Armed (me) and Fabulous (the movie) (No, not that movie)

The hunting is great in this part of Oregon. The resident price for a deer tag is something like $34. But the non-resident price is about $300. And you have to live in Oregon for 6 months to be considered a resident. So, we did not go deer hunting this year. Besides which, we don't have any equipment, and neither one of us has much shooting practice.

So, we are biding our time and waiting for next year. With a lot of advice from friends and the gun guy at the hardware store, I have bought a rifle that will be good for deer and elk hunting, without having so much recoil that it will knock me flat. It's a Savage Sierra Model 10, and it's caliber is 7mm-08. It's got a scope on it with 3x to 9x magnification. All of this is very new to me, so there are some things that are going to take time to get used to. Apparently the first thing one must do with a new rifle is to sight in the scope- That is, set it up so that the crosshairs are actually aligned with where the bullet goes.

We are lucky to have a shooting range just a few miles from the house. It is pretty primitive, but it has a bench and targets at 25, 50, and 200 yards, so it will do just fine. I heard that it's on private property which has recently changed hands. I don't know if the new owners are OK with having folks pound a bunch of lead into their land, but they haven't put up any no trespassing signs or anything like that. I don't suppose it would go over too well if they did. The range has been in use for at least 20 years.

We went down to the range this weekend to do some target practice and scope in the rifle. Our pal who is a really, really good marksman was kind enough to set it up for me. With everything dialed in, I was able to hit a 6" square from 200 yards. 200 yards!!! I couldn't even see the square without looking through the scope. And at 100 yards, I was within a couple inches of the bullseye. Wow. Just goes to show that with the right tools, anyone can look like an expert.

He told me that elk season starts this week. There might be a few non resident tags left, if I want to put up $300 and take my chances. At this point, though, I think I'm better off shooting at the orange square. I think if I was facing a real live bull elk, I would be too keyed up to get a good shot. Even if he was 200 yards away. Those things are huge!

More wildlife on the plate. I helped another friend of ours butcher his deer, and so he gave us some of the meat. Deer meat has a distinct game flavor, I think I actually like elk better. I had a great time cooking this deer steak, though. Some sort of alchemy happened and it transformed itself into corned beef while it was in the pot. I soaked about two pounds of venison steak in tenderizing salt, then cooked it in the pressure cooker, with wine, sun-dried tomatoes, Montreal seasoning, and a few bay leaves. Bam! Corned beef. I'm writing that recipe down!

We haven't gotten satellite TV yet. And we might not. If we got the package that has the channels that I want (DIY) it would be $80-some a month. I'd feel like having the TV on all the time, just to get our money's worth. We haven't gotten our new TV yet, either. We promised ourselves a new TV and justified it by saying that there are no movie theatres, no nightclubs, no sports teams, no restaurants, and no other forms of entertainment within 70 miles of here. But we are finding that the old TV is usually gathering dust in the corner, so we haven't gotten serious about the new one yet.

We have been watching movies now and then. I find it hard to commit to sitting in one place for that long, so not too many. We finally got around to watching Party Monster the other night. It was better than I expected it to be, which is not saying much. You'd think that a movie about a bunch of drug-addled New York club-hoppers would be fast-paced and exciting, but it was mostly just depressing. The whole thing was kind of icky, actually. We had to watch it, though, since the main character of the movie is Michael Alig. I knew his sister in college, and I met him once, too. How often does someone make a movie about a murderer whom you have met? They cast Macauley Culkin as him, which I though was perfect. Who better to play an insecure, self-important, domineering queen? He was just 'fabulous'. It's funny, people think of movies as escapism from their daily lives. When the movie was over, we stepped outside into the cold air and watched a deer munching on the neighbor's lawn, looked at full moon, and reflected on how lucky we are to be here, away from all of that stuff.

The air here has been thick and smoky for a couple of days. It's burn season. The morning that I started writing this entry, there were some big controlled burns taking place. This is a photo of the sunrise over the mountains, taken from our backyard.