SO.......
I'm not much of a fan of winter. I think American Christmas nicely encapsulates everything wrong with the country, I'm sensitive to cold, and I'm quickly getting too old to cope well with ice. I've learned to manage. I start wearing 2 layers of clothes in September most years, 3 layers by December. I'm wearing 2 layers of socks in my own living room right now.
I've planned my life around my hatred dislike of winter. I work a seasonal job. I prioritize which hobbies I indulge in around whether or not they can be done indoors. I surround myself with tropical plants just so it feels a little warmer to me in the winter. I sit indoors and sort photos from warmer times, like this one of a snail on a traffic cone. You won't see that shit when it's 20 below, I'll tell you that.
One of my favorite winter pastimes is giving the airguns a yearly tune up. I have a little trap I made from a cardboard box and some old curtains, and enough room in my basement for a 10yd range. This group is the first ten shots from an old Crosman 1377 I was resurrecting for someone else, and was too funny not to take a picture of.
One thing about a cardboard box trap, you get a real sense of how much shooting you're doing real fast.
Here's one that'll turn up the heat and show a love of shooting. The crude target you see painted on the cover of my old kiln was used for sighting a .22cal air rifle at 30 yds. If you're wondering why all the airguns, my little homestead is technically in a small village that has very strict laws about discharging firearms in the village limits, but the forest is so thick here that we frequently find ourselves in need of some projectile oriented pest control.
Enough about target practice. If anyone can identify this caterpillar, please let me know. It was the only one I saw and it didn't seem to be eating much, so I snapped my picture and let him take his chances with the birds. We get problems sometimes with tomato hornworms, so they don't get that kind of mercy. Hopefully I won't regret letting this thing go.
Winter talk tends towards shooting and slaughter, and people have long considered winter a season of death and dying. I see the beauty in this season of death, and find it mesmerizing, but uncomfortable. I've taken a winter picture of those two large pines every year for nearly 20 years. I may do a post of those pictures someday, it really illustrates wild growth of a few tree varieties.
My biggest problem with winter is the many unscheduled workouts. I could manage the cold a lot better without all the snow and extra obstacles, and why does everything in these frozen hellscapes have to be wet? My slice of heaven has some acreage to shovel when we get snowstorms, starting with two flights of stairs before getting to 200 feet of steep, rocky, treacherous driveway. Those recent storms in the Northeast US left me with this, followed by 2 inches of rain, that then froze, followed by freezing rain and another dusting of snow.
Of course, it's not all awful. Some years, my little waterfall between ponds runs just enough to go a bit glacial, and we'll throw on some extra coveralls and go outside and have a slide. It's a lot of fun, for about 5 minutes. Then it's just another wet and freezing reminder of winter.
I wanted this post to warm me up, how did it end up full of winter pictures? Let's exit on a nice warm summer sunset. To help keep it cozy, I'll even wrap up before the last picture. Stay warm out there, all you northern climate dwellers!
