Matt and Robby use indoor golf range they helped build at the BHM office out of a discarded fishing gill net. They are using a video system to record and playback their swings so they can analyze them.

We’ve finished deadline for the Jan/Feb issue so I’m back to the Gold Beach Youth Golf Team. We meet at my office, which has been converted to the golf club, this afternoon to discuss the winter schedule. Right now it’s raining most days and it gets dark about 5 pm, so it doesn’t leave a lot of room for golf outside. The kids built an indoor range out of an old discarded ocean fishing gill net in one of the BHM storerooms, so we have a rainy-day place to practice. Through donations the club purchased a used video system so we can record, then analyze the kids’ swings.

Two people have taken me up on my appeal for donations of golf clubs in my Oct. 15 post.  If anyone else has clubs they no longer use, we’ll put them to good use. I’ll pay the Fed-Ex charges. Just e-mail me (dave at backwoodshome.com) with your mailing address and I’ll ship you a pre-paid mailing label so you can FedEx the items to us. If they are real good clubs, we’ll even pay you for them, but we can’t afford much.

Lisa with prepaid FedEx ticket. We'll send you one if you have golf equipment to donate.

You can also help out the youth team by buying a golf shirt I designed. I talk about it in my upcoming editorial in the Jan/Feb issue. It costs $30, but it’s high quality — 65 percent poly and 35 percent cotton that would sell for about $35 at a golf pro shop. I’ll not only send you the shirt, but I’ll also send you a free, autographed copy of my book, Can America Be Saved from Stupid People, and our little U.S. Constitution book. The offer isn’t online yet (I’ll have the webmaster do so soon) so you’ll just have to call the office at 1-800-835-2418 to order. Here’s what the shirt looks like:

The golf shirt has the Backwoods Home logo (embroidered) on the left breast.

Today, after learning my local health department now has swine flu vaccine for adults with certain conditions like asthma and heart disease, I decided to get a shot because I have heart disease, having had heart bypass surgery. So I called the health department to find out when I could come down for a shot.

“How old are you?” the health worker asked.

“Sixty five,” I said.

“You’re not eligible,” she said. “The cutoff is age 63.”

So there you have an indication of what is in the future. There is now enough vaccine for all the children, pregnant women, and adults “who qualify,” but because swine flu vaccine is government-controlled, bureaucrats have decided my age has disqualified me.

I‘m expendable!

Today, while tending my first wood stove fire of the season, I burned the tip of the middle finger on my right hand while opening the wood stove door because there was a hole in the glove I used to operate the stove’s door handle. I threw the glove away, went to the garage drawer to get another, and found only six gloves there, all left-handed. It suddenly occurred to me where all the right-handed gloves had gone.

My brother, Hugh, is visiting from Maryland. He’s on the right. That’s John Silveira on the left. Lenie and I are in the background. Hugh and I play golf every day when he visits. Since he’s as bad as I am, I at last have a chance to beat someone.

Been thinking a lot about the H1N1 virus lately, doing research on whether or not my kids should get the vaccine when it becomes available in two weeks. Annie just announced she’s pregnant, which puts her in the highest risk category for swine flu so I’m particularly interested in whether or not she should get it. The CDC says of the 700 pregnant women who have confirmed H1N1, 27 have died. That’s a very frightening statistic.

Coincidentally I’m rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says European diseases killed 95% of native peoples in the Americas within about a hundred years of Columbus’s arrival. The Indians had no resistance to Eurasian diseases like smallpox, flu, cholera, measles, and a host of others, so they died in droves. H1N1 is fairly mild now but it has the potential to mutate and become more deadly, and modern humans, just like the Indians back in 1492, have no defense.

I’ve asked Silveira to help me with the research. I’ll let you know what I decide.