I got an award - and I did'nt end up pregnant!!!! Oh and our bear adventure.

Fresh Fixins gave me an award for being a 'hoot'.. I love that people want to come and read my blog!!! I explained in her comments that the only other award I was given was by the Milk Man and I ended up pregnant. I made her promise that it would not happen this time - you must be careful when you recieve awards - wait, or was it a reward?? Thats what it was a reward!!! Milk Man gave me a reward - so why do I get the short end of the stick? I mean if it was a reward for somthing nice I did, why do I have to have a baby for doing somthing nice.... that bites!!!!
Anyway!! Sorry to be skeptical Deb.... I wont let it happen again. I promise to be much more grateful in the future!


SO - where have I been right? I have been trying to get things together for when the baby gets here. He has already got a blog name - I was going to have a contest but when Train Wreck called him a Milk Dud, I could not pass that up!!! It will fit him perfectly.....

Not much exciting going on at this point, so I thought I would post about an exciting time we had this spring - in March to be exact. We had a late spring so there was still A LOT of snow on the ground till mid April. In March we got a phone call from the University of Wisconsin asking us permision to go onto our land. They further explained that they had place a tracking collar on a bear cub 2 years ago and wanted to 'retag' her. This ment they had to dart her while she was hibernating and put a new collar on her. We got to go along and see the whole thing - Big Son was so excited, Lispy on the other hand - well, it wasnt like chasing a basard wooster... The pictures I have of that are from a disposable camera that I had made into a disk of pictures....


This is a picture of where we started - I am standing on our land going onto our neighbors land. I want to make a note right here that we would NEVER NEVER NEVER log our land the way this has been 'clear cut'. Its important to me that you know this because we feel there is NO NEED for clear cutting like this. However, this piece of property is in a government program and 'they' decided that it needed to be clear cut. Yet they promote you to select cut or let them 'manage' your woods - my answer is to that, Ya right buddy.... sorry to get on a soap box... ANYWAY!

The bear, we named her Helga, was WAY up on the tree line which is at the top of the photo. Its a long way up there and I was about 5 months pg at this point. Palmer carried Lispy all the way to the top of this ridge - and it was a LOOOOOOOONG way up there.

This picture is half way up - its a long way and we still have a ways to go. I kept stopping and putting the camera up to my eye pretending to be taking a ton of pictures, when really I was waiting for my butt to catch up. It was dragging about 15ft behind me! I was trying to catch my breath, the snow was about 3ft deep still and at some points your foot would go through the upper crust and my leg would get stuck clear up to my 'ho-ha'. Talk about embarassing, I was with about 8 differant men.

Here we are almost to the top - praise God from whom all blessing flow...
We had to wait here for a little bit until the guys from the University found out exactly where she was and darted her before we came up.

Here we are weaving our way through the tree tops, yes they are really the tops. When 'some' loggers log a place off, they leave the tops for waste. ALL loggers top trees, but a lot of them will use the tops for fire wood or chip it up for compost. These loggers obviously could not have cared less, soap box again.. sorry...

This is the view for where she was found. It also shows where we started from WAAAAAAY down in the vally where the trees are uncut. She fell asleep under a bunch of tops that were bunched together. The researchers from the university said that she will hibernate within 100 yrds of this spot for the rest of her life, unless she decides to leave the area or is pushed out of the area by another bear.


The next few pictures are of the where she was and her. I wont comment on any of them or it will take forever to get this post done!
This is where she was sleeping:


This is a picture of her in her 'den' - she had not dug a hole like most do. The guys from the University said that she was so young and not pregnant, I blusehd then, so she did not need to burrow to keep the snow off of her babies. She was on the south side of a bluff - yes bluff, it was almost straight down from where her den was. This picture is crappy, but her head is facing right and her body is at an angle. Looks like all black fuzz to me!!


Here her head is facing down and the red thing in the picture is her ear tag. She weighed about 125lbs and they figure next year she will be sporting baby's on her teaters....

Here is a random Lispy picture of that day.

So that is about it for my bear story. It was a great learning experience for Big Son - he got to do show and tell at school with the pictures and thought he was really all that.
I will leave you with a picture of Big Son petting Helga his new girlfriend....


5 days till Milk Dud makes his appreance and from the way he is kickig today, he will be wearing tap shoes....