Your 4th of July? What are you doing?

So, what are you doing tonight on this 4th of July and Independence Day?

The current time here is just after 8:45pm, and it's pitch dark outside. The sun set just 30 minutes ago, and it's as dark as the inside of a cow. There is complete silence. No light pollution...nothing. Every now and then some distant fireworks will appear on the horizon, but beyond that there is no light.

A moment ago a few coyotes began to howl, calling to each other. I couldn't see them, but one was up in our high pasture by the cows. The cows are pretty good at defending themselves now that they're grown. No coyotes will mess with them tonight.

One of the things I love about living so far out in the boondocks like we do is the silence. Almost as far as I can see in any direction is nothing. Solitude. It is truly bliss. There is no traffic, no sirens, no loud motorcycles or cars, no loud music...just quiet. Always quiet. Peace.

There is a light breeze, and just now I hear the sound of a few raindrops hitting the roof. Nothing major, but I can hear each one as it falls.

I would post a picture, but it would be of total darkness. The rain is falling harder now, just drops by drops.

In a way, this is a better Independence Day than anyone could ever ask for, freedom in all manners of the notion.

Happy Independence Day, America! Take stock of what "Freedom" really is...in your own special way.

I should have added...it is (50) miles to the nearest city from here, and (20) miles to the nearest town or gas station. It is also (30) miles to the nearest traffic light, even a single traffic signal, and even then it is just one (but they're building a 2nd one...which is rather disturbing). The nearest neighbor is over a mile distant, and it's just a family of three. It's 2.5 miles to the nearest County maintained road. From the house (here) to the County road is road that we must maintain, rain, or shine, snow or whatever. Our County (volunteer) Fire Department asks that we keep a 5,000 gallon tank of water on our place to assist them should they need to extinguish a fire. We keep a 10,000 gallon tank, just in case (and I'd like to make it 20k, but that's a big tank).

I remember when we first came here; there was nothing. We started with dirt. Now, 25 years later, from the air, this place looks like a small paradise. The FBO Airport 50 miles distant uses our barn as a turning point for their procedure turns for student pilots during the day, and many of the instructors do stall training over our land (much to the chagrin of our cows).

I've often said, in my professional career I deal with the most cutting edge electronic systems known to man, but I come home to this...peace beyond description. It is a stark difference, and it is what I call "balance".

I say these words to give a glimpse of "freedom". Perhaps it is not for everyone, but it is for me. Without this 'balance', I would surely lose my mind.

We all have our own vision of what freedom is, and there is no wrong answer. When we look inside our hearts we will find how we define this concept. I share these personal words in hopes that others will see how to define their own slice of freedom. I spent many, many, years working to get to achieve my definition of it, and everyone will have to work hard for theirs too. But, in time, it will come...and the important thing to understand is...realizing it when you start to get there!!

I cooked baby reds with baked whitefish for supper, put all the strawberry freezer jam in the freezer , got out the chuck roast from the freezer for tomorrows dinner, and did a little research on pectin's effect on carb metabolism...then came here to ATS.

Yeah, guess I am Getting old, not interested in going out to the bars anymore or going to evening social functions and wind up having someone drunk or stoned run into my caror sitting on our flimsy aluminum Subaru hood and denting it all up.

Years ago I would have thought there was something wrong with me...turning into a Hermit or something

a reply to: rickymouse

Sounds like a good night indeed!

I had a couple hot dogs. LOL!

I have a few ham hocks in the freezer, so maybe I'll make some bean soup tomorrow. Now that you mention it, that sounds like a really good idea!

Maybe a little hot outside for warm soup, but man, that sounds really good!

edit - I don't honestly remember the last time I ever went to a bar, and those used to be one of my favorite haunts! I think it must be at least 30 years now.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk


My daughter, her husband, and my 3 1/2 year old granddaughter ended up coming over for a while this afternoon. My granddaughter played with all the toys, she and I went outside and threw some "poppers" on the ground, we all played some WII bowling and golf, and then it got crazy as we all played an instrument from the "family band" set I bought years ago.

