Poison Creek

Thunderstorms were predicted for the day and, in fact, did start up in the afternoon. Knowing that I decided to get a bike ride in early up in the Poison Creek area. I like the Poison Creek loop since it's a short one and the best part is it isn't all burned up. It was burned up years ago. Back in the early 80's there was a fire that pretty much screwed up this country but it's grown back and the plantations are starting to get big enough to block the view. You can see one of the plantations in this picture. Anyway, my tracks looked like the first of the year and there were still some snow drifts blocking regular vehicle traffic. Didn't see any wildlife but I did find more bear tracks. Seems like the bear populations must be doing pretty good judging by the many tracks I have encountered so far this year. Biking in the woods... ya gotta love that!!

Bear Shit

Well, maybe not bear shit in the literal sense, more like shit about bears. Had a 29 mile bike ride up along Diamond Mountain road yesterday. I found some really fresh bear tracks going down the road I was riding on and half expected to turn a corner and find her walking out ahead of me. That didn't happen, which I am happy about, mind you. There were still some pretty big snow drifts across the road in places, some of them 4-5 feet deep. It was hard packed and easy to walk across and the up side is it virtually guaranteed that I wouldn't see anyone else... and I didn't. There were some rain showers that I mostly missed getting directly under, and it was still nice and warm. I'll have to work next week but not before I get a day or 2 of fishing in. Retirement is good... Ya gotta love it!!

Computers and country music...

Since the weather turned back to March and I had a computer problem to work on anyway, I have been home for the last few days. This will change today as it is supposed to warm up into the 50's today... whooopeee!!! 50's and the first of May. Not unusual at all, don't get me wrong, but not what I would prefer. The mid 50's are comfortable enough for bike riding as long as I have a few hills to climb every now and then. I'm thinking about heading up the Bizz today but that thought is a work in progress... we'll see.

Computer problem.. yeah! Not my computer, but sort of a burden anyway since it was such an unusual problem. This thing is running Win XP on 256mb of RAM... first problem. I know my friend Tom's computer also has similar specs, and his isn't any faster but the RAM for his machine was too expensive to upgrade it. I checked and they can get 2 gigs of RAM for this one for about $50.

But after I cleaned this thing up and got it running again, I ran into a very weird problem. You can't uninstall anything from the Add/Remove Programs applet. For some strange reason all of the registry keys for uninstall are gone. I did a system restore and got them back but then had to go through cleaning it up again... and they disappeared again. Apparently something I uninstalled took all the registry keys with it. There is an easy work around... don't uninstall anything. Actually, some programs have an uninstaller that came with them, so those could be uninstalled and anything installed from now on should be OK, but I just hate it when things don't work the way they are supposed to. I don't want to have to go through the long cleanup process again so it's going back to the owner like it is. No real downsides to this unless you really, really want to uninstall something, then all you need to do is reinstall over the existing installation and then uninstall it. So another lesson in operating system glitches... ya gotta love that!!!

Fish are biting!

Yesterday I met Chris up at the lake and we tried to find a place to fish for the first few hours. The lake was about the busiest I have ever seen it and it reminded me why I stay away from here on weekends. We saw some large bass but couldn't get them to hit, trying rapalas and plastic worms. Eventually we started catching fish and some of them were really nice.

The crappie are starting to school up and we caught quite a few of them and they were quite large. We started using a bobber and jig setup and caught bass and crappie with that rig. Chris caught 2 big bass, one weighed 3 lbs 14 oz, which is the one in the picture here, and he got another one that weighed just 1 oz under 3 lb.

Even though we had a slow start, the fishing was actually pretty good. I caught 37 fish, lots of them nice solid keepers if I had a mind to keep some. OK, I did keep a few but all the big ones went back in, including that nice crappie, which was full of eggs.

Batteries

With gasoline at almost $4/gallon, driving up to the lake to go fishing is getting a little pricey. So yesterday I load up and drive up there and the parking lot is pretty full, everybody else had the same idea I guess. I get the boat unloaded and park my truck and walk back down to my boat. When I turn the key to start my motor I hear a sound that I didn't want to hear... the battery doesn't have enough juice to even engage the starter drive. Bummer!

Now I have to decide what to do. I did have a couple of workable options. One, fish close to the ramp for a while before leaving early. Two, use one battery and switch them back and forth, then come back and leave early before I completely discharge the one battery I still have. Both options include cutting my day short.

I tried fishing in close to the ramp for a while, all the time thinking about what to do, and finally decided that I needed to just load up and come back down the hill and get another battery and find something else to do for the rest of the day. So I didn't catch any fish, had a nice drive and a little more practice backing my boat into my driveway. That little trip probably cost me $10-15 in gas, but the biggest bummer was not being able to catch any fish. Oh well, I had a fine time anyway and now I'm ready for fishing again in the next few days with a new battery. Any way you look at it ya gotta love it!

Finally warmed up some

OK, so global warming seemed to be in the news a lot last year when we had above average temps in the spring. This year, with the temps mostly below average, nobody is talking about global cooling. I just wonder where they take these temps that are supposed to show that the atmosphere is warming. If you ask me, I'd say we are starting another ice age and that would be much more devastating to the human race than global warming. In either case the fact that the atmosphere is dynamic and in a constant state of change is apparent. How short sighted are we to assume that we have any idea what the "normal" temps are for any given piece of planet earth. With our limited collection of environmental data it's hard to draw any concrete conclusions.


Now the earthquakes over by Reno are a new thing I never heard of before. Oh my god, California is getting ready to slip into the ocean! Or is that being caused by global warming too?


No matter what is happening with this world we live on, ya gotta love getting out and riding a bike when the weather is nice, as it was yesterday. Today it's a fishing day up at Antelope Lake, tomorrow up to Hat Creek to visit with my grandkids, and then Sunday more fishing.. Life is good!

Last Chance

Creek, that is...

I just love the look of those meadows up there in the early spring. The willows are starting to think spring and they have the coolest yellow tinge to them. It won't be long before they turn green. My bike ride was only 14 miles but I got a late start so that's my story, and you know the rest.

I took some pictures of these pretty little flowers in the past but I had forgotten how small they were so I added a penny to give them some scale. Since the weather is supposed to turn shitty again I thought I better get out. I was intending to go fishing but some stuff in the morning gave me a slow start and the wind was starting to blow pretty good, so the bike riding seemed like a better thing to do.

Either way... it's all good.