JINKSTO

When you click on a photo in Facebook it takes you to the album with that picture.  If you click the picture again it’ll take you to the next photo in  that album.  I sometimes do this just to look back and remember what I’ve posted.  Then I thought, heck some of these need to be on the blog.  Here are a few from this year that I think are cool.. with original Facebook captions:

When you live in foreign lands like North Carolina you have to have basic needs imported.

A New Hobby

There’s something poetic about finished wood resting on the cold steel used to shape it. If I find a poet I’ll let you know what it is. Ooooh pretty is all I got.

Easy is as easy…

Bird house holder $20 or $8 for 3 feet of rolled steel and 10 minutes with a torch. [Note the Christmas lights still up at the end of January? How about the non-functional satellite dish?  Sometimes documenting your redneckness is easy.]

At least it’s not in Spanish

Metric or imperial I don’t care. Just freaking PICK ONE!

Fry it!

I love that sound. Catfish rock.  … this one has a comment after it that says: Also, I’m told that the dirty stove is completely my fault and that I should have cleaned it up before taking a picture and putting it on the Internet.

Chilling

Might go for a ride later… If I can find the bike.

The Mist

Livin in a cloud today

[no caption… just me and mrs jinksto in a local small town diner]

Nanny taught you to make pudding and now you’re teaching me. That’s almost like Nanny teaching me. Damn these chopped onions.

Scrubbing the table. It’s 48 degrees you won’t even get a little frostbite. Drama queen. #L’ilMatchGirl  … Comment: (after much abuse by doting relatives about child labor laws) “Surprise: He lived through it and scored hot chocolate from Aunt J.”

Hunting

(no caption)

Heh I just saw myself

Some days it’s worth it to drive an hour and half and then walk two
miles in the dark just to prove that the sun will come up in that place.

Not much hope in killing a deer while laying down and drinking coffee
but some morning are so perfect that it’s worth it.

Wanna save the world? Stop buying Mylar balloons. I find several every year in the woods. This week I found two on the same day in the middle of Uwharrie National Forest.

What did your office look like today?

Today’s hunting picture is for cousin J who doesn’t like climbing trees. 🙂 [Note “cousin J” had a negative reaction to the heights in the previous couple of photos.  I’m just picking on her a little.]

Rum Cake

You’ve gotta love a pot that size.

That’ can’t turn out bad.  (it didn’t)

[no caption]

This entire structure is concrete. Siding, shingles, everything. The ony things not concrete are the toilet seat, the window and the door. Amazing feat of engineering. I’ll bet it’s tougher’n a brick shithouse.

[no caption] Kicking off a pigroast at 3am or so… thought it was cool how the coals showed up as purple.

[no caption]

The $50 potable pig roasting pit.

Comment: ?*CAUTION* untrained redneck engineers built this device. It may or may not serve its intended purpose. It may be used for other purposes when not used for its primary purpose. Other uses may include, tire chocks, home leveling, impromptu step ladder, trot line weights, temporary sidewalks, retaining walls, car jacks, car ramps, bicycle ramps, lawn edging, book shelves, bed frames, coffee table, door stops or other uses as required.

God Bless America.

Sometimes the late night chat conversations can get a little sideways…  For what it’s worth, the stuff about my home town; all true (or as nearly as I recollect *cough*). 

Except the Indians win a State Championship a lot more often than that.  The girls team has something like Nine State Championships over the last hundred years or so.  The Boy’s team… not so much.

Oh, and, the local diners food was actually a rather good home-style meal…I don’t care what the health department said.

9:25 PM <bubba>  not sure He got the memo that we’re one team
9:25 PM <bubba> and we’re here to serve the business
9:26 PM <me> Like the diner in my hometown.
9:26 PM <me> Sit down, you’ll eat what we bring you.
9:27 PM <bubba> that diner has a monopoly on needed services
9:28 PM <me> Nah, there’s a burger shack across the street built in the shape of a giant teepee.
9:29 PM <bubba> stop contradicting my similes
9:29 PM <me> School mascot is an err.. native American
9:30 PM <bubba> I believe you meant to say "indigenous casino owner"
9:30 PM <bubba> that’s how they’re properly referred to these days
9:31 PM <me> Welcome to Anacoco Louisiana Home of the "Indigenous Casino Owner’s"  (State Champs 1953)
9:31 PM <me> Doesn’t have the same ring to it really
9:31 PM <bubba> that’s a road sign worth having
9:32 PM <bubba> why is there such a resistance to naming schools after people from India?
9:33 PM <me> You know how people hate outsourcing.
9:33 PM <bubba> good point
9:48 PM <me> Actually, I think the teepee is gone and there’s a bank branch there now so this whole conversation fell apart.
9:48 PM <me>  … Which is fine because I’ll probably use it to write a blog post anyway.

