My Wife Will Never Walk With Me Again

I’ve mentioned in past posts that the back side of my property backs up to a large feeder creek of the San Jacinto river and because this area has been left in it’s “wild” state, except for a few trails, I get my fair share of visiting critters passing through. No big deal, except for the wild hogs, these critters seem to fear me more than trying to strike fear into me. Tuesday night my wife and I went for a walk down to the creek, one of many places we walk, to see if we could get a good view of what was happening with the moon and the eclipse. We never made it, we came across this strange bloody mess instead. This immediately freaked my wife out and she turned back to go to the house. Not me, for some reason, I wanted to check it out. I was trying to find signs of what had been eaten here and what ate it. But, I found no evidence of anything, just blood. Best I can figure is the pack of dogs that cruise through here got ahold of one of the small hogs and this just happened to be the spot for dinner. Its hard to say really because I don’t actually know what happened. This just proves allot of bullshit happens out here that I don’t see directly. My wife has been wanting me to clear/thin out this 1 1/2 acres since we first moved in 11 years ago, this just added fuel to the fire.

Fences Make Me A Great Neighbor

Not the way you remember hearing the old saying? It’s my twist because it makes more sense to me, plus I could really give a shit if I have good neighbors or not. Mine know I don’t want them in or around my yard. For the newbies reading here today, my house sits on 11.93 acres of land somewhere way outside the city of Houston. Now, we live in what’s called an “acreage neighborhood” where all the homes sit on a few acres. Just so happens that when I bought my “lot” that I bought the two lots available to the left and the one lot available to the right. Why? Because I wanted my neighbors to have to put some work into it when they would choose to be nosey. After almost 10 years I would say the experimental theory has been a success because I barely know my neighbors, just the damn way I like it. Within the almost 12 acres there is a roughly 4 acre pond which was dug so I could build up where my house would be built, as well as level out what would become my yard. Also, there is 3ish acres of a densely wooded area which butts up to a feeder creek off of the San Jacinto river. Everything else is mowed as my yard and has a wooden fence around it.

Well, after the storm last night I found a tree had fallen on a section of my wooden fence way in the backyard. This explained why the breaker for the electric circuit had been tripped. Yes, it’s a partially electrified fence. Why? To keep the criiters, varmints, and the neighbors dogs from digging under the fence and getting into my yard. Don’t worry, out in this area its only putting out about 2000 volts. But, the tree seems to have damaged the line by completing the circuit, hence tripping the breaker. At least the mystery is solved, I figured I would find a dead animal of sorts out in the back, not a tree on the fence. Since I located this so late in the afternoon all I really felt like doing was exactly what I did, take a picture of it, well, actually about a dozen. Why? I needed them to show to the insurance company to show the damage. The adjustor will be out Monday morning to make a report so I can’t touch it until afterwards. If it were endangering life or property then I can, but its just a fence so I was told to wait. Waiting is not something I am good at, especially when there is so much work to do. Meanwhile, the neighbor on that side figured out I was back there and decided he wanted to have a 30 minute chat about absolutely nothing, in fact I don’t even remember as I sit here writing this.

When I tell my wife what had happened and what went on with the insurance she went off on one of her tangents and wants me to look into having the tree removed by someone and the fence repaired by someone. She didn’t ask when I would be taking care of it, she wanted to know when someone else was going to do it. There will be nobody else doing any of it because I want to do it. Plus, I have the kids to help me out, so it will be fine. On top of that, I finally got my favorite tool on the planet running again after it died on me back in March, I thought it was really dead, but it runs like a screaming chainsaw banshee now. So I’m good to go. Y’all were aware that every man has his favorite tool? My dad’s is a 50 year old flathead screwdriver, my son’s is an old roofing hammer, mine is, well, mine is the fine machine pictured below, its probably the most useful and versatile tool I have ever owned. Next week I put it to the test, next week I will see if bringing it back to life was worth it, next week the chips will fly. Fuck calling a tree removal company, fuck someone else fixing my fence, I will do it my way. My wife knows this already, she was just trying to be cute and see if she could ruffle a few feathers. The adventure never ends in our marriage, but that is life as well, shit happens, we could cry about it or take care of it. Some of us know the right answer, the others call a tree removal company.

