A Thanksgiving Week

A Thanksgiving Week

By Allan Olson

Thanksgiving week, a day and ultimately a weekend full of food, oh glorious food, so much food we are in a food coma all week, munching on pies, leftover turkey and ham and so much more that goes with a large festive meal.

For probably the last 10 years or maybe more, we have spent Thanksgiving at or near home, usually hosting a meal of some sort for us or a few more – sometimes many more. This year’s event promises to be a much smaller crowd of people and perhaps not as much food, but I’m pretty certain there will be plenty for leftovers. Our guest list will include our family, my niece and my mother in-law as of publication time and according to my niece and wife it will be a pajama party Thanksgiving. This sounded like a great idea to me as stretchy pants won’t be near as constricting as a pair of jeans after several helpings of pan bread, pumpkin pie, ham, turkey, mashed potatoes and likely a variety of other good food that will be placed on the table to delight our palettes, I wonder if this is going to be a unformal meal if we can even have dessert first instead of the main course. This idea will need to be approved by main cooks as I wouldn’t want to upset the cooks by that suggestion. Of course since I’m not one of main cooks that means I will be assigned to clean-up duty and since that will likely include putting away food, it just means I get to sample more while I’m doing it.

Since I plan to gorge myself in food all weekend that also means I should probably plan a little exercise other than turning the pages in my book or pushing the buttons on the remote, computer or phone. So I’m planning a little geocaching excursion. Exactly where my travels will take us, I don’t exactly know yet. I have a few locations planned and until I find out exactly what the plans are for the weekend, then my locations will be determined. Part of my planning is to hopefully do a couple night caches – there is one in Bemidji I have yet to get and two in Menahga. I’m hoping that maybe a few other geocachers will join us at one or both of these locations but I can’t recruit fellow cachers until my plans are confirmed for the weekend.

Hunting Update

It was a perfect weekend to be outside – the weather was a little chilly in comparison to the other two weekends of hunting, but the wind had greatly decreased and the temperatures weren’t so bad as we needed to stay in the house or vehicle to get warm. Nikolai and I spent several hours on Saturday trying to fill one of the remaining doe tags and we even spend some time in our lucky stand hoping that maybe another deer would come to visit us while we were ready and armed, but no such luck. That morning we took a stand I don’t normally visit on a regular basis and in the distance we saw some unwelcome guests that we wanting to cause trouble in the neighborhood – those of a 4-legged variety. So we decided that we weren’t interested in that stand any longer, picked up my brother and his daughter and we moved to another section of property a few miles away.  That afternoon my younger brother tried a walk in the woods and didn’t chase any deer out for Nikolai and I – so went in for lunch and then went back to the same lucky stand that evening– hoping for another opportunity, but again no luck.

Sunday morning – this was going to be our last foray for the weekend, it was time to call it a season. My brother, Nikolai and I all trudged out to the stand one last time. We were going to take the same stand as yesterday and my niece was going out to her dad one more time and Nikolai and I were going to try and push some deer in their direction.

Shortly after we got out to the stand, we once again saw one of those 4-legged creatures in the far distance, not a good start to the morning in my book. However since it was a long way off and the direction it was heading was further away we decided to stick it out – only to push the woods in hopes my niece could get her first deer. So around the 8 a.m. mark I sent Nikolai in one direction and I took another. As I was carefully but perhaps not quietly making my way through the woods I chased up a couple deer to my right. Unfortunately they were not heading in the direction of my niece, so I took a shot at one of the deer through the brush. The doe moved a little faster and then paused at the edge of the woods waiting for her fawn before jumping away. I tried getting another shot off at her through the brush, but it was so thick it looked like a jumbled mess in my scope. I walked back out to the field and found the tracks she came out on and went back in at that location hoping that maybe I would kick another one up but unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. Reflecting back on it, there was a couple things I wished I had done differently, including starting my walk in the woods about a 100 yards to the north of where I did, perhaps trying my open sights for the first time ever and instead of standing and taking a shot, I should’ve taken the few more requisite seconds and took to a knee and steadied my home just a little more before firing – of course hind-sight is 20-20 and we will never know if any of those alternate solutions would have made a difference.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

Please remember to watch out for the buses that are carrying our most precious cargo. Also snap a photo or two to preserve a lifetime of memories. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit.