Junior’s done with school for the summer, and is back on his regular shift at work, which is second shift. 1:30 to midnight. He says he likes it, but it’s strange for me. I’ve never been involved with anyone on a different shift from me, and I can see that it’s going to take some getting used to. I guess I’m lucky it’s not third shift; I’d never much see him at all if that were the case.

I may have got a little spoiled while he was in school. His hours were odd but the days he worked matched mine, mostly, so there were weeks when I got to have him for four out of seven days. Not bad. Now though, we’re down to two days a week and I’m going to have some Junior withdrawls. He goes back in on Sunday afternoons, so no more quiet Sunday evenings together after a busy weekend. No more Wednesday date night; he’s working, and there’s no shifting it to Thursday either, as that’s his night with his kids.

It’s going to get a little tight when hunting season comes around. He’ll have a nice long weekend off, but it won’t match mine. I’ll have to bust my butt the rest of the weeks to get every other Friday off, and I’m doing some serious negotiating to find myself backup for at least three weekends a month, instead of my regular two. Otherwise, we’d only see each other twice a month, ironically missing each other during our favorite joint activity. Fortunately, Seamus wants to go hunting too, so I can drag him up with me. I predict a lot of living up at camp in the fall.

May is going to be a busy month anyway. Junior’s taking some time off to go to a shoot in Reno, but unfortunately, I can’t go with him. I’m taking a week to go get trained in Sacramento for another water license. When I get back, he’ll still be gone, but I’ll have at least two, and possibly all four kids, and won’t be able to go hang with him even for the weekend.

It sounds like a lot of complaining, but it’s all worth it. I will put up with an awful lot of scheduling nonsense to get to be around this man. Sure, it would be easier to snatch an hour here and there if we were living together, but we’re getting there without rushing. The more time we get under our belts, the more solid I feel. This is where I belong, and the man that suits me better than any other could. I’d rather be juggling time with the man I love than still drifting around aimlessly.

Yesterday afternoon, I was minding my own business, flushing hydrants and turning valves near some abandoned hangars inside the flight line. It’s a little corner where no planes go at all, so they don’t maintain the surface and weeds have popped up in every single crack in the asphalt or concrete.

I like these old hangars. I was just showing Junior the biggest one on Friday. I’ve posted pictures before; it’s five stories to the inside ceiling, so tall that it used to get its own little weather systems inside on a humid day. There’s a surprising amount of wildlife in these abandoned bits of urbanity. I’ve seen red and grey foxes, and endangered Kit Foxes elsewhere. I’ve climbed to the roof of the big one, only to find that coyotes had been there before me, presumably chasing the ubiquitous pigeons, rats with wings. A Red-Tailed Hawk lives in the big one as well as a couple of owls, and I regularly startle owls or find pellets in the slightly smaller ones too.

Someone had been in the big open hangar I was working my way around just a little while earlier, showing it to a potential client and making pathetic jokes about me washing the floor out while I was at it. Sorry; the only building washing I do involves a fire hose, and you don’t get to pick and choose where I shoot it. I suggested he roll his windows up or move on, as I was about to demonstrate. He thought I was joking but moved anyway. Good thing; I wasn’t.

Around the other corner of the building next, I was working valves for about ten minutes when my back insisted on a break. I ratcheted myself back upright and relaxed a little and started to look around at my surroundings, instead of straight down like usual. And I saw an oddly-vertical bundle of feathers blown up against a wall of weeds.

Dead things aren’t at all uncommon around here, and I always like to look at them to see what we have. It’s usually birds, but I’ve found some outstanding foxes and some cats, and have a nice collection of skulls from my finds. I casually walked to within about ten feet of the carcass when its head swivelled and it glared at me with big yellow eyes. At that point, it suddenly resolved itself into a baby barn owl, not fully fledged. He wasn’t angry enough with me to clack his beak, but he wasn’t happy.

