Want To Know How I Spent Part Of My Sunday?
In short: trying to recover from a bone headed move. Let me explain. I have a series of trail cameras positioned in various areas of the woods where I deer hunt. I don’t check them often…maybe once every two to three weeks or so. So, quite often when I go to switch-out and remove the memory cards replacing the camera with a fresh, empty card…I keep the cards conveniently secured in a little clear plastic carrying case.
Just so happens today I got lazy. Yup, I know…hard to believe, but at one of my last stops I removed an empty SD card from the case and put the full memory card inside the protective case after removing it from the camera. Problem was…I laid the plastic case on my 4–wheeler and went back to the camera to make a few adjustments.
By now you probably see where I’m going with this story. Yea, so I returned to the 4–wheeler and drove off excited to get back home so I could view all the pictures. Whoops! Big problem. I drove for about 1/4 mile until I finally felt my pants pockets. Hmmm…they both seemed rather flat and empty. Could it be…no, was I that stupid…DAMN! I drove off without noticing the memory cards loosely placed on top of the ATV.
So, I back-tracked searching and searching the area several times with no such luck. I was okay with the fact I probably lost $50 to $60 worth of camera memory. Didn’t make me happy, but that could be replaced. What couldn’t be replaced were the 100s of pictures contained on those SD cards snapped over the past few weeks. If I fail to find the protective card case, I also must now accept that those pics are gone forever without ever getting the chance to view them. That really hurt!
After several hours of beating myself up out in the woods I decided to suspend the search and go home for lunch. My eyes needed a rest, besides…there was always hope I could entice the family to come out and offer me a few more pairs of eyes to scour the landscape. In fact, I had a plan. I would bribe them into assisting me. After humbly explaining to the family what I had done by losing the photo cards, I offered up Dairy Queen for supper to anyone willing to help me go back out to continue the search. Not surprisingly, I had plenty of takers. My wife, my 12–y/o stepson and my 1–y/o daughter all accompanied me back out to the woods to continue the search.
Now let me say this. I learned a very important lesson today. They make jeans with pockets for a reason. If you have something important that you don’t want to lose…it should go inside your pocket when you don’t need that item. Had I adhered to this plan it would have saved me several hours of frustration and lost time, not to mention the growing embarrassment.
Well, to make a long story a little bit shorter…after marshaling the family’s assistance my wife, Bert, found the lost memory cards about an hour after we commenced searching. I let out a big yell…kissed my wife…kissed my little girl…and tried to kiss my stepson (but he predictably avoided my exuberance). Turns out I had walked right past the lost memory cards several times and did not see them.
In closing, I gotta say searching for something you’ve lost in order to recover from one’s own stupidity can be sort of like trailing a wounded deer. In both instances you scour the ground looking for the tiniest clue hoping that within the next few steps you’ll finally observe a positive sign.
In this instance, the prize found was not fresh venison…nope, instead, when I got home and loaded the pictures into my computer it showed I have two very nice bucks sporting some rapidly-growing velvet racks. This is always a positive sign for the area a person intends to hunt during the fall. Yes, getting the chance to observe those bucks came at a cost of some Dairy Queen treats, but I guess that’s still a rather small price to pay to recover from a careless act.
© 2009 Jim Braaten. All Rights Reserved. No Reproduction without Prior Permission.