Family

Goes Around

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I’m listening to Sting on a bluetooth speaker upstairs here in our living room. Sting is downstairs in the family room, the album Sacred Love (one of the many I ripped from my CD collection) is playing from my Mac mini. I’m lazy so I’m using the iTunes Remote app on my iPhone to choose my albums from the music library on my computer.

The last vinyl album I purchased new was Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. According to Wikipedia, Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell one million copies in the CD format and to outsell its LP version. That was 1985, almost 40 years ago. From then on, all I purchased were CDs. But then sometime after the introduction of the iPhone, iPod, and music streaming music services takeover, the vinyl LP began to make a surprising comeback. 

Apparently the CD is now on the decline with a resurgence in vinyl. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) notes that in 2022, vinyl sales topped 41M units while CDs came in at 33M (PDF). But where are streaming services in this musical mixture? Well, streaming was 84% of music revenues in 2022, still the dominant force in the music industry.

I note all of this because, in my desire to continue to downsize and “ronny-kondo” the office, I thought it would be expeditious to rip all of my CDs to a hard drive and get rid of all those pieces of plastic. So in 2017 I ripped all that I had and stored my music on an external WiFi capable hard drive. I had intended to link to the hard drive thru my iPad and treat the drive as if it were a CD jukebox, all of my music available at the tip of my fingers. Glad I saved the CDs! the software to access the mp3 files on my hard drive thru the iPad no longer worked. And when it was working, I had a hard time keeping the two of them linked on my network.

So we are back to playing the CDs on the only remaining player in the house. I had to purchase an external DVD player for the Mac mini since it didn’t come equipped with one. And those albums? The ones we got from my Father-in-law are out in boxes in the shed. I think my wife’s brother will be stopping by to pick them up for his vinyl collection. But I don’t think I will be copying and saving them. What’s old is new and what goes around eventually comes back around.

Oh, Christmas Tree!

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Are you Team Fir? or Team Faux?

I grew up, as I am sure most people of my era (here for us boomers!) with only a “real” Christmas tree in the house.

According to the Nature Conservancy, nearly 10 million artificial trees are purchased each year in the US, manufactured primarily in China. That’s a lot of faux! However, the National Christmas Tree Association suggests that 25-30 million real trees are sold each year here in the US.

The benefits of real trees are numerous: they are recyclable, produce oxygen and provide a home for wildlife while growing, and have a look and smell that simply can’t be imitated with pvc plastic trees. Although I never knew anyone to have one other than my grandfather, the aluminum tree was quite the design essential of Mid-Century Modern homes during the early 1960s. Stylish! but no smell.

One of the cousins sitting in front of an aluminum Christmas tree. Note the rotating lighting display behind the tree!

Growing up our family would cut trees outside of Reno, Nevada. And the tree we brought home was always a pinion pine. Looking back at some of my photos, I wonder now how the bush-like shape of the pinion pine ever qualified it as a “Christmas” tree? But it did have a wonderful smell! Very prickly, lot’s of sap, and a short squat tree was how I remembered ours.

When we were married I hoped to share the same experience of cutting our own Christmas trees with my family. There are several tree farms here in Loudoun County, VA and we’ve tried a couple of them. Ticonderoga Tree Farm wasn’t far from our home and we visited them a few times. Snickers Gap Tree Farm is a bit farther drive but worth the effort. Their Douglas fir and blue spruce are beautiful. Thinking of fir trees, there are Fraser Fir, Noble Fir, Douglas Fir, Balsam Fir, Canaan Fir, and any number of spruce and pines that make great Christmas trees if you are looking for varieties from which to choose. Not all are available locally but perhaps they are in your region.

I love this picture of my son and I cutting our tree at Ticonderoga; now, years later we have switched to artificial trees. As I recall, we stopped buying real trees when we considered the rising costs of yearly purchasing a tree vs. the one-time cost of an artificial tree. And the faux tree came pre-lit! But I miss the excitement of finding the perfect tree, the lingering smell of pine through the holiday season, and the thought of supporting our local growers. Perhaps we will buy real in the future.

Many, many years ago, back in the early 1960s, our family helped my Mother’s sister and her family plant a tree farm on 10 acres near Laytonville CA. It seems an odd location now: Laytonville in Mendocino County is surrounded by forests. And a tree farm isn’t something you can just plant and leave to nature; the trees have to be pruned to shape and there are always deer wanting to eat the younger plants. I asked my cousin and she said they eventually sold the property and never harvested any trees from it. But I am wondering, maybe a tree farm isn’t such a bad idea for an old retired guy? Support our local farmers! Merry Christmas friends.

