Canadian Dreaming

Today I woke up to a snow-covered world. The rain falling yesterday afternoon and evening turned to snow in the wee hours and continued into the morning. The temperatures, in the mid-thirties, caused most of it to melt as the day wore on. As one anxious for weather conducive to outside activities, this was a setback.

The time inside gave me the opportunity to plan for spring weather as it will arrive eventually. Lately I have been thinking about my fishing trip to Canada in May. After several years of annual trips, the pandemic has prevented me from going since 2019. At this point it appears that the border will be open. It will be a matter of making sure I have whatever proof of vaccination and testing is required at the border and having all of it with me.

Yesterday I ordered a new fishing rod from St. Croix Rods in Park Falls, WI. They are available in the local sporting goods shops, but I may not have been able to find exactly what I wanted. In addition, I watched a video of someone who ordered from the factory and his excitement over getting it straight from Park Falls made me want to order it. I called to make sure they had it in stock and Peter, the phone representative, said it would ship in one week. I am going to use it primarily for walleye fishing. Now I am searching for the right reel for it. As with everything else, there are a lot of choices. 

In order to fish in Ontario, I will need an Outdoors Card and a license. The Outdoors Card allows the bearer to purchase fishing and hunting licenses. The card is good for a three-year period. I bought one in early 2020, before the pandemic shut down the border, so mine is good until 2023. My fishing trip will be for eight days, so I will purchase the eight-day license. 

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry offers two types of fishing licenses, conservation and sportsman. These vary in cost and the number of fish you can have in your possession. I fish for walleye, northern pike and lake trout. If one purchases a sportsman license, the more expensive of the two, he or she can have four walleye, four northern pike and two lake trout at any one time. A conservation license allows half of each of those amounts. No one can eat that many fish in one day, so the limits really only affect how many fish you can bring home. I will get the conservation license and that will be plenty of fish for me. 

The final two things to check today were my passport and Canadian cash. My passport is good until 2027, so there are no worries there. I have $55 Canadian left over from 2019, so I will go to Associated Bank in May and exchange enough American dollars to get another $150 Canadian. I don't like to be up there with no Canadian cash. 

As I look at the snow and hear the wind blowing, I am happy that this year I have the trip to the wilds of Ontario, Canada to look forward to. 

Nice Canadian Walleye

I Did What During the Pandemic?

The world passed the one year mark of the Covid 19 pandemic in the middle of March. Each week it feels like we are getting closer to life as it was before the onset of the pandemic, but we have a ways to go. Doing what seemed normal at one time, like eating in a restaurant, feels safe but unusual. Avoiding other people in stores and even on the street is now normal feeling behavior. A friend described receiving a friendly touch on the arm from someone and reflexively pulling back. It will take some time to react to other people and circumstances in way we once did. As we completed one year of this life I began to think about what I had done with a lot of newfound free time.

Wisconsin was fortunate to have a dry and warm spring in 2020, so I was able to get outside when I felt the need. But it was still March and April in Wisconsin, so it was not all seashells and balloons. There were a few things I got around to that I may not have without the pandemic. 

Martin D1

There had been a few songs that I had been playing on my Martin D1 acoustic guitar, but I did not know all of the verses. A couple of them were Bob Dylan songs, so there were lots of verses. The first one I memorized was "Desolation Row". It seemed fitting. I would get out the guitar and set up the lyrics on a music stand in the living room. I learned one verse and memorized one verse every couple of days as I watched the neighbors walk up and down the street in a pandemic daze. There are ten verses, so it took about three weeks to learn them all. Next, I moved on to "Tangled Up in Blue" by Dylan and "This Hard Land" by Bruce Springsteen. That got me through the spring and into the early summer. I did not play as much during the summer, but got started again in the fall.

When the cold weather returned I picked up my Fender Stratocaster American Deluxe electric guitar and start learning lessons out of the "Blues You can Use" book. It has lessons on chord and scales with short musical examples of each concept. There is a CD enclosed that I could play along with. I had worked my way through some of it over the years, but I made a concerted effort to play for an hour each day. I am still playing most days, but life has gotten a little busier since I got the vaccinations in February. My playing skills improved noticeably and it is fun to play along with the CD. 

