Dennis Barrow

Did you hear about the new rule in Hawaii?
Your not aloud to laugh loud anymore.
You have to keep it at aloha.

Mark Reed wrote:

I love huckleberries but have only eaten them one time during a camp trip in the Teton Mountains. We shared a patch for a brief time with a grizzly bear. The bear looked as us, we looked at it and we all went back to eating huckleberries.

My favorite wild fruit where I live are wild black cherries, mulberries and persimmons that have hung onto the tree into winter and basically dehydrated or freeze dried.

I take a radio with me and play it fairly loud to let the bears, (grizzly and black), know I am here, and please leave me alone.
Over the years I still have been asked, (maybe told is a better way to say it)  to leave good huckleberry patches.  I comply with their request.
Used to just carry a side arm, but now have that and bear spray.
My favorite is huckleberry jam.  That an huck's on pancakes.
I wonder if there is any in freezer I overlooked?

Living here in the mountains of Montana, my favorite wild fruit to harvest and eat is, by far,

HUCKLEBERRIES !

With the wife and I both retired and are on fixed incomes, I figured credit score was not a big deal.  In the US it still is. as it effects insurance rates.

We have no debt.  We do travel at least once a year, been to Antigua, US Virgin Islands, (St Croix, one of our sons lived there for awhile), Costa Rica, Mexico and of course Hawaii.  (Had a credit card cancelled while in Hawaii a year and a half ago.  The company said it looked like suspicious travel. lol).
I think Belize in next on our agenda.  ------------- not sure why I threw in this last bit ----------------

Our score is still high, but down a bit from when we were working and had debt.

What we do is get a new credit card every other year.  We currently have 3 cards.  Costco, Airlines and just one other for backup.  We use them at least once a year or more, but pay them off each month.

I think using the cards helps keep the score up there, maybe, maybe not.

Timothy Norton wrote:I'm thinking of purchasing a scraper/chopper tool with the intent of being able to process down some woodier material by hand and to work the compost pile itself.

Anyone have any experience with one?

I purchased an inexpensive chipper from Harbor Freight a couple years ago.  Main idea was to chip the corn stalks for mulch and compost.  (I only have a few dozen corn stalks each year).
It works great for that.   I saved a pile for mulch and found it had already started to compost down by the time I wanted to use it for mulch.

I always am on the lookout for a workable used and very cheap in price blender for the kitchen scraps for the garden.   Our chickens get the majority of them, but some go to the garden.   The stuff I work into the garden I chop up fine so the worms don't have to work to hard.  lol.

About 10 years ago I did a small experiment with composting.   I chopped up some of the kitchen waste fine and put it in one corner of my compost pile, the rest went into the rest of the pile.  Just cold composting, but the chopped turned into great soil over the summer, while the other took until the next summer.   I was pleased with the results but the work of chopping all the time was the down side.  Hence the eye out for a decent blender.

No debt.
Perfect weight.
8 hours of sleep.
Great Mental Health.
Healthy food.
No alcohol.
That was my peak!
I was 8 years old.

Killing them with kindness is taking much longer than I expected.


A minute varies depending on which side of the bathroom door you on.


I married my wife for looks.................but not the ones I am getting lately.

I bought some shoes from a drug dealer.
I don't know what they are laced with, but I have been tripping all day.

We do plan meals about 50 % of the time.
   A quick look in the freezer to see what is on top, gives us an idea of the week for dinners.

   What we are hungry for makes up a lot of our planning.  Planning meals also means what we need to use that is getting older in the pantry.
   Some of our planning happens at the store.  In store specials or things just fall off the shelf into our cart. :-)

   We have a list on the fridge, by store.  Shopping the weekly ads is a must.

Town is only 15 miles and we usually make a trip once a week.

My mom and grandma always had a pot on the wood stove all winter.  
One week it might seem like a soup, the next it had migrated into a stew.  I do remember mom transferring the contents into a different kettle every couple weeks so she could clean it.

When I got married we would keep a soup pot on the wood stove for a couple weeks until my wife said "NO MORE SOUP",  then a couple weeks later it was back. lol

I have 4 sons and took them to hunting camp when they were still in diapers.  They grew up at camp with a continuous stew pot on the stove.
Now they are grown they do the same.

At camp we always had a nice selection of spices and vegetables so anyone could add what they thought it needed whenever they wanted.  I can only remember one time we had to "toss" it.

Always a good selection of meat for the stew.   Forty plus years of camp and never was there a lack of meat hanging.