The Old Folks Home

[bamadude]

Sunfish is fine. But we will know you arent from around these parts

 

[Arielle]

Oh what a lovely Hiking companion!!1! Referring to the doggy of course!! We are 2 weeks away from getting a new puppy-- feeling both a mix of scared and thrilled. Been so many years since raising a puppy. lol

Trying to catch up. . . too many posts .. . . been reallybusy with the gardens, kids and WORK.

Trying to finish the basement , sort of. Paint the walls, and dont know what to do with the floor. THe 20 year old concrete is flaking, so it wont take tile. Concerned paint will just look crappy in a few days of wear and tear. . .so welcome suggestions on options.

 

[Arielle]

Sunfish is fine. But we will know you arent from around these parts

lol, yup, its like soda vs. pop v. soda pop ROFL Besides I think my accent might give away that I'm not "from around these parts".

 

[Wisher1000]

I need to come to dinner at your house. That sounds lovely.

You have a standing invitation! Come on, anytime, but if you give me a few days notice, I will cook up some good old, down home, Alabama soul food and even treat you to some old fashioned scratch banana pudding or some fried apple turnovers.

 

[drumstick diva]

I used to breed & Show Cockers, but now and then needed to add one - I too was nervous and excited and wondering if I could love an adopted pup, after spending years breeding my own. Of course my foundation stock was all adopted but that was different. I got used to my own line and how they behaved, an outsider was uncharted territory. Luckily it fit in just fine and I loved her as much as my "own" furry children.

 

[Arielle]

Oh you are killing me WIsher--- homemade banana pudding??? You are killing me-- I just started my diet again. . . .. . nothing like banana pudding, with cream, ripe bananas. . . . fresh eggs. . . . .

need to go make my sugarfree chocolate bark with roasted nuts.

 

[Cynthia12]

Oh what a lovely Hiking companion!!1! Referring to the doggy of course!! We are 2 weeks away from getting a new puppy-- feeling both a mix of scared and thrilled. Been so many years since raising a puppy. lol

Trying to catch up. . . too many posts .. . . been reallybusy with the gardens, kids and WORK.

Trying to finish the basement , sort of. Paint the walls, and dont know what to do with the floor. THe 20 year old concrete is flaking, so it wont take tile. Concerned paint will just look crappy in a few days of wear and tear. . .so welcome suggestions on options.

Thank you, and can't wait to see the pup! What breed? Photos! You hear? Photos!

 

[dsqard]

Cynthia your dog looks so adorable in your pictures and I LOVE what you did with mine. They look great!

Did my final hike down here yesterday. I don't think I will ever do such a long hike on a time restriction again. I only had eight hours to do the just over 9 mile hike. I made it to the main attraction (Golden Cathedral) at just about the half way point on my time and it was all uphill on the way back. I was concerned I wouldn't make it back to the trailhead in time. I did because I was really moving out in places on the way back but it really didn't make the hike enjoyable. There also wasn't a lot to see along the way. I wouldn't recommend the hike to Neon canyon to anyone unless you are willing to hike 9 miles to see one thing. Ah well, at least it was a bit overcast on my way back. I went through every drop of water I had with me too. For all my complaining, it still beat a day at work.

View from the trailhead before I headed out.




This bush looks like chicken wire to me.


At the top to the right a little is where the trailhead is for the trail. You can see one of the cairns marking the trail in the center bottom of the picture.


The desert in bloom. Bunches of phlox.




Golden Cathedral

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Got the treadle machine cleaned up and oiled and ready to go. Took me about 8 hours to take all the plates off and clean all the moving parts and remove much of the rust.

Very nice work.

Our splitter is DH with an axe. My brother has already started to clear it out and has cut enough for me to see the house from beneath it.

I had a big hackberry snap off and fall on my ladder and chainsaw. I've been using a handsaw to cut it up. I got the ladder out but still haven't unburied the chainsaw.

So you're from Bama (deep south) and called it a bluegill (northern term). I'm from new england and called it a crappie (southern term), and now we need to wait for someone to call it a "brim"

Quote:

Well a bream here is either a bluegill or a shell cracker (depending on gill color). We have black and white crappie too. My phone screen is cracked so pics are tough for me to see. The outline looks like a bluegill in that pic

Shell crackers are Redears. They call them shell crackers because snails make up a big part of their diet.

Chiming in a weee bit late . . . .. I'm a New ENglander and have always called them sunfish! WIth or without the sunny patch.

That would be correct. Sunfish is one of the largest families of freshwater fish in North America. Most are native to Missouri.
Local or colloquial names include bream, chinquapins, perch, shell cracker, sac-a-lait, slicks, brim, gills and another common name around here is goggle eye that I heard on the river this week. Sometimes just called panfish because most are the shape of a pan. With at least 15 species found in ponds and lakes and still more in cold fast rivers, it's no wonder people just lump all them together as bream. Some are a little hard to tell apart, especially for me, the less common ones since I might only see them once a year. It kind of makes me crazy when I hear people call them perch, since perch is an entirely different family that includes the white and yellow. Bass, on the other hand is a family all its own including White and Striped. The latter can live in fresh and salt water.

Bluegill are sunfish, Largemouth Bass are sunfish, as are Smallmouth, Spotted and Rock Bass, White and Black Crappie, Redear, Longear, Pumkinseed, Green, Warmouth. Well, that's all I can remember for now.
I think we caught all of those except spotted bass and the two species of crappie on our trip this week.
Sometimes people call Spotted Bass, Kentucky Bass.

I was a fish fanatic as a kid. I had a couple great books on Freshwater Fishes of North America. I know I read them cover to cover several times.
By the time I was about 13 or 14 I knew such trivial and obscure facts as, at what age do Muskies begin to spawn and how many eggs a 5 year old Smallmouth lays.
We built a lake on our farm and I was in charge of stocking it with forage fish and other animals as well as gamefish.

No wonder one of my friends calls me 'a wealth of useless information'.

 

[Beer can]

@ChickenCanoe Fox squirrel and red squirrel are different, fox squirrel are bigger then grey, we don't have the fox. Red squirrel here can be hunted yr round but are about the size of a chipmunk. Had a couple reds trying to raid a robin nest in a oak out front yesterday. I decided to help the birds out with the pellet rifle but couldn't get a shot, they kept hidding in these flowers (wild rhododendron??)

Package of firecrackers chased them away for now
Easiest way I've found to skin a squirrel. Best when freshly killed, they have tough skin. Make a slit across the back so you can get two fingers in each side, pull hard as you can and rip it each way, gut after skinning.
Grandpa I heard ate scrambled squirrel brains and eggs for breakfast. Yuck.