Ten Simple Rules For Dating My Daughter

Rule One:
If you pull into my driveway and honk your fucking horn you’d better be delivering a package or a pizza, because you’re sure not picking anyone up.

Rule Two:
You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter’s body, I will remove them permanently and mail them to your mother.

Rule Three:
I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their pants so loosely that they appear to be falling off their asses. Please don’t take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete fucking idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your pants securely in place to your waist.

Rule Four:
I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilizing a “barrier method” of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate, when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you. Remember, I own guns and a backhoe.

Rule Five:
It is usually understood that in order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my untouched daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is “early.”

Rule Six:
I have no doubt you are a popular fellow, with many opportunities to date other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is okay with my daughter. Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I will make you cry.

Rule Seven:
As you stand in my front hallway, waiting for my daughter to appear, and more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget. If you want to be on time for the movie, you should not be dating. My daughter is putting on her makeup, a process that can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of just standing there, why don’t you do something useful, like changing the oil in my car?

Rule Eight:
The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool. Places where there are no parents, policemen, or nuns within eyesight. Places where there is darkness. Places where there is dancing, holding hands, or happiness. Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater, and a goose down parka – zipped up to her throat. Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies which features chain saws are okay. Hockey games are okay. Old folks homes are better.

Rule Nine:
Do not lie to me. I may appear to be an older man who has a few miles on him and look very mild mannered. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. I can disassemble, reassemble, and reload my Desert Eagles faster than you can ever run. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I remind you I own guns, a backhoe, and 10 acres of partially wooded property behind this very house. Do not ever fucking lie to me because I will end you and any memory of you.

Rule Ten:
Be afraid. Be very afraid. It takes very little for me to mistake the sound of your car in the driveway for a common criminal looking for an easy score. When my bullshit meter starts pegging out, the voices in my head frequently tell me to clean the guns as I wait for you to bring my daughter home. As soon as you pull into the driveway you should exit your car with both hands in plain sight. Speak the perimeter password, announce in a clear voice that you have brought my daughter home safely and early, then return to your car – there is no need for you to come inside. The camouflaged presence you might feel will be mine.

Reminder: We live on an enormous piece of wooded property surrounding a good sized pond, I’m a gun owner, and the owner of a rather nice backhoe. Make good choices when with my daughter because I have already made my choices about you.

Posted From Scorpion Sting’s Motorola Droid Maxx!

How Being Under-Qualified Saved Me

Normally I wouldn’t be especially satisfied with being told that I’m under-qualified for a specific job position. However, having the lack of one specific qualification saved me from moving somewhere I really didn’t want to live. Now that I have the definitive answer let me start from the beginning of how this all came about. Before I get to far ahead of myself let me explain the above photograph. It was taken earlier this year by my cousin who lives outside of Bismarck, North Dakota and sent to my mother (his aunt by marriage) to illustrate what a great winter they were having. My mother thought it humorous to show me the photo since I spend 98% of the year in shorts and flip flops. Anyway, back to the story. Seems in my family circle news of me being laid off has expanded out to extended family as well. Well, my cousin, who has lived in and around Bismarck his entire life, works for a company there that manufacturers diesel powered recreational vehicles (RVs), buses, and large specialty vehicles. Anyway, he had a position open and wanted to give me an opportunity to fill it for him.

Our first telephone conversation was short and to the point, he needed my resume. Now, that’s convenient because I had recently updated my resume. After a few days he called me for an impromptu telephone interview. Seems I offered everything he was looking for with one exception, I don’t have any over the counter sales experience. It would appear that being a bartender isn’t considered actual sales experience. Who knew. Unfortunately, this minor detail is a major deal breaker. In many ways I’m not disappointed in the decision, in other ways, financially speaking, it was a let down. I mean, I just let an $80,000.00 a year job slip through my fingertips as well as a company sponsored relocation. So, in that regard it sucks a bit. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to live that far north, because I’m really not a fan of the cold weather or snow.

