A digest of the top blogger thoughts and ideas - The A listers

I went pheasant and quail hunting for the first time last Saturday. I've recovered enough now to talk about it. It wasn't shooting birds that was so difficult. In my opinion, those suckers have all the odds and run a bigger risk of dying of hunger or getting hit on the road than getting killed by a hunter. No, the part no one told me about was the work. Once in awhile I'll turn on that guns-n-ammo channel with the overweight guys driving up to a field with a couple of dogs. The dogs go out and chase the birds and the guys shoot at them and occasionally hit one. My friends, that is not reality. Reality is approaching a field which undulates like the belly of a stripper doing a $500 lap dance. The field is full of weeds that are neck high and as thick as Suri Cruise's hair. I'm told to go out 100 yards and follow the contours of the field. Weeds wrap around legs, they hide rabbit holes and, by the way, since it is 9:00 in the morning, they are wet with frost. In fifteen minutes so am I. Wading through the weeds requires a strange goose-step where your foot pushes down on the weeds so you can walk over them. Walking through them just leads to weeds wrapped around your body like some kind of alien invader. And then there is the gun. The gun that felt so light and easy to handle in the store now weights two hundred pounds and seems to attract weeds. I terrified the weeds will get the safety off. So I come to the top of the first rise. I wouldn't know if there were birds in the field because I'm using all my energy just to move forward and not step into a rabbit hole. I'm lagging behind, but downhill isn't any easier than uphill. At the bottom of the hill is what my comrades call a draw. I call it a ravine. Someone yells for me to watch out, it is a little marshy. Shortly thereafter I go thigh-deep in a muddy bog. Heroically I resist the urge to use my shotgun to lever myself out and when my husband comes to help I snarl at him to just go away and hunt the damn birds. I manage to extricate myself without losing my boots, but I'm wet and muddy from the waist down. My shotgun isn't muddy, as I threw it away from the bog to eliminate the temptation of shooting myself or anyone who came near me. I let them finish the "draw" and head back to the truck, using the plentiful weeds to scrape the mud off of me as I go. By the time I get back to the truck, crawling through the barbed wire fence without tearing the back of my shirt too badly, I'm actually fairly dry. Stiff with bog gunk, but dry-ish. So I sit on the tailgate and wait for the others to come back. At that moment two pheasants peek out of the brush along the ditch bank and look at me. Unfortunately they don't fly, and I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to shoot them on the ground. Also, they are hens and I'm also pretty sure I'm not supposed to shoot hens. By the end of the day I'd walked at least 20 miles, seen three rooster pheasants and five quail and never fired my shotgun, which continued to gain weight with every hour. I'm almost too tired to eat when I get home, and watching tv is almost too strenuous, but I can't help thinking that women would pay money to get this kind of sick exercise. I intend to market it as the NRA Workout Plan and PETA folks relax - no shots will ever be fired. We'll be just too damned tired.