I Am Officially a Hundred-aire!

Well, it is official.

Those of you who have been following this blog understand how bizarre life has been in the past few years.  Go ahead, click on the search box and enter "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch".  You'll see.

I published my book "Living Among Sasquatch: A Primer" at the beginning of this year. After sending out free copies to libraries and such, and after flying to New York to speak at a conference, this month's royalty check from the publisher has put me in the black.

Yes. I'm a hundred-aire. Woo hoo!

My Sasquatch related novel is moving along well now. I'm at 114 pages, and over 31,000 words. Since I stopped thinking about what I was going to write and just let my fingers type, it is going much more smoothly.

I can't wait to sit down to write today, and to see what happens next because I have no idea.

Coincidently, this memory popped up on Facebook from three years ago...

had to shut the dogs up in the cabin. I can hear a buck scraping the velvet from his horns not far from the cabin. The dogs don't know what it is but they want to go find out.

This is pretty funny, because knowing now what I didn't know then, that was no buck.  That would have been a Sasquatch.  Most likely Pamela's big hairy friend.  It would have been warning others that there was now humans living in the cabin.

Crystal River, Florida in Photos

Our new favorite place here in Florida is Crystal River.

Photobombed by a Goat?

I was photographing my wife, grandson, and dog... and I get photobombed by a goat. 

He's an Oberhasli, if you're into goats, but from my experience, goats of all types are jerks.

A Battle of Wits

Know what stinks? When your animals are smarter than you are.

Look, I've accepted the fact that all of my female dogs are smarter than me. Only Chevy, my male pitbull, is also as dumb as a bag of hammers.

The goats are here eating weeds. It has been a battle to keep them out of the garage where they love to go to eat cardboard, garbage, andplastic flowers.

I put up a fence, which works well, but I need a gate that the dogs can go in and out of, but that the goats can't. So first I made a swinging gate. Penelope the puppy escape artist figured out in seconds how to swing it open to come and go, shortly thereafter followed by our pointer, Olivia. Perfect. Goats are too stupid to figure out a swinging gate.

Wrong. Amos the Goat watched the dogs with great interest, and within a couple of days was coming and going. Great. Just great.

Plan B. Raise the gate up and fix it so it doesn't swing. The dogs can crawl under the gate, but the goats are too tall. Perfect.

Wrong. See photo. Our goats must do the limbo when we're not home.

In the battle of wits, I'm coming in last.

The Ticket

I got a $180 ticket yesterday for having a beer.

Pamela and I often go to various places in the Ocala National Forest. There are many springs, and yesterday we went to Mill Dam which is a lovely picnic spot with a small sandy beach on a small lake. Like all places in the Ocala National Forest, it has signs saying "No alcohol".

Well, me being an old fart pirate and all, I read that to mean "Don't get drunk 'n shit". Certainly it doesn't apply to the adults who go there. Simply keep it out of sight, don't get drunk, loud, and rowdy. That sign is meant for kids who would have keggers there otherwise, not retired old men.

Wrong.

Pamela and I are on the little beach. It is hot, as it is everyday in Florida. After swimming, I go to our little cooler, pull out a beer and slide it into its coozy. I sit in my beach chair, and PQ says to cover it. Here comes the cops, two of them. I stick my hat over it.

"Sir, is that a beer?" says the lady cop.

Me, being me, say "It is a ginger ale." Hey, it could be. I haven't even opened it yet.

"Can I see it?"

I take the cold beverage and hold it up.

"Slide it out of the coozy please."

"You only packed ginger ale, right honey?" I say to Pam. I slide it out. It is a beer. "It is a miracle!" No smiles from the lady officer. The man officer chuckled.

"Sir, I'm going to need you to put that cooler in your car and show me your drivers license."

Uh oh. Seriously?

Long story short, they gave me a ticket. Oh, they were nice about it, and I wasn't a jerk about it either. I joked around with them.

"Did you see the signs?" they said.

"Sure. But I thought it was intended to keep rowdy drunk kids from partying, not an old man from having a beer on a steamy hot Florida afternoon."

So they handed me a ticket. $150, plus a $30 processing fee. WTF is a processing fee? It sounds like bullshit to me. I pay $30 for the honor of them taking my money?

But the cops were indeed nice about it and not jerks. After they handed me the ticket, I said "I feel like I should thank you, but I can't thank you for giving me a ticket. But you were nice about it, so thank you for being nice about it."

I really thought I could joke my way out of that one. Nope.

So from now on, I'm going to do what everyone else does and put my beer in a Slurpy cup from the Kangaroo.