It’s a Zoo Around This Here Place

While I’m enjoying the nice cool temperatures to the north, I’ll be publishing some posts via my iPhone and not so much on the snarky side for a change, but more on the informative side instead.  I hope I don’t bore you to tears.  Just consider the posts this week your “staycation” courtesy of Midlife Slices.  I might be able to sneak in a few live updates on Mrs. C but if not, you can bet I’ll share all the good, bad and ugly when I return.  But for now…………………

One day this week I drove the 38 miles west to visit my Dad and pick up my youngest son who had spent the day helping Papaw haul equipment and doing some fishing.   That boy loves to fish and must be moving constantly or he’s not happy.  Kind of reminds me of my Dad, who is almost 84 and has to be doing something constantly or he’s not happy either, plus he falls asleep 

My sister and I have long given up harping about the long hours he puts in a day of hard farm work, lifting and working in the Oklahoma heat and humidy and we’ve decided if that’s the way he wants to die, at least he’ll die happy.  Hot and tired, but very happy.

I hardly ever go anywhere without my camera and especially not to Dad’s because he’s always doing something interesting.  I was raised by my Dad and mine was a life of constant new adventure in the hands of a man who knows no fear of failure.  Not that he hasn’t failed, he has, but he never let a fear of failure keep him from trying absurd and bizarre things. 

For instance, one time he raised alligators and not just a couple but hundreds of the stinkin scarey beasts.  My oldest children were small and he’d take them into the gator pens with him to feed these monsters and I’d be scared to death one of my children would become lunch, only I also trusted my Dad to never let anything happen to one of his own.  Daddy had no fear and therefore my kids had no fear.  One is now 32 and the other is 27 so they obviously survived but it was me who had the near brushes with death (heart failure) at the hands mouths of those mighty jaws.  (just kidding)  

Besides his alligator phase, my dad has also raised ostrich, wallaby, zebra, giraffe, camel, fainting goats, llama, koi fish, as well as the boring and quite common horse and cow.   I’m probably leaving something out of his exotic menagerie but you get the general idea that this man loves a great adventure and those adventures usually involve an animal of some sort.

With his advancing age, he’s slowing down a bit and weeding out some of his day to day responsibilites to free up some time to travel and enjoy life a little more.   Now he’s down to koi fish (because they are lovely and they like to watch them in the ponds), llama (to keep the coyotes away from the koi and the goats), goats (to keep the weeds down around the fish ponds) and elk.    Beautiful majestic wapiti or elk which are the second largest species of deer in the world and one of the largest mammals in North America and eastern Asia.

Storms were brewing (as usual) in Oklahoma and it was getting darker and I had no time to adjust my camera but their beauty is still unmistakable. 

In these pictures the male’s horns are all in the velvet stage.  When they are harvested in the velvet they are dried and ground and used in Western medicine as an aphrodisiac.  My Dad would never saw the horns off any of his elk and doesn’t raise them for anything other than his own pleasure except now he’s wanting to sell them so he can take some time to travel. 

We were driving around the pasture and they were chasing us thinking we were about to feed them even though they’d just been fed a little earlier.  The greedy pigs. 

One big guy wanted to get up close and personal but they aren’t always friendly, especially when they think you have something to eat.  I had to shoo him back cause there’s nothing worse than elk snot on a camera lens, except maybe kid boogers. 

The little guy in the middle of all these cows is a deer my Dad rescued from the middle of the highway just hours after he’d been born.  I’d never seen a deer as tiny as he was when daddy first brought him home several months ago.  His mama must have been killed and the car in front of dad had run right over the baby, straddling the curled up little ball of fur while he was laying in the middle of the road so it’s a wonder he wasn’t killed too.  Dad bottle fed him several times a day and night and now he thinks he has a new mama and follows my dad everywhere. 

Then there was this little stinker who had twine from the bales of hay tangled in his horns.  Looks like an elk pompadour to me.

Elk shed their horns every year and it’s a natural process.  There are tons of ways elk horns can be used and made into something beautiful.  My Dad just picks them up out of the pasture and stacks them up.  I’m not sure he’s made anything beautiful with them but he sure has the stock should he get a hankering to do so but right now they are in a big stack in the fish house.  I should make a table or a light fixture or maybe a Christmas tree out of them.  But then again…….maybe not.