DEC-A-7
SCORE! TWICE OVER!
THE YEAR-END LETTER-03 IS IN THE MAIL,
AND THE
FIRST OF WINTER’S STORMS
SNOWS IN
BUT I ESCAPE TO THE
TO MAKE THE
FINAL DEER HUNT IN
AND SECURE AN EIGHT-POINT BUCK ON ITS WAY
TO THE
BUTCHER SHOP AND TAXIDERMY,
RETURNING TO SNOWED-IN DERWOOD
It was only as long ago as February, when I remembered what real winter was like! I was snowed in and tried to get my way down to the mailbox on snowshoes. But that was then, and it was late into winter. This is now, and it is early in December. We are having a white pre-Christmas! I scurried around on Thursday to try to do the chores that I knew might be snow impaired on Friday, like dropping off the change orders and checks at Derwood. I just drove the fateful Bronco up the driveway in 4WD, the first such human-associated tracks to be made in the snow, next to the tracks of scores of deer in their passing—Derwood has been their’s alone, since I find the checks and contract copies still on the mantle where I left them last week, and they have suspended the application of the siding, and all other work to be done, presumably since no one could get to the worksite, the big wheel trucks notwithstanding, with a few more of them presuming about hunting in their unanticipated day off. I was one of the latter. So, this note will be about a few chores completed, and about the last of my MD deer rifle season.
This is the last of my December
Maryland events before I take off this next weekend to
‘TWAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT,
AND THE PRE-DAWN REVEALED THE SIGHT INCH
ACCUMULATION OF THE “EARLY WINTER’S” FIRST SNOWFALL
I got up early on Friday
morning to check o the results of the snowstorm that had been predicted for
this early in December, and—sure enough—there it was. It is piled high over the vehicles and
blocking up traffic, and still falling down in heavy wet snow flakes. It could cause a problem this time since
Diane Downing is scheduled to fly out at eight o’clock AM from DCA to get to
Orlando to help Scott and Suze pack up for their career-long departure, that
will include their commissioning service at the Orlando home church that will
be one of their sponsors in their change in their lives to full-time missionary
status. They will be going to
I put the Bronco in four wheel
drive—a system that had not been much used until the February blizzards of this
year, although there may be a greater need for it in the northern winters of
I went on to work, and set to doing the last of my envelope stuffing. I had tried to get the color printer to make a full color copy of the “color collage” of two pages of the 03-letter, but at 651 Megs for each page, the printer would have to take overnight for each page printed. I asked one of my junior gurus to help me resolve this, and two of them worked it out that they could print the color pages on two different printers, but not in time to get the copies out for this weekend. I told them to proceed, and that I will later add the color collage pages for your year-end letter when I visit you, but then went to the post office with the two plastic US Mail tubs with the annual Christmas year-end-03 letter, which is now “in the mail.” I hope you enjoy it, especially since each has included the hand-written personalized note and a bunch of appropriate color pictures from our common experiences of the 2003 year. It may take you just a little bit longer to read the photojournalism of the entire book-length “oeuvre,” but perhaps you will have long dark and stormy nights of your own coming up soon, for which this bit of light reading is ideally suited!
I went to the Department of Surgery where a young fellow named Joshua Katz is located in an office I used to have in the Department, and he wanted to help me “archive this extremely valuable resource” of the slides I had taken in Nigeria over three decades ago. We worked at the slide scanner, until equipment failure forced us to back off, but I had hoped to carry a CD rather than a carrousel of slides to the Berkshire Medical Center to give this “Tropical Surgery” as one of four talks I am giving up there, but I will still have to give the talk from a slide base. The fun talk for them will be the two carrousel “Trekking through Kashmir” at their Saturday night “International Night” for which I was the first and continuing speaker for the decade or more they have held this celebration at Christmas time. I will carry in my CD unit to install a software program called ACDC on my laptop, so that I may be able to work some weekend with the scanner at home.
I received a warm and wonderful
note from The Reverend Doctor Bob Croskery after his return home from the Thanksgiving
week trip that began with their visit to Derwood and meeting me. I replied and sent him a note on the subject
of his highest ambition—the Parker double shotgun, the highest work of that
art. Subsequently, I have learned from
Bill Webster about the possible availability of just such a classic Parker on
the
As I prepared to leave the office
to drive to the
WITHIN THE NEAR-TERM FUTURE,
AS I WORK WITH SEVERAL STUDENTS
ON MEDICAL
NOW, FINALLY, ALSO THE SUBJECT OF A NEW
BOOK
For that same time period—February—I
was meeting with Kevin Bergman in my office who would like to have me plan an
excursion with him—his third mission trip with me. If the Philippine trip is now disrupted by
the change in plans of the
Over eight years ago, I had met with Ronald G. Landes of Landes Bioscience Publishers, and contracted with him to write and edit a book entitled “Surgery and Healing in the Developing World.”