Also, I’ve gotta say, that it’s cool being from somewhere that my spell checker identifies as a typo. 

You wake up just wanting to tell somebody off.  The naysayers and doubters throughout life who have held you back (or tried to) are good targets.   Those who never believed in you.  Who smirked at your accent or laughed at your redneck understanding of the world.

For those folks, this:

And, yeah… I shouldn’t feel that way… and I try not to so its just some days.

She stands barefoot on the front porch in sweats and a t shirt.   Arms crossed, feet together on one of those, “not cold enough for a jacket but cold enough to make you glad it only takes the dog a minute to go”, nights. She’s waiting for the dog to, well, go.

I walk outside and hold her from behind, warming her, sharing the moment.  We stare up into the night sky that God has forged from the darkness this night.  Partly cloudy skies black out the stars in huge masses.  The moon shines brightly through a hole; its light cascading out onto the face of the clouds making them beautiful even as they try to hide its light.

As we watch, the hole begins to shrink rapidly toward the moon.  It’s brightness dimming barely at all.

“It looks like the moon is sucking the clouds in toward it.” she says.

I watch for a second and she’s right.  It does look that. 

I kiss her quietly on the top of the head and say softly, in my best Science Fiction B Movie voice, “Yeaaah, that’s not gonna be good”.

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When you write a blog regularly you sometimes get free posts from folks.  You’ll start to write a reply to a comment on another post and after 30 minutes of writing you realize that it’ll make a pretty good post itself.  This one is thanks to Ms Betty who commented on my Christmas post with this comment:

Here’s what I wrote as a response:

Thank you for the kind words. 

I’d like to write a book someday, maybe, but the trick (as with most things) is getting started and staying started..  I like the short essay’s that I do here because I don’t have to do a lot of work to keep the story together for long.  Unfortunately, I believe that most publishers consider blogs to be “tainted” in some way and require unpublished “new” content.

Another problem is that I have a lot to learn.  I passed all four years of high school English (actually, I took and passed all four my senior year.) and studied literature a bit in college but that’s about it. My grammar is horrible (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.  It’s the “not” times that bother me. ).

My punctuation is always punctual but I tend to put comma’s anywhere I want, rather than where they should be.  Periods I’m good with though and semi-colon’s which are the most fun because they make you look smart and no one else really understands the rules for using them regularly anyway.  Other punctuation is pretty much reserved for making smiley faces.  Also, my vocabulary is tiny and I wouldn’t know a preposition from a proposition so I stay away from places where either might be invoked for a purpose.

That said, I did start a book, once, in college.  At some point I determined that if I wrote a page a day I’d have something worth reading at the end of the year.  That was 16 years ago; I’m still on page 3.

Again, thanks for the kind words.  I very much appreciate that people get some small measure of joy out of the stuff that I write.  It makes it very much worth it.

If you like what I write, you should check out Michael Perry’s "Population 485".  He’s an amazing author that focuses his books on rural folks in a similar style to the way that I write (though, he’s much better at it).  Or, just keep reading here. 

I could share the normal platitudes about Christmas being a “time for sharing” and “family”, but everyone does that.  I could go the other route and remind you that Christmas is a celebration of the Advent and Christmas.  I could.  But why bother really?  Either you are a Christian who believes that and nothing that I say could convince you otherwise (not that I would try) or you’re not and nothing that I say here will change your mind so let’s take that as a given; Christmas is a time of year that Christians celebrate the birth of Christ with family (My definition, if you don’t like it get your own).  My story is more about understanding why Christmas is special to me.  It’s not those reasons, not really, but they’re closely intertwined.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere here that I grew up poor in a rural and generally poor community.  We didn’t know that we were poor.  I mean, I guess someone knew it but he wasn’t sharing with us kids.  There were things that we wanted that we couldn’t have but our parents always did a great job of making sure that we had what we needed.   There seemed to always be money for the occasional coke (of any flavor… even pepsi (it’s a southern thing)) or a couple of bucks for a new toy on our birthdays.  We didn’t get to go to the mall but there was a Christmas parade in town that was (after the parish fair of course) the event of the year. 

