Whistling Badger Blog

Today, I got to head out to Red Canyon, ostensibly to hunt rabbits, but mostly to wander around, launch arrows at twigs and dirt clods, look for petroglyphs, confuse the daylights out of some muley does (I've been working on my fawn bleat; it still needs work), and generally let the magic of beautiful country wash the crud of a stressful week out of my head. It is hard for some people to believe that teaching elementary music can be stressful.  I won't go into the reasons here.  Those of you who work in the current education system need no explanation; the rest of you will have to take my word for it.  It isn't like being an EMT or an infantryman; there is no trauma or horror, but little things build up over time.  For me, nothing cleans out the old attic like an afternoon in the red cliff-juniper country. My rabbit arrows, despite being the wrong spine for my bow, were flying well.  No suicidal rabbits presented themselves as candidates for...

After all these years, I always thought that arrowing my first big game animal would be more...epic. For many years, every September has brought pictures to my mind of the screaming bull tearing apart trees even as the arrow speeds toward his ribs.  I imagined multi-hour stalks on big muley bucks.  I sort of figured I would have to fend off grizzly bears as I quartered my animal in the deep wilderness. As it happened, the big event took far longer than I ever imagined it would.  And when it finally happened, it was surprisingly straight-forward. I've had a rather tumultuous relationship with archery for around three decades.  My first bow cost me $15 at a garage sale:  a 70 pound, osage longbow backed with a strip of fiberglass that was starting to delaminate.  I mildly startled a few rabbits with it, but that was about as far as I got.  I never could really get the thing to full draw without my bow arm shaking....

AGE 4 July 18, 2013 Guy at the restaurant: Are you going to be a musician when you grow up? KT: No, I just wanna be a normal people when I grow up. July 18, 2013 On the trail Tuesday, with no context or preamble: I bet a forest fire would take out a mosquito. August 30, 2013 · Katie is performing a medical procedure on one of her princess dolls, using the tiny blow dryer from her dollhouse bathroom set. She is very intense about it. "I'm giving Jasmine some very special soap medicine. It hurts way more than a LOBSTER! But it's the ONLY WAY!" Dean Lehmkuhler: "On a scale from 0 to LOBSTER, how bad is your pain?" September 16, 2013 · You know it is a wet September in Wyoming when there are shore birds in the yard! We spotted this flock of snipe (the real kind, not the kind you send kids out to hunt) in the yard Sunday morning. I saw four; Katie saw "about a hundred." And she thought they were kingfishers, which resulted in some fun exp...

Katie has been part of our world for the better part of ten years now.  I know everyone thinks their kids are amazing, but...well, mine really is.  She is not without fault, of course, but I know her to be kind, obedient, humble, confident, and about as smart as any kid could possibly need to be.  She is also one of the happiest, most imaginative, most oddly insightful kids I've ever known. And yes, she still does that fluttery, Monty-Python-face thing when she's really happy about something or her imagination is working overtime. She also has a gift for words.  As a young child, she would play with words and ideas almost the way she played with toys:  Arranging them, making them into new forms, trying things out to see how they worked.  Sarah and I have collected some (not nearly enough) of her funny and odd little sayings on Facebook through the years.  Now at last I have collected them in one place. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:...