cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By the way, I eat squirrels. During the weekend I set up a study in the enclosed back porch, which is a shitty little room of about 8x10' that isn't really good for anything. I'm sharing space with the chest freezer but I've still managed to make it sort of comfortable. Its a room where I can write and look out the window with a heavy door closed for acoustic privacy from the rest of the house. I took F. squirrel hunting in the woods behind his house on Saturday afternoon and he got his first kill. He did technically shoot the deer for our last class, but that was a captive deer on a farm and didn't really count as hunting. So this was his first actual hunt with an actual kill. He handled it really well. On Sunday I slept late for the first time in over a month. When I woke up I sequestered myself in the new study and wrote a 1,600 word article about cooking and hunting squirrels. My ragweed allergies were going fucking crazy all day. I organized the books and archive of magazines in the study and tried to figure out how to fit a rifle rack in there. I'm trying to make it into a serious work space with all of my most important hunting, anatomy and ecology books immediately at hand for reference and a wide enough array of random shit that I have, like bones and fossils and gun parts and feathers and birds nests and so forth to provide inspiration for articles. The squirrel article turned out really well. I could probably have gotten it published but I need new food-related content on my official blog right now so I used it there. My first NPR commentary aired this morning. It was all right. Not the best that I could possibly do, but it was all right. I'm tempted to go home tonight and write another one but I don't want to do it just to do it. I think that I'll be of more use to them if I wait for something timely and write a fast, topical essay that addresses an issue in the news that I have particular knowledge of. The kudz u piece will probably air in the next week or so and I suppose that some number of listeners will remember my name from the commentary today. My real name is a bit unusual and I'd be hard to confuse with someone else. With 2 mentions a week apart I'll have built some level of recognition among a new audience. If I could just sit alone in that study for 5 hours a day and write then I could get so much shit done. I'm sick of having to come to this day job. I want to write articles and books every day. Or more likely I would go hunting, fishing and hiking for 2 or 3 days a week and then spend the rest of my time writing about what I did and how I turned it into food. That is a job that I can do very competently. I just need to get over the income hump and have at least 6 months worth of savings socked away. The fox squirrel tasted pretty good. Better than an eastern gray. I'm going to give the grays another chance, I think. After work today I'm going over to my brother's land to hunt for a few hours. The woods behind my place are litke a fucking jungle right now and there is zero visibility. His place is all mature nutbearing hardwoods with lots of squirrels and very little understory growth. The visibility will allow me a lot of shot opportunities. I would like to bag half a dozen or so in order to experiment with a taco recipe that I have in mind. I'll take pictures and use the recipe in a book if it works out. 4:35 p.m. - 2010-06-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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