I watched a TV news report on frantic efforts to remove debris from the last hurricane in Florida before Milton comes ashore. The debris lining the streets was about shoulder high. Milton was up to cat 5 and much larger than Helene.
My parents and my sister went on a cruise to Alaska out of Seattle. On the last day, yesterday, my Dad took ill and went to the sick bay on the ship. He was there all day and got really good treatment and testing and they found fluid around his heart and elevated troponin, and a fever they couldn't touch with what they had on the boat but the doc on the ship wasn't able to do more than stabilize so they got him off the ship when they pulled into Victoria so he could get to a hospital. Seattle was 12 more hours away so he ended up in Canada. He is improving but his troponin level is very high and they are trying to figure out what is going on with his heart. He's got a cardiac history, quadruple bypass 40 years ago.
In talking to my sister I learned he and my mom got the covid booster a week before they left. And now it is starting to make sense. My parents drank the covid koolaid and pretty much cut themselves off from me and my kids for 3 years. Even today they wear masks around us. At first it was because my wife works at the hospital and then because we didn't get the vaccine. To say it has caused some friction would be putting it mildly.
There isn't a doubt in my mind this is from the covid booster, he has myo/pericarditis and heart damage from it. The fever fits right into the mix as his body is reacting to the shot by an activation of the immune system. I love my parents but they sure got taken for fools by the government.
I saw an ad for .22 COLIBRI. I’d never heard of them, but apparently they’re the modern version of a .22 CB. They are a powderless .22 long? Maybe? Or is it a long rifle brass? Do they increase the primer to propel without additional powder?
Anyway, it brought back a flood of memories.
When I was a kid, in a close suburb of Chicago, one had very few options for ridding the space under the front porch of vermin. I set up a round conibear trap and caught one opossum. Turns out she had a pouch full of toothy little rascals. The jill was dead but the joeys were alive and still clinging to her carcass. I dumped the whole mess into a garbage can full of water and pushed it down with a concrete block. We went to dinner and afterwards the problem was solved. Dad didn’t want a repeat, so he just threw away the old trap, opossum, babies, and all (I think he was afraid if I caught something and the trap didn’t fully kill it).
Dad got me a Have-A-Heart trap and I made a catch pole and went to work. I caught (I don’t remember) several more opossums and a couple raccoons under there. Not knowing how to dispatch my catches without attracting undue attention, he got me some BB caps and some CB caps. I would drag the critter out of the trap, hold its head down by the basement floor drain with my catch pole, and put a CB or BB in their ear from inches away with my revolver. The BB caps worked, but not well. The CB caps did better.
1) I miss that old Herter’s single action .22 I traded it when I traded up to my Ruger Super Single Six 9” (still have it).
2) I plugged my nose and skinned those opossums. I learned to ring their feet, neck, and tail (from an article in Outdoor Life) so I could leave the hide whole and unsplit. We froze them and next time we went to the furrier near my Uncle’s place in Iowa, I sold them. They said that they were skinned properly and handled correctly and they gave me $3 each. After that I wrapped the carcasses in doubled garbage bags and threw them away- nobody should touch and smell an opossum for $3