I rapidly wrote my chapters of this
book, including the first chapters while sitting in the
Then, I never again heard from the publisher. I wrote emails almost monthly, and got now response, until I got only the message that the email address had disappeared. I called the phone number listed in the directory assistance, to find the phone was non-functioning. So, this is at the same time that the completed text on Surgical Endocrinology is typeset and camera-ready by J & S Publishing, just as it pulls the promised printing of that completed book and scuttled the already written “Year of Fulbrightness” since it was going bankrupt. This was a gloomy development, with all that effort in finishing three complete books which die at the printers, just as Kurt Johnson had pulled the plug also on promoting “Out of Assa” his first –ever foray into the unknown world of the “trade books.”
Each of the contributors has asked me repeatedly when the book would be coming out, and after referring each to the publisher and there getting the same non-response I was getting, I had despaired of ever hearing of it again. As all this gloomy futility had closed around me (only my “year-end annual reports” seem to be getting finished, illustrated, copied and mailed out—since there is only a single person responsible for each step in the complex production of these numbers!) I got an abrupt message from Ron Landes, saying “We are keen to publish the book by Spring of 2004 and page proofs will be forthcoming in February.) See Dec-A-4.
So, I was able to relay this good news to Edgar Rodas, a fellow contributor to my book, and to tell him that the WHO had contributed support as a “handbook” publication.
THROUGH THE
STORM, TO THE
ANOTHER
EXPERIENCE OF SITTING THROUGH FOUL WEATHER, WATCHING A FIELD, PREVIOUSLY FOR
DAYS:
THIS TIME
FOR ONLY A FEW MINUTES!
Bill Webster had called me to
invite me to his farm and to the
I quickly changed my clothes into
the hunting gear I had crammed into the Bronco, and we went over to the
Bill was looking behind him ten minutes later as I whistled several times, since in the wind he did not hear me the first few times. I pointed. In front of me, about two hundred yards away, a single doe had come out in the field, probably tricked by the heavy overcast into assuming that it was later than it was. The doe walked further away and to the left to be about 280 yards out. I waited two minutes, and then saw a flicker as another deer came in from my right. A quick glance showed me it was a buck and a good one. So, I figured Bill would get that one, and I touched off at the doe. The doe fell down. The buck ran. The buck was out at 280 yards when it looked back. I said to Bill, “Do you want me to get him?” “Yes!” At the sound of my shot, the buck dropped. And the doe got up. I was not even looking toward her, and Bill said “The doe is walking away!” I said “Shoot it!” As he shot she jumped the ditch and entered the deep woods.
We were concluded in our hunt at
We carried the buck to Bill’s farm
and hoisted him on the gimble and I dressed him out. He is a good clean kill and is a nice
representative sample of an
EIGHT-POINT BUCK
Odocoelius virginiensis
Glenn W. Geelhoed
7 mm Mag at 270 yards, 153 pounds
Bill and I went to eat at the Bobby
Murphey’s in the historic Washington Inn—where George Washington had slept. A
book written by “
We watched the Outdoor Life network to see pictures of deer hunting in Pennsylvania, and got our juices running for the next morning’s hunt here at his farm—especially after one seep with the big spotting light revealed about a dozen deer feeding in the fields outside his house. I listened through the night as a rainstorm blew in and turned to sleet and ice.
The next day is more classically
like what we have had before: I crawled into the treestand and watched intently
as the first light broke, and shivered in the cold, and saw---nothing.
It is odd. Our deer hinting
has been feast and famine. Bill wanted
me to stay the night and hunt the evening twilight, but I was worried about the
storm and the getting back to Derwood and the packing out of the Bronco and
refilling it with what would be needed for my trips forthcoming. We went to breakfast in Princess Anne and
talked to some good ole boys that were deer hunting in much the same manner as
we had. We then drove up to the
Bill had heard that a new female
taxidermist had set up shop in Princess Anne, so we gave her a call. She was not in. I called Parker’s Taxidermy to see how the
two deer I had sent in last year and the fox I had given them two years ago had
gone in their progress. I was startled
to hear that they had done nothing! I had been worried that they would be
finished before the game room was, and now I found out that the mounts had not
even been started through processing! I
knew this would mean that Don King might not be alive by the time we would be
able to show hi the big buck from
UNPACKING THE BRONCO,
AND RE-PACKING FOR THE NEXT TRIPS
I will now
have to go through the sixteen years of archaeological stratigraphic layers in
the Bronco to unpack it and to re-pack it for the last trip up through