No bailout, no way

I know this isn't supposed to be a political blog, but I just have to say "No Bailout, No Way".

I like to consider myself fairly self-made. My parents gave me a good start, but they didn't hand me a set life. When I decided to marry my beautiful bride I knew I had to support her, so I joined the Navy in order to provide for my family. In that time we made some mistakes and ran up some bills. Instead of filing for Bankruptcy we put in a payment program and we become debt free next month (5 long years later).

While we were paying off this debt we knew we would be stretching ourselves to buy a home. Instead we rented for 4 1/2 years until we were able to get a Fixed Rate mortgage and live within our means.

Now people are planning to take MY money and reward those people for gambling with their money. Where is the right in this? Let the market correct, let the gamblers lose, let the failures fail, and STAY OUT OF MY WALLET.

It is not the job of the government to step in and save everybody when they make bad decisions. Small government, personal accountability, let me keep what I earn.

Thus endeth the sermon

Yellowstone 2008

Each year I take a trip with my Father In Law. Normally we climb a major peak, or at least try to, but this year a friend recommended we take a Canoe trip in Yellowstone National Park. Now, we live about 3 hours from the South Entrance but in the 4 years we have been back in Wyoming this is only my 2nd trip there.

An amazing statistic is that 3,000,000 people (6 times the Wyoming Population) visit YNP each year, yet only 2% of them ever leave the pavement.

For our trip we paid Xanterra an ungodly fee to ferry us over to the SouthEast Arm of Yellowstone Lake. from there we took canoes 7 miles down to the very Southern end of the lake to camp. We were there for 4 nights, and I must say it was a trip that will be in my memories forever.

Even though we were in the middle of the busiest park in the US we went a full day without seeing anybody. The only sign we weren't totally alone was flickering campfires on the distant shores.

The picture above was taken from our 2nd campsite. The weather was unbelievable, the scenery beyond compare. I will post a few more pictures in the coming days.

My weekend

So today opened the Archey hunting season here in Wyoming. Since it happened to fall on Labor Day we thought it would be great to head yup to the lake, camp for the weekend with friends and family, then head out hutning bright and early.

The weekend started great. Saturdays weather was perfect and even though we got out of town late it still was nice. Sunday was OK, little bit of rain and wind, but nice. We took the kids out fishing for a bit (no luck, but still nice).

After dinner me and a friend decided to go up to a high meadow and cold-camp so we could hopefully be in place for the early morning elk.

We positioned ourselves in the middle of a swampy meadow, sheltered by trees and some camo blankets. There were fresh elk beds all over and it seemed to be perfect.

Everything went fine until about 2:00 AM when it strted to blow and rain. It rained on and off (more on than off) for the rest of the moring. We got up at 6:00 so we could glass the meadow for elk. It was wet, cold, and empty. We stuck it out until 7:30 but realised the only dumb animals out in the rain was us. We headed back to the campers, made coffee and called it a day.

Luckily this is the first day of 2 months of Elk Season, so we live to fight another day.