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Excursion to Hatcher Pass

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     The girls and I had such a good time last week when we went to Kepler Lake, we decided to go fishing again. Liz has been on vacation, and Autumn has been off work waiting for the new location for the cafe' to get the necessary permits so they can open. We wanted to try Hatcher Pass again. Last time I was there in June with Camille and her daughter Justine, there was still ice and a foot of snow on the lake. I checked with Fish and Game and found out that they stocked the lake on July 4, but it still had ice and snow on it. We figured by now, it had to have thawed out. We wanted to catch some of the thousand trout that ADFG had stocked. This time, I figured that I would offer the trout something other than nightcrawlers so I wouldn't have to spend all my time baiting the girl's hooks. I brought a handful of frozen, raw shrimp with me. I still ended up baiting some of the hooks and taking a few of the fish off, but for the most part, I spent most of my time baiting my ...
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Fishing With the Girls

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  About a month ago, I was getting desperate to go fishing. I tried to get several people to go with me down to Kepler Lake, near Palmer, but for one reason or another, it didn't work out, so I went by myself. I won't say that it was a mistake to do that, but I will mention that it was a real challenge. For one thing, the john boats, while large enough in length and width, don't have much depth to them. I guess because they are flat bottomed, kind of like me, they don't want the seats to be too high in the boat. As a result, unless you are young and limber or an athlete of some kind, they can be incredibly uncomfortable to sit in for any length of time. They all come with oars, but for an additional $5.00 per hour,  you can rent an electric motor to push you around the lake. In retrospect, perhaps I should have just stuck with the oars, although that would have provided an additional challenge. As it was, I was sitting in the stern of the boat, facing the front, and hav...
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Feeding the Ducks

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    Last week, while my daughter, Camille, and her oldest daughter, Justine were visiting, I recalled that there was a little park down on Lake Lucille that was populated with quite a number of wild Mallards and a few Grebes. I guess they're wild, although by the look of these pictures, I suppose they could be considered domesticated.  They certainly come running whenever anyone comes to the park and gets close to the water. Since we didn't have any stale bread we wanted to get rid of, I took several tubes of saltine crackers to feed them, along with some black sunflower seeds. Needless to say, they made short work of the food we brought them. Justine laughed with delight and of course tried to get them to eat out of her hand, which they didn't want any part of. Like most things we enjoy doing, once wasn't enough, so we made a second trip to the park to engage the feathered gluttons. This time I didn't bring saltines, I don't want them to end up with high blood ...
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Bait or Supper?

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    About a week ago, my neighbor and good friend, Butch, mentioned that a friend of his who he has hunted and fished with for years wanted to go fishing for the afternoon at Finger Lake, close to home. He wanted to take his boat out and make sure the motor was running OK. Of course I don't know what we would have done if we'd gotten stuck out in the middle of the lake, since he didn't have a kicker motor, but I'm sure we could have gotten a tow in before it got dark. The day was almost ideal for fishing, overcast with a slight wind. It was kind of cool, but I had brought my jacket, so I was pretty comfortable, unlike my last experience with a boat up here. I need to do a post about that, but I want to get a picture of the boat I rented first so you'll have an appreciation of what an experience that was. Anyway, we motored over to where my friends wanted to fish and I dropped a salmon egg into the water with a bobber about three feet up the line. It didn't take ...
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The Vermont Country Store

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 Last year when we went East on vacation, I briefly mentioned stopping in Vermont and picking up my friend Buffalo Bob on our way down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We spent several days in Vermont looking around, and Buff knew all the local areas for miles around. Amongst the places we visited was the famous Vermont Country Store. Perhaps you've been there yourself or received one of their catalogues in the mail. I don't know if they still do mail order, I guess they sell primarily on line now. Anyway, I happened to be thinking of things from my childhood the other day, and one of the things I recall was Chum Gum. It was bubble gum, but it came in sticks like regular chewing gum. I think you used to be able to buy it in a pack of three, I'm not sure. Anyway, it was by far the best bubble gum on the market, sweet and soft and chewy. Like most bubble gum, the flavor didn't last very long, but it was sure satisfying while it lasted. Unfortunately, the company that...
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Niagra Falls

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  I haven't had much to write about lately. My life has been incredibly boring. I suppose if I were living in Iran or Israel right now, my life would be something they would envy. I did go fishing last week, which turned out to be a fiasco, but I'll write about that at a later date when I can get some pictures of the place I visited. I rented a boat, and I wasn't foolish enough to bring my camera with me, knowing full well it would probably end up in the bottom of the lake. So, I'm going to write about our trip down south last year. We visited the Ark in Kentucky, which I did write about I think, I'll have to check, then we made our way through our home town in Ohio, where we visited my sister and one of Jan's friends. We stopped off at Niagara Falls, New York, since we were passing through anyway on our way to Vermont to visit our friend Buffalo Bob Holden. Niagra Falls used to be a big honeymoon place when I was a kid. It runs in my mind that different game sh...
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Wow! Those Are Big!

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Normally, the phrase I used for the title of this post would be reserved for something other than fruit, but in this case, I felt that the description more or less fit the item I was describing. A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter, Jen, blessed us with a gift from Harry and David's for Mother's and Father's days combined. It sounds like for the next few months we'll be receiving whatever fruit is in season. I'm fairly certain they won't be sending any watermelons through the mail, but there may be peaches, plums or nectarines, I'm not really sure. This month it was strawberries, and as you can see, they dwarf any normal sized strawberries that most of us have ever seen. I didn't know what to compare them to, so I used a teaspoon to give you some idea of the size. Of course strawberries are easy to bruise, and it would be disappointing to open a box of them and find that they had been damaged in transit. The folks at H&D solved that problem with a cus...
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