Summer Solstice

Yesterday was the day we mark as having the longest amount of daylight for the whole year. This past week I have been afflicted with a bit of insomnia and only seem to be able to get five hours of sleep at best each night. I woke at 3:50 am yesterday, well before that long period of light began. But the insomnia did allow me to enjoy every drop of sunshine the day offered. I didn't miss a thing. It was quite refreshing to see it only a little dusky at 9:00 pm, the way it will be at 5:00 pm come winter. But that's still a long way off and, though the days will shorten, they'll only lack a minute or so of daylight each time.

May, 2009

Well here we are in June already and the days are starting to heat up and get humid as they usually do this time of year. It was May that proved more unpredictable. In the course of 31 days, we saw highs in the fifties, highs in the eighties, heavy rain, sunny days and high winds. One day, 70 to 90 mph straight-line winds tore through southwest Missouri knocking over trees and downing electrical lines. I lost about a 70 foot section of privacy fence with two 4X4 posts broken off at ground level and the rest uprooted concrete and all. It fell over onto my neighbor's peonies. My dog was the only one excited about it since it meant she could terrorize two backyards for a few days. Looking forward to warm summer days and cool summer evenings this month.

All Lit Up

Earlier this week, we had a round of thunderstorms pass through during the early morning hours. I remember waking up just before 4am and hearing the sound of thunder nearby. I lazily considered getting up to unplug my computer but could not convince my body to follow through.

At 4:08am, I bolted out of bed as lightning either struck the house or something close to it. In rapid succession, I heard the zizzer, opened my eyes to see all the lights in the house flash on then off again and heard a clap of thunder that seemed loud enough to be something falling on my roof.

Lightning has made the phones ring before and one time, blue sparks connected my fingers to the truck door handle I was reaching for just before a bolt hit a tree about fifty yards from me, but this was the first time the electricity was close enough or potent enough to turn on lights that had been physically turned off.

I would have thought it was my imagination if it were not for a call from a neighbor who said they were worried because my house was completely lit up for a brief second during the height of the storm.

Personally, lightning scares me. I enjoy watching thunderstorms and am in awe of the power they can unleash but I have had a few close brushes with lightning that have gone beyond coincidence.

In this case, no damage was done. No major appliances nor the computers were fried. The lights went back off and the storm moved on. Only the eeriness of what had happened lingered.

Corn Cobs

The tailless squirrel returned this weekend. I hadn't seen him in a few weeks and wondered what had become of him. He wandered into the yard hopping like a rabbit and headed for my wildlife feeding area. I keep a couple of bird feeders there and pour some seed on the ground for the doves as well as some fruit for the mockingbirds. I also drop a few ears of hard corn, the kind grown as silage and made for squirrels.

The tailless one headed straight for one of those ears, picked it up in his front paws and began munching on it the same as a human would, grasping it firmly and working his way from one end of the ear to the other. All he lacked was butter and salt. After a while, he decided it would taste better if eaten closer to his own home, so he picked up the ear and headed across the street with it, although with a bit of difficulty as he had not calculated the full weight of his quarry.

But he finally did manage to make it to the neighbor's yard and I lost sight of him. Now I wonder what my neighbors will think when they find an empty corn cob tossed carelessly in the yard, and which one will get the blame for leaving it there.

Morels

I had my first encounter with a morel mushroom last weekend. I had never seen one before except in pictures so I was excited, especially since the finds are rare. I wrote about the experience on freshare.net and you can read that article here: The Morel of the Story.

What was surprising to me was that morels didn't taste as exotic as I expected. I thought I would discover a musky, woodsy kind of flavor but what I got was a mushroom so mild it barely tasted like a mushroom at all. I mean, it was good and I ate my share but I expected something, I don't know, maybe stronger in flavor? Something that would linger on my taste buds.

But don't read this as total disappointment. I'll be back after the oddly interesting little fungi same time next year.

Spring

Earlier this week I mowed the lawn for the first time this season. The mower was a little cranky after being made to sit quietly all winter in a cold storage shed but it was finally convinced to start. At this early juncture, my lawn is mostly comprised of tufts of grass in a sea of dead brown material and an assortment of weeds. But all of it needs a weekly trim regardless of affiliation.

The reward in these early days of spring is the sweet fragrance of hyacinths that permeates my backyard and entertains my nose if I as much as glance in their direction. They don't stay around nearly long enough but their scent is a clear message that the growing season has begun.

Ping-o-Matic Won't Ping

I have tried using a free service called Ping-o-Matic to send out pings to a raft of directories anytime I update one of my blogs. I know the key word here is that it's free and I shouldn't complain, but here it comes anyway. The service is extremely unreliable. In my experience, about 95% of the time, Ping-o-Matic takes a few minutes to spin its wheels, jams up, then blames the mess on me by delivering an error message that says "Slow Down Cowboy" and tells me that my last ping was only a few minutes ago. Really? Who pinged you guys over at Ping-o-Matic? I didn't, neither did any automatic system on my blogs. So don't you really mean to send me an error message that says, "Oops, our site is down ... again."

