When I was a lot younger…and dumber….I would take a friend down to the creek a mile or so from our quaint country village to go snake hunting. I had an air rifle that used slugs and had to be pumped up to pressurize the firing chamber. My friend bravely lifted up the rocks in the creeks to see if the snakes were hiding under them. Neither of us ever got snake bitten but to this day i cannot under stand why we didn’t.

I have to admit that we did not go snake hunting very often ….had to work up the courage …and the funny thing is that we never found a snake under a rock. I found one sitting on a rock once and I took a shot at it but missed and it got all angry and hissed ….and I fled …my friend fled right on my heels ….To be honest, we saw some snakes on these outings but we never actually shot one. So the great white hunter had to find something else to occupy his time in the woods.

My friends and I would go down to the creek in the woods near out little country village and we would float down the creek in inner tubes for hours at a time in the Summertime. Those were the days when creeks were actually safe to swim in and there were plenty of critters and creatures …sunfish….catfish…turtles….frogs…crayfish….all kinds of interesting things —- and some frightening things too …. things like water moccasin snakes and snapping turtles.

But we were carefree and it was summer time and there wasn’t all that much to do in town so we came to our secluded wooded sanctuary for the peace, the quiet and the adventure.

(Image is generated by artificial intelligence)

When I was a Sixteen-year-old kid, I would go down to the woods near our home town and stare up at “Dead Man’s Cliff” planning on climbing it one sweet day. The cliff carried its name for a long time before i was even born. This was a secluded kind of wooded area — it was not well traveled in my youth. It was the kind of place a young man could hide away and just enjoy peace, quiet and imagined adventures.

I often took a friend or two with me on these trips and one day, after erecting a camp for a night out, we actually did cross that creek and climb but the side of the cliff. We were not the first to do so apparently because as we climbed we had a nice well-worn path to walk on. It was steep and kind of exhausting but it was well worth the adventure.

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When I was a young man, I found the local cemetery to be the ideal place to go at night, when the whole world seemed to have calmed down from the day’s freneticism and just reflect and contemplate. I was a real loner back in the day except for two or three really close friends. So I could become quite morose and melancholy while sitting alone in the cemetery but also some of my greatest inspirations and revelations occurred in the same setting. (The image is not me but is artificially generated as a representation or illustration.)

First of all, Jimmy raised the temperature on our furnace because we had a zero temperature night and I have to tell you that the first thing I experienced because of that move was to spend an entire night with a stuffed up nose. I have to find a way to get him to lower that temperature or I have to find a good dehumidifier because warm dry air is no good at all for my sinuses. That is the first thing for today.

The second thing is what I consider to be really good news. My body weight is on the rise again here in the 8th week of recovering from my cduf disease. As I said somewhere before, that cdif caused me to lose 23 pounds and despite the suffering caused by the ailment, I was pleased with the weight drop—- even though it was rapid and it worried me for awhile until my doctor told me not to worry about it. Now I am informed that gaining some of that weight back is a good omen as far as the disease itself is concerned. So now I am going to cut back some calories to try and plateau the weight at the 220 pound level even though I know that my normal weight is supposed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 186-200 even— according to the doctor.

It is now 6:32 in the morning…. time for ham, eggs and toast.

After thought —- Here is a headline that I read this morning: “Congress races against the clock to avert skyrocketing health care costs for millions” — and here is my personal OPINION about it …… “Ain’t gonna happen. Congress is too impotent right now to do anything about saving healthcare for millions of people. Mark my words, millions of Americans are going to go without health insurance in this “Great Again America” of ours. But I have some hopes that the President can pull us out of this one. He seems to have some great ideas for a healthcare program for America.