its been a long long time since ive written anything, and im sorry for that, and so i figured i would write something while i sit and flip between the half dozen or so baseball games that are on right now (hooray for the mlb extra innings package) so it should be a pretty good evening, and so without any further ado...
PJ vs. Ashley Fishing Trip: Round IV
now, all of my faithful readers (if there are any left) know that my friend ashley and i very much enjoy fishing, and most of you probably also know the typical results of our fishing competitions but for any new readers out there (not likely) i will briefly summarize the results. Ashley always wins. It doesnt matter what the rules are , and i change them all the time to whatever suits me most that day. In the end Ashley has always caught the first fish, the biggest fish, the most fish, pretty much any category of judging a fishing competition that i can think of. I have been steadily improving each time out and if you used some creative score keeping, you could argue that i should have won the last time, but this time i was determined to win outright. There were a few changes this time out. We were going to a different lake this time and we would be fishing from kayaks as opposed to from the shore. I felt these switches would give me a much needed boost and i felt confident as we pushed off from the shore. my confidence would not be rewarded as ashley soon landed the first fish, a fairly decent bass. at this point i decided it was time for a different strategy, i was going to copy what ashley was doing. She had tied her kayak up to a dead tree sticking up out of the water and was fishing next to these partially submerged bush things, i was content to float around aimlessly in my kayak while my line trailed behind me not attracting fish. Her method seemed to be working better and i am not above copying my opponent in an attempt to win at fishing so i went over to the tree and tied up there as well. i thought it had paid off pretty soon as i felt the end of my pole bend a bit, i jerked out of my half asleep state and yanked back on my pole. sure enough, i felt a good strong tug and thought "haha, we shall soon be tied!" but then as i was reeling i didnt feel the resistance like a fish, so i jerked the pole again and there he was, i felt him again so i started reeling again. but as i reeled i still didnt feel like there was a fish there and i reeled my line in all the way and there was the worm i had put on the hook, without even a nibble on him, and i was very confused... then i looked up and realized that the tree i was tied under had a branch hanging down that i had apparently been hitting with my pole and that had fooled me into thinking i had a fish... ashley thought this was hysterical.
Soon after this i landed an actual fish, about the smallest large mouth bass you could possibly catch, but at least i did not get shut out for the day. As it turned out, it was the last fish to get caught that day. ashley mentioned something about the fishing being bad because it had been rainy and stormy all morning and the fish dont like low pressure systems or something, which i can totally understand, bad weather puts me in a grumpy mood a lot of times too. Im sorry i dont have any pictures of our fish, at one point ashley accidentally dipped her camera in the water... now that i think about it, there is no proof of any of our fish, that means there is nothing to prevent me from saying i caught tons of monster huge fish and ash didnt catch anything, but i wouldnt do that, it would be dishonest, besides, i dont think anyone would believe me... but thats ok, because even though the fishing was not as great, it ended up being the most exciting fishing experience we have had yet.
right from the beginning of the day we saw a lot of wildlife, there were a lot of geese, and some other birds that i think might have been cranes or something, and when we were climbing into our kayaks some little frogs were jumping around the edge of the water, and there were plenty of turtles sunning themselves on logs and such. and then things got a little more interesting, when i was paddling over to where ashley was tied up to the tree i saw a snake slither into the water from the shore, and i told ash and she said it might have been a water moccasin, and i didnt know what it was because i had never seen one before, and then we started seeing more and more of them, snakes would poke their heads up out of the water and look around for a while, and then they would dive back under for a while, and then one of them started swimming right at us, he got to about 20 feet away and then he changed directions a bit and went over to the bushes we were fishing next to, ash said it was definitely a water moccasin based on his patterns, (there are a bunch at her lake in arkansas making her an expert moccasin spotter). I wanted a closer look at one but for better or worse that was the closest one got to us...
scary...So we were sitting in our kayaks and discussing what would we would do if one of the water moccasins tried to get in our boats and i believe the consensus was panic, attempt to smack it with either our fishing poles or paddles and i would probably flip over my boat and drown, when all of a sudden we hear someone blasting away with a shotgun somewhere nearby, and this made us a tiny bit nervous because we had no idea where this guy was and getting shot by some crazy redneck was not in my plans for the weekend
Even scarier than water moccasins...
