WOODBURN, Ore. — Inching along the dusty field under a broiling sun, Simon Santol tossed garlic bulbs into buckets and chatted with the other stooped-over Mexican workers. The conversation wasn't in Spanish.
Instead, they spoke Santol's native Triqui, or Mixtec, Zapotec or other languages indigenous to the poorest regions of Mexico. Many of the workers can barely get by in English or Spanish.
"It was hard at first," the 28-year-old Santol said in halting Spanish. "We would look for someone who spoke our language and Spanish. Now I have learned a little Spanish.
Does anybody besides me see a problem with this. This fellow is in the United states illegally and he is happy because he has learned some Spanish. HELLO, we speak English here. We are spending tax dollars to help these folks out. Let’s help them out of the country.

I leave Friday afternoon for Alaska; I’ll spend 7 days fishing for salmon. I remember the trip from 2 years ago. What a great time I had. I am really looking forward to this trip. The only down I have with this is my shoulder is giving me fits. I have some bone spurs in my right shoulder and I am been have a lot of pain lately. The bride has gotten me a doctor’s appointment for the 5th of Oct. This guy is supposed to be great. I want the shoulder scoped as soon as possible. We did have to cancel our trip to Pennsylvania, (we were leaving on the 5th) which I am not really happy about. My best friend lives there. We always have a wonderful time. Most of the time is spent fishing and talking stupid. Talking stupid is hard to explain but it does get both of our brides shaking theirs heads. That in it’s self makes it fun.

It is starting to feel like fall. Fall is the season I enjoy the most. I use to spend a lot of time in the mountains every fall, chasing deer and such. I don’t hunt large game anymore. But I have been thinking about doing it again. It would be more about hanging out in the mountains then shooting anything. I have all the guns that would be needed to hunt anything in this part of the world. I would love to go after birds when I get back from the fishing trip. But if I get the shoulder worked on there is not going to be any hunting this fall.

I believe that my tomatoes have all but stopped getting ripe. So I talked the bride into having some fried green tomatoes with dinner tonight. If you have never had fried green tomatoes with ranch dressing you are missing some good grits. Well time to go I’ll post more later.

It has been 5 years since the attack on America. 5 years since the largest mass murder in our countries history. The networks were running unedited tapes last night, from that day. I had overwhelming emotions, same as I did 5 years ago. My emotions from that day have never gone to far away. They have just gone underground in a manner of speaking. In the building I work in there are a number of air force officers from varying countries. A few come from Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Turkey, and Pakistan. Every time I look at these guys I wonder if they are really allies or would they turn on us. I have developed a deep seated caution with these folks. A general distrust anything Muslim. I can not get past the viciousness and cruelty these people have. Do to our porous borders I have to believe that we have sleeper cells living among us.


Last night was the ground breaking ceremony for our church building. The ground breaking was done by the children in the church. It was very nice as about 30 little ones all wearing hard hats and been given little shovels turned the dirt to start the building. So here we have our children the hope of America taking part in a building up our wonderful country on the eve of the anniversary of the worst attack on our country. It seems some what ironic. We had our first meeting of our little church 5 years ago on the 9th of September and just two days later we changed forever. I have driven home for lunch and It did my heart good to see the streets lined with American flags. It looks like it did the days following 9-11. Flags were everywhere. GOD BLESS AMERICA

My wife and I have decided to try the stock market. I have no intention of making my fortune there but I think it my b fun to play with for a little while. I think I am going with Scotttrade.com for my on line broker. I am going to be using Investools to help me make my decisions on my stocks. It looks like the whole market is in a sideways tread right now. So I am not too worried on getting all wrapped up with this. I have been reading that since the 1950’s the worst months in the market are Sep, Oct, and Nov. Anyway it may keep me busy in my retirement, which my come sooner then I think.

Just got home from Chicago. What a fun city, we had a great time. Spent way to much money but had a great time.

You can not bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You can not help small men by tearing down big men.
You can not strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You can not lift the wage earner by putting down the wage payer.
You can not help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You can not keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You can not further the brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
You can not establish security on borrowed money.
You can not build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
You can not help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

We are getting ready for a long weekend in Chicago. We will leave early Thursday morning and come back mid day Monday. This is just a little adventure for no other reason then the bride said “let’s go to Chicago over labor day weekend”. As I do most of the time I said okay. The only down side I see to this is the fish are really biting out at Wilard bay. It would so much cheaper if I just stayed home and went fishing. Maybe I should talk to the bride about this?

 

Fishing wwas great last night. We threw back more then we kept.  I have my fish in the Smoker right now, should be done just about bed time tonight. 

Ava expressing herself

My weekend started this morning with the dogs deciding that I was no longer tired. That is okay I had to get up to get my coffee anyway. The bride and I both work a compressed workweek. We work 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and 8 hours every other Friday. That adds up to 80 hours in a pay period. So every other Friday is a day off. We love this arrangement. This is also payday, and we tend to run around and take care of errands.

I have been calculating what my retirement will be when I decide to pull the plug, the numbers look pretty good I have 18 months until I am eligible. 36 months until the house is paid off. Talking with some people that have retired already and they claim everyday is like Saturday. How cool is that?

