Her Stories Memoir Challenge: Month 3

 This month, our third in the HerStories Memoir Challenge, I have had the pleasure to read a wonderful story, titled:

The Blue Cotton Gown, A Midwife’s Memoir, by Patricia Harman

Most women, ages eighteen to eighty or so, have put themselves in a Blue Cotton Gown. Naked, scared and never comfortable, we can only hope to have a compassionate person like Harman to help us through our highs and lows as we experience life. The stories of the women, and of the author herself, will make you laugh, cry and at times, make you feel like you are there for the experience. It takes a brave, proud woman to show us her nakedness, her scares, her highs and lows with clean, straight forward writing about women’s lives being touched by a mid-wife.

 

Be sure to follow the link to the Memoir Challenge and read the lives of many fascinating women from all across the globe.

Lions, Tigers & Bears – oh My!

Be sure and go back and check out my blog entry last fall on Aug 8th about the bees.

Bees are important to the commercial and back yard gardener alike, and their numbers appear to be declining. I can’t tell that here in my portion of central Texas as I have bees everywhere. The title of this post? It comes from an email I sent earlier today. We’ve been experiencing some of our late season frosts again the past week and many people, myself included, are having to move plants in and out and in and out and …well, you get the picture. Last week, when I was moving IN a particularly lush potted lemon tree [as well as roses, Pineapple Sage and Hibiscus that haven't made it into the ground yet] – I accidentally moved in a few bees that were loving the free lemon flowers. The Lion – the March winds, roaring and rattling the garage doors. The Tigers – bees trapped in the garage where the roaring and rattling are going on. The Bear – those of us who are grumbling about moving all these plants around with the bees chasing me in their anger at not being given a choice where to spend the cold nights.  Fortunately, I think today the last of the bees have made their escape and they are happily enjoying the grapefruit, lemon, peach, mulberry and other blossoms around my yard. The wind dislodged hundreds of grapefruit blossoms and they are scenting up my house as we pick them up and places them in bowls in several rooms. Best air freshener I’ve had in awhile!

Heroes & Guns: Jamaica Wild

I’m having fun in this on-going series as I have the opportunity to get out and try or revisit some guns, including the holsters, saddle slings & other equipment; I get to reread work from my favorite authors and I get to discuss what I am reading with others. Wasn’t it someone from TV’s old series, “A-Team”, that said, “I love it when a plan falls together”?

So for my latest installment, I am pulling from two separate books of Sandi Ault’s Wild series. You must go visit her website at www.sandiault.com and see the gorgeous pictures of her wolves and read about all her extensive research. Meanwhile, enjoy:

Jamaica’s Pistol

In Wild Indigo, Jamaica is called upon to use her handgun to protect herself from a desperate Pueblo man and to  rescue a little boy. In the ensuing struggle, the Pueblo man, Hunter, throws a rock and knocks the gun from Jamaica’s grasp. As she scrabbles to the corner to get the gun, he grasps her legs and a hand to hand battle is on. ‘He moved toward the edge [a cliff] as I kicked and wriggled. He swung backward, ready to hurl me over the side, and I threw my arms behind his head and grabbed on tightly. Hunter roared again, and then suddenly released me onto the floor of the ruin. I dashed to the fire pit and grabbed the gun. I turned it on him and he raised his palm as if to stop the bullet, the other hand clutching his chest. We stood gasping, both of us, staring at each other, gulping air, the rain and hail pounding us.’ [Wild Indigo by Sandi Ault, published January 2007 by Berkley Prime Crime]

 

Again, in Wild Sorrow, the gun comes out as Jamaica, her wolf Mountain and her horse Rooster are caught out in a blizzard and need to find shelter with a murder victim they had discovered in an abandoned Indian school building. Not knowing if the murderer is still around, ‘I led Rooster through a blinding whiteout to the door. Once I had tied the reins to the door handle, I opened my saddlebag and grabbed a flashlight and my LED headlamp. I drew my handgun out of my pocket, then slid through the narrow opening and looked around…’ [Wild Sorrow by Sandi Ault, published March 2009 by Berkley Prime Crime]

 

What is this gun that Jamaica has to pull several times from her under coat or belt holster? Her gun of choice on and off duty is a SigSauer P229. The day of the six shooter is becoming a fast retreating memory as American law enforcement agencies are readily accepting the semi-auto pistol. This particular gun combines high round capacity together with a serious big bore cartridge that is readily and commonly available, and it does it in a package that is both light to carry and reliable to shoot.