I was afraid that the guys in the hangar had scared him out into the open before he was ready. They nest in there, and I didn’t know if he was ready to fly or not. His head was still awfully fuzzy, amongst the flight feathers. I quietly walked a little closer, and he took off for a low glide, which reassured me. Unfortunately, he flew away from his cover, and sitting out in the middle of the asphalt, he looked like an awfully juicy target for some wandering predator. The mockingbirds thought so too, and divebombed him. I started to circle around to gently haze him back to the hangar, but he wasn’t having any of it. His next flight was stronger though, and left him in some weedy concealment, so I stopped worrying about him and went back to my work. He’ll be fine.

I sure regretted not packing my camera with me that day though. I need to get back into the habit of keeping it with me; work stories are so much better illustrated.

As busy as this weekend was, it was also pretty relaxing, in its own way. Instead of running all over to hell and back, we took the trailer to camp less than an hour from home so we didn’t have to run back home after each event. Cut down on the driving significantly, and let us get some drinking in too.

Friday night, we pulled into the trap club and set up camp, and then ran off for dinner. I’d wanted to show him Woolgrowers over in Los Banos, one of my favorite restaurants of all time, and we were still close enough to his birthday to make it an excuse. And it was good too. They feed you so much that you need a dolly to roll out of there. It’s family-style Basque, and a favorite of all of the local farmers and ranchers and not so much of the influx of commuters in that town, so people like us feel right at home. We happened to get what would normally be a four-top in a regular place to ourselves, instead of being seated in a row with a bunch of strangers, which can totally happen there. And the food they brought filled up that table, and the waitress had to take things away to make room for more.

What you do is order your meat (lamb chops for me, prime rib for Junior) and everything else comes with it. Wine, soup, potato salad, bread, beans, lamb stew, green salad, and french fries. Even though they scaled down for our small table, it was about enough food for six people. And there was no way I was going to finish three giant lamb chops, but that’s OK; lunch! Oh, and you get ice cream if you want it when you’re done, in those little cups with the wooden paddles that you used to get at the public pool in the summer. I could not face ice cream, having blown all of my extra space on the rest of that green salad with the addictive dressing.

Back to the ranch and up fairly early to meet M and her family for breakfast, since she lives in that town and it would have been silly not to go see her. That was the only time we could both pencil in for each other all weekend, but it worked out fine.

Zip down to Gustine to pick up some sausages at Wolfsen’s to go with dinner, and then back home to watch Seamus play a game.

 

He did all right; they lost, but not by much. I did catch him eyeballing his mom the photographer once when he should have been catching the ball; we’re going to have to have a little talk about that one.

Back out to the trailer, and this time in time for their annual rib BBQ. Oh, and the drinking, which was why we brought the house with us in the first place. Nobody had to drive home. Junior fed me too much bourbon, but since I didn’t mix my liquors this time, I escaped the hangover that being that buzzed should have done me. I got to see Junior a little whirly too, but not all that much.

The next day was our nominal reason for being out at the club; the last trap shoot of the Winter League season. Junior’s team squeaked by to make it into the shoot-offs next weekend by three points. Since we had to be at the awards ceremony, it made for a late day. We still had to get the trailer back to Junior’s place and me back home, before we just collapsed onto the couch. I didn’t fully recover until today, Tuesday. I spent Monday being a zombie and working the bare minimum until I could go home and take a nap. I love these busy weekends and all that we get to do, but I come home and look at my filthy house and just groan. Between these and running somewhere every day after work, I just don’t have the time to manage things, and am seriously considering getting a housekeeper once a week just to knock some of the grunge off so I’m not a ball of stress every time I look at my kitchen.

Happy Birthday sweetheart. Finding you was the best thing to ever happen to me.

I love you.

My son John doesn’t get as much air time here as Seamus, largely because he’s mostly uncomprehensible to me. The few things that he’s interested in have nothing to do with me. Even if they could, like his camping thing through the Boy Scouts, he makes sure that I am not a part of it. He hates my kind of music, he won’t cut his hair, and he refuses to participate in any number of the interesting things that the rest of the family does. What kind of kid who likes to camp won’t go camping? One who likes to push his mother’s buttons, that’s what kind.