Overwhelmed

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overwhelm, v. transitive. To bury or drown beneath a mass of earth, water, etc.; to submerge completely; to destroy or obliterate by covering with something.

“Sure I can stop by and pick up a few boxes; photo albums, slides, nicnacs and some family memorabilia? No problem!”

It had been four years since my father-in-law had passed away and his wife was feeling like now she could really go through his things and separate out what his children might want to keep. There were the photo albums, of course, and what turned out to be more than 75 boxes of Ektachrome slides: family and work activities captured over the span of thirty years. There were also boxes of framed photos, graduation certificates and medals of accomplishments, the many small items accumulated from a man’s career in the US Army. 

There was..a lot.

As she and I talked over coffee, it was apparent she had felt overwhelmed by all of it, was still feeling some traces of emotion even as the relief of saying goodbye to all of it became more real. 

When we went downstairs to begin packing my truck, I could immediately understand her feelings: I was overwhelmed at the number and sizes of the boxes stacked in the carport! 

They had been married nearly 17 years before he passed away. As much as I had grown to know him, one thing I understood was that he loved his family and he loved documenting everything. And he saved everything. She must have felt swamped to even begin sorting through it all.

I’ve written before about planning ahead for what we will inevitably leave behind (Memories & Mementos). My plan for most of this is to scan the photos and post them in a group album online, ideally a Google photos https://www.google.com/photos/about/ And then, tentatively, dispose of the originals. We bought an Ion Pics2 SD slide scanner thru and online estate sale (I love those!) and so far it has worked well for this project. Here’s the link if you are interested.

As I’ve worked through scanning these, arranging the boxed slides into sets, it seemed easier to group them by year rather than subject matter as I had originally intended. But I’ve found in the past with overly large or complicated projects, the satisfaction for me has come in just getting started, grouping and arranging the subject matter or tasks into smaller goals has brought it’s own sense of accomplishment. And as the stacks and stacks of photos gradually decreased in size and number, the satisfaction of nearing the end of the project has increased dramatically.

To date I’ve scanned over 1,700 slides; there remain approximately 1,000 left to scan. But I’m more than half-finished! I won’t be feeling overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do with everything that we’ve accumulated over the years: as long as I have a plan, I’m content. It’s just going to take some time.

It’s Just Hair

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It’s just hair. Is it? Is it really, just hair?

This morning I got a haircut at the same barbershop I’ve been using for the past three years. Invariably the first thing the barber will ask me is, “How would you like it cut, sir?” My answer is always the same: just a trim.

And yet…and yet, it’s never the same. Just about every six weeks I stop in at the same local shop, I take the first available seat, and the routine is always the same. A little small talk, generally about the weather; perhaps that I’m retired and can come in early in the day, oh? Your wife is still working?  how are your children—grandchildren, what do you think of this or that current topic? 

And then, always, every single time: your hair is very thick (meaning hard to cut). Yes I know, it’s a blessing, thank you Mom. But when we are finished, it’s always a mystery, a bit like Monty Hall and the reveal: what’s behind Door Number One? Always different. 

My older brother has sandy blond, curly hair. My younger brother has wavy hair, not blond but not quite brown, though all of us sport more gray these days. My hair used to look more like my late Dad’s, dark and full, though he wore it longer than I do and he styled it a bit like Elvis Presley, swooping it back with a generous amount of VO5 cream. I’m salt and pepper now, or “mostly gray” (it was a shock to see that on my drivers license description), and I keep it short. But I never know what it will look like on leaving the barbershop.

This morning I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of the patron seated in the chair next to me. He carried on quite a dialog with the barber (stylist?) and it was obvious he wasn’t happy with the progress. Fearful of cutting it too short—she had been warned of that—it seemed now it wasn’t short enough. And uneven. He continued to guide and direct the process even after I had finished and was on my way up front to pay. But I noted that he let her know that he would be returning (this was his first visit) and that he expected they would get to know one another, his expectations, how best to achieve the desired goal. Looking good!

