Chiggers

After a weekend of playing around in the bucolic Oklahoma countryside I am absolutely ate up with chiggers and bug bites.

Statistics:

  • Four fish caught. Two big beautiful crappie (pronounced croppy), one orangey perch I hooked in the side of the face, and one nice green bass with row upon row of sandpaper teeth. Crappie have large eyes and love to fight swimming back and forth very fast. The bass was more like a heavyweight, just trying to pull off the hook and get away. Fishing is all about the anticipation and imagining what’s under the surface because most of the time you’ll get a strike for every 25-30 casts. That has been my recent experience, but then I’m quite the novice angler. There are few things better than being out in the morning and getting your hook in the water.
  • Three bowls of ice cream with chocolate cake in Corningware bowls. I am spoiled, but it was at least for a good occasion this time: Jody’s dad’s birthday.
  • One greenish yellow box turtle caught. I almost kept him, but I envisioned getting tired of it and letting it go, so I put him back on his way in the cow pasture since box turtles are territorial and need to guard their domains. I wanted to carve my name in his shell just like my great grandfather used to do , but I didn’t have a knife on me, as usual. Apparently, my great grandfather would carve his name in the shell of every turtle he found, and his neighbors would call him up on occasion and say, “Hey Frank, I found one of your turtles.”
  • At least five naps on the couch while reading my book.
  • Spotted one large bull frog, the size of a serving platter, half-submerged in the cow pond at LeHigh. They look strangely human when they get that big. We planned a tentative frog-gigging expedition for later that night, but Walmart doesn’t carry the necessary implements for spearing enormous frogs at night.
  • 5 comments

    1. I love fishing for crappie! They’re so much fun!

    2. Yes, they’re pretty fish too.

    3. I wonder why my gravatars are hosed.

    4. Apparently you got your fishing expertise from your mom!!!! I love to fish!!!

    5. You can’t claim responsibility for everything, mother dear. We should go down to the coast and do some crabbing.