June e-Postal Match

Random Nuclear Strikes is hosting Mr. Completely's June e-Postal contest. Click Here for the link to your instructions and target. These contests are a great way to get in a little practice for your trigger finger every month, and they are a fun family activity. EJ made his way home for a visit in May, then promptly bested me shooting the May contest. The May results will be posted over at Danno's blog in the near future.

Countdown To The Gun Blogger Rendezvous!

Photo courtesy of Derek, The Packing Rat

There are just a few more than ninety days until the annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous at the Silver Legacy Hotel in Reno, Nevada. This event is loaded with fun and fellowship, and it raises money for Soldiers' Angels Project VALOUR IT, which benefits our wounded warriors. Mr. Completely needs to know how many will be attending this year, so please click over to his blog if you are interested and click on the link to GBR at the top of his page. You need to make hotel reservations and register with Mr. Completely, plus make your travel arrangements. The Rendezvous gets bigger and better every year, and will run from September 9 through 12, with three range days scheduled.

Crankin' It Up

I don't know much about Arnold Johnson's Orchestra, but it does please me to hear a Swedish boy doing well, and knocking out a hot dance number. I found on the internet that Mr. Johnson lived from 1893 to 1975, and was very busy in the music business during the 1920's. He studied at the Chicago Music College, which makes sense because a lot of Johnsons came into Chicago via the Great Lakes during the late Nineteenth Century.

Jungle Creep

Another forester once remarked that we worry too much about how we plant trees, because if we just leave a place alone for ten years the trees will show up anyway. It is nice to make your own decisions on which trees to grow, but he made a good point. Trees may look peaceful, but you have to beat back the forest on a regular schedule or it will take over a place.

One By One

The Farm Bureau newspaper this week has an article that tells us Illinois increased its timber area by 303,000 acres between 1982 and 2001. (Why are their statistics ten years old?)
The Conservation Reserve and Wetland Reserve programs administered by the USDA are the biggest push behind this forest growth. CRP and WRP plantings come in all shapes and sizes; the one above is an upland 13 acre planting...



and this one is 300 acres of land that never should have been cleared for farming.

Most of the conversion from agricultural to forest land is done by planting one tree at a time with rigs like this one, which has been working almost every day this spring. The people putting the trees in the ground have to look at each one, then put it in the planting slit so that the top of the root system is at the ground line. People new to planting usually ask me how much of the tree goes in the ground. That's easy; just all of the root.

This is a bur oak seedling that has been in the ground for a little over one week. Below is Walt Townsend's rig.

Not A Victrola

Pianosyncrazy pumped out the Wabash Blues for us on his 1925 Stroud DuoArt piano for us.

It's Tough After A Long Weekend, But...

Back To The Old Grind!

The Price Of Our Freedom

Robert Service wrote extensively about the men who fought on the Western Front in the Great War, and he was well qualified, having served there as an ambulance driver from 1914 to 1916. I always think of this passage from "Ballads Of A Bohemian" on Memorial Day:

"Silence and solitude! How good the peace of it all seems! Around me the grasses weave a pattern, and half hide the hundreds of little wooden crosses. Here is one with a single name:

AUBREY.

Who was Aubrey I wonder? Then another:

To Our Beloved Comrade.

Then one which has attached to it, in the cheapest of little frames, the crude water-color daub of a child, three purple flowers standing in a yellow vase. Below it, painfully printed, I read:

To My Darling Papa -- Thy Little Odette.

And beyond the crosses many fresh graves have been dug. With hungry open mouths they wait. Even now I can hear the guns that are going to feed them. Soon there will be more crosses, and more and more. Then they will cease, and wives and mothers will come here to weep.

Ah! Peace so precious must be bought with blood and tears. Let us honor and bless the men who pay, and envy them the manner of their dying; for not all the jeweled orders on the breasts of the living can vie in glory with the little wooden cross the humblest of these has won. . . . "

Crankin' It Up; Memorial Day Weekend

Weekend Steam: Say It Isn't So!

Bayou Renaissance Man posted shocking news this week about one of our nation's historical treasures; Admiral Dewey's flagship Olympia. Our oldest all metal warship is in serious need of repair to keep it afloat, and the officials in charge of this important artifact are promoting the idea of sinking it so it can be utilized as a recreational resource for divers. Unbelievable!

Mrs. TBS and I visited the Olympia ten years ago on a trip to Philadelphia, and this ship was one of the highlights of our vacation.

Visitors to the Olympia may stand at the very spot where Dewey spoke the immortal words:
"You may fire when ready, Gridley."

Most of the guns on the Olympia are replacements since the ship fought in 1898, but are still important military artifacts.

Visitors to the Olympia will find many fascinating historical tidbits to admire.

This commemmorative tablet was cast from metal salvaged from the Maine after it sank at Havana. It is a priceless treasure from the time that America emerged as a world power.

Click over to SpanAmWar.com to take a virtual tour of the Olympia, and be sure to look down on the starboard engine, (Two of the three cylinder heads are visible.) and visit the engine room.