Saturday, May 22, 2004

Just took Maggie and Frank and the two kids next door fishing at Lake Nokomis.  I spent the whole time untangling lines and freeing snagged lures.  I got to cast once.  Everyone took their shoes off and waded and Maggie eventually fell over and got wet.  She immediately turned blue and started shivering, so it was time to leave.  It was the first fishing adventure of the season and I was totally unprepared and disorganized.  2 out of the 4 fishing rods aren't working right and I didn't have half the stuff we needed. So, for me and for anyone planning to take kids fishing, here is what you need: 5-gallon bucket folding chairs vest with pockets for tackle plastic cutting board a bunch of hooks with the barbs filed off. change of clothing snacks sandals that can go in the water. tools:  pliers, scissors, knife one working fishing pole for each kid one lure or hook per pole already tied on bait you don't mind getting wasted sunscreen bug repellant drinking water 9:45:54 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, April 07, 2004

DNR Trout Stream Easement GIS Layer My cube neighbor is creating a database of all the easements owned by the state along trout streams.  It will soon be available in GIS format.  That is, you can download the data and make pictures like this, which is the new data layed over arial photos.  This particular selection is Lower Gavin Brook in Stockton, MN:  4:23:59 PM    comment []

	Friday, April 02, 2004

Trapping Turtles This is a turtle tag.  If you are a turtle seller or recreational turtle trapper, all of your traps require one.   The DNR sells about 50 turtle licenses each year.   Three people here have told me they taste like chicken.  If not prepared properly they can be very high in contaminants because their fatty tissues store contaminants from their scavenger diet.  To prepare a snapping turtle, you chop the head off and let it bleed out for 24 hours because the involuntary movements last that long.  If you don't hang them up while they are bleeding, they can crawl away without a head and get lost.  Turtle is a popular item on the menu of area restaurants west of St. Cloud.  I want to find out where I can try some.     11:13:33 PM    comment []

	Thursday, April 01, 2004

Roland just came by the office. He is always interesting  to talk to.  His work is organizing fishing education events. He is putting together a kids fishing training event outside the Twins game on May 10.  The DNR puts on lots of great family events like this.  The schedule for all of these is on the DNR events calendar .   He also told me about two blogs by friends of his: True Life and David Anderson's Lost City. 4:02:37 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Woodland Mayhem Cold and windy morning.  Took my kids plus the kids next door to Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield.   On a long path through the woods,  I got far ahead of the gang and while waiting,  I picked up a stick and started whacking dead branches off of a tree.  Whack whack whack. I started remembering how I used to do this all the time as a kid.  Whack whack whack. When I returned to the present, I noticed that all four kids were gathered around in mute astonishment.   The responsible adult was whacking the crap out of a tree.  And with each whack, they felt a constraint on their own behavior fall.  Once they recovered their wits, they all started searching around for sticks of their own.  There were lots of fallen trees around that needed whacking.  Were they ever tired when we got home. 3:44:47 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, March 24, 2004

My most memorable live music experiences: Soul Asylum played at Springfest 1989.  I was black and blue for three weeks afterwards, partly from pogo dancing and partly from being hit in the head with a vodka bottle.  My friend from Madagascar tried to get us all to stop pogo dancing because it was freaking him out.  They played "That's when I reach for my revolver" during which I had a moment of stop action reality where I was bouncing off of people, bounding around the dance floor with no effort, barely touching the floor, barely inside my body. Hank Williams Tribute night at the 400 bar.  The best entry was the lead singer of Trailer Trash up there belting out hank songs with his cowboy hat and cowboy boots.  Wowee was I ever drunk. Greg Brown played at the "Alternative Energy Fair" in Forest Lake in 1991.  About 16 people attended.  He got up on stage, looked around and said, "What if they had an Alternative Energy Fair and nobody came?"  It was a beautiful night and Greg did not disappoint. Union Station at Winnipeg Folk Festival.  Alison Krauss is something else.   Years later, while working at Pillsbury, I saw a poster for Union Station in someone's office and stopped to say how much I liked them.  The owner looked at me blankly and said  that he only had the poster as part of a promotion they were doing. Mandy Rogers and the Treefrogs singing "I never get your love" in my backyard.  My introduction to the Twin Cities music scene was seeing The Wallets at the St. Paul Armoury in 1985.  The Blue Up also played.  One hundred kids with flannel shirts tied around their waists. Lonnie Brooks playing at Wilebski's Blues Saloon in Frogtown.  1986.  I made the faux pas of telling the people I was with that he sounded like the Rolling Stones.  "The Rolling Stones sound like him", I was assured. Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeans playing at the Cabooze.  I accidently got in a shoving match with some woman over who was going to stand where, but other than that, it was very enjoyable. Run Westy Run at the Cabooze.  I was there with Sean McCarthy who I worked with at Ciattis.   Sean is worthy of a whole seperate post.   Their lead singer was so cool, whipping himself around the mike stand and stuff.  I used to be into that sort of thing. Fugazi at the Heart of the Beast theatre.  The room was packed and hot with no room to dance so the crowd just kind of mashed itself first against one wall and then against the other.  A black kid was pulled out of the audience for fighting and brought up on stage.  Some poor fool taunted him from the audience and the removed kid took a spectacular dive over eight rows of fans and brought his fist down on the guy's face with a POP that was heard across a room packed with 200 noisy people.  That almost shut the show down.  Good thing it didn't.   I really worked something out of my system that night.   9:02:31 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Went to Clouds in Water zen center just now. It is right in downtown St. Paul. Someone stopped me at the door and asked me if I knew what to do in a 35 minute sit. I said, "Yeah, yeah I know what it's all about." Except I didn't know. Zen meditation is different than what I have practiced for the past few months, which is vipassana, also called insight meditation. So different that they pulled me aside for special attention. Zen meditation is breathing and focusing on the breath in order to quiet the mind.. Vipassana is breathing and paying attention to what floats by in order to quiet the mind. One obvious difference is that Zen meditation has a lot of structure and rules. You hold your hands here. You sew your own robe. You focus here. You sit like this and walk like that. It was explained to me that rules make things easier because then you don't have to decide where to focus your breath or which direction to face. When the instructor took me out in the hall and told me how things were, he had me sit for 10 minutes with the special posture and special focus on the spot one inch behind my navel. Fire crept into my back and knees, but I got an idea that this kind of practice could produce the kind of holy stupor that I crave.  I have decided to leave this type of practice for after I get more practice at the insight meditation. 10:12:37 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, March 16, 2004

