I Love You!!!

I woke up one day and realized that I had a 15 year old daughter. She was distant, moody, consumed with her friends, and in reality wanted little to do with her crotchety ancient 39 year-old dad. I was assured by everyone that this was normal and this was just what “teenaged girls do”. I believed that for a while but after I thought about it I wondered whether she wanted me to just go away or whether she was just seeking assurance that I was still there and I still cared.

“I love you.”

”I love you too”

This is the phrase that Brieana and I have exchanged on every conversation since she was a baby. We still do this every day. Sometime she has initiated, and other times I have, but a conversation isn’t over until we have exchanged these words. Of course there have been a few rare conversations that haven’t ended this way but not many. It is so common that sometimes I wonder whether it is just a habit or whether it is a sincere exchange of feelings but…..

…..in the time I have spent on this earth I have heard too many stories of men, women, and children who have (or very rarely have) heard their parents say the words, “I love you.”. I have no intentional plans to overcompensate for this, but I don’t think a sincere expression of your feelings for a person should be restricted because  a person can’t utter the words….”I love you”. 

I think as a rule we should tell the people that we love that, in fact, WE LOVE THEM!!! Why on earth wouldn’t we? Tell your child, your grandmother, your dad, your mom, your wife, husband, TELL THEM!!! Just break the ice and don’t care if they tell  you back. Just tell them!!

Below is a picture of my incredible daughter that inspired this post with her refusal to hang up the phone without saying I love you… even as a distant and moody 15 year old.

Tell them….

The Garden Is In Place!

Last year was my first attempt at a vegetable garden. Initially I wasn’t sure I would enjoy the project. I’ve always had the tendency to believe that it was pointless to take the time to grow something you could simply walk over to the store and buy. However, over time I realized that it wasn’t a huge amount of work and being able to walk out your front door and grab a fresh pepper straight off the plant was worth the effort.

At first I was going to do the whole trendy “organic” gardening but I soon realized that whole concept was strictly for jobless hippies that had more time than sense. It’s a great idea if you have the time to hand remove bugs and organize late night snail massacres but for me it seemed a lot easier to just go down to the industrial farm supply store and buy some heavy duty chemicals. Through some connections I was able to smuggle out some stuff that puts DDT to shame. The plants glow a bit in the moonlight but the entire neighborhood hasn’t seen a bug in over a year. Come to think of it there also seems to be fewer cats roaming around.

I expanded the garden a bit this year. Here is the plant tally so far.

24 Walla Walla Onion plants
3 Ace Tomato plants
2 Beefsteak Tomato plants
3 Yellow Pear Tomato
4 Anaheim Chili Peppers
1 California Wonder Pepper Plant (Sort of a bell pepper I think)
1 Yellow Squash
1 Zucchini
2 Early Girl Tomato plants
Cilantro
Basil
Chives
and I still need to plant some jalapeno peppers.

I’m probably forgetting a few things because I really expanded this year. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s a picture of Jake post-onion planting.

2010 Camping Trip #1

So I decided at the last minute to make our first pseudo-camping trip of the season. Brieana as usual had plans with a friend so, again, as usual it’s me and Jake with a free Saturday night. We decided to hit Lost Lake and do a quick overnighter to dust of the gear, break out the tent, and make sure all of the broken and missing camping items are discovered when we are 15 minutes from home as opposed to 3 hours away.

Plus is gave us the opportunity to try out our best offseason purchase. The REI Hoodoo 3 tent. As many of you know I don’t tend to pay full price for many things. I don’t consider myself to be cheap but it kills me to pay full price for something that I know good and well will be half off the week after I buy it. So I have been checking REI for months trying to catch this tent on clearance and finally did. Regularly $249 on clearance for $149. SOLD!! Best tent I have ever owned by far.

So after setting up the tent I figured we had about an hour of daylight left so I put a rod in the water to see we I couldn’t coax a trout into biting. First cast…….pay dirt. It was a planter trout so it wasn’t huge, but it fit nicely in the frying pan which is what really counts.

 

Since one trout wasn’t enough for dinner we had Frito boats. I can’t recall the last time I actually ate a Frito boat but I was trying to find something filling that wouldn’t require me to break out the camp stove. Something I could cook in the Jetboil which is quite possibly the best camping accessory ever invented. (I should be getting endorsement money…) Boils water in two minutes, cooked the can of chili in probably a minute and a half. Jake’s quote, “That is the coolest thing ever!!!” And I agree.

We caught two more fish the next morning which looked just like the first one so I had a nice fresh fish lunch on Monday morning. Think we’re ready for camping season!!!

Technorati Tags: REI,Jetboil,Hoodoo,San Joaquin River,camping

Ode to my Blog.

It's Wednesday afternoon and I just realized that yesterday my blog turned 18 months old. I've never been big on anniversaries, but for some reason this one just feels special. I haven’t always paid close attention to my blog but after 18 months I've grown rather attached to my blog. In turn, I think it has sort of taken a liking to me as well. It's a relatively plain blog. Not for lack of potential, but mainly because its owner is too lazy to figure out all the fancy blog gadgets that seem to decorate the pages of other blogs. Sometimes I feel sorry that my blog is so plain, but I think it's character building. My blog will learn to stand on it's own without hiding behind flashy and shallow exteriors.

Unfortunately my blog doesn't have much of an opinion most of the time. In fact, it's never really said anything. Sometimes when I'm alone in bed at night I wonder what my blog could say if it could talk. Would it ask for more content? Larger font? Perhaps a few more web links here and there. I guess I'll never know really. However, if I was my blog I think I'd probably ask for more pictures. Possibly of women in bikinis. Or maybe some clowns and circus midgets. Of course I'm not my blog so this is all pointless speculation.