And as if all of this wasnt enough excitement, my kayak was slowly sinking the entire time we were on the lake. now these kayaks had a few holes in the bottom of them that lets in some water, i am not really sure why they are there, i think that maybe by letting a tiny bit of water in the boats are more stable, but its really not much water, just enough to splash on your feet and make your butt wet, but as i was sitting in my kayak i kept getting the suspicion that i was taking on more water, i tried telling ashley this but she never believed me, i would say "ash i think my boat is sinking!" and she would say "youre not sinking" and i would say "i am! im taking on water!" and she would say "no youre not, stop being dramatic" and i would say "im not being dramatic, my boat is sinking because i am so fat"
We're gonna take a little detour from the fishing story for a while to weigh in on a much debated topic; whether or not i am fat. i guess calling it a much debated topic would be a bit of an overstatement, the debate consists of me saying im fat and everyone else saying im not (aaron prowell is probably the only person who would agree with me, he has called me fat for years), now i guess i can maybe understand there argument that im not, i mean when im wearing any amount of clothes you cant really tell, but this past year or so since ive had my job i do a whole lot of sitting around at my desk, and all that sitting around has really taken its toll and i am as fat as i have ever been in my entire life, but people still argue with me when i mention this so i thought i would present you with some of the evidence of my fat-ness. i got a new pair of pants at some point last year, and everytime i wore them they were tight, which was weird because they were the exact same size as every other pair of pants or shorts that i own, but they were tight on me, and then one day at work i split the back of them clean open, they split right down the seam because of my fat butt, i think this is very good evidence of how fat i am, skinny people do not rip the seam on their pants, only fat people do... here is another example, when we went kayaking we got a couple of life vests, which i was very glad to have, because i am not a very strong swimmer and i would probably drown if i were to fall off my boat, but thats a whole other story, when ash gave it to me she said "here, i got you a medium, i think that will fit" and i said "im not so sure about that, ive gotten pretty fat" and she of course said "youre not fat" but then i put on my life vest and it was really snug on me, i could barely snap the little buckle across my waist and then when i zipped it up it was super tight around my chest and i showed her this and she said "wow, you really must be fat" and then we come to find out later that it wasnt a medium after all, it was in fact a large/XL.... and then of course, i made my boat sink, speaking of which, i think its pretty obvious im a big fatty so i'll get back to my fishing trip story
so im sitting in my kayak and im not catching any fish and so i dont really have anything better to do than sit and debate with myself as to whether or not there is more water in my boat than there used to be, when i first got in my kayak there happened to be a tiny little bit of water sitting in the cup holder built into the bottom of the kayak, but the water level was far below that. a little while later i checked again, and the water level was up to the base of the cup holder, a while later it was over the edge of the cup holder, I tried telling ashley this again, that i was sinking but she again dismissed me saying i couldnt possibly be sinking. a little while later and the cup holder was now 3 or 4 inches under water, the whole little cabin area of my kayak was full of water, it was like sitting in a bath tub, and i was sitting noticeably lower in the water, so i mentioned to ash that it was only a matter of time before the water started pouring over the sides of my kayak and i sank completely and drowned. as this was the most ridiculous statement i had made yet ashley looked over to my kayak and finally realized i wasnt just exaggerating about the amount of water in my boat. At this point i decided that rather than sink, and either drown or get eaten by water moccasins, it would be a better idea to paddle to shore and dump out some of the water that was building up in my kayak, so i paddled to shore and jumped out of my kayak and tried to pull it on shore, i barely could get it up out of the water because the entire thing was full of water, the whole hollow bottom part was full, apparently there was a big crack in the bottom that was letting all the water in, ash paddled over and said "oh wow, i guess you really were sinking!" i dont know why people dont believe me when i say things sometimes...
