Hobbies

I like hobbies. I have a lot of hobbies. For Example:

My favorite hobby is woodworking. I have a shop
and lots of tools. I just don't ever seem to have time to work in the shop
with the tools. I have plenty of projects and ideas, just not much time. Not to
mention the fact that I have so much other stuff in my shop that I cannot
do anything in there when I want to!
I also love to golf. I am horrible at it, but it is a lot of fun
chasing that little white ball around nicely mowed grassy areas. I have decided that my slice is just the result of me being a forester. I really like trees! I spend a lot of time getting that little white ball out of the trees.

My newest hobby comes from my love of maps and GPS. (Global Positioning System). Geocahcing is a lot of fun. I get to hike in the woods, sometimes in towns, and find hidden treasures by following GPS coordinates. Its lots of fun, and currently probably my favorite hobby because the girls can do it and like
to do it with me.


I also still love mountain biking. I did it a lot in college. I even raced. Back then I was
all about going fast and racing downhills. Now I am trying to get back into it just to get
into better shape. It can get very expensive if you get into it too much.

Photography is another hobby I enjoy. It was too expensive when I had a film camera.
But now I have a nice digital SLR and I can just fire at will when I see something.

My next hobby also involves firing something, but this time hot pieces of lead
come out of the end of a narrow round barrel at a high rate of speed and hopefully puts meat in the freezer. So this is not just a hobby, its sortof like grocery shopping in a fun way. I bet you would not have to deal with crowds if you could do regular grocery shopping this way!
One thing I love to do, is hike around in the woods.
The great thing about this hobby is it is very inexpensive. Unless you think you need expensive
boots to do it in. It is also great because you can throw in some of the other hobbies at the same time. The best part for me is that I get paid to do this at work!

These are just some of the hobbies that I could remember right now. The only problem with having all these hobbies is finding time to fit them all in, or deciding which one to do at any given time. So a lot of times I am overwhelmed with choices and have to sit down and blog about it. Oh no, there is a new hobby, Blogging. Maybe my new hobby would be collecting hobbies. I could try new things once and claim it to be a hobby. It would probably give me lots of new things to blog about. But when would I get time to do my old hobbies? How do you make these decisions?
There is always tomorrow.
Feel free to use any of my hobbies as your own. I obviously cannot do them all at once and am more than willing to share! Although it might be fun, hunting golf balls on my mountain bike carrying the thing I build in my workshop that holds my camera and rifle. I could even put a GPS signal in the balls to find them like a geocache. That sounds interesting. Hmmmmmm?

I've been tagged by Brooke. Here it goes. There are a list of questions about reading and my answer follows each question.

1. Do you remember how you developed a love for reading? Not really. I think I really started reading books when I was driving water tenders on slash burns or gone to a fire in camp at night. I needed something to do while waiting for the truck to be filled with water or something to do between dinner and sleep.

2. What are some books you read as a child? I do not remember any particular book from my childhood. The only ones I can think of right now are ones I read because I had to in high school. Like: Of mice and men, 1984, and ??? I thought I remembered another one but it went away.

3. What is your favorite genre? I really like action and adventure novels. Like Clive Cusslers series with Dirk Pitt. Or I also like all of John Grishams books. Most of those have to do with some form of court case or law stuff. I used to really like Tom Clancy, but he got too good at writing descriptions of things in his books and they got too long and too many words. For instance I remember in one of his books he took 5 pages to describe in extreme detail all the things that take place in the millisecond it takes an atomic bomb to go boom. Too many words! So I quit reading his books.

4. Do you have a favorite novel? I like all of John Grishams and Clive Cusslers. But My favorite books are probably the Left behind series or the Chronicles of Narnia Series.

5. Where do you usually read? In bed or at the table.

6. When do you usually read? Evenings or early morning.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time? Yes.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction? Not really. The only difference would be, in the morning I am reading my Bible at the table, in the evening I am usually reading other books in bed.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library? Neither. My wife buys them, I read them.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy? Yes. I like to collect the books I have read(or plan to read.) so that I can read them again if I get the urge. I have read the Left Behind series 3 times and the 3 books I have of Chronicles of Narnia twice.

