Sloat California.. Cheaper gas!

Chris has his own place over in Sloat so I drove over there and went bike riding with him up into Poplar Valley. It was cool to be in some new country from most of my normal bike riding areas. The ridge in the background of this picture is Eureka Ridge. There is still a bit of snow in the high country and we had to traverse one snow patch on our bike ride. From his house our ride gained over 2000 ft of elevation and we had some great downhill runs.

One of the sidelights to this trip was when I went through Quincy I was shocked to see that the gas was 10-15 cents a gallon cheaper over there than it is here in Susanville. Quincy is more remote than Susanville and I have been going through that town regularly for the last 30 years since the Plumas National Forest Supervisor's Office is there and I regularly had to travel there. Gas has almost always been more expensive there than Susanville so when I see that it isn't so now, I can also deduce that we are being screwed once again by the local gas stations who have obviously banded together to control the local price of gas. It's bad enough that it costs so much to fill up your tank these days and it doesn't sit well with me to know that the local gas stations are gouging us even more. Maybe we need a billboard outside of town warning travellers not to buy any more gas here than they need to get to almost any other town in the area so they can save some money. Needless to say I filled my tank while I was over there for the very first time in my life, buying gas in Quincy. Fuck buying local when the locals want to rip you off!

Ahhh... Spring!

Bike riding in the spring... what could be better? Well, I guess even I could come up with some better things to be doing so maybe it's not the absolute best thing to do, but it certainly is when I am doing it. Had a 16 mile bike ride up Squaw Canyon and down Rogers Canyon. It was supposed to be windy and it was a little bit, but not enough to keep the clouds from building up to thunderstorms. Since we could actually use some rain I was hoping for that but it didn't happen where I was although I did pass through a few wet areas on the way home later in the day. No matter what, it was a nice day to be out and I took full advantage of it.

This picture should be familiar territory for a few of my friends... especially Tom.

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!