In review, I would have had to uproot my family, lease out my home & property, and go live in a place that is known for its harsh winter environment. What in the fuck was I smoking! I imagine, if things would have turned out different, that we would have moved. But, I think I would have regretted leaving Texas. Plus, those damn yankees talk funny, it would have been like moving to a foreign country or something. Personally, I think the right thing happened, maybe for the wrong reasons, but I can live with that.

Fun Facts: Backyard Invasions

Have you ever sought something so elusive that the mere fact it is so elusive begins to make you wonder what in the hell you were looking for in the first place? Well, this situation is half right for my situation because I know what I am tracking, I just don’t know where its hiding. Seems every spring for the last nine years or so the wild hogs come up from the river and into the woods on my property. I started hearing them a few weeks ago and upon investigation I found where at least one of them had recently been. I have yet to spot one with my own eyes, but I know they are there because I can hear them. Problem solved, I put up a couple outdoor cameras where there was evidence of their presence. This tactic finally paid off and I caught one on camera. Analyzing the picture reveals this female just gave birth or is going to soon. Which is a greater reason that it doesn’t need to be here, I don’t mean it needs to be dead, just not here tearing the damn place up. The actual plan is to catch her and any others and relocate them up the river quite a ways.

Over the years I have been able to catch them and successfully relocate them. However, a few rather large hogs (over 300 lbs) have met their demise which directly resulted in them literally being smoked. Damn they tasted great too. I am good with either result which presents itself. I will be sure to post an update, but for now I need to catch this elusive little bitch, and fast.

Crawfish Boil Family Feast

Let me tell y’all how I get my family involved helping me do shit I need help with, I feed them afterwards, and provide them with plenty of frozen margaritas. What did they do for me to deserve such a royal feast? Well, the five male helpers who ranged in age from 20 to 62 helped me manually clean the edges of my 3 acre pond, meaning they cut, chopped, whacked, stacked, hauled, and prepared a burn pile of 8 years of under and over growth material to reveal my yard underneath. For 12 hours I saw nothing but assholes and elbows because the were aggressively attacking the pondskirt for increased access. I wonder where all the damn catfish will hide now.

The prize? A huge crawfish boil prepared by my son and me. The picture does not do the close to 50 pounds of food justice. When we dumped the basket onto the picnic table I thought I was going to lose a limb because the feeding frenzy had commenced. It took 6 adult males shy of 30 minuted to make the mountain of food disappear, that and around 6 1/2 gallons of frozen margaritas. For those of y’all who have never had crawfish all I can tell you is maybe you live to far up north. Its a popular meal down here in the gulf coast. Anyway, I just wanted to share because I know most of y’all reading this right now did not have this for dinner and that’s a crying damn shame.

Shake Your Tail Feathers

For the past few months I have been following the advice of the diabetic dietitian I formally was insured to see which is to walk at least one hour a day covering at least one mile in distance.. I don’t go to a gym, nor do I visit any circular monotonous track, because I have plenty of room to walk on my property. Hell, the walk from my front door to the main street where my mailbox is located is just shy of 1/4 mile, so I have plenty of places to walk. In preparation I did cut a pathway for myself through a section of my wooded area because it was going to be easier to go through it than around it. While on the topic of taking advice, I was told I needed to write more on my blog to get back into the swing of things by a good southern doctor friend of mine, she knows who she is and that’s what counts here. In the end, I do walk for over 1 1/2 hours each evening and now write more on my blog, if this can be called actual writing to y’all. I enjoy my walks because it is very peaceful, very relaxing, and doctors say it benifits my health. Bonus.

Over the last few weeks I have noticed that the water fowl down on the pond and surrounding it have been acting differently which means that they are either spooked or they have just moved on. I am pretty lucky because this pond always attracts some spectacular wildlife to observe. When I looked a bit closer at the overgrown side of the pond I found 2 different places that a predator had made a meal of a few of the young ducks. This didn’t surprise me as my property backs up to the woods, a creek, and a few thousand acres of absolute nothingness. There have been some small paw prints in the mud around the area so I know there are dogs running around. I never minded them because they stay well out of sight and down in the bottoms of my property. I have seen one out of what I expect to be 3 or 4 of these “wild” dogs. I have had to pop that one in the ass with a pellet gun twice because it was getting closer with curiosity and I don’t need that in my actual yard around my house or other buildings. So, we tolerate each others presence so to say.