The Christmas Parade had horses and floats and brand new tractors from the farm supply store.  There were Shriners on those little Go Carts who would do donuts and figure eights and all kinds of crazy stunts just inches from the kids lining the street.  There were the folks from over at the VFW who would walk among the crowd and pass out little flags for you to wave whether you gave them money or not and there was the usual array of small town floats made out of some farmers utility trailer and still smelling a bit like the manure that he had hauled with it the week before.  There was “the most beautiful woman in the world” which was usually the local rodeo queen riding in a convertible loaned out by the local Ford dealership.  There were people you knew and had known for your entire life but you couldn’t play with them.  The parade was about getting out and meeting people so a wave, a hand shake or two and it was on to see who else you knew.  They even had Santa Clause stop by every year for a ride on the fire engine and who wouldn’t?  *I* certainly would have driven in from the north pole for a chance to ride on that big shiny truck with all of the lights flashing… still would. 

The mall?  The mall was 58 miles away and kinda bare even then. Phhttt… rich kids.

People from that area didn’t collect toys for the poor because, well, you might be on the list to get one! Being poor wasn’t something that happened to other people, it was a fact of life.  We were all poor and it didn’t fundamentally change our lives except that we learned not to want things that we couldn’t have.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, we collected toys for the orphans over at Saint Michaels (I learned at an early age that Catholics have more orphans than anyone) but we were Baptist so, no orphans.  If you were going through a particularly rough time you might find a Hefty sack of “gently used” clothing on your porch one afternoon after church but no one would show up with a newspaper crew to give your kids Christmas presents.  Our charity was subtle, quiet, respectful.

On Christmas Eve, just before bed time, Mom would let us open one gift each.  That gift was ALWAYS a set of pajama’s that we’d immediately change into and then be sent to bed.  No matter how hard we tried to pick a different gift she always managed to work it so that we ended up with those PJ’s to sleep in on Christmas night.  As we got older and caught on she resorted to putting them in large oddly sized boxes that just HAD to be an awesome gift. 

When we went to sleep on Christmas Eve there were no visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads because… well… what the hell is a sugar plum anyway?  Rich kids in the city might get sugar plums but by the time that Santa passed by our community the preserved fruit pickings were pretty slim.  We had dried figs once, the year mom won a food dehydrator from somewhere… that’s about as close as we ever got.

Chestnuts over an open fire?  Nope.  Nary a one.  We didn’t even HAVE an open fire.  We had a gas heater because that was cheaper, (even in the 70’s) than firewood. It was a big wall mounted heater that was set in such a way as to heat rooms on both sides of the wall.  Ours was between the kitchen and the living room.  To save money we didn’t run the heat at night so mom or dad would light it first thing in the morning before we were rousted out of bed.  It was always a race to see who could get a premium spot next to the heater for getting dressed on really cold mornings.  You’d hear the “splat, splat, splat” of little bare feet on hardwood floors followed by teeth chattering as we got as close as we could to the warmth.   You’d stand there mostly naked and put your clothes on, socks first, as fast as you safely could. The heater would leave little squares branded on your ass for the rest of your life if you bent over in the wrong way to get your socks on.  Which reminds me, personal quirk:  I ALWAYS put my socks on first when getting dressed.  I think this explains why.

When we put up our Christmas tree mom and dad would take us on a drive through the woods.  We’d look for the bright green patches through the leafless hardwoods that would indicate a small stand of eastern red cedar trees.  Each time one was spotted we’d stop, and everyone would trek through the woods to check them out until you found the perfect tree.  It had to be full with no bare spots and just the right height.  When I got older we were sent into the woods behind the house with a handsaw to get a tree.  My brother and I could spend all day walking those woods looking for a perfect tree. There were no “purchased” trees that I knew about back then and anyone that had an artificial tree was just a little odd. (still are if you ask me).

We didn’t get a lot of gifts and the ones that we did get were taken care of for years.  I still remember the Christmas’s that I got the “big” gifts.  My first BB gun, my first bicycle, my first shotgun.  All were cherished and maintained carefully.  We didn’t get big gifts on our birthdays, only Christmas, and we certainly didn’t get more than a few gifts. All of our gifts were wrapped with exceptional care and attention.  They were individual works of art created with love and paper recycled from previous years.  Mom would hand make the bows out of scraps of ribbon from her sewing kit.  I try to spend the same effort wrapping presents today but I’m nowhere near as good as she was.

