Game theory

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I had mentioned a few posts back that there was a wild game butchering class coming up that I was thinking about attending. Well, Saturday was that day. Someone managed to bag a deer a day before the class, which was handy, so in addition to the sheep that they were keeping on hand ‘just in case’ we also got to use an actual deer.

I have gutted and disassembled plenty of deer. However, I have never actually butchered one. That is to say, I have never broken it down and processed it to the point where it was chunks of meat wrapped in butcher paper ready for the freezer. I usually knock the horns off, gut it, and haul it to the processor. The in-town processor, the oft-derided H&H Meats, closed a few years back leaving no in-town processor. SO, time to bone up (see what I did there?) on DIY. Why not? I have a vacuum sealer, a freeze dryer, a pressure canner, and a pair of deep freezes. As it turns out…I don’t have a good boning/fillet knife. Gotta fix that.

The class was pretty good. There were about a dozen people there and about 3/4 of the XX chromosome persuasion. The class was at the Missoula Urban District facility which is one of those lovely left-wing co-op type organizations that has parking lots full of Subarus and cars with ‘coexist’ bumper stickers. The brother/sister team of cutters teaching the class helpfully made to note their preferred pronouns on the whiteboard. Fortunately that was about the extent of the political self-identification.

The class was informative and these people clearly knew what they were doing. The gal doing the majority of the instruction was an absolute maestro with the knife. She would just point it at a cut of meat, slip the very tip pf the blade in, and the meat came apart like she was wielding a lightsaber.

Did I learn anything? Of course. Do I have the confidence to spend a day dissecting an elk, stuffing it into vacuum bags and getting it into a freezer? Mmmmmm :::hand waggle:::. More confident than I was, let’s say.

The gal teaching the class does butchering for people..I mean, on behalf of people..so I would guess that if I drop an elk, bring it to town, and throw some money at her I can just get it done that way. But, the apocalypse wont necessarily give me the option of hiring a pro to farm tasks out to, so its probably a good idea to take a class like this.

 

Coincidence?

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Microsoft email and Teams crapped out Thursday and then a ‘communications issue’ shut down all outgoing flights yesterday. Coincidence or a cyber attack?

You know the direction Im leaning in. I’m wondering if this was the first step in drawing our attention away from something about to occur.

Candid Camera XX

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Some people have mentioned difficulty viewing videos. Not sure what to tell you, man. Maybe switch browsers? I use Firefox and they show up fine.

Article – Meet The Montana Man Who Builds Luxury Doomsday Bunkers Across The Rockies

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From a steel fortress buried deep in the Rockies to Kanye West’s infamous concrete mansion, Bozeman, Montana, builder Andrew Mazzella has made a career out of projects that blur the line between survival, luxury and obsession.

Thirty feet beneath solid rock somewhere in the American West sits a 60-foot-long survival bunker, built for someone who wants a place to disappear when the world goes to hell.

Getting it there was no small feat.

I would think, discretion being kind of a requirement in that particular line of work, that he might want to be a little more low-key than having an article about him showing someone getting a shelter installed. But..you do you.

Would I love to have something like that? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But, I rather like the idea of something equally useful but above ground so I can enjoy that scenery I paid for.

 

Tax time

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The difference between death and taxes is that death does not get worse every year.

My property tax bill for my place here in town arrived the other day. And, my property tax bill for the Beta Site arrived today. Let’s see what we have here…

In town? A hair under $5000
Beta Site? A hair under $60 (and of that, $55 is ‘forester’. Actual taxes from mill levy stuff is $2.78)

Yeah, thats not a typo. In town I pay almost 100x what I pay at the Beta Site for 1/200th the acreage. Yes, 1/200th. And, of course, every non-property-owner in this town has a vote that counts as much as I mine. So when they want something new and shiny for the city to build, they can just vote for it because, hey, it’ll be those rich property owners paying for it and not us ‘working Montanans’. And yet, in the same breath, these people will whine about rents being absurdly high while never connecting those high rents to the property tax increases being passed along to them in their rent.

Both of these properties are 100% paid off, and yet I still have to pay for the privilege of just keeping them. Madness.

I need to go buy a bulldozer and a buncha concrete.

 

Candid Camera XIX

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Next year, by hook or by crook, I’m getting a muley tag and taking the swagger outta this guy….

