Elk season 2009????....2010

My elk hunt starts on Friday, January 1st, 2010. But don't be confused, it is a 2009 hunt. I had to have a 2009 license to apply for the tag, but now I have to have a 2010 license to actually hunt the elk. So basically I have to pay for 2 licenses for 1 hunt! But I am not going to complain. As long as I can find another group of gawkers such as this one,

sometime after the 1st and before the 31st. If all goes according to plan, which it never does or ever will, I will have a couple hundred pounds of elk meat in the freezer before the end of the month of January. Now if the darn gawkers will cooperate and the runners keep running and stay away from their slower moving cousins, then it will be a good successful hunting season and I will finally get to blog about actually filling a tag! That could be fun. We'll see what happens. Stay tuned.

1st annual, after Christmas, Christmas Tree "Lighting" Ceremony

Here is another Jayne family tradition. Okay, like crab for Christmas eve dinner, we only started this one last year, but it is going to be an annual event. Technically this is the first year because last years attempt was a bust. We watered the tree too much while we had it up for Christmas, and it would not light up. :(

So this year we made sure it would light up. We did not ever water it at all! It was nice and crispy and ready for this years "After Christmas, Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony."
Here is our dedecorated tree. Just waiting to be "lit" up.

Here was the first attempt to light the tree this year. It kind of fizzled. If it were not for my years of firefighting and burning slash, I may have been worried that it would not light up again this year.

However, I had plenty of juice to light it up this year. Here is attempt number 2 and as you can see. It was a success.

Trees burn well and burn fast when they have not been watered. This is a good example of why you are supposed to water your tree while it is in your house.

A couple seconds later.

It only took about 30 seconds to get to this point. This brought back a lot of fond memories of my past forest fire fighting days.

It took less than 2 minutes to get to here. The neighbor that was watching said, "That was almost better than the 4th of July."

All good things must come to an end though, and after just a couple minutes it was over. There is a lot less tree to have to dispose of now! That was fun and entertaining. It gives me another reason to look forward next Christmas season.

Disclaimer: DO NOT attempt if you are clumsy, accident prone, fear fire or lack common sense.
No buildings, people, animals or property were harmed or in anyway damaged in this ceremony. This would not be wise to attempt indoors or on a dry lawn.(use common sense)
I hope everyone got as much amusement out of this as I did and I wish you all a happy and safe end to 2009 and start to 2010.

Busy Christmas Day

For the past several years, at least as long as we have had kids, our Christmas day routine has been to have our immediate family Christmas at home first thing in the morning. Then, late morning we go to Grandmas house for Christmas with Brooke's side of the family. Then sometime in the next 2 months, go over to Paisley for Christmas with my parents, and then find some time to meet with my sister and her family for Christmas a 4th time. These all usually take place days or weeks apart and at different locations each time, so there is only 1 cleanup required at our house.

Well, this year we got to cram all 4 Christmas meetings into the same day, all in our house. This was a busy day with a lot of eating and kid present opening. First, we did our normal immediate family thing as soon as we got up. But it also included my Mom and brother, who came over here from Paisley yesterday. Then at about 10:30 am, Brooke's mom and sister and her sisters family came over. We had a great time watching kids open gifts, visiting and eating. Next, at about 1:30 pm, my sister and her family made the trip up from Eugene. Which brought another round of gift opening, eating and visiting. Fun was had by all and no one went away hungry. Once the bulk of visitors left, we settled in to figure out what new things were in our home and what to do with all the stuff. We got to enjoy playing some new games with the kids and playing with our kids new toys! At least until the kids got loud enough asking if they could play with them too, that we had to share.

Now that it is all done, you would think, we still only have to clean up once, right. Not really. We had to clean up between each group of visitors and now that they are all gone we have to clean up the food and kitchen stuff that is about 4 times as big as normal.
I guess I better stop bloggin and get to work.