Mom would always cook Christmas dinner for us.  We didn’t have a lot but we had standard holiday fare.  Turkey, shot by dad.  Beans, carrots, squash, greens (mustard and turnip) and corn all grown by dad.  Cornbread ground from corn that we had grown and Yams made from sweet potato’s from the garden.  Chocolate pie, butter pie (actually cheese cake) and, of course, mom’s banana pudding.    The banana pudding was homemade, from scratch, with real ingredients.  When my nephew was out here for Thanksgiving I taught him to make it as well.  At one point he looked over and said, “Nanny taught you to make pudding and now you’re teaching me. That’s almost like Nanny teaching me.”  I had to leave the room.

We went to church every Sunday.  We went to church a few extra times around Christmas for the Christmas cantata and other events but there wasn’t a lot of difference.  We celebrated Christ’s life and the gifts that He granted us through His death all through the year.  On Christmas we celebrated His birth.  It’s hard to explain to folks but there wasn’t a lot more “Jesus” in the world around Christmas, at least not for us.  We were celebrating a single day in His life the same way that we celebrate every other day that He walked among us.  The same as we celebrate His death and His resurrection. No one had to remind us that “Jesus is the reason for the season” because we never forgot. Ever. Not on Christmas and not on any other day of the year.

Christmas isn’t a biblical Holy day but most Christians seem to have forgotten this.  They ask, “What are you doing to remember Christ during Christmas?” which is an ( probably unintentional ) insult.  Why would I need to do more to celebrate Christ just because it’s his birthday?  The answer, “Nothing more than I would do to remember you on your birthday,” doesn’t always make people smile but it’s true.  Maybe they should study up the other 364 days out of the year?

So that’s Christmas to me.  Memories.  Faith. Family. Community. Santa Claus. Gifts. Food.  All wrapped into one joyous celebration for the birth of our Savior.  Some would call it less than enough focus on Christ.  Those people need to pray on it and get over being jealous of my very full heart. 

Others would call it forcing Christ into others lives as part of what has become a corporate holiday.  They can play at hypocrisy and adoption of a traditional Christian holiday (not Holy Day) if they want but like the Christians that I find wanting, they won’t have much luck ruining the holiday for me and mine.   Maybe they should pray on it as well?  Mayhap Buddha has an answer for them… somewhere…

For me?  I’ll spend the day with family.  Presents with my wife at daylight followed by Brunch with my nieces and then hooking up with the Hines for a day of enjoying my community of friends.  It is enough.  it is more than enough.

For the folks that read this blog.  Please, have very Merry Christmas. 

— Jinksto

P.S If your mom is around on this Christmas holiday take the time to give her a special and heartfelt hug.   You’ll wish you had more of those one day.  I promise.

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Occasionally when I’m working too hard I’ll get an email with a subject that says something like “7 pictures for you”.    In my email window I can see a summary of the mail and that says, “You have been sent 7 pictures. followed by a list of “descriptive” file names.  Usually along the lines of IMG_3681-1.JPG. 

I always stop and have a look as soon as I can because I know that the email is from my favorite wildlife photographer.  I suspect that a “professional” wildlife photographer might have comments on contrast and lighting and “subject composition” but me, I can’t tell the difference between these and the stuff that get’s slapped into the glossy pages of National Geographic (except that there’s less (and by less I mean none!) indigenous nudity.).

Looking at these pictures always reminds me that no matter how many computers and monitors I have going and no matter how many countries are represented on the call that I might be on that just outside my window is an awesome world.  Because, well, it is just outside my window.  She sits in the next room with your tripod and her 17 foot lens and takes pictures with a camera that can double as a GPS for my truck… or… heck probably as a navigation computer for the space shuttle (on sale by the way).  When she thinks she has a few good ones I get an email.

Here are the ones from today:

Not bad eh?  ‘scuse me while I stare out the window for a while.

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A few weeks ago I posted a question in “Manly?” about how to explain to young men what it means to be a man.

Rob and I have discussed this repeatedly since then and sought input from a lot of people.  He’s come up with a list of five points that I’d like to share with you.  His descriptions are slightly different but the general points are the same.