It’s been quite a sport of mine wondering what my haircuts would look like when finished. And really? I’m fine with however they turn out. Hairs grows fast and I generally wear a baseball cap anyway. My sympathies are with those guys who are follicularly-challenged: hopefully they aren’t paying the same amount that I do, or at least they get the hot towel and neck rub after the buzz cut. Where are you with your cuts? Very particular in how it’s styled or comme ci, come ca? Do you always make an appointment for the same stylist or do you take the next available chair? It’s just hair, right?

Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

The musical Hair, 1967, lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Broadway poster from postermuseum.com

More Trees than Time

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Whether it was growing up in Nevada, or just that we always had a home with a fireplace, it seems our summers included cutting firewood. Not necessarily cutting down trees, but cutting downed trees into fireplace-lengths, loading them into our truck, and then unloading and stacking the wood alongside the house when we got back home. 

A cord of wood is measured 4 ft x 4 ft x 8 ft long. Dad liked to have at least two cord split, stacked, and ready for winter before summer ended. As I recall our chevy pickup could hold at the most, maybe one-third to one-half cord? Along with his chainsaw, a five gallon gas can, a wheelbarrow to carry the wood back to the truck and a tool box—that didn’t leave much room for wood. But with the sideboards fitted into place on the truck we could carry quite a bit. Nevertheless, enough wood for burning during the winter generally meant 5-6 weekends spent in the forests north and west of Reno during our school summer vacation.

Though my older brother was only a year older than me, he was larger. I imagine that is why Dad eventually let him use the chainsaw. My job was always to be the carrier, carting the cut pieces of wood back to the truck and “stacking” them so as to maximize what we could bring back. All the work and none of the glory of being a junior lumberman!

Last year we hired a crew to take down four very large trees on our cottage property. These were oaks, walnut, and poplar trees, dense hard wood. I’ve let them lie in place for a year as they dried out and I figured out how to best to deal with them. 

I bought a Craftsman ten inch electric chainsaw from Lowes in the fall and started cutting off the smaller limbs and branches and stacking them to burn in our fire pit. 

As one would expect, the small saw proved ineffective when it came to cutting up the tree trunks. I hoped to buy a larger gas powered saw through one of the estate sales we love to shop. That didn’t work out, they generally sold for more than what I wanted to pay for a used piece of equipment.

So this year I finally bought a new chainsaw. It’s 16 inches, not a beast but it can definitely cut through some wood! 

I came across an old photo of my niece out with her Grandpa cutting wood. I wasn’t surprised to see that Dad had continued to collect wood for the fireplace (which by then had been outfitted with a fireplace insert). The photo is likely from the late 1980s, Dad had to be in his sixties by then. It’s gratifying to see that he was still at it, though undoubtedly my brother was there alongside him to help load the truck. I think more than gathering firewood, Dad enjoyed spending time in the woods. It was rugged life that I didn’t appreciate at the time. But the longer I am out with our own small forest, delimbing fallen trees and clearing paths, the more I find I am like him. I still have more trees than time ahead of me and there is work to do. Time to get to it.

R Names

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Rick, Russ, Ron, Rodney, Ralph, and Randy: apparently the “Rs” were very popular in my extended family. Oh, I forgot Rex, so that makes seven of us with first initial R, last name Hilbig. You can only imagine our mom’s keeping us all straight, let alone how emails could get messed up!

In the 1950s, my birth decade, Rs weren’t as popular as I had thought. Both of my brothers’ names were more popular than mine. David ranked 5th, Richard ranked 7th. Ronald was 15th. You can find your own ranking online here: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1950s.html My honor is redeemed knowing that my middle name, James, actually ranked first during the 50s. In the top 100 popular names, Rs placed 11 times. Sorry Rex, you are 198th! A decade later, Ronald had dropped five positions to 24th.

I only caught on to this confusion of names recently after an email never arrived in my in box. Check your spam folder (I had) was the sender’s suggestion. His email had not bounced back so apparently someone, a recipient, had read it and discarded it— or it ended up in his spam folder. 

Emails are tricky that way; they aren’t case-sensitive but they do require a level of accuracy that my spelling can seldom attain. I’ve been plagued by the curse/blessing of auto correct on my iPhone. The “suggested” spelling can be over ridden, but I’m not always aware of it when it happens. (Shakes his cane)

I had given what I assumed would be an adequate amount of time to receive a letter. Four days had passed after a Monday holiday so I wasn’t too concerned not having received the expected correspondence. Luckily the sender reached out to me via text wondering about my reply, or lack of one as it were. He had asked for my home address and I (naturally) thought he had sent the information we were looking for via USPS. But I was wrong. 