so i waited for a while until my kayak finished draining out and then i went and fished for a while longer, when my boat was almost fully filled with water again we decided it was probably a good time to quit for the day before i sank completely (i mentioned before that ash accidentally dipped her camera in the lake so there are no pictures of this fishing trip, so i had to recreate all the pictures here for you)
Hey that reminds me, i watched the movie Titanic the other day in its entirety for the first time the other day, and i have to say, my favorite part of the movie was all the rich snobby people, i realize you arent supposed to like them, they are supposed to be the bad guys in the movie, but i loved all the scenes where they were eating their fancy dinners and dressed up all nice, and then the men would go off to have a brandy and a cigar and i wanted to be them...
time to switch gears, now i might have mentioned this before, but i love fortune cookies, i love chinese food and i eat it all the time and then i get my fortune cookie and i get real excited when i get a good fortune and grumpy when i get a lame one, and when i get good ones i keep them until they come true, the other day i got one that made me really excited, it said "an unusual dream will come true." im interested to see what unusual dream of mine comes true, right now im hoping it doesnt mean a dream like you have when youre sleeping, because ive come to the conclusion that whatever part of my brain, or part of my subconscious or whatever it is that controls what i dream about, ive decided that it doesnt like me, because it seems that for the past month the only dreams i ever have are ones about my ex girlfriend, and occasionally i get a dumb baseball one thrown in there as well (dont get me wrong, i love baseball but i never had good baseball dreams) and bad dreams always put me in bad moods after i wake up, which they probably shouldnt, cuz they dont really mean anything but i take dreams very seriously and even more seriously now that i know one of them is going to come true, i hope my cookie wasnt talking about sleep dreams, but it meant dreams as in something i hope will happen, so im looking forward to that, i have some ideas as to what dream i hope works out but im not going to write about it and jinx myself, although the cookie did say it would be an unusual dream, and i have some weird ones so this could be pretty interesting...
speaking of fortune cookies, my buddy got one at lunch the other day that said "accept the next proposition you receive". I thought this was one of the most amazing fortunes ever, it gave him a very specific task and if it had been my cookie i would have definitely followed its advice, no matter what the proposition was, i realize that it could be possible, although arguably quite an elaborate and complicated prank, but if you wanted to put in the effort you could probably get me to do just about anything if you were able to rig the fortune i got in my fortune cookie, my friend trent however did not follow the cookies instructions and therefore missed out on some amazing adventure im sure, as a punishment, the next time we got chinese food for lunch his fortune cookie did not have a fortune in it at all...
so i really like to eat noodles, and ever since i moved out here i have been buying these little pesto sauce packets, and i like to make those and put it on noodles and its delicious, and then a tragic thing happened, they stopped carrying them in my grocery store!! all of a sudden they just didnt have any more, and i look every week, and ive been to several grocery stores here and none of them ever have them. i wonder if maybe i was the only person who ever bought them and i slowly worked my way through the stock they had left and when i had bought them all they were all gone, and it makes me very sad, but, being the eternal optimist that i am i check every week when i am at the store, and then a couple of weeks ago i was feeling especially lucky, so when i was looking for my pesto packet i did an especially thorough search, i pushed all the other related sauce packages to the side and dug way to the back (and kind of made a big mess) and i was rewarded for my efforts, there in the very back was a single pack of pesto mix!! oh i was so excited, if there had been a whole box of them i probably would have cleaned out the whole store. now this alone would have been enough to make that trip to the grocery store the best one of the year, but there was more to come. Ever since i moved away from new mexico my parents periodically send me salsa and green chile and stuff like that, they did it when i was at purdue and they do it now that i am in wichita. and the other day i had a bottle of salsa that they sent me that i had never had before, it was El Pinto's Wild and Fiery Chipotle Salsa. It is quite possibly the best salsa ive ever had, and thats a pretty strong statement but it might be true. I opened it when my buddy Greg was in town visiting and we both kept commenting on how good the