My daughter and her husband had to run down to Salt Lake City last night; they were buying a used car from private party. So the bride and I had to care for the new granddaughter. Oh my, she was a fussy little thing last night. I had forgotten how much a little bundle of joy could cry. Ava is about 9 weeks old and crying is the only way that she can express herself. No one will ever have to wonder what this child is thinking. She can express herself. But it was fun. The bride would get her all calmed down and hand her off to me. I would hold her until she started to express herself then hand her back to grandma. I like this arrangement.

The bride comes home this afternoon. She has been gone for 8 days. It will good to have her home. I am cooking a spaghetti sauce in the crock pot. The house is pretty much clean; I just have to run the vacuum a little. That is mainly because the dogs are still shedding. I have been feeling a little under the weather the past few days, just tired and achy in my muscle and joints. It seems that something is going around. I know the bride would want to go to the spaghetti factory down in Salt Lake (one of her favorite restaurants) but I don’t think I am up to it. So I am cooking here at home. I am heading to the store as soon as I post this. I need to get some French bread for garlic bread and some cheese.

I never did get to go fishing, my neighbor invited me over to have a bar b qued steak so how could I turn him down. We watched preseason football, Chargers vs. Bears. My Chargers lost big time it is just preseason and it does not count. They play mainly second and third string and to see who will make the team.

I hope everybody has a great weekend and Nate gets over having to fax certificates to the training monitor ;-)

I am planning a fishing trip Friday afternoon. The bride comes home on Saturday so Friday is the last day I don’t need to get kitchen pass. I am hoping to catch a bunch of fish. I want to try out my new smoker on them. I love smoked fish. I bought the smoker for the fish I plan to bring back from Alaska ( I leave in 30 days). But I am going to smoke a chicken tonight. Please no joke about how am I going to light it or how big are my papers. We are all much to mature for low brow humor like that. Besides the chicken wings kept poking holes in the papers, I’ll use a pipe this time. ;-)

My friend Dave from Dave’s place( http://akshot.blogspot.com/ ) is taking a hiatus from blogging. He has had a thorn in his side with an over the top and obnoxious fellow that calls himself prophet of god (pog). I know my buddy Dave used his blog to share about his life his excitement in severing God. I am going miss his posts and hopes he enjoys his new grandson. I am a Christian and I do believe in the ministry of laying on of hands. If I could find pog I would be willing to minister to him with the laying on of hands real fast and frequent. But that is an issue between me and God.

I am looking forward to a quite evening at home with the dogs. I have been staining the deck for the past couple of days. I am at the point where it is all the little stuff that takes so long. So I will put the chicken in the smoker when I get home put on some grubby clothes and get to work.

My sister came home from the hospital today. she says she is feeling alright, just tired.

The bride is gone again; she will be back next Saturday. So again it is me and the dogs with no adult supervision. My buddy Nate from Wasted electrons and I dropped the bride off at the airport 5:30 AM yesterday and headed for the desert with a truck load of guns. We got to my shooting place about 6:30 and it was a beautiful morning. There is nothing like the desert in the morning. I just love it.

We wandered around for a couple of hours, the rabbits were breaking a ways a head of us and we didn’t get many good shots. That is okay it was more about hanging with a friend and shooting guns. We walked back to the truck set up some targets and increased the lead content of my secret shooting place. Nate had gone to a thrift store and bought a bag of plastic figurines that we used for targets. Yes we picked up our trash when we were done. There were a couple of Mickey Mouse figurines; you have no idea what a 230 grain bullet out of a 45 acp can do to Mickey until you shoot the little rodent. All I can say is Mickey went away.


Before the bride left me we went to the movies. We saw World Trade Center. For me it was a very powerful movie. I think it is a must for folks to see. The only knock I had on the flick was they did a Hollywood gun thing. They had a gun start to cook off rounds. The gun started to fire by itself. I am here to tell you there is no way in God’s green earth that this could happen the way they depicted it. But Hollywood makes movies to make money.

I talked to my sister this afternoon, things are going very well. She told me not to make here laugh because it hurts. So I hung up. Not much else going on, I think I will go and stain the deck before I make myself some dinner.

The surgery is done and she did well. She should make a full recovery. Praise God. I only have one big sister and I would like to keep her around for awhile.

I just got a phone call; they canceled my sister’s surgery at the last minute. It looks like the patient before her had complications and it took longer then they had planned. So they wheeled her out of pre op and she is sleeping off her morphine. She is going to go sometime tomorrow

My sister is having a triple bye pass on Wednesday.

Bad News, my sister is in the hospital. They think it may be her heart

Some of the forums I read on line tend to support the second amendment. Most lean a little to the right when it comes to politics. But what I have noticed in every forum there is a thread that warns about a shortage of ammo coming. I am sure that most have noticed an increase in price and a decrease in availability. I bought some ammo at sportsmen’s warehouse at lunch yesterday. Not much, 150 round of 357 mag, 100 rounds of 22 wrf and 50 rounds of blazer (aluminum case) 45 ACP. I want to make sure that the 45 and 357 feed and ejects reliably before I buy a bunch. The price was not bad, $10.99 a box for the 357 and $10.49 a box for the 45. I believe I will head for the gun range this evening and shoot holes in paper. I may post a range report later.