When they left I straightened everything up then just enjoyed the (somewhat) quiet for the rest of the evening. The town I live in has decided to do their fireworks tomorrow night, so it was more quiet than it normally is on the 4th.

Overall, I enjoyed the day at home way more than if I had went to a big event somewhere. I envy FCD though...total quiet! My dream...

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I am only about three miles from town, but I can see the gun club from out my front window through the woods. It has a bar there, and I am a member. I only have five acres, but for seventy five bucks a year, I have access to the two hundred acres the club has. Plus, if I want a drink, the prices of the beers there are two thirds of what they want in other bars in town.

I like having the rifle range there, I have neighbors surrounding me now, so it is better to go down to the clubs range to shoot. Unless of course a bear is trying to break into the house. The wolf, coyotes, mountain lions, skunk, woodchuck, and deer don't bother me, but the patio door won't even slow a bear down. I do bitch at the little bucks standing up on their back legs hitting each other next to the patio door though.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: rickymouse

Sounds like a good night indeed!

I had a couple hot dogs. LOL!

I have a few ham hocks in the freezer, so maybe I'll make some bean soup tomorrow. Now that you mention it, that sounds like a really good idea!

Maybe a little hot outside for warm soup, but man, that sounds really good!

edit - I don't honestly remember the last time I ever went to a bar, and those used to be one of my favorite haunts! I think it must be at least 30 years now.

I haven't made bean soup in around five years now, that actually sounds good. We had Homemade chili last week, but I think maybe I will make bean soup next week after you mentioned that. Have to go buy the ham hocks though, don't stock those in the freezer, I used to buy a whole pig maybe ten years ago, but my friend quit raising them and I never got another supplier of pig. Boy, did the price of smoked pork hocks jump up now in the stores around here.

a reply to: rickymouse

Nice!

a reply to: TruthJava

Sounds very nice!

Peace is where you find it, and who you find it with!

Sounds very nice!

My freedom comes to me naturally, no hard work for years required.

Grey hairs; a different story, I had to wait a long time to start getting old 😂🤷🏽‍♂️.

a reply to: [post=27418894]Flyingclaydisk[/

Damn you and Ricky!

Now I’m hungry. Where’s my pirating outfit?

I did some yard work and mowed the front lawn before the rain. Put in a couple of hours panning the creek and got a little color, probably because I dug down into the gravel bed more. Went to bed early. I'll catch the fireworks on the weekend.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Recovering from ER...again.

Hey? I got to DRINK... Lidocaine...THAT....was my celebration!

Happy Bday, America!
💪🫡

originally posted by: TheMichiganSwampBuck
I did some yard work and mowed the front lawn before the rain. Put in a couple of hours panning the creek and got a little color, probably because I dug down into the gravel bed more. Went to bed early. I'll catch the fireworks on the weekend.

I should go panning one of these days. The Yellow Dog river used to be good years ago, but since there were gold mines around here, one less than two miles down the road, there could be some color in the streams here too.

When I was searching for rocks here, I found someone had picked a lot of something out of the rock many moons ago. Maybe Indians, maybe early miners who took the ore back to some camp they had here. There were some rocks with bits of a silvery, not oxidized and very flexible metal in them I found, so I looked it up and around here, the gold and silver form white gold which is super flexible and not corroded like silver would be in the ground. You would have to crush a lot of rock to get an ounce of gold from what I found here though, and of course, it is not pure, it is white gold. They also collected chert and some flint which I found. The flint had evidence of being used to create fire, shaped like a large brick, the chert rock was in piles, they collected it probably to rub together to make fires with moss in between. The flint is a rock not found around here, so they hauled that here, probably from downstate...near Flint.