 

There are good and bad sides to the equation, “Is this gun for me?” or more importantly, “Is this a gun that Jamaica should carry?” I think, absolutely. Let’s take the bad first: The only true slight downsides I’ve found with this gun are when taking it out on the range for a couple hours of practice, the recoil when using the .40 SIG can be fatiguing and the P229 is a bit larger and heavier than what I would consider for recommending as a conceal carry gun for a person of smaller build. For Jamaica, a woman in great shape, this would not be a problem. On the heavily weighted GOOD side of the scale, it has a double action trigger pull with a decocking lever that is simple and easy to teach to those shooters who formerly carried revolvers. Once you have your own particular gun sighted in and your chosen stance, you cannot blame this gun for bad accuracy – that would be what I call, ‘user error’. The gun impressed me with its accuracy, even in a quick moving tactical course. The grip is well designed, comfortable and serves a double purpose of making the rearward recoil push more straight back than can be felt in some competing models. The P229 comes in models for 9mm Luger, .357 SIG and .40 S&W, all of which ammo is common to purchase and easy to reload. The patented automatic firing-pin lock gives an added safety advantage and there are no complicated firing sequences with the double action/single action semi-automatic. This is a seriously good self-defense and law enforcement pistol and a gun I would want to carry in any of the action packed scenarios experienced by BLM Agent Jamaica Wild.

Heros & Guns – Jamaica’s Shotgun

With special thanks to author Sandi Ault and her book Wild Inferno. Visit her site at www.sandiault.com

In Wild Inferno, the Hotshot crews are getting a briefing before they go out to fight a wild fire that is blazing through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. While on patrol, Jamaica herself often carries a Remington 870 Super Magnum Pump-Action Shotgun. Here is a brief excerpt from Wild Inferno showing one of the uses of this gun:

 

The wildlife agent took over the briefing: “This she-bear may be reluctant to take her baby near the highway or down through the black where it’s already burned. And they’re starving. We’re going to try to get up there and bait some traps so we can capture them and transport them to someplace safe. But in the meantime” – he held up a double-barrel pump—“we need to talk about these shotguns—a couple of these have already been issued to the crews in that area”.

            Some of the firefighters laughed and joked about bear hunting season being open, but the wildlife agent held up his hand to stop them.

“These shotguns will only be used to fire a beanbag round. That’s a strong nylon pouch with about forty grams of lead shot inside. The beanbag is inserted into a standard twelve-gauge shotgun shell. When that shell is fired, the bag is expelled at around two hundred ninety feet per second. In flight, it spread out and distributes the impact over about six centimeters of the target. It is meant to deliver a blow that will minimize long-term trauma with no penetration, but will briefly render the animal prone and immobile. Now, this beanbag round has a maximum range of around sixty-five feet, but it’s inaccurate over about eighteen or nineteen feet. The idea here is to stun the bear and give you time to get away, not to harm the bear.

“This is just for your safety….” [Wild Inferno by Sandi Ault, Publ. by Berkley Prime Crime, Feb 2008]

 

As a defensive tool, the Remington 870 is a fantastic choice for Jamaica and, often, may be found in use by BLM agents, Forest Rangers, military and even your local police department. The beanbag round mentioned is a common device used for putting down wild life, or even persons, when you wish to stun or impair them, but not necessarily to do permanent, penetrating harm. The gun has versatility, reliability and a very dependable action that make this one of the most sold and highly praised shotguns in today’s market.

 

My personal experience with this gun can be summed up in one cliché, to borrow an advertising term> ‘it takes a lickin but keeps on tickin’. First of all, my shotgun of choice for hunting and for personal protection is a pump action. They are easy to learn and easy to use. The 870 uses a bottom-loading, side ejecting receiver which, after 1000’s of rounds, does not seem to jam easy unless there is ‘user error’. Yes, it is a very rugged gun that functions reliably under the very worst of conditions and is durable enough that after a hard life with you, it will still function well for the person you pass it on to – with an almost guaranteed bang for every trigger pull. It’s heavy enough to absorb the shock but not too heavy that it puts an undue strain on you. There are many variations of the Remington 870 with availability in 10, 12, 16, 20 gauge [also a 410 bore], barrel lengths from 18 to 30 inches and weight from 7 to 8 pounds. A handy tool or a sportsman’s friend, this pump action shotgun has a 4 to 8 round internal tube magazine that can chamber up to the 3 ½ inch shell. Because its components are produced on high-speed production machinery, the gun has far out paced the earlier guns that required precision machined parts and hand tooling that made earlier guns much more expensive and time costly to produce. Parts are readily available and interchangeable should something break. It’s affordable, simple to maintain, easy to learn use of and just plain fun to shoot. Jamaica has my stamp of approval on her personal choice of shotguns.

New Peeps

Here are some of the new babies we got for our new flock of egg layers. These are Buff Orringtons and they lay brown eggs. Hopefully, if my gender testing skills were working, they will all be females. If we end up with a rooster, you will hear about him in our stew pot in a couple months.