I do have an appointment this afternoon with my eyeball doctor, so the range will depend on what he does to me. There is a chance that I will have my eyes dilated. If that is the case I will not be going to the range. I will sit around the house and watch TV with my sunglasses on.

Back to the ammo, those of you that own guns, I would suggest that you buy as much ammo as possible as soon as possible. It never hurts to be prepared.

Despite cleanups, trash along smuggling routes piles up faster than everBy Tony Davis Arizona Daily Star Tucson, Arizona Published: 07.30.2006After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers. Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O'odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But that's only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there. Authorities estimate the 3.2 million-plus entrants caught by the Border Patrol dropped that much garbage in the Southern Arizona desert from July 1999 through June 2005. The figure assumes that each illegal entrant discards 8 pounds of trash, the weight of some abandoned backpacks found in the desert. The trash is piling up faster than it can be cleaned up. Considering that the Border Patrol apprehended more than 577,000 entrants in 2004-05 alone, the BLM figures that those people left almost 4 million pounds of trash in that same year. That's 16 times what was picked up in three years. And that doesn't include the unknown amounts of garbage left by border-crossers who don't get caught. Diverse trash found all over "We're keeping up with the trash only in certain locations, in areas that we've hit as many as three times," said Shela McFarlin, BLM's special assistant for international programs. The trash includes water bottles, sweaters, jeans, razors, soap, medications, food, ropes, batteries, cell phones, radios, homemade weapons and human waste. It has been found in large quantities as high as Miller Peak, towering more than 9,400 feet in the Huachuca Mountains, as well as in low desert such as Organ Pipe National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. It's even started turning up in smaller amounts in hiking areas closer to Tucson, such as Josephine Saddle in the Santa Rita Mountains on the route to Mount Wrightson, says the Southern Arizona Hiking Club. "In the Huachucas, you are almost wading through empty gallon water jugs," said Steve Singkofer, the Hiking Club's president. "There's literally thousands of water jugs, clothes, shoes. You could send 1,000 people out there and they could each pick up a dozen water jugs, and they couldn't get it all." Cleanup not cheap, easy While nobody has an exact cost estimate for removing all the garbage, it's clearly not cheap. But McFarlin agrees with several advocacy groups that without a tightening of controls on illegal immigration, a guest-worker program or other reform of federal border policy, the trash will just keep coming regardless of what's spent. The financial details: ● In 2002, the U.S. estimated that removing all litter from lands just in Southeast Arizona — east of the Tohono Reservation — would cost about $4.5 million over five years. This count didn't include such trash hotbeds as Ironwood Forest National Monument, the Altar Valley, Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta. ● Since then, Congress appropriated about $3.4 million for a wide range of environmental remediation measures in all of Southern Arizona. This includes repairing roads, building fences and removing abandoned cars. ● The five-year tab is $62.9 million for all forms of environmental remediation for immigration-related damage across Southeast Arizona, including $23 million for the first year. Waste unhealthy, unsightly Most of the garbage is left at areas where entrants wait to be picked up by smugglers. The accumulation of disintegrating toilet paper, human feces and rotting food is a health and safety issue for residents of these areas and visitors to public lands, a new BLM report says. "It's particularly serious in areas where there are livestock," said Robin Hoover, pastor of the First Christian Church in Tucson and president of Humane Borders, a group that puts water tanks in the desert for the entrants and coordinates monthly cleanups of Ironwood Monument and other sites. "I've even found injectable drugs in the desert," he said. "It's rare when we find that kind of stuff, but there's tons of over-the-counter medication out there. If some cow comes along and eats a bunch of pills, that would be a real sick cow." The trash also isn't good for wildlife, said Arizona Game and Fish spokesman Dana Yost. Birds and mammals can get tangled up in it or eat it, causing digestive problems, Yost said. It's not at all uncommon to find the trash in bears' stomachs, he said. Plastic bags, foil wrappers and certain foods are all problems. Remote areas need more help But clear inroads are being made into the trash problem, said BLM's McFarlin. Using the U.S. money, various local and federal agencies, the Tohono O'odham Tribe, the conservationist Malpais Borderlands Group and student youth corps remove trash from the most obvious and accessible areas, she said. What needs tackling now are more remote areas such as wilderness, mountains and deserts far from major roads, she said. A couple of times, authorities have had to use helicopters or mules to haul stuff out of such areas. This summer, with Border Patrol apprehensions of entrants down, the Tohono O'odham Tribe is seeing less trash on the ground than usual, said Gary Olson, the tribe's solid-waste administrator. "I don't know whether they're hiding their trash or whether they are just not coming," Olson said. But only six weeks ago, No More Deaths, an advocacy group that looks for injured, sick and lost entrants, came across a 10,000-square-foot area five miles west of Arivaca littered with hundreds and hundreds of backpacks. "I've never seen anything that size. It's unbelievable," said Steve Johnston, who coordinates the group's camp near Arivaca