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them? I like all their Veggietales books.

12. What are you reading now? She Calls Me Daddy, Disciplines of a Godly Man, Romancing Your Wife, and The Lie: Evolution.

13. Do you keep a TBR (to be read) list? Yes. Its called the big pile of books by my bed!

14. What’s next? I will probably reread She Calls Me Daddy, or Bones of Contention, and I would also like to get the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia Series so I can finish all of them.HINT HINT

Don't believe anything she says!

Isn't she pathetic. You would think she is abused, looking all sad and lonley like this. Don't believe her. She is using you to try and get you to pet her or let her out side off leash so she can run away. She can jump up and spaz at a moments notice! If you get her too excited she might pee on your feet, so watch out. The pathetic look is a ploy to gain attention.

Will power.

What is will power? For me when it comes to food, I think there is two little guys living me. One is names Will the other is Will Not. They are perpetually in a mixed martial arts, no holds barred cage match over what I want to eat and do actually eat. The little guy named Will is a nice guy. He is always trying to help me out and do what I want when it comes to food intake.(quality as well as quantity) He looks out for me and reminds me that I do not need to eat that full foot long sandwich, I would be just fine with a six inch, and feel better afterwards too. Or he will tell me that even though I'm hungry, its almost time to go home and dinner will be ready soon. But just when I think I'm gonna make it through, Will Not jumps up out of no where and body slams Will to the mat with the $5 footlong. Its less that $1 dollar more for that footlong than the six inch you want to order. It wouldn't be financially responsible to get a six inch when I could get a better deal for the foot long. Maybe I Will just eat half of it and save the other half for tomorrow. Will Not jumps back up and puts Will in a choke hold with that freshly toasted smell of that delicious sandwich and before Will wakes up, its all gone.

Or at the end of the day, I'm a little hungry, since I ate my lunch at 9:30 am, and Will reminds me it will be dinner time when I get home. I do not need to get anything. It works and I start to leave the office. But as I go by the lunch room, Will Not jumps off the top of the cage, smashes Will to the ground, and puts him in a painful armbar, as the people on break in the lunch room tell me I have to come eat the last piece of cake. Will tries to get away, but Will Not has been working out and those armbars really hurt! That cake was good.

Besides it wouldn't it be rude to not help celebrate someones birthday. Then sometimes Will does help me out of the office safely and I start home. Only to be visously hit by Will Not with greater hunger and a reminder of the change in the ash tray and the dollar menu at Mcdonalds. Will Not reminds me that the change is just going to waste bouncing around in there, and I should really use it to keep it from bouncing out and getting lost in the truck and it will keep me from passing out from hunger on the way home. Its a safety thing! With all this good reasoning Will Not has Will down in a full guard blasting him with brutal elbow to the head, rendering him helpless long enough for me to stuff a $1 cheeseburger down. $1 cheeseburgers should be illeagal!

Occasionally, Will does pull one over on Will Not with a sudden spinning leg kick to the head, knocking him out long enough for us to get home without eating a bunch of junk. Its amazing how much better I feel when Will wins. That gives me incentive to follow Will more. So he is slowly building his strength and is getting even with that mean old Will Not. Eventually, I might even lose weight.

It reminds me of what Paul the apostle said in Romans: For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

I can thank God for his mercy and grace, knowing that he loves me and through Him, I can overcome sin.

I can't beleive I put a duck on my blog!

I cannot believe I just put a duck picture on my blog. (see below) It must have been a week moment, so for all you faithful Beaver fans out there, here is a couple pictures to help you get past that other one.

Equal Opportunity!

Just to show that I am an equal opportunity blogger, I decided to show my true sportsmanship and include an Oregon Duck picture on my blog. Someone sent me this Duck picture a while ago and I really think it a great picture. So now no one can claim this blog does not share space with the Beavers and the ducks.

They pay me for this!

I love my job. God has blessed me greatly. Where else can you get paid to go out in the forest and see things like these on a daily basis.

