Neanderpundit

One side hate and one is hope

I am speaking with an old and dear friend about the job of raising children, and she reminds me how much f a balancing act it is. don’t spoil her, don’t deprive her. Don’t protect her from everything, don’t let her hurt herself too badly. Don’t make her afraid of everything, don’t prevent her from developing healthy fears. The balance between the appropriate freedom and the appropriate control is tough.
There’s also the damage you can do if you do fuck things up.

So i keep walking this line. I have a great guide in the Ogwife, who, unlike me, grew up in a large enough family with a HUGE extended family that she has seen all phases of parenting, and knows what to do and what not to do, for the most part.

I have done a lot of tough jobs, and raising a child is no different, though the end result is far more rewarding.

smells a certain way. Likewise the inside of a deer. The guts of a pheasant have a specific aroma, and field dressing a rabbit is something nobody will ever forget, who has done it.

One of the things you don’t get, being removed from the production of your own food, is that the internal smells of animals being butchered share their aroma with the farts you have when you eat their flesh. Turkey farts smell like turkey innnards. Deer farts have that same distinctive aroma as a freshly field dressed deer.

In Africa, while I was hunting, one of our guides ripped off a particularly noisy and noisome fart, and it only took a second to remember where I’d smelled that smell before- in an emergency room, where a colleague at the steel mills was having his intestines reattached to one another and reinserted in his body cavity after having had them gouged partially out by heavy machinery.

Anyway, in camp, everyone else waved their hands and laughed at the rank smell, holding their noses and smiling, but I was a little chilled, despite the summer’s heat. I looked at the guide, and he uncharacteristically looked away from me. He knew; I knew.

It’s in the middle 30’s this morning here in DFW and all of us southern pussies are freezing our collective asses off. I wasn’t built for the cold.