I can’t remember if I told you Practical Woodsman folks this or not, but I’ve been dealing with an eye issue for two weeks that has had me looking like Quasimodo.
I’m not self conscious about it - meaning, I honestly don’t feel embarrassed about it or anything. It just is what it is, and all of us gotta deal with things of this nature from time to time. And if you haven’t ever had to deal with anything like it yet - you ain’t lived long enough, ‘cause buddy, it’s a comin’ sooner or later.
I’ve simply been waiting patiently to get over it. At the same time, it has been gross looking, and I haven’t wanted to subject anybody to having to see it. It just hasn’t been pleasant to look at my face lately - more than usual, I mean 🤣.
Anyway, it appears I’ve been on the mend for a couple of days now (what a relief) and I should be back in the video making business soon. I appreciate your patience with me these past couple of weeks while I’ve been dealing with this issue.
Hey! Y’all have a wonderful - but safe - weekend!
Rut, the Practical Woodsman guy.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