A Man Should Know How to:

1. Glorify God
   God commands it.  It is, in fact, the purpose of man so it sort of has to be first on the list.  I believe that everything in the bible rolls up into this.  For that matter, everything that follows does too. It has the shortest description but is larger than all of the rest together.
   * Character
   * Honesty
   * Faith
   * Honor
   * Sacrifice
2. Pursue a Woman
   One. Singular.  You don’t “catch” a woman when you get married. You’re not done.  You’re never done.  Your entire life should be about (as Rob notes) perfecting the pursuit of the one woman that has agreed to be with you. Every morning, every day, every night should be about pursuit of that woman.  She is your second half and she completes you.  Without her you are half a man.
   * Commitment
   * Comfort
3. Raise a family
   I’m at odds on this having been led not to have children but I can still get behind it.  We’re talking about knowing how to do things.  I would submit that it’s better to know how and not do than it is to try and not know how.  Far better.   Reading my blogs you’ll see that I have a fairly good understanding of the process and, if you want, I can get references.    In the end, if you are a man as defined by this list then you should know how to do this.  You should be able to lead others in doing it.
   * Provider
   * Father
   * Counselor
   * Guide
4. Live in Community
   That doesn’t mean a “global community” whatever that is.  It doesn’t mean “pay your taxes and know that they’re going to support someone who needs it.”

   It means, seeing a need and solving it.  It means being available to your community to assist them.  It, also means, accepting help from your community when you need it.
     
   To live in community means living as a larger family with your neighbors and ensuring that you are moving forward as one. It means sacrificing time that you don’t have and giving money that you can’t spare to help someone that truly needs it. 

   It’s easy to say, “I’d love to help but I just don’t have time.”  It’s even easy to prove that you don’t have the time.  I work 60-80 hours a week and still find the time.  Sometimes I have to sacrifice things that I “want” to do in order to find the time.  Being a man is hard.
   * Teacher
   * Aid
   * Giver
   * Sharing
   * Leading

5. Wage War
   Meaning exactly what it says.  You must be able to wage war.  You must be able to defend against evil and, let’s be clear, evil exists in many forms.  In fact, evil exists in every form imaginable because man’s imagination helps to create it. 

   You must protect your right to glorify God whether that is having the intellectual capacity and training to argue for his existence or the ability to fight for your right to worship Him.

   You must be able to protect your wife.

   You must be able to protect your family. 

   You must be able to protect your community. 

   How you do those things can vary.  The ability to wage war doesn’t mean that you reach for a gun, or a knife, or even a club every time something doesn’t go your way.  It means that you defend what is yours when it needs defending and do it in a measurable and justifiable escalation.  Run into my car and I’ll forgive you. I’ll tell you not to worry about it.  Break into my house and threaten my wife and I’ll shoot you in the face.  That’s graphic but it explains my thought.  This also means waking up every day and making war with yourself…. with sin in your life.
   * Security
   * Liberator

Here are Rob’s thoughts on the same topics.

If you posted a comment on “Manly” and don’t see it listed here don’t fret.  Everything listed there is here.  We just thought that it falls into one of the other categories.  I’ve gone back and listed attributes that I think fit into one of these categories and I haven’t been able to think of any that doesn’t fit.  If you can I’d love to hear it.

A couple of notes:
We’re not expected to get all of this right every day but we are expected to get them all right often.  As you grow into a more perfect man you should be able to get them right more often.  This “softening of the line” isn’t reason to excuse failing though.  It’s just to say that no one is perfect.  We all get get some of these things wrong.  This is reason to try harder.

Though we are addressing men specifically here many of the same values apply to young ladies.  Some of them are slightly different and some are completely different but they are all just as important.  This exercise was to solve a specific problem.  We haven’t needed to address these things with the ladies because, well; they’re perfect, my nieces.   Everyone knows that.

Finally, thank you to each of the people that left a comment on the original post.  As I noted earlier, your ideas were invaluable and we truly do appreciate the thought and honesty that you put into the comments.  This is probably one of the most serious posts that I’ve ever written on this blog and will have the most far reaching impact of anything that I’ve ever written.  You responded with the reason and depth of thought that the topic deserved.  I feel truly blessed to have such wonderful people in my life.

P.S. I’d never shoot you in the face.  It’d be Center Mass until I run out of bullets.  For anyone considering threatening my wife, I hope that makes you feel better.