Yeah, he’s prowling around up there looking for some action….

DIY cam tower…or…”How I accidentally built my own Flock camera”

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I’m very much enjoying the Starlink/Jackery/Eufy combo that lets me sit at my desk at work and periodically look at the Beta Site and, in that way, make my time at work a bit less tedious and pointless. I will have a much longer, detailed post at some point about how I set up the combo that has, so far, run the cameras pretty much non-stop for the last couple months.

But…

I usually mount the cameras to a handy tree. I have a lot of them (trees, that is) so it makes sense to find one that is appropriate and simply bolt the camera to it and let ‘er rip. But, sometimes it isnt that easy. I have to find a camera mounting point that is close to the area I want to cover, has a tree nearby enough to suit my needs, the line of sight has to be free of obstructions, and the branches have to be sparse enough that if I put the camera high up it isn’t obstructed. Sometimes that just isn’t possible and I have to compromise.

Necessity being the mother of invention, I tried to figure out what to do and, in the process, I accidentally basically created my own Flock camera.

I picked up some 15-gallon blue barrels off Facebook Marketplace and set one aside for experimental purposes. First thing I did was cut a hole in the bottom of the barrel and install a bulkhead for 1.5″ PVC pipe.

After that, I found a piece of 9′ PVC pipe that someone had scrapped and threw a threaded male adapter on the end.

That threaded end got screwed into the inside bottom of the barrel. So, you now have a barrel with a pipe sticking straight up out of it. Threw a couple 50# sandbags into the barrel on either side of the pipe to give it weight and ballast. Cut a hole in the barrel lid for the pipe and slid it down the pipe until it was snapped shut on the barrel mouth…there is now a sealed barrel with a pipe sticking up out of it. Slapped a tee at the top of the pipe to hang the camera and solar panel from and we’re done.

And when I saw it standing there in all of its Orwellian glory I realized I had just built a very Flock-looking device that was sure to attract attention if I left it in my yard. So..disassemble for transport.

But…not before we spraypaint everything camo so it doesn’t stick out too badly in the woods. I’ll screw some 2×4 to the bottom of the barrel as outriggers for a little extra stability and then I’ll have a portable put-it-anywhere camera setup to move around the Beta Site as needed.

And, of course, while I was up there I did my circuit of cameras and downloaded all the images for review. The usual assortment of mule deer, but…a return visitor we havent seen in a while:

A mountain lion. Datestamp says he was up there last Tuesday. I’m telling you, guys…its a gorram zoo up there. But at least he’s not running around with anti-tank mines….

Best laid plans

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Well, the plan was to head up to the Beta Site and get a few things done. Didn’t go that way. But, as always, lessons were learned.

I was on my way out of town when I realized I had forgotten to pick up some C-clamps. Since I was only a few blocks from Lowes, I swung by there, got what I needed, got back to the truck, put the key in, and..grrrgrrclickclickclick. Okay, it appears we have a battery issue. Fortunately, I was prepared for this. A few months ago I purchased a Milwaukee jump pack to keep in the truck for just such a crisis. Ir runs on the same M18 batteries all my other tools run on, so it seemed to make sense. Gear is only good when it works, so I picked up a protective case to protect the unit, battery, and accessories. I put a charged M18 battery in the case, taped a note on the case telling me when the battery was last charged (so I know when to inspect it. Check your gear, guys!), and tucked it away in the truck box. And today, I got to vindicate the expense and effort.

Once I had the engine running, I headed over to CostCo to get a new battery. Interestingly, CostCo was out of my particular battery size. Okeyfine, headed over to Napa and grabbed one. Got it put in and everything seems to work out fine.

But…while I am not a terribly superstitious person, I do accept the possibility that this is the universe telling me ‘dont go there today’. Is there anything up there today that won’t be there tomorrow? No. Is there anything I need to do that can’t be done tomorrow? No. So is there any practical reason, other than weather, that I should go today instead of tomorrow? Well…no. So why take unnecessary risk? I now have more time to get gear together, more time to review what I need to take up there, and more time to load the truck.

But…the lesson learned here was that having the jump pack in the truck was a worthwhile tactic. Sure, I was in a parking lot full of people and someone actually did offer to give me a jump start. But if this had happened up in the boonies it would be a different story…no one to rely on but yourself. So, have gear on hand just in case.