In addition to watching 4th of July golf cart parades, we enjoyed a number of other things these past several days. Grandson Henry picked out a delightful wind toy for our yard and gave it to me for my birthday. He suggested we bring it to the lake, so we now have Kermit the Frog, or one of his relatives, riding colorfully near the entrance to our cabin. (I told Henry that he sometimes likes to ride on the other side of the cabin, where he can watch the boats go by.) I love these kinds of wind toys and kites and their bright colors.
Our two flower gardens are doing very well, with lots of petunias and other things blooming. Kathie planted columbine a couple of years ago, and it is gorgeous right now.
Several years ago, I bought this 5000 piece picture puzzle, but until now, I haven't been motivated to start it, as opposed to simpler 1000 piece or other smaller puzzles.
Well, I finally got it out of its box. It took one day just to turn all the pieces face up. I was able to sort out all the edges as I went along, but they are all completely black, so putting the edge together is a non-starter.
I watch or listen to baseball games or listen to books on my iPod while I work on the puzzle, and since I took the picture below, I've actually managed to put together maybe 250 or 300 pieces. That's around 5% of the puzzle. At this rate, I'll be working at this for a long time, although probably the rate of "putting together" will accelerate as the number of pieces remaining diminishes. Fun! See what retirement allows?
The morning of the 4th, we decided to paddle as far up the river as we could. Kathie's mother was a trooper and went along with us. There are often lots of animals to see, and this trip was no exception: 2 deer, a beaver, eagles, a kingfisher, and lots of jumping fish.
We had to drag through a few areas. When we got as far as we could without portaging, we stopped to fish awhile. It felt like a western trout stream, but there were lots of smallmouth bass instead (and some suckers, one of which Kathie hooked when offering a worm for bait). Our neighbor passed us on the way up there (he was using an electric trolling motor on his canoe but had to paddle some of the way). He caught an 18" bass just as we got to the area where they were fishing.
Yesterday, Kathie and I took our boat the other direction and found a spot in the flowage where weeds were growing. We had quite a bit of bass action there too, and I hooked the following 15-1/2" smallmouth. Not a huge fish, but a nice fighter and good for a meal. I was using two rods at the time–a lightweight rod with a bobber and another that I was using to cast a leech on a jig. This guy hit on the lightweight rod. I was just getting ready to cast the jig, when I noticed that the bobber was nowhere in sight. He was a tussle on the lightweight rod, which probably made it more fun. That's Kathie's foot, not mine, by the way.
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