For Stock Rigs Only

Darn if that don't look like a literal catdog.

 

the wolfie we know does NOT have "scared" in her vocabulary

 

pineapple is almost ready to harvest!

 

When you get to be my age....you're just glad when ANYTHING rubs up against your leg

 

See since I'm much younger, I thought of this:

 

I was thinking black bear...without being able to look. In SE Alaska, we'd rather work in areas where the animals hadn't had much human contact. Brown bears are no problem, since we both know we're in THEIR living room, so we'd both do our own thing and then their visitors would be gone. Brown bears eat black bears, no tolerance there, so in the areas where there are black bears, they are rather timid and will check out the human visitors on their turf. Second summer on a sockeye weir, my crewmate suggested counting fish at night. We leave the night to the black bears, but ok, we'll try it for a night. Wolfie can guess what that was like...
Bein' the crew leader, I went first, laying a white background on the shallow streambed, pulling one weir picket and counting fish with a tally whacker in one hand, Coleman lantern in the other, trying to identify species and count in that small circle of light. After a while my eyes were too confused to make out individual fish, and blind to the darkness behind. I told that younger guy to take over, and he spent less time at it than I did. Kinda spooky standing in the water in the dark, especially when you have no night vision.
During broodstock collection and eggtakes that September (1989), a couple of the hatchery seasonals came out and every night, one would take a sponge bath and walk into the creek to rinse off. One night, she came back into the wall tent, put a hand on my shoulder, I looked up and quietly said, "Bear?" With a slight nod, we went outside with flashlights and saw the holes in the sandy bank cut where she and the bear had both spun around and taken off. That's why, "We leave the night to the bears." So she "kissed the bear," to paraphrase part of the "real Alaskan" definition. We all did that on the Tongass NF Integrated Resource Inventory out of Sitka in the 1980s, or close enough... That's how I came by this "informal nickname, formally Charlie Delta Bravo" (Thanks to Alpha Kilo Lima, hydrologic technician), the phonetic alphabet for our data card initials.

Fences are rarely as secure as you think they are. I laughed when we pulled over into the driveway at the HAARP site on the way back to Glennallen in the late 1990s to take a leak, The ladies were impressed by the chain link fence, until I told them to look down the fence line. It stopped about 50 yards into the brush in both directions.

 

Evenin' Stockers

 

If we fits, we sits.

 

That's a lot of money framed up there

 

Yup. Aint over yet.

 

I got several projects here that require a decent amount of lumber, but it's all been put on hold...

My electric company also imposed a 45% rate increase so that puts an even greater squeeze on things...

 

45%?! Friggin ouch

 

Apparently not the microwave if you're in @Delta09's area

 

Only cause I need the AC on at 67°...

 

As far as they're concerned....the project is done

 

67°.....damn

 

I'm hot stuff and need cooled down

 

good morning Bill & Buds!!

 

Good morning Jeffrey