It is a pretty lonely day today, most everyone is not at work because it is a holiday here. "What holiday is on November 15th?" you may ask, wasn't Veteran's Day just this past weekend? Yes, that is correct. Veteran's Day was on Sunday and observed on Monday, but today is all-together different.

Today is the day that we celebrate the opening day of firearm deer season. Starting on October 1st in Michigan you can bow hunt as much as you want. That is until November 15th. On this day hunters trade in their camouflage for blaze orange and their bows for rifles(or shotguns if you live below a certain latitude) in Michigan and head out into the woods to bag a big buck.

Personally, I don't hunt, I have done it in the past, but I would much rather go fishing. This past weekend though, @mrsbozz, our friends and I went out hunting for a different kind of meat.

About four months ago, I read a post by @ericwilson about a place called the Dublin General Store. The Dublin General Store is pretty famous for their jerky. They have all different kinds making up an entire wall of the store. If I hadn't seen the pictures taken by @ericwilson, I probably wouldn't have believed it.

Part of what I think is really cool about our trip is the fact that many times you see people talking about things on Steemit and you make a comment and say "oh, I would love to go there someday, that place looks really awesome, thanks for sharing this." Knowing full well, you will probably never make it to the country, island, or basic geographic location they are talking about. In this case though, I actually did it! I am lucky enough that this place is just a two hour drive from where I live and we actually went!

We were staying in Manistee, MI, so it was closer to a half hour drive to Dublin, MI to visit the Dublin General Store.

The roads were a little dicey on our way, so that slowed our progress a bit. Dublin, MI is near Wellston, MI, but that probably doesn't help you much either because if you blink you will miss Wellston. The same is true of Dublin which is comprised of just the general store, a gas station, and maybe a small restaurant from what we could see. Google Maps paints a similar picture of the composition of Dublin.

In fact it is so out of the way that @mrsbozz joked about feeling like we were driving them out into the woods to dispose of the bodies as we were heading there. We made it though and were pretty surprised to see the parking lot packed full for a Saturday morning.

Besides being a jerky destination for tourists, hunters, and all other sorts of folks, this store is also the local grocery store and hardware store. We entered in and started to take a look around. My wife soon found some of the souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts they had and showed one to us. I don't mean to keep talking about how small this town is, but the shirt she showed us actually said "where the hell is Dublin, MI". That tells me if they can joke about it, I should be fine joking about it in this post as well.

We soon found our way back to the area where they keep all the jerky and like I said you wouldn't believe it unless you saw the pictures. They just have jerky lying about the place, not enough room on the wall so they store it in shopping carts for people to grab.

We quickly started going through all of the flavors. @mrsbozz was immediately drawn to the turkey and chicken jerky they had because she doesn't eat beef. As we worked our way down the wall, we found some exotic kinds of jerky as well (alligator, rabbit, wild boar, elk, Kobe beef.

In the end, we settled for a honey mustard turkey jerky and the garlic and onion beef jerky. It wasn't until we got home on Sunday that we tried it, but I must say, it is some of the best jerky I have had in a while. You can tell they use some really good quality meat for the product. I am very impressed and if I am ever back in the area, I will probably make the side trip to get some more. If you took the time to visit the stores webpage that I linked at the beginning of this article you will notice that you can order online and have it shipped to you. That might be another option for me if I get a craving in the future!

The prices were pretty reasonable for jerky. I think both packages we purchased were around $15 a piece. Probably not something I would spend money on every week, but well worth it for the quality and for a special treat.

Side note

You may or may not remember, but in the past I have written about a company called NuScale Energy LLC. They have a design that is being implemented for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors(SMNR's) that take up less space than a traditional power plant and are immuned to melt downs. Additionally these SMNR's can be daisy chained together to equal the power outupt of a much larger facility.

After I posted about NuScale some of my followers brought up the fact that even if the proccess is safer there is still the waste that needs to be dealt with. I thought that was a really great point that I had not considered so I reached out to NuScale via their Facebook page and I actually got a response from them. I wanted to share that with everyone in case you were interested.

Here was my original question to them:

I saw an article about NuScale a while ago and have been a fan ever since. I am really excited about the idea of reactors that are immune to meltdowns. The tragedies in Japan and Russia are something that can't happen again. I have a question though, what kind of waste is created from SMR's? Is it less than a normal reactor? Being super safe isn't going to matter much if there is still no viable way to deal with the waste materials. Thanks for reading this!

And this was their response:

xxxx, thank you for your question. What's interesting is that used nuclear fuel still has considerable energy available, and could be recovered.There are existing and new technologies on the drawing boards today that can utilize this fuel. We have demonstrated that used fuel can be safely transported and stored, as needed. The NuScale design will also be able to take advantage of advanced fuel designs in development, when they are ready, which hold real promise to reduce the inventory of used fuel. In addition, the NuScale plant design incorporates proven safe, secure, and effective used fuel management systems. Used fuel is stored underwater in a stainless steel lined concrete pool for at least 5 years. The concrete pool is well below grade as is part of the reactor building; a highly robust structure designed to Seismic Category 1 and aircraft impact resistant requirements, capable of withstanding a variety of severe natural and man-made phenomena. The facility design includes on-site dry cask storage of the used fuel for the life of the facility, or until such time that the used fuel can be ultimately stored at a permanent long-term used fuel repository.

So there you have it. Take it for what you will, I was just impressed that little old me actually garnered a response from them.

Thanks for following along! Only one more day until the weekend! Try to think positive even if the markets are not!

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