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The fad this week is to change your Facebook Profile picture into a cartoon character if you support the fight against child abuse.  I haven’t done it.  I’ve seen several threads discussing the value of this and tonight, someone asked me in exasperation, “what harm is in it to just raise awareness?” and I provided the following explanation:

The harm, I think, is that it allows people to believe that they have done something. Which, as <the original poster> pointed out, they haven’t; not really.

No one’s eyes are closed about child abuse. We all know that it happens, highlighting that it happens just to remind people doesn’t make it better and it doesn’t change the way a kid with a black eye feels about it.

What does help is donating money to people that do help or, even, volunteering to help yourself. Tonight several hundred thousand people will go to sleep feeling smug about helping to combat child abuse. There will also be something like 120,000 bruised children going to sleep tonight praying that someone, anyone, will do something more than flip a few bits on his or her facebook page.

This weekend, Rob and I took some young men camping where we talked about how to grow into men.  Friends that replied to my blog post “Manly?” about this helped a great deal.  Thank you.

All of these young men come from divorced houses and though they’re not “abused” in the traditional sense they are missing traditional role models. They are struggling to understand what growing up means.

Left to themselves I don’t know what would happen.  Maybe they’d turn out fine or maybe they’d learn to drink too much beer and hit kids.  I don’t think it’s something to experiment with.

In the last year we’ve seen these young men volunteer to do work in the community, we’ve talked with them about problems at home and at school. We’ve talked to them about drugs, alcohol and sex.  All of them are on the B honor roll or higher now and none of them are parents or have been arrested. We even saw one of them baptized.  Personally, I count that as a tentative success.

I’m often surprised at how eager these young men are to learn when given the opportunity.  We constantly correct them.  We don’t cut them much slack at all. We make them work, sometimes hard and yet, they always come back for more.  In some cases they ask us to show them how to do specific things.  They want to be good people and are trying so very hard at making themselves into that.  They’re just not sure how yet but they’re getting there. 

So, no, I won’t be changing my profile pic to a cartoon to show my support for stopping child abuse… I’m a bit busy actually stopping it.

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We have a cockatiel.  His name is Kiwi.  The bird annoys me regularly but I have to admit that he’s pretty cool to have around.  Mrs. Jinksto, loves the damned thing.  A lot. 

He sits with her as she reads, she scratches his head, they sing together and talk to one another, they share plates of food and, once or twice, a shower.  Don’t ask.   He’s her buddy.

Several years ago we loaded up the camper and headed to a state park in Illinois for a weekend trip.  It was winter time but we needed to get away for a bit and our camper was outfitted for dealing with the cold.  Rather than leave Kiwi at home we packed him up and and took him with us.

We had an awesome time trekking through the park in the snow and generally just hanging out all weekend.  Kiwi sat on the table by the window and talked to the wild birds that happened by.   As we were packing up to go back home Sunday afternoon Mrs. Jinksto stepped out of the camper and the bird decided that he wanted to go too.  

That doesn’t work because we keep his wings clipped and he doesn’t really know how to fly.  In fact, I was fond of calling him a feathered brick due to his aerodynamic capabilities.  As his wing feathers grew out he could get some nice distance but never what a pilot would call a “positive rate”… meaning he could fly “down” but not “up”.

As he fluttered out the door, we met a beast that we had never had reason to meet before.  A year or so later I would start flying lessons and learn about this phenomena but on that day when the beast know as “Density Altitude” reached out and smacked me I was completely unprepared for it.  I expected the bird to flop ungracefully into the snow with a undignified splat, learn his lesson, and be returned to his cage.

Read this next bit fast, it’s all sciency stuff and only here for fun. 

Density altitude is defined as the altitude at which a given air density is found in the standard atmosphere. For a given altitude, density altitude changes with changes in atmospheric pressure and air temperature.  An increase in pressure increases air density, so it decreases density altitude. An increase in temperature decreases air density, so it increases density altitude. Changes in humidity can also affect this but to a lesser degree.

What’s that mean?  It means that cold air is more dense than warm air (which you already knew) but it also means that it is easier to fly in cold dry air (like the 22 degrees F that it was outside that day) than it is to fly in warm humid air (like the 74 degrees F that it was inside the camper that day).  A LOT easier  Annnddd, it also means that when my flying brick hit the cold, dense air outside the door his trajectory changed drastically and he went very nearly straight up.   For a long time. 