Christmas Eve Dinner with the Jaynes

When I was growing up, the Jayne family tradition for Christmas Eve dinner was Oyster Stew. It was something I did not particularly care for. Okay, I despise Oyster Stew. I did not look forward to dinner on an otherwise wonderful time of year. I did everything I could to get out of having to eat it, but always was forced to choke some down every year. Once I was old enough to realize I would not live with my parents forever, I told myself that this tradition was ending with me. I have not eaten Oyster stew in a very long time and am sure I never will. But now that we have a family, we decided a while ago that we needed a tradition of our own for Christmas Eve dinner. We have tried several things over the years, but nothing had stuck. Until last year. On Christmas Eve 2008, we had Dungeness crab and shrimp. I only had the crab, but the girls all had shrimp also. We decided that was now our tradition. So here in 2009, we had the 2nd annual Christmas Eve Crab and Shrimp feed. The one improvement this year was a result of our trip to Seattle in November and eating at The Crab Pot. I cut some Oak cutting boards and built some little wood mallets for breaking the crab just like we used at the Crab Pot and now we have our Jayne family Christmas Eve dinner tradition with its very own hand made utensils.

Here is the table just before serving the crab.

Here is a close up of the cutting boards and mallets.

Here is the shrimp and the utensils.

Now just like at the Crab Pot, we just dumped all the crab and potatoes out on the table and had at it.

Doesn't it look yummy? I am going to like this new Christmas Eve dinner tradition.

No more Oyster stew!

Frozen Falls

These pics speak for themselves.

This is what McDowell Creek falls looks like after a week of below freezing weather. There are 2 trickles of water still flowing down the falls. One on each side of the falls. The center has no flowing water at all, just ice.

I took the pictures on December 10, 2009.

Fake deer or big fakers?

While driving through the woods the other day with a co-worker, we spotted this deer standing in the plantation about 200 yards from us. So, like we always do, we stopped to gawk at it and see if it had the gawker genes or runner genes in its blood. Since it is not hunting season, it is hard to tell because gawkers still just gawk and runners, knowing we cannot shoot at them legally, just stand there and pretend to be gawkers for us. Just as expected the deer just stood there and gawked. We got out the camera with the big zoom lens and the binoculars so we could gawk back. After several minutes of a world class stare off, we started to realize that this deer had not blinked, twitched, chewed, ate grass, turned its head, fipped its tail or any other thing that both gawker and runner deer are well known to regularly do. This deer did not move.

We began to wonder if this was one of those fake deer that game officers set out to catch those hunters that are so frustrated by all the runners running off out of thier sites before they can get an acurate shot off, that they start straying from the rules and guidelines for hunters set up by the agency that attempts to manage wild animal populations and start throwing lead in the direction of anything that looks like a deer, anytime of day, or night or from inside their vehicle or from a road.(there are laws about when, where and how to shoot at wild animals.) About this time, we notice a second deer doing the same thing. So we snap some pics and watch both of these deer for what seemed like an eternity, and niether one of them showed any sign that they were actually real deer. Finally, we came to the conclusion that these were in fact fake deer. There seems to be no way that even the world champion gawker deer could stand this still for this long and not at least need to scratch itself where one of its thousands of fleas and ticks is biting at it. The only thing we could do now was to walk out and get a close up picture of these two stuffed decoys.

So after watching them intently for over 10 minutes without any sign of life, I shut the truck off, we got out and started walking toward the fake herbivores. But to our supprise, once we hiked about 150 feet towards them, they both came to life and ran up and over the hill along with a third deer that had been hiding in the brush.

Then it came to me. These two gawkers were testing their gawkabilities against each other. The third one was judging to see who flinched first. Kind of a gawker deer world championships right here in our own back yard! I'm sure they got bonus points for convincing the 2 legged creatures in the noisy 4 wheel beast that they were not real. Now all we have to do is hope they continue this competition and forget about when the next hunting season starts. We just need to keep the ones with runner genes from infiltrating the area. So all the discouraged hunters out there have something to look forward to for next year. We have world champion gawker deer right here waiting to hold a pose for us come next October!