Cold weather--Again

Do you remember years ago when the Bush/Gore election results were hanging in the balance by Florida's inability to count the votes? I had a friend from Florida call me at that time and tell me that they would release the results of the election when all of the folks in the other states came and picked up their old parents from Florida. I now find myself in a similar position. If I promise my Yankee friends not to speak ill of them any more, will y'all please come pick up your dadblame weather and take it back home where it belongs!
 I know that folks who live in cold weather climates must be amused at the total chaos in the south at the moment due to a few inches of snow and ice. I have friends in Atlanta who spent 8-9 hours in cars yesterday afternoon on what should have been a 30 minute commute. As of just an hour ago, there are still cars stranded all over the Atlanta area with passengers who never made it home.
 Before you giggle too much at us for making mountains out of mole hills, you should try spending a couple of days in south Georgia during August. Our temperature is going to be over 100 degrees and our relative humidity is generally in the 70% range.There is never a dry thread on your body, and the gnats ,by the billions,stick to your sweaty body. I have concluded that one must be a native to this  area to survive the summers. Evidently, the same can be said for cold weather because we are struggling with it.
 Riverview got lucky on the predicted ice storm. We had rented a three phase generator to keep the main lodge going in the event of the predicted two-three day power outage. We also bought every lantern and flashlight in south Georgia, and double stacked firewood at all of the cottages.Of course in another five years when we have another event like this, we will not have a clue where any of this equipment is.But, praise the Lord, we didn't need any of it. We got a little sleet for about 15 minutes around 5:45 this morning, and then it was over.The hunters who managed to survive the cancelled flights are all out hunting, and it has warmed all the way up to a balmy 30 degrees at almost 11:00.

Texans

I know that those of you who read my occasional posts have noticed that I poke gentle fun from time to time at our northern guests. But, I really do love Yankees. We would probably still be picking cotton and starving to death were it not for those wonderful northern guests of ours. As a matter of fact, Yankees are much like cotton, but they are a lot more fun plucking.
 Today I want to talk about folks from another part of this great nation. As F. Scott Fitzgerald opined in his book, The Great Gatsby," The rich are not like you and I".Well, here's a newsflash for you,"Neither are Texans"!There was a time that I classed Texans as southerners, but I have decided that they are a subspecies all to themselves. The first time I observed this was in my early years here. As any of you who have ever hunted with us know that we have a strict " no alcohol policy" during the hunting day. Once as I was walking around the lodge grounds during the noon hour, I noticed one of our Texas guests guzzling a cold beer. I walked up to him and asked him if he remembered our conversation about no alcohol during the day. He calmly looked at me and replied,"yes". I pointed at his beer and asked him about what he was drinking. He said,'Son, this ain't alcohol. It's a beer". The scary thing is that he was as serious as a heart attack when he said it.
 Well, last night we had a late arrival in Tallahassee who happened to be one of Tyler,Texas's finest citizens, I am sure. He insisted on renting a car and driving in late at night by himself. Texans are a rather independent lot. We took every precaution to see that he got here since we would all be sound asleep if and when he drove in. We gave him good directions to Riverview and good directions to his cottage. As a stop gap measure, we also printed directions to his cottage and told him that they were taped to the rocking chair on the porch of the main lodge. Allow me to interject here that our cottage directions have been left that way for late arrivals for decades, and we have never had a guest fail to find his cottage---until last night.
 Do you remember my comment about us all being sound asleep when Tyler's finest citizen arrived. Well, we were, but the guests in the other six cottages that were not a part of his group did not fare as well.This morning after a considerable amount of teasing, our guest looked at me much like my beer drinking Texan of old and said," I can't believe y'all sneaked around this morning and placed signs on all of the cottages after I got in".
 Oh, the life of an Inn Keeper!

cold weather quail hunting in south Georgia

I have no clue what a polar vortex is, but I would just as soon not see this bad boy again. It needs to head on back up to the polar region where the inhabitants are bred to survive such weather. I realize that most of you are going to have very little sympathy for me when I begin whining about how cold it was down here. Once in my early years after a particularly grueling day, my Dad asked me if I needed a little sympathy. When I responded to him that I could sure use a bit, he replied by telling me to look in the dictionary and I would find it listed between s- -t and syphilis. Pop was a hard man! At any rate, I have learned not to expect much sympathy, but I want to share the following observations about our recent cold snap:
1) Dogs lose interest in fussing and fighting, and only want to snuggle up together.
2)Guides become mutinous if you ask them to get on their jeeps even one minute before 9:00 am.
3)The quail fly faster probably trying to generate some body heat.
4)I do not feel the need to stand outside and chat with my guests as they climb on the jeeps.
5) I am not envious of my guests opportunity to hunt quail as they ride out to the courses on the convertible jeeps.
6) If you septic tank overflows(and ours did),frozen poop doesn't have much smell.
7) If your pipes freeze at your house and you can't shower, you will not smell too badly either.
 Allow me to add that if the South had won the War Of Northern Aggression, I would have ceded the North lands back to them because I certainly would not have wanted to occupy the conquered territory! Our blood is just too thin for this type of cold. Perhaps folks in the northern climates keep more antifreeze in their bodies than we do.
 The quail hunting is going great this season. We have VERY few open dates available between now and the end of the season with the exception of Valentine's Day weekend. I fear that male America has been hijacked by the card,candy,and flower industry.
 I will close with this funny quote that I saw on the Internet this morning concerning the recent cold snap--It is so cold that I saw a Democrat with his hands in his own pocket.