I sometimes wish my blog could interact with the other blogs. I think it would play well with the others. It wouldn't push the other blogs around or bully them at all. I'd like to think my blog would be a kind, understanding, and gentle blog. Accepting of others and embracing blog diversity. I would like to think it would stand up for less fortunate blogs and fight against the tyranny of blog aggressors.

Overall I think my blog is pretty darn lucky to have me as an owner. So lucky that if my blog could play the lottery I bet it would win. Then my blog could loan me some money at a very low rate of interest so I could buy the Ferrari I've always wanted. Plus I doubt blogs pay taxes so it would get to keep the entire jackpot.

I thought about getting another blog, but I don't think I could give both of them the attention they deserve. Not that my blog is jealous, it just requires time and energy. Time and energy that I couldn't spare to have another blog. I want to give 110% to my blog, not 55% to separate blogs.

I'm proud of my blog and hope it continues to grow into a fine example that blogs everywhere can look to for guidance. HAPPY 18 MONTH BIRTHDAY BLOG!!!

The sweet smell of success……finally!!

So as I mentioned in the earlier post we have been sort of on a salmon drought. I got to Oregon on Wednesday and my dad informed me that the fishing was “really slow” (Translation……NO FISHY!!) So we hop in the truck and take a road trip to Idaho to do a little river steelhead salmon fishing. Three days and a mild case of frostbite later we haven’t even gotten a bite. The frustrating part is that we could actually SEE the salmon swimming upstream. We even saw several salmon which in some ways is worse. Sitting there freezing your ass off on the bank of the river watching salmon swim right by your lure just isn’t right. I was tempted to just dive in and take my chances. See video below and you’ll see how close they actually were.

However, we doubled back to Oregon and the day I left to come back to Fresno we found a couple of suicidal salmon who may have just felt sorry for us. Either that or they were just tired of all that swimming upstream. Here’s some pictures of our day.

Technorati Tags: salmon,steelhead,chinook,columbia,columbia river,springer,idaho

In the mood for fish pictures….

I’m counting the days until next Wednesday. My spoiled brat kids are going on a Mexico cruise with their mom next week so I decided it was my window of opportunity to head to Portland, Oregon to catch the Columbia River spring Chinook salmon run!!! A long weekend of relaxation on the river hopefully interrupted frequently by fast and furious fishing action. Now mind you the on the past couple of trips the action was far from fast and furious. More like slow and painful. However, it’s very difficult to complain about a weekend on the river.

While the last couple of trips we haven’t exactly harvested the fish, we have over the years caught our share. So I’m in the mood to see some fish pictures to properly focus my positive energy into catching copious amounts of Chinook next week.

Unfortunately Jake was the only one that caught a fish the entire weekend. :)

One of our best days ever at Courtright!

The Holy Grail of Salmon. The Spring Chinook!!

Brie doing her best Vanna White imitation on a sturgeon that is about to go back in the river for a little more seasoning.

Okay….so it’s not a fish but we still caught it.

I don’t recall catching anything that day but it’s a cute pic nonetheless.

Annette and her first big catch though not her best catch. That would be me.

This picture just makes me sad. Brie is a munchkin!

Even Mojo the Monkey has gotten in on some of the action.

I just wanted to post this because it reminds me of when I was skinny.

Hopefully we will be adding to the stockpile. This is not all the fish of course. With all the really big fish we were too excited to get the camera out until it was too late. :) Anyone buying that one?

Dead Zebras and the Mysteries of Google

As a society we give a lot of credit to Google. We rely on them for just about every piece of information that we need to easily find. This is a lot of power for one company to possess. Think about it, how hard would it be to to include or omit information based on what you would like society to be exposed to. Somebody is making those decisions which led me to immediately think of the obvious……dead zebras.

Over the past year I have been casually observing the statistics of my blog and have learned some rather interesting things…..

#1: In 2009 I had 459 visitors to this blog. 231 of those were tagged as “unique” visitors. And here I was always taught that everyone was unique.

#2. The average visitor spent and entire 50 seconds on my blog which tells me that I either have a small following of world class speed readers or people just don’t find me as interesting as I find myself.

#3. I’ve had two “unique” visits from Slovenia which I am guessing is in Eastern Europe but I honestly couldn’t tell you much more.

#4. By far my most viewed blog entry was written on February 11th and entitled Beer, Camouflage, and Dead Zebras 

I found the popularity of the Beer, Camouflage, and Dead Zebras entry curious. There wasn’t anything spectacular about the piece. In fact, it was simply an entry documenting my annual tip to the Portland Sportsman Show. I figured there must have been something more to this phenomena. So I Googled it…..

Not surprisingly when you type the word combination Beer, Camouflage, Dead, and Zebras my blog entry is at the very top of the Google list. So I tried other combinations to see how high up the entry was on the “Google List”…..

• Beer and Camouflage………#4 just after a “How to Camouflage Your Beer Can” tutorial. Why?
• Beer and Zebras……..#12 right after The Beer Goggler blog with naked pictures of some chick in a zebra striped skirt.
• Dead and Beer……Too far down on the list to even find. Apparently the word “dead” and a commonly consumed alcoholic beverage are often found in the same article.
• Dead and Zebras……#4 right after a myspace page for the band “Naybubble and the Dead Zebras”. I bet they’re glad they’re #3.

I find this to be a little disturbing. Not so much the way Google lists the search results, but more the keywords you need to type to get those results. What sicko is out there searching for beer and dead safari animals? I would think no one, but that apparently is not the case. In addition these people are finding my blog!! I’d better be nice. So the next time you are researching the life expectancy of Zebras, studying beer camo, or looking for dead animal pictures and come across my blog site stop in and say hello.