Stock Values

I got up before the stock market opened today. You would think that my motivation for this was to torture myself by watching the gains of the week past evaporate on this fine Friday morning. No, of course not… First of all, I am not that masochistic and secondly my portfolio was actually holding up quite well as the general market was consolidating.

I got up early to play 1 vs. 100. No, not the new popular NBC game show with Bob Saget, but my own redneck version of the same. I was determined to reduce the mob, decimate it, annihilate it! The mob of rabbits, of course.

For those of you not familiar with the story, allow me to recap… For the past year and a half, I have been planting everything from tiny vegetables to the larger trees out here on the farm in Bennett. I have been planting them and the rabbits, well the rabbits have been eating them. After spending some time searching for a humane way to control the problem, 6 months ago I finally got a nice air rifle from Wal-Mart. This was effective in reducing that rabbit population, but not nearly as effective as the rabbits were in reducing plant life. So, a good friend helped me add an optical sight. Little did I know that this particular sight would only help when the darned targets (i.e. rabbits) were exactly 50 ft away, while guaranteeing failure at all other distances. And the rabbits (them silly creatures), for whatever reason, never wanted to be exactly 50 ft away.

By the time I figured out that the rabbits were probably smarter than they first appeared and took the optical site off, the growing season was behind us and everything that I thought could be eaten by them, was. So, I relaxed a bit and decided to spare the lives of the remaining critters. That was a mistake…

December came to Colorado and with it several feet of snow. And so what’s a poor rabbit to do when he can’t get no food from the ground. The answer may surprise you – it did me. The rabbits grow little antlers and girdle (eat the bark all the way around) the more mature trees above the snow level. Ok, they didn’t really grow antlers, but there were so many of them working so well on that bark that we might have as well had deer for guests. This is how we lost a four year old ash tree, an apple tree and three pear trees.

Now it was pay back time. Today the mob was only reduced by 2, but I am still in the game and this time I am staying until the winning end!