Oh, I'm not taking it all that seriously--except a little with drover. But I actually like to investigate ballistic minutiae, since the investigation often inspires articles.
But I was also having a lot of fun with the U.P bars tangent. Haven't been there since 2000, when my wife was writing an upland game cookbook and we put 12,000 miles on the pickup, traveling around the country to collect wild birds for her kitchen experiments. She refuses to cook pen-raised birds, since they're different than wild birds, and as far as I can determine nobody's ever pen-raised woodcock, the reason we were in the U.P.
We got real lucky and hit the woodcock flight right on the nose, thanks to a cold front. We also managed to pick up a few ruffed grouse, and spend some time amid the local culture. It's a living.
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
