January 13 2007

Well gang, there’s sobering news this week. If you’ll pardon the expression.
While last week, we had the overwhelmingly good news that our club house and shooting ranges were being given back to us by the powers that be, this week, after sending a team from the clubhouse committee to the ranges, we find that things are not exactly rosey.
The damage to our property is more extensive than we had at first thought. The clean up is going to be challenging indeed.
While the grass has been mowed meticulously for the first couple of years of our absence, during the last six or seven years it has slacked off.
You can’t blame the range people for slacking off, since getting control of our property was beginning to be a sort of fantasy. A dream if you will.
Anyway, the grass on all the ranges is currently chest high, and there are trees growing, especially cedar, that are six years old. You wouldn’t recognize the place.
The targets of one inch steel plate have been stolen from the anti-tank gun range and anything made of wood, firing line signs, yard markers and fences to hold targets, have apparently used for firewood.
Thousands of beer cans are scattered through out the property, especially around the lake near the clubhouse.
And then there is what you can only refer to as "tagging".
Some of it is the work of urban gangs that have found the place, and some of it consists of various combinations of greek letters, which leads one to suspect college frat boys or girls.
The little hand prints at the edge of the lake tell us what we already knew, that raccoons like and need water. No salivary glands and all like that, and the amount of raccoon scat inside the clubhouse tells us that they like living indoors as well.
Along with the raccoons the clubhouse has been infested with a crowd of insects that would make an entomologist’s dreams come true.
Termites, scorpions (not insects really) ticks, impressively good sized spiders (reclusive and otherwise) and possibly a colony of killer bees.
For which reason nobody felt particularly inclined to crank up the lawn mowers and the bush hogs until after the exterminators came and went.
One of the clubhouse committee, rather than stay inside of the infested clubhouse over-night, decided to sleep in his sleeping bag the first night, only to find at two-thirty in the morning, that there was a snake in the bag with him.
Moving as slow as he could, while wishing he could sprout wings and fly, he finally got free of the sleeping bag and proceeded to put as much distance as he could from the thing.
In the process, in the dark, in his bare feet, he kicked over a couple of fire ant hills.
Another member of the team, hearing the commotion running to the rescue, reached into his knapsack, pulled out a bottle, unscrewed the cap, and began dousing his feet and legs with Maker’s Mark bourbon. It stung like hell, but it didn’t do the fire ants any good either. Said the not to be named committee member later: "I sure wish I’d a knowed it was a king snake in that bed roll."
Yeah,well.

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary