The past several days have been a mix of yard work (very little but some), archery and finishing putting up rats.  It has been busy.  So, let me recap the host of events!

Saturday’s farm work went well.  We had another great crew to work the ditches and we finished the big long ditch from the creek, up through the rendezvous area to the pond and then from the pond to the main gate.  It was an all morning thing and when Bones and crew brought down the breakfast we had just finished up to the pond.  The timing was perfect!  And the breakfast was superb as well….eggs and ham!  The down side was Ducks egg was soooooo very “yolkie” he got a ton of it on his face and shirt…..GAG!  The rest of us enjoyed eating ours and watching him wipe his off.

Once the farm work was done, Weasel’s family and I went to an archery event…..The Utah State Archery finals.

We had signed up for our shooting to start at 3 p.m. and a couple of my mentors at the Brigham Bowmen talked me into playing.  Since all this archery stuff is all new to me, they told me there had to be at least 3 people sign up for any given “class” in order for them to create a bracket for that class.  So, I decided to play in the “traditional” bracket.  I’ve been shooting since January and can hit the target paper about half the time.  For me that is pretty good.  Mind you, I said hit the paper the target is printed on, not necessarily the target itself.  You have to figure that if I can hit the paper half the time, that some of them have to hit in the scoring ring sometimes too.  The target paper measures about 20 inches square and the target looks like the one in the flyer.  The white area scores 5 points and each ring coming away from the center score 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectfully.  Anything outside that are goose eggs.  I have learned I don’t like goose eggs but my score always contains several.  A hit on the paper itself and outside the rings is a goose egg and I managed to hit there and outside the whole paper many times on Saturday.

The shooters like Weasel who can hit the white area a lot, shoot at a different target.  There’s is 5 separate targets.

Their scoring is 5 points in the white, 4 points in the blue and zero anywhere else.  They do this so they don’t ruin arrows by hitting all of them in the center of the target.  Arrows are not cheap and any hit will cause the nock to break or become too weak to shoot again.  Robin Hoods are cool once you have an arrow sticking out of another and they give you bragging rights and something to hang on your wall.  Someday I will accidentally have one on my wall, I’m sure, but at a cost of the price of two arrows.

Squirrel shows us how dangerous it is to shoot all your arrows into the white.

Dangerous from his dad’s point of view, but giving him some confidence and bragging rights in his own mind.  I think he is not far off from shooting the “five spot” targets!

So, from this you can see that while I was flinging my arrows and trying hard to hit the big blue target, the kids were down at the other end of the shooting line, plunking arrows firmly into the white and blue rings with regularity.

Weasel, on the other hand, pulled a muscle in his back and ended up not shooting his normal 290 plus score.  When it was all over our scores looked like this:

Weasel 274, Conner 232, Kenzie 174, Squirrel 242 and me with a solid 132!

Chunking it all through a calculator, with 60 shots fired…..  Weasel averaged a 4.5, Conner 3.9, Kenzie 2.9, Squirrel 4.0 and me 2.2 per shot.  We all have much room for improvement.  And after everyone had shot and the scores and brackets were all figured up.  Weasel lost bad!  I think he was number 11 in his group.  Conner was the number one boy shooter in his bracket.  Kenzie was second in the girls of her age, Squirrel stomped his age group and came in with a number one and for an old guy shooting against only one other in my age bracket, they gave me a first.  My competition had a bad day and I felt really bad for him.  While my arrows were flinging all over the place especially in the last half of the competition (I had 12 goose eggs in the last 30 shots), his were doing the same or worse.  Oh well, that’s archery.

So, Congrats to everyone!  Kenzie, Squirrel and I shooting in our first ever competition!  It was fun and we will be doing it again….only with better results (I hope, I’m working on my game).

Monday came around quickly and Bob and I processed a bag of 50 rats that he had stored in his freezer from his days of trapping before I got started.  Today will be another rat day with the last of the rats from the freezer (another 50).  Once all of them are on stretchers, the season of rat caught will be done.  Bob started working over the traps yesterday, fixing them for next season and putting them in bags.  When the rats are finished drying on the stretchers our plan is to put them in bags and freezing them.  We have decided if we can’t get at least $6 straight through for them, it will be worth it to freeze them and try to sell them next year.  The price of rats is down because of several reasons….Oil prices in Russia, the world sanctions put on Russia for their invasion of Ukraine,  the flood of ranch raised mink during the past several auctions and I’m sure there are other factors suppressing the wild fur market.  Whatever the real reason, the price for rats is “in the tank” right now and a high dollar right now might get you $4 p/rat.  That price would barely cover our costs of trapping the rats, yet alone put any money in our pockets.  It is worth it to freeze them and hope the price comes up next year.

Ok!  I’m caught up now!  By the way “pi” has not paid off yet!

Bears Butt

March 18, 2015