Oh, the stories I coulld tell

People often say to me,"Cader, why don't you write a book of your experiences at Riverview  over the past 43 years". My simple answer is that the statute of limitations has not quite run on many of them. To put it another way,I am counting on many of the folks who will be in my stories going to that great plantation in the sky before I do. Although, I do not know why I worry so much about that because,based on my experience with them, they could not hit me if they shot at me as long as I was standing still.
 However, there is one group that I can feel free to write about as I am convinced that they are never going to die. As many of you know, we offer a discount on our base rate during the holidays to encourage families to hunt with us, and families make up 99% of our business during this time. It is the other 1% that I am writing about here.These men all hunted with me when they were still active in their businesses. Now that they are retired, they still come as a group of friends over the holidays. I termed them cheapskates years ago. Not to be outdone, they were slightly miffed with my terminology, and have named themselves"The Frugal Hunters" club. Most of these guys live north of the "Smith&Wesson" line,and can be deemed Yankees. Surprisingly for a bunch of Northerners, they can shoot pretty good.
 I have to give them this much--they do pay and on time after the leader threatens to go to a couple of their homes with a baseball bat. One of these men in the past would bring me a country ham as long as I paid for it as soon as it arrived here. Evidently, I was a day late paying him one year because the next year he claimed that the country ham store burned down. I will say that they gave me a break this year because the crustiest curmudgeon in the group failed to make the trip this year.I can guarantee you that pro shop sales will not fall off one bit due to his absence.
 I love my job, and really do enjoy my guests who become more than guests over the years. They become friends. I am proud to place the "Frugal Hunters" AKA "Cheapskates" in that group as they have been coming at this time of the year for almost 20 years now. I sure hope that they do not read this as they would be inclined to ask for the "20 year discount"!

Thanksgiving family and hunting

Since we are in the hunting business and our season only lasts six months, we can't afford to close down for all of the holidays. We do shut down for a solid week around Christmas, but we have always stayed open for guests hunting here over the Thanksgiving holidays.Thanksgiving is also the holiday that usually finds all of my children and grandchildren here because children can always be baited in with the promise of a lot of food and free hunting.Many years ago, before Martha and I even had children,much less grandchildren, an old Oklahoma oilman once said to me,"Son, I love the holidays and the pretty holiday lights. But the prettiest lights I ever see are the tail lights of my children and grandchildren as they drive away from my garage". I now understand what he meant. Whew!
 We had a lot of fun,but old folks get accustomed to a schedule, and there is no schedule with a house full of rambunctious grandchildren. I took the five who were old enough to go with me on a short quail hunt Friday morning to observe. Then we had a dove hunt on Friday afternoon. Two of the five grandchildren were old enough to hunt dove,but not quail. They each shot a couple of doves with their youth model shotguns while the younger three claimed to have killed literally hundreds with their BB guns. I sense the making of real hunters in this younger pack as they already know how to stretch the truth.
 Precious memories !

South Georgia weather

As we say down here,"If you don't like the weather,just stick around because it will change". We had our first freeze and a killing frost last Wednesday,Nov.13th. When Martha and I went to visit with our grandchildren on Saturday afternoon of the same week, I wore shorts and a T-shirt because it was 79 degrees. It had been getting dry here lately and someone mentioned in prayer meeting that we needed to pray for rain since most of our crops have been harvested. I politely declined as I told my friends that I made myself a promise never to pray for rain after our river floods of 1994 and 1998. I might remind the Lord that it's getting a little dry, but I do not pray for rain. Well, someone must have because as Noah would say,"It come up a cloud this morning", and the bottom dropped out of the sky. We received 1.6 inches of rain in less than two hours between 8:30-10:15 this morning.. They say that two things a man can want the most and catch up on the fastest are sex and rain. We just caught up on rain!

Our first freeze of the hunting season

This has been a spectacular fall in south Georgia. We opened our quail hunting season on Oct. 17th, and have not had the first unseasonably warm day yet. As a matter of fact, we hunted many days in January of last season that were warmer than any days we have hunted in this October and November of this season. The weather man who predicts the weather like I do the stock market is now saying that we will have our first freeze of the fall on Wednesday morning,Nov.13th. Bring it on as we are ready for it ! The dogs and guides will love it as will my wife who can quit complaining about when she is going to be able to use the clothes that she has moved to her closet in preparation of colder weather.
 As we start our fourth week of hunting season, I am still trying to play myself into shape for the longer hours we spend here. I can honestly say that I totally take back all of the times that I didn't want to take a nap when I was younger. I am struggling to remember the last time that I wasn't at least kind of tired.
 Business is good this fall as we are seeing more hunters than last fall, and the hunting is great ! With apologies to the fine folks who have already visited this fall, the hunting is great,but the shooting could use some improvement. If I were giving odds, I would say that the quail are winning over the hunters in the first three weeks. Every now and then, I am fairly certain that I can hear quail giggling in the woods as I ride around the Plantation.
 Oh well, I need to get back to the old salt mines now.