Later in the afternoon yesterday I had company on my walk, my 17 y/o daughter wanted to talk to me alone. Without getting to much into the talk right here so we don’t get sidetracked let me just say it was about her boyfriend and some problems he is having financially. In the end I was asked if he could move in. When I am done here I will get into that father daughter talk. That being said, the company was a pleasant change to my normal routine. As she gets older she seems to need daddy less and less each day. So, we walked, talked, and enjoyed the peaceful trek. About 45 minutes into our walk we noticed an odd smell, the distinct smell of something dead. This is a smell, for those of the all who don’t know, that is unmistakable, and as we got closer to the source it became much stronger in the air. She tried to guess what it could be that had perished in the woods and then she began to worry me a bit because she asked “what if it is a dead body?” Where in the hell did that come from? However, one never knows what one will stumble across in the woods while on a walk. Putting on my best daddy face I assured her it was not a dead human body we were smelling and this I know for a fact. There is a distinctly different smell between a rotting circus of an animal and that of a human being. What can I say, I have been around the block once or twice. Just imagine learning some of life’s lessons which can not be taught by another person rather they must be learned by experiencing them. Enough said about that, we have a dead animal to find now. Why? Because if we don’t then other predators will come to investigate the smell of death and then I might have a problem I don’t really want on my hands. The plan was to find it, remove it, and get it in the burn pile before it sparks too much interest with the other wildlife.

We walked ahead maybe 20 yards or so and we found the source. I was actually surprised because I was non this part of the trail Sunday evening and this was not here. There was actually more surprise in my mind than just the fact that it was laid there dead. In all the years I have lived here, pushing 10 years now, I have only seen one other coyote and she was on the other side of the creek heading away from the backside of my property. In fact, that was right about 7 years ago so its not like it is a common sight. Oh sure, we hear them in the dead of the night in the far off distance but never see them or any of their activities. But here we have a dead juvenile coyote. I flipped it over looking for obvious injuries and see nothing. I actually expected to see a bullet wound which would mean it just wandered up here and died from its injuries. But there is no clear sign. I called a friend of mine who works with the state of Texas wildlife department to find out what I needed or could do. He told me to just wait and he would come check it out. After he arrived and checked it out it was determined to be a natural death. We loaded the coyote into the bed of his personal truck, said our goodbyes, and that was that. I was in a hurry now to get up to my shop because I had a bag of lye  which I wanted to spread out where the coyote had been to get rid of the smell. Once that was done I had to go shower to get cleaned up for the night. Something my daughter had already done.

I see now that I will have to keep an eye on my land down by the bottoms because I do not need the predator threat around here. I may need to start walking with more than just my stick from now on for sure. Later last night my daughter was on the phone with her boyfriend where I heard her tell him that we had talked and about how our walk turned into a gruesome discovery. I giggled to myself as I walked by because I thought it was it was great, personally, walking and talking with the daughter who seems to have outgrown her daddy.

If You Want Strange, We Got It

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on my back deck and saw something strange way off in the distance. I called for my son and told him to take a ride down past the pond to see if he could find out what I was seeing in the distance. He sent the above picture in a text to me. Is this truly strange? It is strange in my opinion because it is a cluster of 30+ balloons tied together in a bundle in a place that I would figure almost impossible to get into. But, as we can see, the balloon cluster has found it’s way into the swamp I have fenced off in the northwest corner of my property. They are on my property but in an area that is fenced off to keep the small kids out. So, we have a mystery to try to figure out how they got where they are. If they “dropped” in then they had to drop missing thorn covered trees plus they landed in thorny brush. I can’t see how they would have blown in horizontally either because I would think it would be even more treacherous than falling in. Anyway, I thought this was puzzling and a strange phenomena so I decided to share simply because it shouldn’t be. In almost 8 years this will be the first bit of trash ever to make it into the swamp through all the gnarly undergrowth. Any ideas or thoughts y’all would have to offer are readily welcome.

Might Be Best To Go Around

The Ultimate Friendly Reminder