He’s relentlessly teenaged, and it makes my mother snort. Apparently he’s just like me? Was I really that irritating? How could I have been, I was working at the age he’s about to become next month. I don’t remember having time to be irritating, although I do concede that I probably had as little to do with my family as John does with me. This has been going on long before he hit the teen years though. We clashed when he was a first-grader, I remember.

Every chance he gets, he stays at his father’s. I can see him wanting to live there full time one of these days, and I’ll probably let him. We get along better when we see less of each other.

He’s never much participated in any group sports or activities either. There were a few years of karate lessons, and I’d always go cheer him on at the belt tests even if he didn’t want me there. I ahve to make him go to his brother’s events. But this year, finally, he found something that sparked his interest.

John was invited to join his school’s Academic Pentathlon team, which surprised and pleased me to no end, since it wasn’t too many years ago that his grades were in the toilet due to a determined lack of effort on his part. He’s been practicing like crazy, making for some weird pick-up times after the buses stopped but before I got off work. I sucked it up and left early; after all these years of shuffling his younger brother to baseball and whatnot, I owed him that.

The event itself was held a week and a half ago. Most of the tests were behind closed doors, but at the end of the day, they held a game-show style quiz that the families could watch. And he rocked this section, and Seamus and I had a good time rooting him on. We could see his grin and his thumbs-up when he got one right from the bleachers.

The awards ceremony was this weekend, and Junior and Seamus and I went and watched. We were very surprised to see him nab a second place in Literature. Where’d that come from? He hardly reads anything but trashy fiction, as far as I know. I wasn’t half so surprised to see him take first in Science, in his division. He’s very good at that, and is already gearing up his high school classes to make sure he gets into the hard-core stuff. The school’s whole team did pretty well, but the best part for me was watching him be the ham up on stage, completely happy with himself. I don’t get to see that very often.

Of course, he wouldn’t even slap his brother five when he went down to congratulate him after, and he barely grunted at me when I told him I was proud of him the next day. Still, it’s good to see that he’s capable of having fun. I’d begun to doubt it.

I’m no good at keeping secrets, not the fun variety, but I am good at seizing opportunities, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been busy trying to do both. Of course, I failed at the first, but I succeeded very well at the second.

I was out working with some linemen last week, when they were shutting off one of my circuits to do some work. One that I didn’t know all that really well (I have at least a nodding acquaintance with all of them, since this place is very much like a small town and their yard is next door to ours) tracked me down specifically to talk about hunting. It seems that Nevada has opened its Mountain Lion season this year to over-the-counter tags, even for out-of-state hunters.

This guy, Shawn, had a tag coming and a good place to go, but he wanted to hunt behind hounds. He knew that I did that, so he proposed a trade of information: if I could talk some of my houndsmen friends into going and letting him hunt behind their dogs, he’d walk us through where to go. That’s one of the biggest hurdles to hunting in a new area; you can look at maps all you like, but until you have a good feel for the area in person, it’s crazy to just go out willy-nilly. You never know what the terrain’s going to hold for you, or if you’re suddenly on private property, or where the good access roads are. It’s always best to start learning an area with someone experienced in it.

I am no slouch when it comes to recognizing a golden opportunity when I see it, so I got as much information right there as I could and told him I’d check with my friends. Already, my wheels were turning. This is one of the things that Junior’s wanted most to hunt in his life, and since it’s not legal in California (which is a whole ‘nother rant,) it would be an outstanding surprise. So by the end of the day, I had thoroughly researched it on the Nevada web site and downloaded regs and applications, talked to Todd, ordered a mess of topo maps from USGS, and discussed making it a surprise for Junior with his folks.