The daughter bought me a chemical kit for doing gold, silver, and a few other metals and testing showed there was gold in the one sample, maybe like fourteen to sixteen carrot gold in that silverish metal. Too bad they chiseled out so much of it from the rock already, I think it was ore that came from the old gold mine a mile and a half down the road...well, because it is out in the woods there, it is probably two miles from here.

a reply to: rickymouse

Never tried gold panning, even though I live not far from Gold/Silver Central (for the Rockies).

Had a work colleague who really got into the gold thing. He had some kind of a portable dredge thing that they'd use to sift through tons of sediment for gold. They found quite a bit of gold, but every time they did they went out and bought more expensive stuff. Last I heard he said it would be a pretty long while before he ever made his money back.

I've always just wanted to try the panning part of it though. I watched a couple videos on how to start out, but I quickly learned you have to know what to look for to use as starting material, and where to find it. Outside bends in a river was what I gathered. That, and areas where water runs over a rock ledge (they had a name for this, but I forgot what it was). Black sand was better than tan sand. Total amateur/beginner here, just what I saw on some videos.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I put in a childs playground set at a school in an adjacent county around twenty five years ago. While digging the footings in the school yard, four feet deep by three foot diameter, I found some gold in rocks down there. There must have been a quarter ounce. I gave those rocks to the guy running the program in the country. Gold was not super expensive back then, but the rocks were not mine and I did work for the agency so gave them to him.

Well, I guess it was a boom for the school, they got a grant applied for to remove all the topsoil and substrate and replace it with sand for drainage on the property, the person who got the contract was his friend. Ok, they put in a new playground there, much bigger too. They got paid a lot to dig it all up and haul it away and bring in new fill. Hmmm, I wonder how they sifted that and whether there was more. I could have hit a little spot where someone buried their stash long ago. I never asked if they found anymore, I got disabled about the time that they started redoing the school yard so wasn't contracting with the agency anymore.



If they did not find any in the rest of the school yard, I would not be surprised, because what are the odds of three pieces of rock containing gold being in a three foot round hole, the tube was only thirty inch round for the main pole, but the whole was three feet. The other hole around eight feet away was only two feet around, there was no gold there. That is why I said it was probably buried there by someone in the past....was there more? I told him it was only found in one of the holes when I found it. It was gold, not copper, I grew up in the copper country and have a few rocks with gold in them from my uncles collection.

But it probably was just a coincidence that they needed to take out all that dirt in the school yard down three to four feet.

I have been practicing panning here and there locally but I got my start right here on the property. I never thought I could find even trace gold here, however, we have a creek running through my swamp that is a low spot in a glacial outwash surrounded by higher ground composed of glacial till. The area intersects with the Lake Michigan glacier and the Saginaw lobe. The wash from the receding glaciers was around 10-15,000 years ago and I now suspect that my swamp has acted like the "moss" in a gold sluice with the glacial flood plain as the sluice. The waste material contains a lot of pieces of rusty iron, I've heard that is a good sign.

It's a shallow seasonal creek that is only about two feet wide and maybe a foot deep during the spring flood. I picked a spot with a tree root across it that created a small waterfall and a deep hole. I have been digging down about a foot and a half before hitting A gravel bed. The creek bed is muck and small roots for about 6 inches, then sand for about a foot, then rocks and gravel that is somewhat coarse. This lower lever is where I was getting fine dust, it is so fine I used a low-power microscope to be certain, but when I got a little deeper I was getting some small flakes. The fine stuff was throughout the black sand and so small it was hard to tease it out. The flakes were tiny specks, but based on how they were so heavy and didn't want to move around when I teased them out, that must be some real color I had been seeing. I practiced on that pan of black sand and could tease out about a dozen gold specks over and over again.

I tried using an eyedropper to pick up the flakes but they are too heavy. They are hard to suck up and then just drop right back out into the pan water. I could tease them out then let it dry I suppose. That is a lot of work, but if I'm finding dust and small flakes in a couple of tablespoons of black sand, it seems worthy enough. That's just putting in an hour or two here and there.