Greetings from Little Tree's Ramble, the 43 acres of Tennessee mountain land we call home.

As I write this, 1994 is fast rushing into the past. I wonder at the speed of time. Staring into a clock, listening to grocery store music while on hold, seems like an eternity, but to look back at a year or a decade, time seems to be moving at warp speed. I can remember as a kid, people would say "time sure does seem to fly", or "it just seems that the years go by so quickly"; I would think these people were crazy, a day's a day and a year is just 365 of them. Now I think, "Yeah, just 365 of them."

I turned 30 this year. Which was kind of a revelation in itself to me. My first consciousness of my parents' age was when they were 30, so it is kind of ingrained into my mind that my parents are 30. That's just how I think of them. Now I'm 30 and I think how can that be, that's how old my parents are (his mom agrees). Maybe there is some truth to the saying life is so short to make us long for eternity. Oh well, you didn't start reading this to hear me muse about the passage of time.

But this year has gone by faster than any previous. Emily, the Ultra Child, continues to delight and amaze all who come into contact with her. At 13 months, she is fully ambulatory and upwardly mobile. Almost synonymous with learning to walk she conceived the idea that two small objects could be placed on top of each other to gain access to an otherwise unscalable object. Consequently, our valuables are constantly moving upward, physically if not financially, to escape the ever searching eyes of Emily and the grasp of those precious fingers I love to hold. If I had one misconception about child rearing it was that I really thought that by the time they were old enough to get into everything; they would be old enough to understand when told not to. The audible emissions are becoming more frequent and are increasingly more understandable. Her current vocabulary includes MaMa, DaDa, Scott (ot), Hot, Light, Duck, Hi and Cat. The emissions from the other end are maintaining their frequency though gaining magnitude and offense to the olfactory nerve.

In. all respects, Emily is the perfect child. She was sleeping through the night when less than two months old, cries only when something identifiable is wrong, eats everything put in front of her, appears to be bright, and to all who see her, is fair to look upon (Your humble reporter would like to be biased in this matter, but he need not be, the facts are quite clearly on his side). If we could just get her to clean up after herself, Rhonda says she runs the vacuum cleaner four times a day now.

This has also been a "fowl year" here on the Ramble. We raised mallards and Bronze turkeys this year from chicks. The mallards are beautiful to watch but we are down to a single pair, hopefully they will expand next spring. We finally had to get rid of the turkeys because of their propensity to jump on cars. I have always found it disconcerting to find muddy cat tracks across a freshly waxed car, but muddy turkey' tracks were more than I would take. As the pizza delivery boy put it, after the turkey had just jumped on his rice burner sports car, "You people are crazy." At present we also have a big white goose (Hank), some Banty roosters, and Dominecker hens and rooster. I never thought I would want chickens around the place, just because they looked too hickish, but I'm getting used to seeing them around and am looking forward to eating chickens that are not the protein pumped, injection production pulp that the grocery store sells...

We also have a young squirrel that spends the days running up and down the trees doing squirrel type things then shows up at the motorhome wanting to come in and spend the night where it is warm. It has a nice nest up in an overhead compartment made up of kleenex and paper towels. We call her Amy the Amazing Turbo Squirrel, because she can flat cover some ground when she wants to.

Our Corvairs are doing better that ever, mostly in part to Mike McKeel, who, as a traveling Corvair mechanic between Indiana and Florida, finds Monteagle mountain a convenient place to stop. The Ultra Van, the Corvair motorhome is doing fine (with exception to Amy's walnut shells and leftover corn). It gets around 18 mpg if I keep it under 65, and is great for taking Rhonda and Emily on trips with me not to mention the engraving workshop.

This next year is going to be busy too. After many setbacks and tribulations over the past few years, I finally have been approved for Warrant Officer by the National Guard Bureau, and expect to attend school for it sometime this summer. I am still continuing my gunsmithing responsibilities for the National Guard plus working with the U.S. Shooting Team. I will be going to Argentina in March for the XXIIth Pan American Games, as the gunsmith for the U.S. Team. These are held the year prior to the Summer Olympics for all North and South American Countries and will include all Olympic events.

Well, I'm out of paper, if we don't see you this year, know that you are still in our thoughts and prayers.