Month: May 2007

Happy birthday to our niece Rebecca!

Fishing was so good yesterday that we took Tre today. It was a bit rushed because he has to be sleeping by a certain time; I sure am glad I’m not a kid anymore. We had a great time, Wanda and Tre caught lots of Freshwater Drum, and Bullheads, and maybe one of those bullheads were a catfish. They caught so many, we didn’t look all the time.

 

And finally, I bought a new fishing rod and reel. I phoned a few people before I bought it, as I didn’t know anything about the style of reel that it had on it.  Everyone that I phoned had never used one, so I bought it. As I drove home Aaron called, I told him about the reel; he had heard of it, they suck.  The deal is, when you want to cast you flip a lever to unlock the spool (all is good), you place your thumb on the spool do your back swing (all is good), do the forward swing of your cast while removing your thumb to allow the spool to let line out (all is good), then when the lure hits the water you touch the spool to stop it from spinning (BIG PROBLEMS). As it works out I touched the spool too late, the lure hit the water, then I touched it; the outcome is the spool makes a few (lots) revolutions without the line leaving the rod and you have an instant birds nest in your reel. To fix this you have to reel it in, tie your line to the chain link fence, and go for a walk, a really long walk. Once the bad part of the line is off the reel, you can reel it all in again then go back to fishing. It’s all fun and games the first time, but by the fifth time it’s not funny anymore. It took ten casts to figure out that I was casting into the wind and the lure was slowing down too much (going slower than the line speed of the spool), the fix is to touch the spool as the lure is flying; it may shorten your casts but you catch more fish and less fences. I like the reel now, but don’t buy one

We planted 50 Lilac bushes today, it was rough work. The planting wasn’t bad, but finding the old bushes planted last year was time consuming. The old bushes look like a stick with a few leaves on the bottom and the grass and weeds are so tall you can’t find them. It didn’t take too long to plant them though.

After planting we went to Troy’s house for a barbeque, he made some excellent burgers. It was our first time in Troy’s new house, one of the things that impressed me about it’s design is that everything is low maintenance. Troy’s backyard is all sidewalk blocks, deck, and pea gravel, it looks very appealing and has no grass to cut. The inside of the house has easy to clean floors which are mostly hardwood, ceramic, and linoleum.  He also has a screen room attached to the upper level on the back of the house, it overlooks the backyard and neighborhood.

The plan for today was to plant trees, the problem was that it is going to rain all day. The solution: go fishing instead.

We went to Caddy Lake in the Whiteshell Provincial park with our friend Tammy. It was very cold 5C, raining non stop, with a strong wind. We were all wearing winter gloves, and were freezing. We went to a local store where we bought some rain suits, they worked excellent. We looked as thought we were fishing on the ocean. We ended up not catching any fish, but we had a great time.

A spark plug makes a great fishing weight, it seldom gets snagged in rocks.

The land in the Whiteshell is very different from the parries it is part of the Precambrian Shield or Canadian shield, it is very hilly, has more pine trees, lots of moss, deer everywhere, and large rocks all over the place.

Today we went to my grandmother’s birthday party. She became 88 years old, Happy birthday Grandma.

I watched the news tonight and saw that it had snowed in Thompson Manitoba and Saskatchewan (not northern Saskatchewan, regular Saskatchewan). There is a frost warning, thunderstorms and rain tonight. This is not normal, frost and thunderstorms are not supposed to happen on the same day. There was hail in Portage la Prairie and tornadoes yesterday.

I have noticed that there have been more thunderstorms, and better thunderstorms then there have been in the past. When I was younger I would enjoy a good thunderstorm, and I only remember there being three or four a year. Two years ago there was a week with storms every night, and they were good ones with non stop lightning. A week or so ago I was worried that we hadn’t got the entire garden in, tonight there is frost.

Is it global warming, it may be. It seems that there is usually a good storm after a hot humid day, if it is hotter than average I would expect better storms than average. We’ll have to wait and see what is yet to come. As for now it’s chicken wing night and I’m on my way.

Wanda made the best soup ever tonight. She put ground beef, stewed tomatoes, carrots, celery, sambal oleck hot sauce, and spaghetti noodles in it. I ate four bowls, then Sabrina and Chuck invited us for dinner at Boston Pizza. I had an appetizer for second dinner. It was a good evening with excellent company.

Greyhound sucks.

The plan for today is to take Wanda’s sister and niece back to Saskatchewan. They were here visiting us over the long weekend. They took the greyhound bus here, then greyhound went on strike and they have no way home. I hope greyhound loses business this weekend.

Have you ever waited for the numbers on the odometer to line up a certain way, I do and I don’t know why. This week I get 123456 in the work van, and 88888.8 in Wanda’s car on the way west today.

My phone has big problems! I have a Samsung M500, I’ve had it for four months. I have had multiple problems with it. My friend Calvin has had the same phone and has exchanged it under warranty multiple times. I have ignored it’s problems, and I keep having more.

This is what it has done so far:

1. At times during use, it will freeze. You could push any button and it will not respond, opening and closing the flap does not fix it either.  The fix is to wait one minute for it to reboot, or remove and reinsert the battery.

2. The buttons on the keypad have scratched the screen, this does not bother me at all as I only really use it as a phone.

3. Twice a month on average, it will disconnect it’s self from the network. You can not tell that it has done this, it shows full signal strength, and all is good. But while it is doing this you will not receive any text messages or phone calls. You usually find out it’s done this when you try to send a text message, you get a message of “can not send text message.”  And when you try to make an outgoing call you get the message “call not completed, out of range.” The fix, try to turn the phone off, it will reboot then enter service area and you will find that people have left you messages and text while the phone was offline.

4. Today at superstore I attempted to take a picture and everything was upside down on the screen, by this I mean the regular (just opened the phone) was fine, but the camera (see what your taking a picture of) screen was upside down, and as I found out later mirror imaged.  (note: this one was my fault, if the volume is pressed while in camera mode it does this.)

I still like the phone, it doesn’t compare to my old Samsung a680; but it does take a good picture if you hold it upside down and don’t mind everything being mirror imaged.