jdmidwest

Mine was all surgery. Removal of a third of my tongue, replaced it with muscle, skin, and artery from right forearm. 2 weeks with a trach and a feeding tube in my nose. 3 day weekend back in for an infected stitch in neck 4 weeks after surgery. But no chemical or radiation. I was very lucky.

Goofy weather around here lately. Now is the time for Catfish at Perry County Lake. Everything else is tough other than early and late in the day.

Just walking into a hospital sucks for me. That headache I had all evening and today from the CT Dye is still a cakewalk from all of the other chemicals that could have been pumped in my body if I needed something else. I was one of the lucky ones.

Monthly would suck pretty hard. I am on a 3 month cycle. Good luck tomorrow....

7 Months down the road now and some change. First CT scan with dye shows no trace of cancer. Doc says it is what he expected since there was no trace in the lymph nodes at time of surgery. He pointed out the little bump in my neck that feels like a BB is a coupler for the attachment point of the blood vessel. The little stitch that has festered a few times and I have kept trimmed short when it pops out of my arm is attached to something important. It finally healed over and my wrist is completely waterproof now. It was worrying me that it was going to get infected wihen I dunked it releasing or boating fish. Arm is running about 90 percent. Neck still has stiff parts. Tongue still has nice patch of hair on it. Cancer Free. Can't be much better than that. Doc says my recovery and tongue were about as close to perfect as it could be. My miracle continues.

They roll in fast and do a lot of damage. They are pretty small and blend in with foliage. Hard to see at first. First time I saw them, they were eating up neighbors grape vine near the property line. I sprayed it for him so they would not come across to my garden. That was 10 years ago, the poison grapes did not cause him harm.....

I was wondering if the COE annual pass covers you at all lakes the Corps runs, or just the one you buy it for? I used a COE Ramp for the first time at Clearwater Lake this weekend for a joyride with the grandson. They broke it off in me with a $5 fee for an hour ride. That was running the lake from end to end twice in a 50hp Tracker. Most lakes I run, I launch from public ramps or TVA. COE is a very expensive critter.

Its an expensive hobby with its ups and downs. Downright work if you want to make it that way. Then you have to get rid of the honey! You can treat the ground if you have a concentration of them. Killing the host on the plant should get the job done. I put out some of the traps a few years ago and filled a trash bag with them before the day was over. I was dumping the trap at least once per hour. The wind was just right and the phermone was dragging them in by the thousands. When the phermone lost its draw, they started attacking my Pin Oak trees above the trap. They almost stripped a couple of trees about 25 ft tall. I have a neighbor about a 1/4 mile away with a vineyard. The phermone trap lured them off of those grape vines to my direction. That was the last trap I put out and I have not had many problems since. I did have a few hit my pole beans last summer, I zapped them with sevin spray.

Sounds like jap beetles. Use liquid sevin around dark. Dont go out and buy a trap, it just seems to draw them in and make things worse. Sevin dust gets on bees and they take back to hives. Does a number on them. Liquid sprayed in late eve after bees have quit working is better way to apply sevin.

Remember the good old days when Gay meant something else.

People get stoned on the river? I never noticed it that much. I have run across shake and bake meth labs.

Academy makes a Tarpon knockoff using the old style mold that is a great bargain, the Perception Pescador. I bought Heritage Angler 10 for the grandson last summer and use it now on all of my floats. Its light and easy to paddle, stable enough. Plenty of storage for a day trip. Ocean Kayak is nice, plenty of features and well made. Wilderness Systems makes great boats, but pricey like the Jackson ones. I have an Pamlico 120, first yak I ever bought. My daughter likes it. I like it to duck hunt out of. It is a sit inside. Sit on top for kayak fishing is a must. Good seat. Lightweight. Dry hatch and deck rigging. Hull designs. All good things to consider on a yak. Best to find some to try out first.

I drag a hose with a sprayer on it and a couple of beers down to the garden and water everything down once or twice a week depending on the need. Or I use a rotating spray head to mass water and go on to do other things. Some things don't like to be watered from above in the evenings. You end up with mildew and fungus problems. Best time to water is in the mornings. Corn, okra, flowers, beans don't have fungus problems. Cucumbers, squash, melons, tomatoes need to be watered at base or you will have fungus problems.

Most I have seen are colored with the natural barring. Probably just a combination of Rit Dyes. Soak them in Dawn dish detergent to remove the oils to allow them to take the Dyes. Bleach would only make them white and brittle. Tan a few hides and make some mini zonker strips. Collecting tails and fur this time of year will not have the same amount of hair on them as they do in the fall. You have to wait for good cold weather to get good fur.