salsa was, (it reminds me of that seinfeld episode where they are eating the fat free yogurt and they are sitting there raving about it and jerry says "this is so f***ing good!" right as the little kid walks by, haha, that cracks me up). that bottle didnt last long but i had heard rumors that the grocery store here carries el pinto salsa, and so fresh off my excitement from finding my pesto sauce i started walking to the chip aisle in the hopes of finding some, and i got there and they didnt have it, i walked up and down the chip aisle double checking and all they had was a bunch of crap tostitos brand, or pace, and all that trash, and i was devastated... all the excitement of finding my pesto was completely gone... then i remembered there was a mexican food section at the other end of the store so i started wandering back there (i am the most inefficient grocery shopper ever, i bounce around all over the place rather than walk back and forth up the aisles in order), and im not feeling too hopeful as i wander back to the other side of the store, and i even had time to think of a pretty decent analogy comparing the El Pinto Chipotle Salsa to my last girlfriend, very exciting, hot and spicy, and then inexplicably out of my life almost immediately, granted it wasnt a perfect analogy, i think the fact that i live in the middle of kansas pretty well explains why i couldnt find my new favorite salsa, and i only had a minute or two to think about it before i got to the mexican food section and there it was!!! They had my salsa!! i was super excited again, it was an emotional roller coaster of a grocery store trip
writing this has made me hungry, so im gonna go have a little chips and salsa while i watch the end of my A's game. Im sorry to my loyal readers for the huge delay between writing, hopefully it wont be near as long before the next rambling, and if anyone actually does read this whole thing could you let me know somehow, im always curious to see if anyone actually reads this stuff....
Even scarier than water moccasins...After looking around for a while we saw a guy over on the edge of the lake with his gun, and we still were not sure what exactly he was shooting at, there were a bunch of geese around there but unless he was shooting one for dinner it doesnt really make much sense to shoot 1 goose. There are way too many of them and if you are trying to teach them to stay off your property youre in for a long battle as you have to shoot a couple hundred of them before they learn to stay away. He was carrying a dead something in his hand that he dropped by the edge of the water but we couldnt tell what it was, we wanted to find out what it was but we didnt feel like going over there just then in case he was just super protective of his land. we later investigated and it was a big muskrat or something like that...
And as if all of this wasnt enough excitement, my kayak was slowly sinking the entire time we were on the lake. now these kayaks had a few holes in the bottom of them that lets in some water, i am not really sure why they are there, i think that maybe by letting a tiny bit of water in the boats are more stable, but its really not much water, just enough to splash on your feet and make your butt wet, but as i was sitting in my kayak i kept getting the suspicion that i was taking on more water, i tried telling ashley this but she never believed me, i would say "ash i think my boat is sinking!" and she would say "youre not sinking" and i would say "i am! im taking on water!" and she would say "no youre not, stop being dramatic" and i would say "im not being dramatic, my boat is sinking because i am so fat"
We're gonna take a little detour from the fishing story for a while to weigh in on a much debated topic; whether or not i am fat. i guess calling it a much debated topic would be a bit of an overstatement, the debate consists of me saying im fat and everyone else saying im not (aaron prowell is probably the only person who would agree with me, he has called me fat for years), now i guess i can maybe understand there argument that im not, i mean when im wearing any amount of clothes you cant really tell, but this past year or so since ive had my job i do a whole lot of sitting around at my desk, and all that sitting around has really taken its toll and i am as fat as i have ever been in my entire life, but people still argue with me when i mention this so i thought i would present you with some of the evidence of my fat-ness. i got a new pair of pants at some point last year, and everytime i wore them they were tight, which was weird because they were the exact same size as every other pair of pants or shorts that i own, but they were tight on me, and then one day at work i split the back of them clean open, they split right down the seam because of my fat butt, i think this is very good evidence of how fat i am, skinny people do not rip the seam on their pants, only fat people do... here is another example, when we went kayaking we got a couple of life vests, which i was very glad to