As 2025 winds down and a new year beckons, it’s a good time to reflect on your own successes and missteps both in the outdoors and in life.

Legendary PBS painter Bob Ross never made a mistake while painting during his long-running “The Joy of Painting” show. He only had “happy accidents.”

A 5-point buck finally fell to my recurve bow, and it was a combination of 51 years of patience and a happy accident.

Do you feel like a young bird dog squirming in anticipation with his first pheasant feather?

That’s the feeling I get right before opening day of the gun deer season, better known to hunters as the Most Important Day of the Year.

The best time of the year for bow and crossbow hunters is upon us, but if you drive through deer country or run an insurance agency during the rut, you may not be smiling.

The rut is simply the whitetail deer’s mating season. While there are actually a couple times when bucks chase does in heat, the primary rut in our area starts around Nov. 1 and continues for a week or two. There is a secondary rut in December.

The brotherhood of firefighters is legendary, and never was that bond shining stronger than in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 343 New York City firefighters.

That anniversary remains a bittersweet one for all firefighters as they recall the disaster but also the heroics displayed on an epic scale.

My wife and I celebrated our 27th anniversary Sept. 19. We (she) decided to celebrate our mostly blissful, sometimes tumultuous years together (9,862 days) not by traveling to a warm beach or remote tropical paradise but by sharing her dad’s lakefront cabin (Wausau home) on Lily Lake near Pickerel.