Fender DeVille 410 and Stratocaster

It was a quiet Christmas, which I did not mind too much. One of the gifts I received was a bird house kit. That allowed me to spend some quiet time in the basement and provide a new home for a local feathered friend. There was some paint left over from touching up the house and the garage in recent years, so the bird's house matches our house. Now I just need a good tenant. 

Available for Rent

Another basement project involved the basement windows. Many years ago a squirrel managed to get into the basement, through the old chimney I think, while we were gone for a few days. The squirrel, of course, wanted to get out and spent the time clawing and gnawing on the wooden window frames. Our basement is just that, a basement, so I never expended the effort to repair the windows. The pandemic presented a now or never type of situation. So on one of my last motorcycle rides in fall 2020 I picked up some wood filler at the local Lowe's. Once again I found some house paint that would suffice to paint the basement frames. Once the windows were painted I cleaned the glass and will take care of cleaning the outside once it warms up. 

Squirrel Repair Done

 Another activity that took up some pandemic time was jigsaw puzzles. We had not done puzzles since, well, ever, but finished up four of them over the winter. It takes some time to get started, but once we began the puzzle would become something of an obsession. They were puzzles that had been around here for years and their origins were unknown. We fully expected each of them to be missing a piece or two, but they were all complete. 

Jigsaw Puzzle Fun

I continued to do the things I would normally do during a Wisconsin winter. The snow fell in amounts that allowed the Reforestation Camp snow bike trails to be open all of January and February. By March the snow let up and the trails became too icy for me. In February I participated in a Snow Crown Series race at the camp. I rode in the beginner, or "fun group", category. It was a beautiful sunny winter day and it was nice to be out with other riders. We took a couple of car rides around the area and looked for eagles and owls. We were successful finding eagles, but not the elusive owls.

Snow Crown Race Finisher

We are experiencing unseasonably cold April weather, but warmer days are ahead. I have gotten in quite a few miles on my Trek road bike already and have had some good rides on my BMW motorcycle. Tomorrow I will be getting my Harley Davidson Lowrider S out of storage. It looks like we will be dealing with Covid 19 in some fashion into the summer, but the end of the pandemic is a year closer than it was last April. 

Pandemic: Year Two

We are now almost one month into 2021 and it feels a lot like 2020. The most important change is the feeling of hope, which really began in December with the first people getting the Covid 19 vaccine. As the calendar turned over on January 1st I was happy to welcome the new year and say good bye to 2020. The nine months of living under the pandemic shadow were uncomfortable and it only became worse during the holiday season. All of the frustrations of not seeing family and friends were magnified. The weather did not allow for the escapes that spring, summer and fall did. I am normally ready to move on from the holidays and get the Christmas tree out to the curb, but it felt like an exceptionally large weight was lifted this year. 

The state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, 19 January, that residents 65 and over would be eligible to get the vaccine beginning 25 January. My wife was able to get through to Prevea within an hour and we got appointments for the afternoon of the 25th. We will receive our second dose on 15 February. Our lives won't change dramatically, but we will be able to eat in a restaurant and perhaps visit with friends and family inside instead of the driveway or garage. I am hopeful that we will feel safe enough to travel again and stay in hotels. 

Around New Year's Day we finally got enough snow so that the snow bike trails at the Reforestation Camp could be opened. I rode three times a week until the warm weather caught up with us again and they were closed for a few days. We got four inches of snow on the day the Green Bay Packers lost another NFC Championship game and the trails are back open. They are in great shape and that will give me something to do during the long Wisconsin winter. 

Brown County Reforestation Camp

Over the past few years I have considered getting one of those tough cameras to take along on fishing and motorcycle trips. It would be another way to take pictures other than just using my phone, which I don't like to take out in a boat anyway. I have a little Nikon L3 point and shoot camera and I am using that to see if I will like using a camera instead of my phone. The pictures in this post are all from the Nikon. I have played around with the editing feature on it to make the photos a little more interesting. 

I had plans to try and learn to play a little piano and harmonica this winter but so far that has not happened. But now with some real winter weather and icy sidewalks I may be inside enough to pick give them both a try. I have also been working on whittling down a list of books titled "100 Books Every Man Should Read". More about that in my next post.