00 GMT

Every couple of months at work we have a “give away”. Products that have been damaged in shipment or have been returned as non-functional are given away to the employees. Either the employees take them away or the garbage man will. We set up a lottery system to minimize personal conflicts when selecting items. It can be viewed as organized dumpster surfing. We had about three pallets of dings and scratches. One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. A key item to remember is that there are no returns! If for any reason it does not work for you, you are responsible for disposing of it properly.

I picked up this little item. In the past I thought about getting a weather station but I always decided that my money had better uses elsewhere. I was the last employee to pick and it was still there. I guess the appeal of these devices has come and gone. The package had a nice note with it stating that after three days of trying to get it to work she was returning it. I was game to give it a try. I inserted the required five batteries, three for the station and two for the remote sensor, and both devices worked like a charm! I put the remote sensor down in the barn. Living on a farm we pay attention to the details of the weather forecasts.

This winter has been one of the coldest and wettest in recent memory. That was true before the latest storm to hit us. Yesterday we were hit with a blizzard that had the weather men and women thumbing through the record books. They are comparing this storm with a blizzard in the 1960’s. We are located just outside of Cincinnati so this snow fall is unusual. It is not going to break the record snowfall of 1998 but you get the picture. This storm is one for the record books. You can see in the photos how hard it came down. I measured twelve inches of snow outside our front door although it looked much deeper. It is going to be tough to get to the road. Click on any of the photos to see the slide show.

Several years ago a neighbor said one of her horses had been attacked by a pack of coyotes. We were concerned since we had young horses. Coyotes do not normally hunt in packs. We looked and looked but we never saw the coyotes. Occasionally we would hear them at night. They have a distinctive sound and it can sound pretty eerie when you are alone in the country at night. Last week I saw two coyotes near our lake. They looked like the picture but a little grayer. I was returning home after dropping off my son at school. It was a clear, cold winter morning and the ground was covered with an inch of crusty now. The pair were checking out the lake. The lake was frozen over and the geese had left several days ago. I guess the coyotes were hungry and hoping to get lucky.  My presence startled them. They jogged off with a sly smile on their face. I was intruding on them. I was surprised to see them since we have two Great Pyrenees dogs. The dogs hang out at the barn but the lake is only a hundred yards away. The lake is was well within the dogs territory and the dogs have not been shy about chasing off dogs encroaching on their territory. These are farm dogs who have lived outside and roamed free their entire lives. Our female dog regularly catches possums and raccoons during the warmer months. It would appear that the dogs and the coyotes should have a territory conflict. Coyotes and Great Pyrenees are reported to not get along. I suspect this will be the last time I see these two. In a couple of weeks these coyotes should find enough food outside of our dogs territory and they will not take this risk again.

This is catfish caught at our lake. The picture was taken by a relative. If I had seen this monster we would have had catfish for dinner.