This one used to support alot of fish. And it was deeper with a gravel bottom. Back in the early 80 s, it was the subject of a grad school project I helped out on. We did stream surveys with electrofishing for an entire year. I have stayed in touch with all of the years since. Gar have moved upstream to it upper reaches. That has happened in the last 15 years. They were not there in our surveys. They were only in the lower, slower regions. Now we find them in the upper reaches that have a higher gradient and gravel bottoms. At first I thought they were there only to spawn, but I see them year round. We used to catch more largemouth and spotted bass than smallmouth. Now the primary bass seems to be smallies. Longear sunfish are really thinned out, we only found a few bedding areas yesterday, the largest only had about 8 beds. I did find a few bedding goggle eyes but they were only about 4-5 inches long. No snakes of any type yesterday. Small frogs. No tadpoles. Did not notice any crayfish. Still minnows and chubs. I did catch several nice chubs. I did not see any invasive carp. With as much rain and everything, my other concern was that there was hardly any water in the runs that would allow even a kayak thru. Something must be happening to the water table around there too dewatering the area. 10 years ago, I would have put a kayak in this time of year and floated the entire length with minimal pulling over. I would not attempt it now.

Barnes in ST Louis. Dr. spent his residency at Mayo. He was fresh out in his first year. He is proud as a rutting buck with my success. I still have full speech, taste, and saliva after loosing 1/3 of the front left portion of my tongue to a marble size tumor. I have a hair patch on my tongue now. Surgery got it all without having to go thru chemo or radiation. Did you regain full use of your wrist and arm? Mine still has some issues. Carpel tunnel like pain in the wrist along with tightness like someone is squeezing it. The tendon in the inside part of my elbow is still tender. Somewhere on that portion that is my new tongue lies a scar from a 3 hook rapala I deflected on its return flight from a limb with the arm. I buried one point of a treble into that tendon in the middle of my wrist. I cut the eye of the hook with a leatherman and removed the plug and kept fishing that day. Later that night I met up with my doctor, who I was going to fish with the following day. He pushed on thru the tendon, cut the barb, and pulled the hook out. Then we went fishing. He owed me one, I extracted one out of the web between a couple of his fingers one time.

Not silt, clean and clear streambed. Land use is about the same, maybe less timber. I just write it off to natural process. The channel has stayed the same. It has cut to the bedrock and washed out the gravel to make the stream wider and shallower. Willows and sycamores stabilize the gravel bars now.

Since the weather was predicting our first hot humid day of the year, it seemed only fitting to do a little creek fishing. I had planned an outing on the boat for a bluegill fest to stock up the freezer with fillets. But it was too hot to sit on a boat. Waist deep in cool waters was a better idea. We hopped from bridge to bridge on a local river and its tributary I have fished since college. Over the years, the stream bed has wore down to slick bedrock and most of the stream is now hard to wade. First stop only produced a few little ones. The next two bridges were barren. We navigated around a few slick runs to some that I thought were going to be productive and nothing happened. What used to be good has dwindled away to nothing. Just 10 years ago I was posting on float trips thru this area. Now, even with a wet spring, you could not poke a yak thru it because it is so shallow. Next 2 stops were duds. One had about 25 ATVS on a gravel bar and several wading fisherman. The next had swimmers, tents, and many, many people. Finally on the last stop, we found a good hole. But it was only one hole, above it was slick rock beds. We managed to pull a few nice smallies out of it. One was 15 and the other 14. Several under the 12 inch mark. I really don't know what has happened to this stream. I am thinking otters, but did not see tracks or sign. All fish of any size were gone. Crayfish were not seen. No snakes or frogs either. Then there is the wearing down of the streambed to shelf rock. Alot has changed since 1982.

I had cancer on my tongue back in Nov. They took out a third of it and used the muscle on my wrist for the replacement. It was the wrist that I used to block the incoming 3 hook Firetiger Rapala that stuck in my tendon. The scar was removed and relocated in the surgery.

I have seen worse. Mine stuck in the tendon. Can't push it thru, can't pull it out. That scar is on my tongue now, moved over from my wrist.

Yum. Frog legs.

He did not show nipple, so we are all better off.......

Fame and Glory. Same thing that drives many that don't work hard. I have never understood the removal of privileges anyway, not like they care much about breaking the law. They should take that shiny truck in the background and auction it off, Take the boat he used and do the same. And his bow.

Camping is allowed outside of float camps. You should not have big crowds, its not really a holiday weekend. With all the water and flood, expect down trees and tricky bends with sweepers. Brian should be able to fill you in on the river conditions. NFS should go thru and clear areas of downed trees.

It is not a fun process, but survivable. And it always takes something out of you that you never get back. Glad to hear she made it thru.