A lot of people seem to have frowny faces about this Trump presidency situation. You’ve just got to look on the bright side, people. He’s not even in office yet and already job reports are way up for Russian hackers. On another bright note: the Affordable Care Act hasn’t even been repealed yet and already I’m much healthier, getting outside more often in the brisk Wallowa County air and enjoying a lot more exercise, staying busy with chores, hard physical labor, staring at the sun, anything that keeps me from watching or listening to news in any way. It’s so great.

With all this free time I decided to join a book club. We’re reading “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” right now — it’s kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure story — and next month we’ll dip into Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which I gather is kind of a how-to manual for wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape after the crumbling of civilization. Sounds whimsical. I can hardly wait. The voting for book selections leaned toward drastically different titles, genres and subject matter, but the book club uses a system where the most votes aren’t really what decides what you end up with, so I guess that’s just how it goes. Ah, well. Makes sense. Astronomy and bird watching are two more activities I’ve taken up recently, kind of by accident. Sitting in my super-fancy wood-fired Rubbermaid water trough hot tub the other night, I heard and then saw a small herd of Snow Geese flying over in the moonlight. That was worth seeing. Then a while later a meteorite flared up, streaking in slow motion across the sky, heading from the Joseph Airport vicinity toward Ruby Peak. It winked out somewhere above Scotch Creek, from the vantage point of the astronomy hot tub observatory. I checked the fireball reporting page on the American Meteor Society website to see if anybody called this one in, but no dice. Somebody should run up there and poke around. That thing might still be smoking. Looked pretty warm last time I saw it.

Tell you what else was warm lately. My temper, after seeing that photo of poached elk over toward Elgin. The poaching is maddening all on its own, but then leaving the animals to waste cranks up the outrage meter to 11. Here’s a proposal for what to do with poachers. Get a judge to hand down a sentence of mandatory gardening and then move some town deer from Joseph into their yard. Convicted poachers would be legally required to maintain a large vegetable and flower garden with a minimum of four rose bushes, while coexisting with these deer who have adapted to living on flower petals. A gardening probation officer would check in once a month to make sure the garden was still coming along and, if not, it’s off to the pokey. The deer could have ankle bracelets to make sure they don’t leave the yard. Or just have fences built and, I suppose, just send the bill to Mexico.

Jon Rombach is a local columnist for The Chieftain.