New Minnesota weblog.  All about canoe racing.  A Radio weblog. He works at the DNR, in fisheries no less. 11:16:55 PM    comment []

	Saturday, March 13, 2004

Date at Southdale Tonight Kate and I found ourselves in the basement of Southdale Mall eating at Marshall Field's Boundary Waters Restaurant.  The mall energy does not penetrate this restaurant, I was happy to discover.  It was a decent place, reasonable prices.  I had the almond encrusted walleye and enjoyed it, but not as much as the walleye I had at the broiler. After dinner, we saw Starsky and Hutch.  I laughed.  Beyond that, I got nothing much to say about it. The leader of a local band called Har Mar Superstar appeared as a disco dancing contestant, Disco Dave. 11:16:32 PM    comment []

	Friday, March 05, 2004

Review of Poachers Caught! From Poachers Caught!, a book by a retired Minnesota Conservation Officer: In mid-March, a crust formed on the melting snow overnight, preventing already weakened animals from getting to food sources only 30 feet from the trail.  Deer were slowly starving. Many rural dogs located these weakened populations and their primitive instincts prevailed.  The size and breed of the dog had no bearing on the dog's desire to kill; they were pets transformed into wolves.  The morning was the critical time for the killing sprees.  The snow, still crusty after a cold night, would support the dogs' weight and allow them to take long romps far from home over the frozen surfaces.  A pack of mutts would actually form a hierarchy, the largest and strongest dog assuming leadership.  Just after sunrise, I patrolled the edges of yards known to have "pack dogs" looking intently for fresh canine tracks entering the woods.  The first set of tracks was quite large, ambling ahead of two smaller prints.  The thin crust was unable to hold my weight, forcing me to limit my forward stumbling to the deer trails.  Within five minutes of my grueling march, I spotted the first sign of mutilation: a yearling deer lay half buried 3 feet off the deep path.  It appeared to have hardly struggled while raging teeth had torn it apart.  Dogs on a deer mission seldom eat their prey; they only kill for the primal thrill! Twenty yards farther was another red swirl of devastation.  Two more fawns lay a few feet apart amid a layer of brown and white hair strewn about the otherwise white surface.  Before my morning trek was finished, I witnessed 16 carcasses of deer, all slaughtered and left for the ravens and coyotes to complete the feeding cycle. I appreciate the book.  It gives a real education in natural resource enforcement. I learned: A good way to poach fish at night without attracting attention is to sink a light into the lake and spear the fish as the come to check out the light. Don't tell the conservation officer that all the fish you have cut up and packaged are rock bass.  He won't believe you. Poach in an area without vehicle access or surrounded by private lands. Don't mark the path to your illegal gill netting operation with orange tape If you use booze to control the alchoholic butcher that processes your poached deer, keep the shack were he lives locked. There is a great deal of  "It was a dark and stormy night" writing here. However, the exciting stories and insight into north woods culture make the "forward stumbling" through the flowery prose worth while.   Pretty much a meat and potato storyteller, he wades into the technical detail of his work without a look back.  I find the details interesting.  He has a deep knowledge of the biology of the resource he is trying to protect and great skills at watching and dealing with people.  I read in the Star Tribune that he published the book himself.  He could have used a better editor. Despite the rough writing, he made his poachers come alive.  There are sheepish tourists that know they are breaking the law, drunken, gun toting hard core poachers who physically intimdate the officer.  He nails the descriptions of these people and that in itself is entertaining. 12:02:25 AM    comment []

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