I get paid to drive around through scenery like this and hike around to even better scenes. These are just some of the scenes I saw on one trip up to the mountains last fall, checking on contractors and checking status of planting units.

This is a view of Mt Washington from Sheep Creek.

Here is a hidden water fall I found on the company property.

The down side is I do have to spend quite a bit of time in the office now working on the computer. That is not as much fun. Then I do something dumb and look at the NIFC Sit report on line, and get depressed that I'm not seeing scenes like these.

I still miss fighting wildfire a lot and looking at the national fire situation report just reminds me of that. But, I just remember the fun times I had doing it before and that now I don't have to be gone away from my family for long period of time, and it is all worth it.

Thank you GOD for my family and the job you have given me.

Gawkers!!

This is the kind of deer I like to hunt. Gawkers. Gawkers are great for hunting because they just stand there and stare while you run back to the truck to get the gun(or camera in this case) that you forgot to bring out with you. The other type of deer or elk is the Runner. These, as the name implies, take off running into the deepest, darkest, bushiest, steepest canyon imaginable at the first sound of your pick-up 2 miles away. So you rarely get even a glimpse of those. I have on a few rare occasions seen runners before so I do know they exist. I happened to be a passenger a couple times in a truck with a gasoline motor instead of my clanging diesel, and we were able to sneak up on a herd of runners. We saw them long enough to determine that they were indeed elk, and they were indeed running. (you usually will see them for about 3 seconds.) Deer with big racks like the one in this pic are generally of the runner gene pool. That's how they live long enough for their antlers to get so big. So you can understand my amazement that this deer stood there for the 3 minutes it took for me to remember I had a camera, the 1 minute it took to decide to quit looking long enough to go get said camera, the 2 minutes it took to get the camera out and get back to the view and the 5 minutes I spent taking shots of this deer. Then the real amazement came when I downloaded the picture and discovered that there were 2 more gawkers in the picture. (I had not noticed them when I was watching the big one!) My new theory is that they are really runners but have discovered how to read and they found a copy of the hunting regulations that some discouraged hunter threw in the brush after not getting a shot off at the runners for the 100th time. Now that they have this information all hunters are in trouble. The runners now know when they can be shot at and when they cannot be shot at. So now the runners are just standing there looking like a gawker, taunting me because it knows I cannot shoot it legally so I won't shoot at it. (kind of a risky assumption in Sweet home area) So when hunting season rolls around again. I will load up the rifle, and drive my clanging diesel up to see if I can find this "Gawker" again. I'm sure he and his buddies will be laughing up a storm in that deep, dark, steep, brushy canyon. Oh well, I'll just shoot a real gawker. They taste better anyway. Runners work out too much and their muscles are too tough. Gawkers are nice and tender from so much gawking and eating and not running. Those big antlers don't taste very good anyway!

First Geocache

I hid my first geocache last week. I was working up at 4500 feet in the cascades and found a spot with this view of mount Jefferson. You could also see HooDoo and Mt. Hood. I had been planning to hide one soon and I thought this was the perfect spot. I will probably have to hide another one up in the area to make it worth the trip for people to go find it. The girls and I found 6 caches and hid 2 by Foster lake yesterday. The girls really like to go caching but Emma said today that she would like it better when it wasn't so hot.

Emma has a phone?

Emma just came in for dinner with a piece of paper and said she has 2 phone numbers. Here is her Cell phone #: 43446500750910121177700055511220560501243
and her house phone #: 50681000780781550111440783471043004155651325220.
Just in case you need to get ahold of her!

Donations needed

Brookes uncle Danny was up for the biker rally here in Lebanon this weekend. Today, he came over to visit before heading back to Cali. We all liked seeing and hearing the Hawgs as they came in the street. (even though one of his friends was riding a BMW sport bike instead of a Harley.) Before he left, he gave the kids and Brooke rides on his bike. Now Brooke says I need one. I can't argue with that logic. So since theres no way I can afford one without taking on 2 more jobs, and selling the kids, you can make donations to the Harley fund of any amount, and we promise to give you a ride someday.