Happy Columbus Day

I won't get into the historical and argumentative aspects of Colubus day. There's plenty of evidence to show the Vikings actually discovered North America a few hundred years before Columbus, but just take it as it is and say Happy Columbus Day!
Laura and I have a good weekend in the great outdoors. Saturday we headed out for some hunting at 5:15 so we had an early morning and short night. We found a bunch of ducks and thought we might be on track for a good day of hunting, but we eneded up empty handed and home around noon. We grabbed some food and decided a nap was an excellent idea. We rested up for the Husker game and an evening inside.

Sunday we slept in - well, if you consider 8:00 sleeping in I guess, we do now, and then went and found a geocache before hitting up the stores for some groceries. We usually just buy all of our groceries at Wal-Mart and call it good - they are usually the cheapest. Well, yesterday we had a breakthrough discovery. We hit up Wal-Mart for some deals and then went to Costco for more things on our list. After that we drove down the road to Rosauers (pronounced rose-ours) and found a heck of a deal on meat. We ended up going back later in the afternoon to pick up more - we stocked up and saved about $50 compared to what we would usually spend. We even stopped by the Sweetheart bakery and bought bread for $.85 compared to the $1.50 we had been spending at Wal-Mart for the same brand! What have we been thinking the past year!!!!

After we got home we packed up the truck with some decoys and went south to the Lee Metcalf Refuge to do some hunting. Well, I don't know if you consider it hunting, but we put decoys out and watched ducks fly around anyway. Here's a panoramic picture from our blind. I took 9 pictures and put them together real quick. I am starting to find better ways to make panoramics so I might as well post what I do.
This was taken with about 150 degree field of view. West is about in the middle of the picture, maybe just right of center, and south is almost at the left edge. Those are the Bitterroot Mountains and the Bitterroot river is in the trees running through the middle of the frame. You can see it was cloudy and it did rain on us for about an hour of the three that we were there. We saw quite a few ducks, but only had one or two real opportunities to take a shot - we passed on them because they were tough shots and we would rather get a good clean shot than just start firing and see what happens. All and all, I just like being outside and watching the wildlife and enjoying being out of town and away from all the people. One in ten Montanans live in Missoula - the state has half as many people as Nebraska but they are more concentrated in the larger cities so it's hard to get a rural experience with so many people packed into a valley.

My boss called this morning and informed me that we havn't been working the past few weeks because no one has accepted any estimates lately, or just havn't gotten back to him with paperwork so we are waiting for someone to make a move. I have done a lot of things around the house in the past few weeks, mostly getting the house and yard for the winter to set in. If you notice in the hunting pictures there is snow on the mountains already and I don't think it will be melting away anytime soon.

Oh yeah, I was gonna post some pictures from our Saturday hunt. Well, actually just one picture. We had a nice view of the harvest moon setting while we were watching ducks fly around! There's even a few ducks on the water...Heck, here's a bonus picture... Laura is modeling her stylish camouflage chest waders with matching belt - yeah she has to wear a belt to keep them on!The temperatures are starting to drop and fall has definatly arrived here in Montana. We are happy to have the relief from the hot weather, but I don't think we will be having much in the way of medium temperatures - it's going straight to the 30's and 40's. As of 1:00 p.m. this afternoon we have almost arrived at 40 degrees, but still trying. Why can't we just have a few more days with temperatures in the 70's? Until again

-=Nolan=-