Hello-ee Anole

 This is our friend Anal. All winter long, when the weather is warm enough, he will come out and hang on this pole to catch some warmth. Sometimes, his female companion will hang out on the leaf behind him. They live somewhere around this Sego Palm. Now that the weather is almost always warm enough, we usually can find the Anole frolic around the pond or warming on this pole to greet us as we walk by. I’ve even seen them go so far as to lick the Hummingbird food off the leaves of the sego when the feeder dripped or lick the dew off the leaves when we have had a dewey or foggy morning. We see babies every year too and know there are at least two males as we see them posturing at each other frequently. Sometimes, one of the guy lizards, usually the smaller one, sits on my window screen of my office window and watches me work. I’ll know he is there by the shadow he casts on my desk, then I’ll open the blinds and watch him. It’s funny how much tiny life goes on around a little pond outside my window. For example, one of the fish in the Koi pond decided to jump out. Fortunately, I found it flapping on the side before it expired and tossed it back in the pond. Today it is doing just fine. Fish, birds, frogs, toads, snakes, lizards, hummingbirds, a Red Tail Hawk, the Mockingbird that sits on the ceremic frog to drink – and more. All the wonderful life in this little bitty private garden outside my window.

Last of the Red Bud

Every year I say I am going to take pictures of one of our Red Bud trees and every year I’m too late. I have an early bloomer in the back yard, it’s almost all green now, and a fickle one that blooms one side early and one side late. This is the one I have pictures of today. Where I grew up, you knew it was spring, or would be shortly, because of all the Dogwood, Apple and Cherry Blossoms. There are very few (but some) Dogwoods around here but plenty of these gorgeous Red Buds.

Elevator stories

It seems many people have ‘elevator stories’ to tell, whether they are funny, heart warming, scary or otherwise. Almost everyone, I believe, has some kind of ‘feeling’ about elevators. For me, when I think of them, I think of something that happened around 1974-75. Although I was only a teenager, my parents had taken me to Las Vegas with them for a short vacation. Mom and dad did not like to gamble much, I’ve never even heard of them losing more than maybe $25 in a day. They didn’t often drink, and when they did, it was not much. But they loved to go to the shows, the bright lights of the Strip and little side trips to places like Henderson, Hoover Dam and the twisty rocky canyons nearby. Not part of this story, but in 1963 we were IN the belly of Hoover Dam when news reached us that Kennedy had been shot.

Here’s the elevator story. My folks, my aunt & uncle and myself had been to a late dinner show in the Sahara. My aunt & mom had maybe had a couple too many drinks (more than one made my mom silly) and decided they needed to go back to the room. As a reluctant teenager, I followed them, but not closely. For once, this holding back paid off. As the gals weaved their way, slightly off kilter, to the elevator, two men headed for the same bank of elevators behind them, not realizing that I was following or part of the group. One of the men starts mocking and apeing the way my mom was walking, but in a much more exaggerated manner. I have to admit, it was funny to see. Then, mom & auntie reached the elevator, pushed the button and the doors parted; to reveal solid mirrored walls. They look up, stepping in, and see these two guys mimic-ing their movements. The two guys stop their antics and STEP INTO THE ELEVATOR with the ladies, not realizing (or maybe not caring?) that they had been caught. I rush to get in as the doors start to close, and much to my surprise, find that it is Jerry Lewis that had been doing all the kidding around. Nobody dared look at each other, it was actually funny considering the entire elevator was mirrored, so no matter how you averted your eyes from the other people, you could see the others in the mirrors. JL has the decency to blush. Not a word was said that entire ride, and it was many floors. As we got out of the elevator, at a much lower floor than the comedians, it was all we could do to wait for the doors to close before we burst into laughter. I remember mom, clutching her stomach and laughing so hard, with the words, “Oh, oh, I gotta pee, stop laughing you two, I can’t take it.”

I know, you had to be there – but this was one of the fond memories I have of my mom, enjoying our deep, can’t look at each other or we’ll bust out again, laughter moments.

Hummingbird – or not?

Tonite I saw the cutest thing – it looked like a baby Hummingbird, but I immediately knew what it was – a Hummingbird moth! The picture I will place here is not my own, it comes from www.bird-n-garden.com.  I wasn’t quick enough to get inside and get a camera before my husband scared it away. Our visitor was feasting on the lemon tree blossoms.  This one looked identical though!

 Last year, in February, I actually saw my first out of season Hummingbird, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for my first visitor of the year. The weather has been very strange and we have even already had our first June bug! Butterflies have been here year round – we could have a freeze one day, followed the next by little yellow butterflies. They especially love the pineapple sage plant, so we plan to expand that plant just for the B-flies.

Sprouting in my garden, despite the last two nights’ freezes: white & yellow onions, crocus, gladiola, tomatoes & potatoes. Indoors we have tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, radishes,  chives, borage, zucchini, cilantro and more. Last year’s herb gardens were sheltered in the freezes, so there are dozens of recovering plants there as well. Hibiscus & rose are both in bud and ready to bloom. (I have the most wonderful orange Hibiscus plant for teas) One peach tree has already gone past bloom and into fruit; this one we often lose to last April ice storms - the nectarine and other peach trees wait until later to bloom. The deer are attacking the blossoms of everything they can reach, so the battle has begun. They are tired of feasting on my shrubs and want something fresh. Maybe I can stuff one more deer in the freezer…nah. Need to leave room for the spring fish. Fresh bass just the other day!