Ohhh baby!

Both of these pictures are of the same fish who just happened to see my rapala swimming by and decided to eat it. The wind today made it really tough to fish the spot where I caught this lady, so I felt very fortunate to have thrown my lure in the right spot. She weighed 5 lbs 13 oz.

This was my first fish of the day and I had been fishing for about 2 hours before I caught her. It was pretty slow until I finally found a crappie spot and started catching slabs one after another. All said, it turned out to be a pretty good day and I brought home some more nice crappie fillets. Ya gotta love that.

Scenery

That's one thing we have a lot of around here. You don't have to go far to get some pretty good views. Yesterday I rode my bike up to Susanville Peak and sat on the top rock. You can't ride all the way to the top and I had to guess at where to stop along the road to have the shortest hike up. As it turned out I didn't make a very good call and ended up walking much farther than I had to, but it's all good. This first picture is the highest rock pile.



On the way down the road there are some nice overlooks and that's what the second picture is.



But today was a fishing day. There were some really nice calm times today and this is one of them. I was running a rapala through those rocks and getting a few of the smaller fish to bite. I saw some really big ones in there among the rocks but they didn't want my lures. Oh well, maybe tomorrow they will like it better...

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!!!