Todd’s all for a close lion hunt. He’s been going to Utah every year, but that’s a long haul. He said that’s how he got started there though; someone knew someone who knew where to hunt, and he just kept it going from there. He had some questions for me to pass on to Shawn, but said that since it’s so close (less than eight hours,) he was willing to go there himself this summer and scout out the area in person. I asked Todd to keep it quiet for now, because I could just see him telling Don telling Bill mentioning it in all innocence to Junior. But if everyone knew it was a surprise, maybe I had a chance of shutting the grapevine down for a little while.

Junior’s folks were surprised to hear from me in the middle of the day, when I knew Junior was at work, but once I explained what I wanted to do, they were all for helping me pull one over on their son. They got me his hunter safety information and other things that I needed for his tag application. We weren’t as sneaky about it as I’d hoped though, and that was entirely my fault. I looked way too guilty when he caught me talking to his dad, and that got his wheels turning. I’d hoped to shush him by laying it on his upcoming birthday, but that didn’t work so well.

All weekend, I kept coming close to blowing it. I’d catch myself starting to tell him that I’d talked to Todd, or something about Nevada. I was getting entirely frustrated, as I was so excited about it that I was about to climb out of my skin, but I had to look perfectly normal. But on Sunday, I almost blew it big time. He’d got on my computer to look something up, and saw the Nevada website on the drop-down menu, which I’d forgotten to clear. I may have overreacted, but he thought I was mad at him for snooping.

My original plan was to say nothing at all for months, and just have a tag show up in his mailbox in June, but that would have involved forging his signature, something that I’m not willing to do. So I amended the plans to presenting him with the maps and a card with a picture of a lion in it for his birthday. That way, I could still see him surprised, but I wouldn’t have to wait so long.

But don’t you just know it, he started digging again last night, on a day when I’d been talking myself out of just telling him already. Once he saw that he was getting to me, he wouldn’t stop, and kept on pushing. If I’d really been trying to hide something, that would have pissed me off to no end, and I would have muled up and not told him shit, but since I really wanted to share it with him, I let him get to me.

Since he knew it was probably a hunting thing, I made him guess. He went through hunts in Nevada that he’d like to have, getting more and more confused every time I told him it was wrong. No, it wasn’t an elk hunt. Nope, not sheep either. Or antelope. Or mule deer – are you kidding? The draw for that for out-of-state is ridiculous.

Finally, he twigged to what it really was, and a grin just about split his face in two. This is something he’s always wanted to do, and to have someone else know that and set it up for him was really a good surprise. So we spent the rest of the evening talking about it, and looking at maps, and laughing about all the times I’d almost blown it. I called his dad to let him know that he could talk about it now, and that Junior wasn’t just fishing for information if he came home and asked for the copy of the regs I’d left there.

And you know what? It was just as good of a surprise in the middle of a regular week as it would have been on a birthday, and now it’s more fun planning with him, instead of scurrying around behind his back. And it’s going to be even more fun as the months go on, with the scouting and the planning and the actual hunting after the first snow falls. It’s sort of a hunt of a lifetime for both of us, and I am ridiculously pleased with myself for getting it set up.

It’s back, and with a vengeance.

Really, it started a few weeks ago, with practice twice a week, but since I could hang out in my truck and relax a bit on the days that I was responsible for taking Seamus, it didn’t hit me so hard. Don’t get me wrong; I love Little League and I go to every game, it’s just that this has been an incredibly busy year and I’m pretty damn tired when I get off work. But I’ll still go, and photograph every game that I can (it doesn’t come out very well on the late ones; the lights aren’t bright enough.)

 

The first game was a good one for him, even though they lost. He had no less than ten family members there rooting for him. After it, my side all went out for dinner, so my folks could get to know Junior and his little girls, and that was fun too. But nothing’s quite as fun as winning, and on Saturday evening, the third game of the season, they finally pulled that off.

 

Seamus got walked on base twice, but was batted-in both times, and that’s always good for his enthusiasm. Of course, he’s always pretty fired up about it, and happily stands out there in left field, heckling the other team.

