Happy Father's Day!

[maple flats]

To all the fathers out there, happy father's day.
I shoot trap most Sundays and have invited my 2 sons to shoot with me. Today they are going and want to pay my way. My younger son actually introduced me to trap when he was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in Cal. Since returning home about 12 yrs ago, I think he has shot twice with me. My older son hunts deer with shotgun and black powder rifle, but has never shot trap. It will be great having both shoot with me.
Our trap league, which I joined about 8-9 yrs ago, is very informal. When I started my first 7 matches resulted in 25 safe birds in each match (I had always been a rifle/pistol shooter). Since then I gradually improved and while I'm still waiting for my first 25, I do have lots of 24's. In my 24's I think only one perfect game was lost on bird # 25, the rest came earlier in the game.
About 4 yrs ago a friend was shooting a .410 and after the game said he was going to sell the gun, I offered him $100 and he accepted, and thru in 3 boxes of shells. The gun was an old Winchester single shot, model 20 break action with a 4 digit ser. #12XX. After I got fairly good with that gun (hi score 16, while my 12 ga avg. is 22+), I decided to sell it and get an O/U .410. When I made this decision, little did I know how good of a deal I had when I bought the single shot. I placed the gun on an auction site and it ended up selling for enough that I got $475 after paying the commission. My new O/U was $525, so I almost paid for the gun.
.410 shells are expensive, so I started reloading them as soon as I started shooting the little .410. They seem to be finicky to load, while I load about 250 shells/hr in my MEC 9000 in 12 ga, the .410 seems to need a weighed charge in both shot and powder. It seems to take me almost an hr to load 25 shells in the .410, I wonder if that is why new shells cost so much (HA, HA).

[Clarkfield Farms]

Happy Fathers Day to you, too, Dave. And to all. I'll have to talk to you about where you get powder and shot.

Today Becky and I will just be having another normal Sunday. Our daughter, son-in-law and the twin baby grandsons (6-months-old this week!) are going to Cortland to spend the day with his Dad. We, including daughter and her family and all of my family, were supposed to get together at our pace in the Adirondacks with my father, but last Sunday he went into the hospital. We knew that it was a simple (not that there's such a thing as simple) case of dehydration, but with the hospital mergers, new health care laws, and the government mandates to upgrade computer systems and programming (we knew nothing of this until we were informed, I guess we DID have to pass the law to find out what was IN the law!!!!!!!), he's still there and is deteriorating. He was told, in our presence, that his age prevented him from receiving certain drugs and treatments, and that since he was brought into the ER and was not given whatever he needed from a referring physician (IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING), he had to go home and come back to be considered for being admitted... because of his age (YES, told to him in our presence!) and because they could not definitively diagnose dehydration. And, since he wasn't admitted the first time, the family would have to pay for the ER visit, new medicare law something or other. On top of that, they've lost, FOUR TIMES, samples to be tested... and he's showing the beginning signs of "hospital dementia." Look it up if you don't know what it is, it's astonishing. And he went in just to get an IV for dehydration. Before, it would take 3-hours. Now, he's been there a week.

He's turning 97 this year and with the sole exception of occasional (once a year or two) bouts of dehydration from which nearly ALL elderly people suffer, his mental and physical health are - were - excellent. In fact, this MIGHT be the year he gives up golf, not because of HIM but because all of his lifelong friends are gone, and his "younger" friends in their 70's are too tired to do a full 18-holes... so, since he gave up his license in order to avoid being "one of those old guys who shouldn't be driving," he has to catch a ride with one of them.

I think they're just tired of getting whupped by him.

We're going to take him out and get him into rehab to help him regain his strength and his wits before it's too late.

It's going to be a beautiful day, and we will enjoy it and celebrate the fathers, ours and others, those living and those gone.

Our best wishes to all, to Fathers and their reasons for being fathers.

[DaveB]

Yeah, happy father's day to my fellow fathers on the Trader!

We have awesome weather here in NE CT - nice and cool this morning and nice and warm this afternoon. It's starting to cool off as the sun moves below the horizon of the hill to my west so it looks like it's going to be a nice evening as well.

Hope everyone has/had a great day!

[maple flats]

Tim, sorry to hear about your dad's problems. It makes one wonder about health care these days.
My mom had to go to the ER a few weeks ago, because she had something caught in her throat. They did check in and triage real quickly, maybe record time. Then the put her in a room to await the Dr. to check her situation out. We arrived about 9:15 AM. We were told who her Dr. would be. Then we waited. The ER seemed to have no activity that looked or sounded like a super emergency. About 10:30 a nurse came in and asked some questions. Then they went to give mom (she's 93) a medication to control her nausea. Mom and I told them, she had a string bean caught in her throat, no nausea. The nurse said it would help. About 12:30 the nurse came back in and was told there were no changes, she still had no nausea but still had the obstruction in her throat. The nurse then said she had to get an IV started. The nurse read (?) her chart that said mom had a radical mastectomy about 45 yrs ago on her left side. She proceeded to start to set up the IV in her left side (that is a no-no). I had to point that out. Then the nurse tried to start an IV about 6-8 times in her left arm before being successful. Now it was 3:30, still no Dr., mom never did get to see an ER dr. I think he retired before he got to her. Finally, after I got quite demanding they sent her to the OR, where a gastroenterologist( or something like that) was set up to scope her. She finally got scoped at 7:30. They removed the string bean that had been poorly chewed and got caught in her throat. Then after recovery, she was sent home at 9:15. This past week I got the bill (I handle all of mom's bills). The hospital had charged over $4,000 for that fiasco. (The anti nausea pill was $164) Mom's amount was $200. The Dr. bill (scoping)is still not in there, nor is the bill for the Dr. who never saw her.
My wonder is how they do anything, it's a wonder anyone comes out alive.
If something similar happens again, I'll try to take her to Urgent care, not the ER. Problem is Urgent Care is 30 minutes away, ER is 10 minutes away, in good driving conditions.