Tales of Woe

I'm sick again. Not sick in the head, like some of you (OK, most of you). Sick in the lungs. I just got over my head cold, had about a week of good health, and was immediately stricken with a chest cold.

I'm sure this has something to do with the fact that it's 65 degrees out, but I don't know what. The bitter irony of me getting over 50 hits a day to my snowblower review, and yet having used it but twice this season, both times with less than 3" of snow. Some expert I am.

On the plus side, The Mrs. and I have been tag-teaming being sick, and she has moved into the guest room so as to prevent the one of us who is sick at the moment from keeping the other up all night with coughing and hacking. And, I gotta tell ya, it has been a really really long time since I've slept so soundly. This may largely be because, while there is room for The Mrs. and Me, CherkyB in our king-size bed, there really is not room for The Mrs., Me, CherkyB, MaxieC, and FreddyC, and somehow about 3am that's how it always ends up.

On top of that, I'd forgotten to apply my gin-n-tonic cold remedy. It may or may not make your cold go away faster, but it sure is good at keeping your cold from mutating into malaria. And believe you me, a cold is a hell of a lot more fun than malaria. At least, I am told that. See, being as I lived in Kalifornia for 11 years, I met a lot of people from third world countries who were here to steal the high-paying tech industry jobs that Americans don't want, and believe it or not, a lot of them had had malaria despite the fact that they came from big-government socialist paradises that they reluctantly fled in order to join the capitalist pigs in silicon valley.

So, I had mistakenly applied the vodka-tonic remedy, mainly cuz I had it on my mind after recommending it to Paula's husband over on her blog. Except the damned vodka-tonic remedy is a weight-loss remedy and has nothing to do with curing the common cold. Duh. Thus, I have suffered needlessly and have potentially come dangerously close to a case of malaria.

I think I lost a couple pounds, though. But that may have more to do with all the Olestra in the Pringles.

Saturday was a day of fabulous excitement. We headed down to the Big City to see one of their annual shows. I know what you're thinking: Oooo, National Western Stock Show! But, I would caution you that just because you are a bumpkin doesn't mean that everyone else is as well. I know we've never met in person, but just take my word for it.

You'd probably get along great with my wife's hillbilly brother, though.

No, no stock show for us. We went to the boat show. And it was very exciting. There were a lot of boats. Everywhere you looked, boats. However, very few bass boats. In fact, I found a grand total of two bass boats and one crappie (which is supposed to be pronounced croppie, but I just can't help calling it crappie cuz it's so fun to say) boat, which is basically a stripped down bass boat for people who are willing to admit that their fishing skills pretty much stop at putting a worm on a hook and throwing it over the side.

The fambly, naturally, made a bee-line for a pontoon boat. A big one. Something like 26'. Oddly, on exhibit from a boat store that I drive by every day on my way to work. So we went all the way to Denver to look at boats from a local place. The Mrs. spent quite a bit of time discussing pontoon boats with one of the dudes from that place, but eventually admitted that we were there because I wanted to look at "fishing boats". Of which he had exactly one on display - an 18' deep-V walleye boat. This is very much not a bass boat.

However, he helpfully noted that I should expect to spend the majority of my time fishing my childrens out of the lake after they fall overboard if I were to put them in a bass boat. And, given that all our water is in mountain reservoirs, it is prone to sudden wind and 2' chop which is largely incompatible with bass boating. He said he didn't stock bass boats, but could order me one if I really wanted it and have it in 4 weeks.

Now, that is true about the wind, but I filed away in the back of my head that he may have just been telling me a story to stear me to what he had in stock.

We spent a long time going around looking at various fishing boats (and a lot of skiboats), and what I would note is this: pretty much every store displaying boats had decided that the deep-v walleye boat was the way to go, and pretty much every deep-v walleye boat looks the same. You get to choose between 17' and 18', a Mercury vs. a Yamaha engine, and welded vs. riveted hull, but other than that they are largely indistinguishable.

I did finally find a guy who had one aluminum bass boat and one aluminum crappie boat (having previously only seen a $40k pro series Nitro) as well as a bunch of walleye boats. I got chatting with the dude there whilst MaxieC explored the bass boat to find the livewells, batteries, and rod storage (MaxieC had it pretty well figured out at this point that every boat had these, but not all in exactly the same place) and The Mrs. and HannahC were finishing up lunch. It turned out he was a professional fisherman that was sponsored by that marina, not a salesman. So I axed him about where you'd take the bass boat around here, and he said, "Oh...you do not want that boat with your son. He'll be in the water within minutes," and he pointed me to the 18' deep-V walleye boat and said, "That's the boat I take my son on. He's about the same age."

So it looks like the dreams of a bass boat are being shattered. And the deep-V adds about $10k to the price, which puts it above the "what I wanted to spend" threshold. Though the pontoon boats remain price-competitive.

Please, somebody shoot me if I buy a pontoon boat.