Pull

well, I'm so far behind I don't know when the heck I'll catch up.  I've seen enough little hints of things on Facebook and Twitter to know I missed things and it's killing me, but ohmygosh do I have too much to do.  I don't even want to think about how much I have to do, which is why I'm sitting here instead of doing it.

So I will tell you about trap shooting.  You know, when we moved out here, we'd been living on the East coast for nine years in an ultra-liberal university town, and we were card-carrying liberals.  We still are, but we're a lot more thoughtful about it these days, because you can't live in a community of good-hearted, responsible, hard-working capital-C-with-italics Conservative people and not develop a sense of respect for their point of view. Especially when they outnumber you about 12-to-1, so you are surrounded, inundated by their opinions at every turn.

Anyway.  One of the issues I've had to change my mind about is hunting.  when we moved here, I was opposed to hunting, because most of the hunting I'd been exposed to at that point was trophy hunting-- rich guys from the city who use antlers in all of their decorating.  But now we live in Montana.  When we moved here, the median income in our county was $17K.  People hunt to fill their freezers.  I've lightened up.  This is one of many issues that is more complex than I knew when we moved here.

So when MadMax started showing a huge fascination with guns and the whole hunting scene when he was about ten, I gulped, swallowed my pride, and insisted that he take the hunter safety class before we let him anywhere near a gun (I didn't have to insist much, since dh felt the same way).  He took the class as soon as he was old enough, got his license, and now he has two seasons under his belt.  I'm not thrilled about it, and I sure as hell am not mounting any antlers over our fireplace, but there are considerably worse ways teenagers can spend their free time.  And the local hunters-- the good, responsible ones, of which there are many-- are a pretty good, decent bunch of guys.  and women, too.

But what he likes better than hunting is shooting clays, trap shooting, whatever you want to call it.  You have a spring-mounted device that hurls disks made out of clay up into the air, and you shoot at them.  MadMax is scary good at it.  Well, it's scary to me, anyway.  He was in a trap shooting league this winter, and his first time ever he was second or third best on the team. 

so yesterday, dh and MadMax asked me if I wanted to go trap shooting with them.  They've asked before, but I always had a paper to write, or hundreds of pages to read, or it was freezing (I'm definitely a fair weather outdoors person).  But yesterday none of those things were true, so off we went.  We put hearing protection in our ears (little orange spongy things), and dh and MadMax put on their shooting goggles (I am almost never outdoors without my sunglasses so i already had eye protection).  And you know what?  It was really fun.

It takes a surprisingly short amount of time to work your way through four boxes of shells and a two-thirds full case of clays.  We were only there a little over an hour, and we spent at least as much time picking up unbroken clays and spent shells as we did shooting.  I was very impressed with how careful they were about gun safety, especially with me, a complete greenhorn, around.  I took four shots and on the fourth one, I hit it.  I think my eyes were closed, so it was an entirely lucky shot, but don't tell dh that.  I'm done, I've retired with a lifetime career shooting average of 25%.  I'm thinking that's pretty sweet.

and can I just add in one little whine here that we went straight from cool, drizzly, rainy, sleety not-spring into warm, muggy, real Spring and the mosquitoes were THICK.  It's just not fair.  We should have had at least a week or two of nice weather without mosquitoes.  Really.