The postal service will make a best guess and deliver your mail regardless if the address is missing a digit or the street name has been misspelled. But email doesn’t work that way. 

He had sent it thru email to my gmail account. Not “my” gmail account, as it turned out, but perhaps one of my relatives. There are quite a number of us whose first name begins with R. So I am guessing that one of them has received an unexpected and unsolicited correspondence. I have a thought to email him, or her, and find out. I’m not sure I want to learn if there are more of us Rs out there that I haven’t met! I know there is another Ronald Hilbig, who lives in Canada. We had already confused people on Facebook. Glad that was straightened out, though he could be a clone. I’m not doubting anything anymore.

Sincerely yours, but certainly not the only one,

Ronny James

Memories and Mementos

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“What are we going to do with all of these pictures?”

“What pictures, which ones?” I replied.

“All of them: all of the pictures, photos, albums, frames, paintings, prints, just everything.”

Well, I hadn’t given it much thought, but really, what are we going to do with all of this stuff? We had downsized and moved from our single family home to a smaller townhome several years ago. In the process of getting that home ready to sell, I had taken down all of our pictures, photos of family and family vacations, and packed them away in plastic bins. Now nearly four years after that move we are still wondering what to do with many of these mementos and memories, most of them still packed away.

When I was younger and first started taking photographs, I concentrated primarily on landscape photography. Years before digital cameras became popular I would shoot slide film in my Canon AE1 and occasionally have enlargements printed, many of which I framed and decorated my apartment. The prints are long gone but the slide film still looks great, beautiful rich colors after more than forty years.

I switched to a digital camera, also a Canon, when they came out and began taking more pictures of family and friends, documenting our trips and vacations, birthdays and holidays. And that introduced the beginnings of what would be a lifelong challenge: how to share and display, or store for posterity, the many, many images a digital camera produced.

When I got my first iPhone I was all set. Whereas before, one had to remember to bring the camera (or leave it in the car, always at the ready) an iPhone was the perfect accessory: I never went anywhere without my phone and consequently my camera was always with me.

Still the problem remained, what to do with all of these images? Before cloud storage enabled us to archive unlimited amounts of data, and images, I would back up my digital images on the computer and eventually transfer them to CDs. Great for storing photos, not so great for sharing them.

I’ve since been uploading many of my photos to Shutterfly. They have sharing options and also print capabilities for cards, enlargements, even photo books. I have friends who use digital frames that act like mini slideshows; the newer frames allow uploading the images to the internet (cloud servers!) and as long as the display is connected to the internet, any family member can view the display. Bluetooth or wifi-enabled devices are another option.

I’ve been printing photobooks now for years. They have taken the place of photo albums in our home. But like albums from our past, they have started to take up room on the book shelves. We visited friends recently and enjoyed looking through one of their old leather-bound albums, many of the photographs in black and white or sepia-toned. One could almost imagine the passage of time slowing down for a bit as we leafed-through and commented on their old family photos. It doesn’t feel quite the same when you scroll thru endless images on your phone!

I still don’t have a solution for the boxes of photos and albums we have accumulated through the years. We have thought about scanning all of the “pre digital” images. I am a little distraught over having lost or misplaced the CDs I used for “safe secure image storage” in the past. I have found several of the CDs I created have not held up well: the data has either become corrupted or otherwise unreadable. Perhaps storing the images on a DVD would work better. At some point I will probably upload all of our images to Shutterfly or some other third party service. I’ve put many images on a small external hard drive, not sure if that is my final answer yet or not.

What about you all? Is this a problem you have faced before? Any possible solutions you have tried successfully? If so, please share your success stories in the comments below. Love to hear from you!

25 TO 50

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Magic Kingdom opened October 1, 1971. EPCOT Center opened on October 1, 1982. Disney’s Hollywood Studios opened May 1, 1989 and was the third of four theme parks built at Walt Disney World in Orlando FL. Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened on Earth Day, April 22, 1998, and was the fourth–and to this date the last new theme park built at the resort. They have expanded and added on to their existing properties, closing some or adding on to favorites.