To get your pings out quickly and reliably, try Oddpath's service. It's also free. But unlike Ping-o-Matic, Oddpath really does work.

Toughest Month

Blame it on the economy, blame it on a business decision that did not work out quite as planned. Blame it on me. My lease was up at the end of February and I decided there was no point in renewing. It feels like the first step in a dismantling of my business. The end of a long era in my life.

No rescue for me, I'm sure. I'll not expect anyone to ride up and hand me some bailout money. It's a small business, after all, one of many.

But I really don't want that anyway. Just want my office back. Sure, I can work quite comfortably from my home office, a study I built a long time ago and there is the elimination of a long commute to Springfield and back.

But I miss the place. More for what it represented than for what it really was. The office was a stage where ideas were bantered and discussed, many pitched out with the trash but a few really good ones that stuck. And it was a place to have a cup of coffee, share thoughts, fret, converse, laugh, worry, the range of human emotions.

It was only a place, but it was my place. My place in the world.

Songs of Spring

The return of tree frogs is a nice welcoming song to announce that spring is near. I heard peepers the first time this year a couple of weeks ago during my evening walk. They were faint, but discernible in the distance.

Late last week when the weather was warm, it was as if invitations had been sent out. Thursday night, I heard them closer to the road I was walking, concentrated on a few trees in a low spot. Friday night there were more. A lot more. This time they were huddled up in the trees surrounding a field near my house conducting a symphony to orchestrate the arrival of spring.

Officially, the equinox will not occur for another month or so, but don't tell that to the peepers. I am planning to attend several more of their concerts this month.

freshare Podcasts

I decided to start a podcast series on the freshare site and actually produced the first one in late December. Click the program title to listen to that installment: freshare Ozarks Outdoors podcast.

The plan was to create a new podcast every week following a format of introducing listeners to some of our top stories before a segue into the feature: an interview with someone who has close ties to the Ozarks outdoors.

But the format proved to be an awful lot of work to undertake on a weekly basis for a company our size and with a lot already on our plates. Still, I think podcasts are a great tool to reach a new and different audience, and I do like the idea of introducing some very interesting folks to our listeners. Eventually, we might be able to accomplish the weekly interviews but that would be after we clear some of the other items we have going like the t-shirt site, design work, and promting that site, the fresharestore.

So, I think I will take some middle ground and use a format that includes a brief summary of some of the top stories on freshare, a commercial (to promote the store), and a feature that could include an interview but might be a story, or an outdoors related poem or a description of some new photos added to the freshare gallery. I think this format will ease the pressure of researching, interviewing, cutting and editing tape and producing an extended piece every week. Plus, it will mix things up a little so the podcast doesn't get stale.

That said, I think I'll start in on this week's installment.

Odd Backyard Critters

I'm beginning to wonder if we have some mutations in the animal gene pool around my house. Last Spring, a white dove settled in for a meal of birdseed under one of my feeders. Now, a tailless squirrel and and his stubby-tailed cousin are frequenting the feeders.

By the way they move, it seems both squirrels must have been born without the trademark bushy tails average squirrels sport. Neither seems hampered by balance issues unless trying some quirky move so it makes me think the little guys adapted at an early age.

The tailless guy has the oddest appearance at first glance and it makes you wonder if it's a rat you see streaking across the front lawn. His cousin has a bushy tail, it's just that the thing is very short. Abnormally so.

I have a photo of the white dove, but I have yet to capture an image of the squirrels.

I Resolve

I'm usually not much of one for New Year's resolutions and here is my only one for 2009: I plan to write more. Throughout last year, all my writing appeared only on my Ozarks outdoors website, freshare.net, and on a few article sites. But I have missed blogging and resolve to do more of that in 2009. Here, on Amblin Cafe and for a soon to be developed outdoors blog on freshare.

If you check this blog and Amblin, I'll save you a trip today because the same post you are reading appears on Amblin, too.

The Genie

My daughter and her husband had a baby shower a week or so ago. This is their first child and my first grandbaby, so we are all pretty excited. Check out the post about our ultrasound experience.

The best gift they got at the shower, in my view anyway, was a diaper genie. I had not seen nor heard of one until the shower. It's ingenious. Kind of like the biohazard containers you see in hospitals and doctors' offices.

Just drop in the dirty diaper and it is locked up inside the device so the smell, the mess, the sight is gone! Wow.

We can send men to the moon and we can dispose of dirty diapers. Baby technology sure has come a long way in the last twenty-five years.

First Peek

Yesterday, I got a chance to see my first grandbaby for the very first time. I don't want to sound like some wayward grandparent, so let me clear that up by saying I saw her with a 3D ultrasound. She's due to arrive somewhere around March 18 but I welcomed the opportunity to take a sneak peek.