have, because i am not a very strong swimmer and i would probably drown if i were to fall off my boat, but thats a whole other story, when ash gave it to me she said "here, i got you a medium, i think that will fit" and i said "im not so sure about that, ive gotten pretty fat" and she of course said "youre not fat" but then i put on my life vest and it was really snug on me, i could barely snap the little buckle across my waist and then when i zipped it up it was super tight around my chest and i showed her this and she said "wow, you really must be fat" and then we come to find out later that it wasnt a medium after all, it was in fact a large/XL.... and then of course, i made my boat sink, speaking of which, i think its pretty obvious im a big fatty so i'll get back to my fishing trip story
so im sitting in my kayak and im not catching any fish and so i dont really have anything better to do than sit and debate with myself as to whether or not there is more water in my boat than there used to be, when i first got in my kayak there happened to be a tiny little bit of water sitting in the cup holder built into the bottom of the kayak, but the water level was far below that. a little while later i checked again, and the water level was up to the base of the cup holder, a while later it was over the edge of the cup holder, I tried telling ashley this again, that i was sinking but she again dismissed me saying i couldnt possibly be sinking. a little while later and the cup holder was now 3 or 4 inches under water, the whole little cabin area of my kayak was full of water, it was like sitting in a bath tub, and i was sitting noticeably lower in the water, so i mentioned to ash that it was only a matter of time before the water started pouring over the sides of my kayak and i sank completely and drowned. as this was the most ridiculous statement i had made yet ashley looked over to my kayak and finally realized i wasnt just exaggerating about the amount of water in my boat. At this point i decided that rather than sink, and either drown or get eaten by water moccasins, it would be a better idea to paddle to shore and dump out some of the water that was building up in my kayak, so i paddled to shore and jumped out of my kayak and tried to pull it on shore, i barely could get it up out of the water because the entire thing was full of water, the whole hollow bottom part was full, apparently there was a big crack in the bottom that was letting all the water in, ash paddled over and said "oh wow, i guess you really were sinking!" i dont know why people dont believe me when i say things sometimes...
so i waited for a while until my kayak finished draining out and then i went and fished for a while longer, when my boat was almost fully filled with water again we decided it was probably a good time to quit for the day before i sank completely (i mentioned before that ash accidentally dipped her camera in the lake so there are no pictures of this fishing trip, so i had to recreate all the pictures here for you)
Hey that reminds me, i watched the movie Titanic the other day in its entirety for the first time the other day, and i have to say, my favorite part of the movie was all the rich snobby people, i realize you arent supposed to like them, they are supposed to be the bad guys in the movie, but i loved all the scenes where they were eating their fancy dinners and dressed up all nice, and then the men would go off to have a brandy and a cigar and i wanted to be them...
time to switch gears, now i might have mentioned this before, but i love fortune cookies, i love chinese food and i eat it all the time and then i get my fortune cookie and i get real excited when i get a good fortune and grumpy when i get a lame one, and when i get good ones i keep them until they come true, the other day i got one that made me really excited, it said "an unusual dream will come true." im interested to see what unusual dream of mine comes true, right now im hoping it doesnt mean a dream like you have when youre sleeping, because ive come to the conclusion that whatever part of my brain, or part of my subconscious or whatever it is that controls what i dream about, ive decided that it doesnt like me, because it seems that for the past month the only dreams i ever have are ones about my ex girlfriend, and occasionally i get a dumb baseball one thrown in there as well (dont get me wrong, i love baseball but i never had good baseball dreams) and bad dreams always put me in bad moods after i wake up, which they probably shouldnt, cuz they dont really mean anything but i take dreams very seriously and even more seriously now that i know one of them is going to come true, i hope my cookie wasnt talking about sleep dreams, but it meant dreams as in something i hope will happen, so im looking forward to that, i have some ideas as to what dream i hope works out but im not going to write about it and jinx myself, although the cookie did say it would be an unusual dream, and i have some weird ones so this could be pretty interesting...