Cape Canaveral 1976

My first visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom came during the summer of 1976 during my month-long bicentennial bus tour of America. DisneyWorld had opened just five years previously and at that time, only one park was completed. I remember the weather in June was hot and wet. The park was fun, affordable and my friends and I enjoyed it for the day before we took a bus to Cape Canaveral and the Space Center there.

Over the next 21 years three more parks opened, the final one, Disney’s Animal Kingdom opening in April of 1998. 

My wife and I stayed at one of the resorts for our honeymoon in January of 1998. We only have few pictures from that time, and truthfully my memories are somewhat dim, but I know we had a great time visiting the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood-MGM Studios (as it was named then). I remember there being virtually no crowds in January of that year. 

For our 25th anniversary we went back to DisneyWorld. Much has changed since our first visit and, due to their new reservation system, we weren’t able to visit two of the parks. We did enjoy Epcot and the Animal Park. 

In 1997-98 DisneyWorld was celebrating their 25th anniversary; it’s a bit of symmetry that our 25th was celebrated while the parks were still decorated for their 50th anniversary, our silver and their golden. This time I took plenty of photos and we brought home an assortment of mementos and commemorative knick-knacks. Added them to the box labeled “wedding stuff” but I guess I need to update the label.

Pandora, the World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom, Orlando.

We’ve visited the parks twice before with family, for my 60th and then my 65th birthday. In 2017 Pandora-the World of Avatar had just opened and we were able to experience an area that looked remarkably like the landscape from the movie Avatar, as if the movie set had been brought to stunning life. When we visited again this year, the wait time to ride either experience (Flight of Passage or Na’vi River Journey) was two hours. We had dinner in the canteen, shopped the offerings in Windtraders store.

I have seen and read so much about the Star Wars-themed area in DW Hollywood Studios (Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge) and the new Galactic Cruiser immersive experience (hotel) I was really excited to see them. However, Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios remain their two most popular theme parks and reservations were not available during our stay. Just as well: when I saw the cost of staying in the Galactic Cruiser for two days, I was pretty shocked. It seems like it would be a fun place to bring the grandchildren, very immersive experience. But as I talked it over with my friend Dave later, the family could spend a week at a “fully immersive” Dude Ranch in Colorado for half the cost. Something to think about when planning our next adventure. Galaxy’s Edge, or riding the range in the mountains of the Old West? Got plans for the summer?

The Forbidden Forest

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Harry Potter, A Forbidden Forest Experience is currently engaging fans and friends of the Wizarding World at Morven Park in Leesburg, Virginia. It’s hard to imagine the scale of the amount of effort that has gone into this production, from creating the animated props to laying gravel paths lined with Bose speakers, fog machines, and theatrical lighting through the forest of the park. 

As we walked thru it, all I could think of was, hats off to the designers and other creatives (and the IT Department!) who had managed to produce something this massive, involving so many people and cross-disciplines, during the time of Covid.

The Forbidden Forest Experience operates on two entirely separate levels for me. There are enough vignettes—Hagrid looking out into the dark night with his dog Fang next to him for instance— that a fan of the books will be happy, lead along the trail hoping to discover what’s next around a bend or over a hill. But I’m more drawn towards the production side of the experience. LED lighting in the trees, gobos along the paths, the enchanting lighting effects of the field of mushrooms for instance. 

Walk-thru experience have become more common recently. Christmas lighting displays are hugely popular and have grown in complexity the past few years. And really, aren’t we all fans of dinosaurs and the recreations of them? The Jurassic Encounter (https://nova.thejurassicencounter.com has plenty of dinos but they are the main attraction, not the environment.

The aspect that sets the Forbidden Forest Experience apart from any other outdoor adventure I’ve experienced lately is, literally The Forest. There are activities, vignettes, owls, spiders, centaurs and unicorns placed along the trail for everyone to enjoy. But it is the forest that becomes the main character in this drama. Dark, spooky, mist-shrouded or brightly lit in reds, greens, and blues, fallen trees or clustered oaks, white sycamores etched against the moonlit sky: the Forest is the King here. Playing throughout the experience is music from the movies and it really enhances the overall effect.

After searching online for the design group responsible for this adventure,  I came across Thinkwell Group. The tagline on their website really spells it out, “creating custom, content driven experiences in the physical world.” Lighting effects were created by Adam Povey Lighting. I was surprised to learn that there are several other locations of the Forbidden Forest Experience currently available to see, one in Westchester NY; one in Cheshire UK at Arley Hall and Gardens; and one in Belgium.