The nurse pointed out all these wonderful and amazing features - nose, fingers, big toe. I couldn't see any of it. Nothing. Everyone else in the room seemed to, or said they did. But I didn't. Oh, I tried. Strained my eyes, squinted, tilted my head, but all in a vain effort to see what they saw.

Soon I discovered that 3D ultrasounds are a lot like those pictures you see on the comics page in the Sunday paper. You have to stare at the meaningless series of images, really concentrate, then Bam! A 3D picture suddenly appears. And my little granddaughter did, too.

She covered her face with her tiny hands for a while, then did a "peek-a-boo" tease, and we finally saw her chubby little cheeks and her beautiful little face. At one point, she even treated us to a very clear, discernible smile.

Now, people will tell you that babies do not smile. They say it's just gas. But when did you ever smile when you had gas? No, my friend, babies are fresh from God. How can they help but smile?

Fluid Mechanics

One thing I like about websites is that they are easily changed and updated as suits the readers and visitors. We've been running a poll on freshare as well as checking which content gets the most reads, what topics get the most attention, even which pages have the highest Google rankings.

From all that information, we are getting a clearer picture of what our readers want, what brings visitors to the site in the first place and what we should be offering.

The next revision of freshare won't be nearly as exhaustive as the last couple were but it will soon be time to update the site and put the emphasis where readers want it to be. I think this is and should be a never-ending process for web sites.

Long Walks in the Woods

I'm sitting here wearing my hiking boots and that made me think about a long hike I took the weekend before Christmas. A nearly three hour trek through the Arkansas hills and woods.

It was a cold day, mist rose from the wet creek bed along the path. I saw several deer, found a cave, uncovered a rock to find a sleepy salamander. Found some old scrapes a buck made the month before, poked around a couple of old house places and finally got to the river. My favorite place.

I drank in the sights, the smells, the sounds of water moving along its trip to the sea. Quenched and renewed. That's what long walks in the woods are for.

2007 Review

We are coming off one of the toughest years I have ever faced as a businessman. We abandoned a dying print publication in late 2006 and replaced it with what is now freshare.net. But the whole process was like launching a brand new business instead of building on an old one.

Our customer base for employmag was much different than the one we'll have to continue to develop for freshare. And, building a regular readership has proven more difficult than anticipated, at least at first. Plus, the actually physical construction of the site was a learning process that was both expensive and time consuming.

Still, we built the web site traffic to a decent rate by year end, and in fact really only did so between our official start date of June 5, 2007 and year-end. That building will be a never-ending process, but we have the tools and knowledge necessary now to carry it further.

There are still tweaks and a few features we have left to develop for the site, most notably the freshare store, but those are in process at year end and into 2008.

From the knowledge gained building, re-building and launching the site, we learned a great deal about web site construction and aesthetics. That knowledge base has already led to a new side business we hope to continue on into 2008.

While 2007 was difficult and finances strained about as far as they could go, there is new hope going into 2008 that we have a solid platform as well as the means to continue building on it.

Here's to looking forward instead of backward!

Weather Related

Well, the ice storm I talked about in the last post did not affect our immediate area too badly. We just had a little accumulation on the trees and none on the roads. To our west and throughout much of Oklahoma it was a lot worse. Hundreds of thousands lost power and some are still without power.

Last weekend, we were ready for a major snowstorm that meteorologists were predicting could dump up to 10 inches of snow. Temperatures remained higher than expected and we mostly got rain. We did get a couple of inches of snow Saturday night, but it was gone by Sunday afternoon.

Another Ice Storm

We are bracing for another ice storm today and tomorrow. So far, it's only been rain here, but not too many miles to our north and to our west, ice has already fallen and caused power outages, heavy tree limbs and icy patches on roads. The news reported that the entire town of Lamar, Missouri is dark, without power.

We are all hoping this storm won't be of the same magnitude as the January ice storms that broke so many power lines and utility poles causing widespread outages for weeks at a time. Still, the memory is fresh enough that precaution prevails. Grocery stores have been packed with people stocking up several days' supply of food, generators are flying of the shelves, as are batteries, water, flashlights and propane heaters. For many in the area, it was difficult enough last time. Can't blame them for wanting to be prepared this time around.

As I write this, it's 27 degrees. Certainly if precipitation does fall tonight, ice or snow would be the result. Radar shows a band of showers extending all the way back to Texas and growing. Could be a long night.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Besides eating until I nearly burst, I went fishing over the the Thanksgiving holiday. The White River - my favorite spot on the planet. It was still deer season in Arkansas, and there was only one camp at the landing - a deer hunting party. The rest of the river was mine.

It was cold, maybe 40 degrees, and a bit windy but the fish were biting well. The river was very low and the water clear as gin. I caught a limit in less than forty minutes and played catch and release after that.

The rest of the weekend was business. I worked on a website design for my client in the UK and then there was the business of putting up Christmas lights, which I accomplished between rain showers.