Point of View

Here's a pretty nice buck that we saw in a field from our deer stand.   Louie and I were sitting about 20 ft. up in a tree and we watched this buck walk out from the woods.....

It's thrilling to see something like that move cautiously out into view.  He was very quiet and kept looking around.  I zoomed out a little with my lens...

Then I finally zoomed out all the way so I could show you how far we were from where the deer was.  You can just barely see him to the middle right of the photo.  He turned and dashed off.

He was in and out of that field in less than 2 minutes.  We didn't even shoot at him.  It was another nice afternoon in the woods tho....

Deer Hunting November 2012

It's deer hunting season again and we are spending a lot of time out in the woods.  So far we've gotten one doe.  It's just a great time of year to be outside - it's not too cold yet, which I like.

This is the view from our tree stand.  There are still quite a few leaves on the trees.

This cute little guy was the only thing we saw the other day....

The guys spent quite a bit of time looking for some key locations to set up their camera's to see what type of action we are getting on the deer property when we aren't there.

I spent my time taking pictures of mushrooms....

And of Kyle getting loose with the gator....

But all their hard work and planning paid off - now we just have to actually see one of these guys when we are out there.....

Shotgun season opens today.....

What's Thanksgiving Without Cranberries?

I love fresh cranberries and they are so easy to make.  A lot of people don't know how easy they are, so I'm going to show you.

First, buy a 12 oz. package of fresh cranberries.  I buy whatever kind the store has in stock, this time they happened to be Ocean Spray....

Rinse the cranberries and pick out any smooshed ones....

The directions on the package call for 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar.  I tweak it a little and use 1 cup of water and 2 cups of sugar.  I am a rebel like that!

Pour the water, the sugar and the cranberries into a pot.  Turn up the heat.  Start stirring.  The cranberries will start to pop and get soft.  I start to crush them against the side of the pot at this point....

Turn down the heat and keep stirring.  They will easily boil over if you don't keep an eye on them.  I keep boiling them until they cook down and start to get thick.

Turn off the heat, pour into a container and refrigerate.  You can eat them hot or cold.  I prefer them cold, on my turkey.  I really like it on toast, with mayo and sliced turkey.  Yum!

In between cooking, look out the window and admire the lake....

Chablis helped me cook this year and she made the broccoli rice casserole and the green bean casserole.  And yes, I cheated and used instant potatoes.

This cute little bird kept hanging around the back deck...

The turkey took longer than expected to cook, but it still turned out....

Louie, Chablis and Kyle weren't shy about digging in.  This was a hard year for me - Tony decided to spend the day with his girlfriends family.  It was the first time in 18 years that our little unit of 4 wasn't together.  I know they have to grow up and do their own thing, but it was still hard for me.  Than goodness for Facetime - at least I still got to see him for a few minutes.  My nephew, Kyle, came and spent the day with us tho, so that was really nice.

Afterwards we all drove out to the hunting property and sat in the deer stands.

Here's a short video I shot tonight.  This is the first time I've tried shooting video on my camera and it's also the first time I've tried to upload video to the blog, so we'll see how well this works....

Can you see the deer in this picture?  We didn't shoot any, but it was nice to sit out in the woods and enjoy the quiet of the evening.

It was a nice Thanksgiving.  Hope yours was nice as well!

Getting Ready for Deer Hunting

Yes, we deer hunt!  It's a much anticipated time of year for us.  We usually have a house full of people and there are cammo clothes draped all over the furniture and rifles and bows all over the place.  We gather around pots of homemade spaghetti and chili and plates of spicy nachos.  It's usually cool enough to have a fire roaring in the fireplace in the evenings and we roast hot dogs and marshmallows late into the night.  It's warm and cozy in the house and cold and crisp outside in the mornings when we head out.  There is always excitement in the air.

My husband was raised deer hunting and we take our kids every year.  Kentucky is heavily populated with deer.  We take every deer we get, have it processed, and eat it.  Deer sausage is excellent and my favorite thing!  It's like summer sausage and I love it on crackers with cream cheese and hot pepper jelly.  Yum!  I also love the tenderloins, which we fry.  I'll leave that for another post.

We had Chablis and my nephew, Kyle, along for help.... 

My step son, Lou Jr., his wife Nicki and their daughter Alyssa also came along.  We really needed everyone's help this year!

Anyway, we drove out to the property that we rent for hunting to get our deer stands ready for this season.  The heavy rains this year made the grass and weeds explode to jungle proportions.  This is the road leading down to our stands....

Louie, Chablis and Kyle walked the road, clipping wayward branches and picking up logs and sticks that were in the way....

I drove the Gator and pointed out whatever they missed!   :-)

We didn't have too much cleanup to do around Louie's stand.  I had the perfect bird's eye view of the lay of the land tho!

We continued further down the main path and that's when things started to get really bad.....

Apparently a bad storm had blown through at some point during the year and downed a bunch of trees, right across the path.  There is absolutely no way to go around them, so we had to work our way through them.  It's a good thing we thought to bring the chain saws along.  It took us about an hour to work through the first set of trees and move the logs out of the way.  We thought we were free and clear.....

Silly us!  A little further down the path we came upon a set of 4 huge, downed trees, all laying right across our path.  The first group wasn't too bad.  If you look down the path you can see the huge trees laying there...

Each tree got progressively larger......

And larger......

Thank goodness we had the gator!  We were able to tie ropes to the cut tree trunks and drag them out of the way.  Backing up with the Gator, somebody accidentally (not ME, but I'm not saying who) took out our cooler with all our drinks and sandwiches.....

Then one of the saws kept breaking down.  We'd get it started and the minute Louie touched it to a tree, it would die out.  Jr. and Chablis about fell over, they were laughing so hard!

2 solid days of work got most of the path finally cleared.  The property owner is going to brush hog the path for us and in a couple of weeks we should be ready for our first hunt of the year!