There is food available and a merchandise tent at the end of the trail— it is Harry Potter and Warner Brothers after all.  This isn’t a recreation of the Harry Potter World at Universal Studios (no theme park rides) but you can get butterbeer and a souvenir mug, t-shirts and hoodies, and of course adorable stuffed animals. We took home one of the Nifflers; keep an eye on your jewelry! If you consider going, ticket prices seemed a little high for what we are used to, certainly cheaper than Wicked tickets at the Kennedy Center, but more than what you would expect for an experience where you are doing most of the work, or at least the walking. There are family ticket prices. Take a lot of pictures: many of the participants came in costume and really added to the excitement. It is a non-cash event (credit only), something they do announce on their website. The parking lot as well as the road leading into the event area was well marked and well lit. Parking was an additional fee.

When we were there the evening temperatures couldn’t have been better. It was the day before the full moon in early November and a light jacket (wizard robes) was all we needed. The flashlight I had brought was unnecessary and the path could easily accommodate strollers. 

What’s Cooking?

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My Dad loved to hunt, that’s for sure. The earliest photos I have of him on the Whitbeck Ranch in Smith Valley show him proudly holding up two pheasants on display for the camera. He is dressed in khakis (seldom wearing jeans) and a plaid woolen jacket. I found the photo several years ago in a box of memorabilia from my Mom, that and a slew of photos of my older brother Dave on the ranch. There is a photo of Mom as well, her arms wrapped tightly around her from the cold, standing in front of the foreman’s cottage they were living in at the time. Over the picket fence is a set of deer antlers.

Dad loved to hunt. Whether it was pheasants, or geese out in the fields near Fallon, Nevada, or deer in Elko County: he loved the outdoors and getting away with a few of his hunting buddies. It’s October now, deer hunting season in Nevada, and I’m taken back to those years in the 1960s by a sudden memory this week.

Ruby Mountains in Elko County NV

I went deer hunting with my Dad only once that I can recall. It was local, the pinion pine-covered mountains outside of Virginia City. It’s where we would go each year to cut our Christmas trees. The photo of us with that year’s tree shows my younger brother Rick, one of his friends, and my Grandfather, along for the ride. But the climb thru these mountains wasn’t anything compared to the mountains in Elko County that Dad and his hunting buddies would head to in the fall. I can imagine that my complaining about the hiking, and the sitting quietly, and the waiting…would be the reason I didn’t go again. My brothers don’t hunt either so maybe it wasn’t just me, who knows now.

But last week I was given a frozen slab of venison. And Dad’s old recipe for venison stew was what I made. He always used a pressure cooker to start the process and tenderize the meat. I just left it in the pot to cook slowly for several hours before adding the potatoes, carrots, onion and green peppers. Dad like stewed tomatoes but I didn’t have any so, we left that out. Plenty of salt and pepper. Bay leaf of course. It could be my Dad’s recipe, or it could be my Mom’s beef stew recipe that Dad repurposed. We always had venison in the freezer and truthfully, I only remember Dad cooking it.

I saw online recently that The Sportsman in Reno had published a cookbook. The recipe might have come from it, we loved the Sportsman and would go there for everything: fishing and hunting licenses, all our gear, or just to hang out with old guys talking about the weather. It was that kind of place, years before Walmart or Dick’s Sporting Goods took over the sporting goods retail industry. (photo courtesy Karl Breckenridge)

I texted a friend of mine while I was thinking of the past and deer hunting. Pat is an avid bowhunter and I thought it would be great to hear from him, how his season was going. He texted back from his hunting cabin that he hadn’t seen anything yet, and though not as enthusiastic as he had been in the past, still he goes out every season. I can’t remember a year when my Dad didn’t come back with a deer. The mule deer in Nevada are huge compared with the whitetails here in Virginia, but their numbers don’t compare.

I frequently see deer in my backyard here in Virginia (eating the hostas!), but I doubt whether I would have had the patience to hike, sit, sit some more, and eventually hike back down the mountain with a 200 lb deer, especially in that crisp mountain air. I’m more the camera guy, sit back in my recliner, have a hot cup of coffee while I reminisce. But thanks for the memories, Dad. And a love of plaid shirts.