speaking of fortune cookies, my buddy got one at lunch the other day that said "accept the next proposition you receive". I thought this was one of the most amazing fortunes ever, it gave him a very specific task and if it had been my cookie i would have definitely followed its advice, no matter what the proposition was, i realize that it could be possible, although arguably quite an elaborate and complicated prank, but if you wanted to put in the effort you could probably get me to do just about anything if you were able to rig the fortune i got in my fortune cookie, my friend trent however did not follow the cookies instructions and therefore missed out on some amazing adventure im sure, as a punishment, the next time we got chinese food for lunch his fortune cookie did not have a fortune in it at all...
so i really like to eat noodles, and ever since i moved out here i have been buying these little pesto sauce packets, and i like to make those and put it on noodles and its delicious, and then a tragic thing happened, they stopped carrying them in my grocery store!! all of a sudden they just didnt have any more, and i look every week, and ive been to several grocery stores here and none of them ever have them. i wonder if maybe i was the only person who ever bought them and i slowly worked my way through the stock they had left and when i had bought them all they were all gone, and it makes me very sad, but, being the eternal optimist that i am i check every week when i am at the store, and then a couple of weeks ago i was feeling especially lucky, so when i was looking for my pesto packet i did an especially thorough search, i pushed all the other related sauce packages to the side and dug way to the back (and kind of made a big mess) and i was rewarded for my efforts, there in the very back was a single pack of pesto mix!! oh i was so excited, if there had been a whole box of them i probably would have cleaned out the whole store. now this alone would have been enough to make that trip to the grocery store the best one of the year, but there was more to come. Ever since i moved away from new mexico my parents periodically send me salsa and green chile and stuff like that, they did it when i was at purdue and they do it now that i am in wichita. and the other day i had a bottle of salsa that they sent me that i had never had before, it was El Pinto's Wild and Fiery Chipotle Salsa. It is quite possibly the best salsa ive ever had, and thats a pretty strong statement but it might be true. I opened it when my buddy Greg was in town visiting and we both kept commenting on how good the salsa was, (it reminds me of that seinfeld episode where they are eating the fat free yogurt and they are sitting there raving about it and jerry says "this is so f***ing good!" right as the little kid walks by, haha, that cracks me up). that bottle didnt last long but i had heard rumors that the grocery store here carries el pinto salsa, and so fresh off my excitement from finding my pesto sauce i started walking to the chip aisle in the hopes of finding some, and i got there and they didnt have it, i walked up and down the chip aisle double checking and all they had was a bunch of crap tostitos brand, or pace, and all that trash, and i was devastated... all the excitement of finding my pesto was completely gone... then i remembered there was a mexican food section at the other end of the store so i started wandering back there (i am the most inefficient grocery shopper ever, i bounce around all over the place rather than walk back and forth up the aisles in order), and im not feeling too hopeful as i wander back to the other side of the store, and i even had time to think of a pretty decent analogy comparing the El Pinto Chipotle Salsa to my last girlfriend, very exciting, hot and spicy, and then inexplicably out of my life almost immediately, granted it wasnt a perfect analogy, i think the fact that i live in the middle of kansas pretty well explains why i couldnt find my new favorite salsa, and i only had a minute or two to think about it before i got to the mexican food section and there it was!!! They had my salsa!! i was super excited again, it was an emotional roller coaster of a grocery store trip
writing this has made me hungry, so im gonna go have a little chips and salsa while i watch the end of my A's game. Im sorry to my loyal readers for the huge delay between writing, hopefully it wont be near as long before the next rambling, and if anyone actually does read this whole thing could you let me know somehow, im always curious to see if anyone actually reads this stuff....