He went to the very top of a huge pine tree and managed to land.   I could see him and he could see us.  He screeched and cried but had absolutely no idea how to fly down now that he actually wanted to do so. 

The wind was blowing about 20 or25 mph that day so anytime he tried to fly down, he’d go up and end up getting blown to another tree farther away.  We kept calling and he kept screaming until finally he reached the edge of the trees and was left 40 feet in the air over an Illinois corn field. 

I spent the next 5 hours walking across those corn fields.  It was cold.  Horribly cold with 22 degree temperatures and 20+ mph winds I knew that if we left him out there he would die.  I had hoped that with nothing for him to land on he would eventually crash into the ground and I could get him back but after he was caught by the wind I lost sight of him.  We stayed out there until well after dark, trespassing, calling, hoping to hear that annoying little screech.

Eventually, we had to give up and go home, it was too cold and I didn’t have the right clothes for being out in the weather that long.  My fingers hurt badly.  My toes and ears had stopped hurting a while ago.  I hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, expecting to grab something on the way home, so I was out of energy. There was no choice. 

For the whole hour and a half drive home we watched out the windows as we passed cornfield after cornfield looking for him.  We would occasionally make a joke about him already being at home waiting on us but… we knew.  It was just too cold out there.  About halfway home Mrs. Jinksto started crying and didn’t stop until she cried herself to sleep that night.

The next day I worked from home and Mrs. Jinksto drove back out to the park to keep looking.  She kept at it most of the day and came home late.  She cried herself to sleep again that night.

The next day was another repeat. 

She had probably been home for about 30 minutes after being out in the cold all day when the phone rang.  It was a cop from a very small town nearby.

I had put ads in all of the local papers and offered a $500.00 reward for the return of the bird.  He’s worth less than $100 and most can be had for under $50.00 but we hadn’t even paid that for him.  Friends of ours hand raised cockatiels and were getting out of the business so Kiwi was a gift.  My thought was that I would gladly pay $500.00 to fix my wife’s broken heart and if the bird wasn’t found then, well, nothing lost. 

I hadn’t told Mrs. Jinksto about placing the ads because I didn’t want to get her hopes up.  The police officer that morning had picked up the paper and looked in the “Lost Pets” section.  It was a part of the paper that he never read but a couple of days before a farmer who lives twenty miles from the campground had discovered our Kiwi in a tree in his yard.  He had held out his hand and the bird simply hopped onto his finger. The farmer noticed Kiwi’s band and took him to the local police station.  The officer that was working that night had no idea what to do with an exotic bird but wrote down the band number and told the farmer he could keep him.

The farmer had no use for a bird and went to the town bar to think over his options.  While he was there he struck up a conversation with the barmaid who was very excited to take Kiwi home.  The cop stopped off for a drink after work (small town, one bar) and saw Kiwi sitting on the bar.  They chatted about the “poor lost thing” as they fed him pretzels.  When he left the bar he forgot about it… until he picked up the paper a couple of days later. 

When the phone rang and Mrs Jinksto realized what it was about she began ripping through our paperwork looking for Kiwi’s banding certificate.  She recited the band number to the officer and he confirmed that it was the number that he had recorded.  He gave us the name of the bar and the name of the waitress so we called.  She was working that night but said that her boyfriend was at home and that we could, of course, pick up our bird.  She had fallen in love with him too and was happy to see him find his home. 

Ok, let’s stop here and summarize because I want to ensure that you have the timeline down:

While I was out trekking across frozen corn fields in the dead of night and with the temperature falling through the high teens… 

While I called for him in twenty mile per hour winds with frostbite on every extremity looking for my wife’s bird and starving from lack of a meal in nearly twelve hours…

While my heart was tearing watching as the woman that I love had her heart broken and as I watched tears begin to stream down her frozen cheeks as the horrible realization came to her…

That bastard was twenty miles away snuggled up to a nice soft waitress in a nice warm bar eating freaking pretzels.

Seriously. Back to the story…

Her boyfriend was a nice man and happy to help us as well.  He said that he could already see that he was going to have to get a bird for our new barmaid friend.  

When we left, I showed her boyfriend the ad that we had placed in the paper (which neither of them knew about) and left a $500.00 check on the counter for her.  It was never cashed.

Like greybeard I am glad that there are damned fine, honest people in this world.

Oh, also, he’s a cannibal… loves turkey:

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