Misc.

Back from visiting our friend in Anderson and a fun filled fishing trip on Lake Shasta. I caught my first intentional bass. I have caught some small ones unintentionally while fishing on the Sutter Bypass for catfish. But this weekend I caught my first legal sized honest to gosh bass! After hours on the lake while our friend most excellently powered her father’s bass boat around in awful winds, over white cap waves, and avoided numerous ski boats manned by idiots – we caught bass.

Other trip highlights include a story – the beginning and middle omitted -the end result – me floating off alone – in a bass boat  . ..  that I could not start.

I did catch the smallest bass:

The best rock of the day:

While on shore we found some great cougar and bear tracks:

Aah – now what I know you all have been waiting for – the picture of my bass.

Ok, I admit that hard as I try I will never get this.

The Armor of God’s PJ’s? Is this like hiding under the desk for duck and cover drills? Symbolism of Faith at it’s worst? From the site “The whole Armor of God Pajama set will help your children to depend on God to protect them from their fears, doubts, and uncertainties at night so their sleep can be restful and peaceful.” I dunno – all opinions welcome. To think all my parents had me do was say my prayers.

A couple of shots from the Nevada Trip.

From the pontoon boat:

The old stud still has it:

I started reading all my favorite blogs and discovered that the trend to write posts about a a product and get paid for it has hit a few of them. It sucks in many ways. It is not that I really care if someone chooses to get paid for writing as long as they disclose that they are doing so. What sucks is now anytime anyone blogs about any product or service in the back of my mind is – yeah sure – how much did you get for that one? What sucks is do others do the same if I happen to mention the brand of my car, boat, or camera?

I realize that my blog is never going to be a “high rated” one and I really do not care. That is not what I intended. In the few months that I have been blogging the trend has moved farther and farther from the original grass roots type feel to an opportunistic bullitin board for commercialized BS.

I quit blogging about politics and have moved to an informal sloppy method, this is my life stuff. What I have discovered during my short blogging history is this:

• To get more hits use youtube links.
• To get responses – respond to others.
• Posts about specific situations, such as my posts on Annie’s limp tail, my Cairo model, and my pontoon boat have received the most hits (other than a deleted youtube post).
• If you spend a lot of time researching a political subject your work will show up on someone else’s blog without credit back.
• The more hits my blog gets the more spam I get
• The higher overall level of language used is directly correlated with an decline in time a reader spends reading a post.

There are some blogs that I read on a regular bases that are now trying the pay per post thing. Some have been doing so for awhile with mixed results. There is only one blog listed in my sidebar that is experimenting with this and one that has been removed because the quality went down, down, down once they started vying for traffic and posting for dollars.