Smarties Bar & Grill #76

Most male cats are lazy..

 

What happened with the crocs...road burn.

 

Especially on something you would not dream they would mess with. We had a female pet squirrel once and nothing was sacred...nothing. Especially anything she wanted to chew or invade. The people who gave her to us got her back.

 

I laid the bike down in the Grass at about 50 miles an hour. I had no injuries except for some cuts on my shin and my foot felt like I probably broke one of the bones behind my toe for about a month. It hurt like hell to walk on.

If I would have had a boot on my foot I'm quite certain I wouldn't have hurt my foot at all. Then while that was healing up I was riding my motorized bicycle on some dirt roads behind my friend on his four wheeler and he was going around a 90° turn and I thought he cleared it but at the last second he slammed on the brakes and I was going about 25 miles an hour and the truck was coming the opposite way.


It was a narrow dirt road and he was to the right and the truck was to the left and the only place I could go was between them and I had to lay the bike down because I couldn't stop fast enough.

I kind of slid under the truck and touched its back tire with my front tire. The truck I came to a complete stop so I wasn't hurt or anything except for my other ankle..... The guy asked me are you okay and I just said yeah but I knew I'd hurt it because I already saw it swelling.


I actually had to take a little time off of work because now I had both ankles hurt at the same time..... And of course I was wearing Crocs both times.


You figure it wouldn't matter on a motorized bicycle right? Wrong. Lessons learned. Evidently I have to learn most everything the hard way

 

https://www.myrecipes.com/news/should-we-eat-squirrel-meat

 

We're way ahead of you on that down here in the south. It is likely that my first ancestor that landed here in the Carolinas in 1797 probably enjoyed squirrel rather frequently. Thomas Gordon... He came from England

Squirrel hunting is a southern tradition. And they probably eat them up north too.

 

If only all our problems could be eaten.

We also have American red crayfish displacing our native species and invasive deer such as muntjac and Chinese water deer damaging trees.
All delicious problems to have.

 

It is amazing to me that the red crayfish is so invasive. I have tried raising the devils. They eat each other pretty fast. And small changes in water chemistry can be fatal.... especially the small ones. They eat vegetables and meat....makes no difference to them. And talk about harvesting machines..... they are the best.

 

Yup

 

They carry crayfish plague which has wiped out up to 80% of native crayfish.

https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2019/05/Invasive-crayfish-species-Profiles_0.pdf

 

We have 97 species of crayfish in Alabama.

 

I understand our native mosquito fish which is the most common minnow that we have, it's very invasive in Australia.

Anywhere you see a body of freshwater in Florida and you see minnows 95% of what you will see are those....gambusia

 

They are live bearing fish and relative to the guppy. Just by looking in the water it would be hard to tell gambusia from wild guppy.

 

I can mostly tell myself because they kind of look like small mullet.

The other one around here you see in the water that's common is the sail fan Molly but those tend to be much larger on average.

I made a minnow trap once and was very avid about going around trying to trap different species for my aquarium. I once chased a male sail fin Molly, a magnificent specimen in all of his resplendent breeding colors. ... Around a small lagoon with a hand dip net for about an hour and I finally nabbed his ass!

 

We have some very pretty native minnows but I ain't trapped nothing for a while. I have several minnow/ crawdad traps. Been busy starting cuttings of my various landscape plants. Ain't even been fishing this year

 

I haven't been fishing either and forever and that just ain't right! About time for me to cast net some tilapia of about 4 in and go put them on my hand line
and catch some 20 or 30 lb bull sharks and get one for the freezer.

I use about 60 lb monofilament with about a 2 and 1/2 ft 100 lb solid wire steel leader with a good live bait hook and 2 oz of lead and this one place where I go and brackish water in the Peace River it won't be about 20 minutes before you get a shark

 

So I'm making the squirrel a cage of half inch hardware mesh and I'm making it a cylinder shape that is 4 ft tall and about 2 ft across.

So it will have plenty of room to climb up and down and around.

When I'm home and awake I let it run around the house but I don't want to let it just do that because it might get up in the furniture or chew some wiring and electrocute itself.

My friend has had pet squirrels before and he told me that I better start getting it off of the bottle or it'll be a titty baby a year later if you keep giving it to it.

I also feed it peanuts and apples which it seems to like.

I assumed that they would live about as long as a rat which is to say three or four years... Since they are basically a tree rat.

Come to find out they can live up to 20 years in captivity. So if I do end up keeping it I guess I have a friend to grow old with

 

“Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or girl, and “sin” made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
“It’s too heavy,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
- from The Hiding Place: The Story of Corrie Ten Boom
We are asking our children to carry loads that are way too heavy for them. They should not be forced, as children, to see and feel the world through the lens of adults. Innocence is worth protecting and worth fighting for. We need to do our part as teachers, parents and caregivers to carry certain things for them until they are old enough to bear the load.

we like Grey squirrel up here too. I liked it, and now we have green crabs edible but hard to pick, I was in the Army with a guy from Mount Mitchell, what an interesting guy

 

Mount Mitchell in North Carolina? Beautiful place.

 

Corrie Ten Boom's personal assistant used to live in my neighborhood. Nice lady.

 

Eustice Conway on mountain men lol

 

Still raining.. I'm keeping an eye out for an old guy building a ridiculously large boat here.

AND I'm selling my bike... I have to work on it a couple of hours before I go for a ride.. hence, it has been sitting partially disassembled for months now.

 

Just had Carolina Reaper sausage and rice for breakfast. May have been a mistake.

 

Sell it and throw some money on the proceeds and upgrade to another bike

 

I think I'll retire from bike riding.. I have some nice cars, and they are a little more forgiving if you let your eyes stray from the road a second.. And I can converse with wifey too! with a hard top around us.