At least this isn’t going to be a no-win season. He learned a lot of techniques last year, but not winning any games gets to a kid after a while. It’s more fun to photograph too; more excited faces, more action shots, and more good pictures to give to proud parents at the end of the season. I’m trying to explain to those parents that don’t know what I’m up to, what I do. I don’t want them to think I’m hogging the good spot on the fence just because I’m selfish or oblivious. They’ll get something out of it too. A couple of them already knew what I do, and I’ve seen parents I recognize on all of the other teams we’ve played so far, so it might not be too weird when I go over to the opposing team’s side for a few good shots now and then.

But it’s a busy time. It seems that we have way more Saturday games this year than last, so there go my free weekends. And we’re still playing twice a week during the week, and quite a few of those are late games. That gets us home quite a bit after bedtime, so it’s kind of hard on him too, but I think he’ll manage. He loves it, after all, even if he’s not the best kid on the team, and so do I.

If we didn’t fail this course, we didn’t do so awful well either. I give us a generous C+.

It started out fine. I had an overly-optimistic plan, as usual. Remember the Great Meat Jello-Mold fiasco of 2007? Junior, who hasn’t yet exactly learned how I am with overly-optimistic plans, thought he’d help me out with it. I’ve always wanted to learn to smoke, and rolling a turkey up into a big fat doobie just isn’t practical, so he brought over his bullet-style smoker. I picked up some mesquite charcoal and applewood chips, and had every intention of having smoked turkey for dinner.

 

Like any good rednecks living in town, we did this little piece of performance art in the driveway. The neighbors were delighted. But hey, the dogs would have knocked it over in the backyard, and where better to sit with a beer and watch grass grow all day?

Oh, and did I mention that, even though he owned the smoker, he didn’t know how to use it either? So we were both going in cold, with some instructions for a similar model that I’d swiped off the internet. We had to figure out a lot as we went. That is what I do. It’s driving by the seat of my pants, only in the kitchen. Or in this case, the front yard, because I am classy like that.

 

One of the lessons that took us all day to master was getting the temperature right. We started off with a bang, and let the coals get good and going before we put the turkey in, but then it kept wildly fluctuating. It would sit in the right zone just long enough for us to think we could go do something else. Then the damn thing would see us walk into the house and snicker, and drop the temp down into the red zone. So out we’d come again, and stoke it back up, and try again. Eventually, we figured out that if we took the lid off, which seemed counterintuitive to keeping the heat in, it would let the coals get enough air to really get going. Then we could leave it alone for about two hours at a time.

But it took us half a day to learn that, and at half an hour per pound, with a 17-pound turkey, which is what I had in the freezer leftover from a turkey shoot that Junior won, minus the times where nothing was really happening at all, it looked like we’d be eating dinner at approximately 11 AM next Tuesday. So we had hamburgers, as the natives were getting restless. So much for making other people help me eat 17 pounds of turkey.

Eventually though, the skin looked right and the juices were running somewhat clearly and we were really getting tired of this crazy-ass project, so we poked it with the meat thermometer and called it good enough. Junior stripped the meat out, and it was cooked through, and it did smell pretty awesome, but I was all full from hamburgers and pretty tired of smelling smoke by that point. Although a smoked Junior still smelled delicious.

I was disappointed in how dry it was. Most of my oven-turkeys come out nice and juicy, but not this one. I had some gravy fixins ready to go, but by then it was bedtime. Junior had a sandwich and I grazed a little, but I was in no mood to stand and stir gravy.

 

I’m going to be eating smoked turkey for the rest of my life, approximately. I have the carcass in the fridge waiting to be made into stock, and turkey meat coming out of my ears. I had a smoked turkey caesar salad for lunch yesterday. Junior took some more sandwiches to work. I’m considering making turkey Divan tomorrow night. I expect by Friday, I’ll be eating smoked turkey sprinkled over ice cream or whirled into a smoothie.

Perhaps it’s time for another overly-optimistic cooking project: Meat Canning 101? I suspect he’s learned to run away screaming though.