Water Dog

I read a pretty good article on the spawn where the author had observed bass moving toward the beds even in cold water but holding at 8-10' until the water warmed. His speculation was that the eggs swelling in the belly caused the momma bass to begin to move more so than temp.

Best Buy rooked me on a nonexistant REBATE. I read the fine print, jumped through the hoops, did everything that was required and never received the rebate. It was't that much but I will never buy anything from them again. There are other sources. Trust is important with me. I've had good luck with Wal-mart, Sams, Target, and Cabela's and many others. I keep a mental list. "Best Buy" ain't on it ! Cabela's sent me a new rod for the one that was damaged (nicked) in shipment and I got to keep the damaged one. One on one on the phone, no questions asked, can't beat that. I will pay a little extra in order to deal with honest people.

I keep that kind of evidence hidden in a drawer in the basement. ;D We have to try it all don't we.

;D First time for me ;D I don't know which one was the best, the snake and trolling motor have got to be close to the top.

What a great kid and nice family!

I believe that recipe would work on most any fish. Will give it a try. I'm into spicy! ;D

We used to wacky rig worms going through the worm twice in the middle to cover the hook and any fish in the creek will take a bite. Trout tend to swallow them which means that you can't catch and release if you want to unless you cut the line. Flys will tend to be in the lip. In worm fished streams you will catch more fish on flys maybe since they haven't seen them.

Come on now, rope burns, that sounds a little wimpy ;D Get back in there and kick that horses aaas... uh, :-? Shape that horse up!! ;D

I like to use a fly rod and fish nymphs and a few dry flys on occasion that I have tied myself. Turn over a rock or two and notice the insect larvae and tie something similiar. Stoneflys and terrestials like crickets, ants, and grasshoppers generally are good in various sizes and natural colors, brown or black. I generally fish for native trout in small rivers, most likely, creeks to you. Trout can be in very small creeks but I am not fond of fishing anything less than 20' wide. Purists are generally dry fly only and they watch the hatch very closely. I never was a purist and since 95% of a trout's diet is floating submerged in the water coloum, nymphs and wet flys work well enough for you to get your limit. We always carried the fixings to build a fire and cook a few trout for lunch which a purist would frown on, might even be illegal, but we would examine the stomach contents to see what they had been feeding on and tie it and fish it. I never have had time to fish enough to hurt the fish population. Great fun was had by all! ;D You will always find a fly favored by local fishermen. Watch the insect life in the bushes, for example green inch worms, or Japanese beetles, and throw whatever you see and you will catch fish.

1. feet ;2. needles ;3. heights 4. cabbage It's the things that I can't control and you have mentioned a bunch of them, the screeching tires... 1.My family's health, this one gets me. 2.All of the Givverment and their well intentioned regulators like: All that I've ever seen have been nice ones

Just trying to point out that oil (fuel) is just another commodity traded on the free market. Futures affect prices. Political instabilities and placing some fuel sources off limits (ANWR) affects Futures because it affects supply. Check it out.. Politics also affects prices with taxes, 43 cents in my State, supposedly for highway construction, but the Gov. has chosen to 'move the money' around, so there you go, back to politics. SOME EXAMPLES OF COMMODITIES [edit] Livestock & Meat Commodity Unit Currency Bourse Lean Hogs 1 lb USD ($) Chicago Mercantile Exchange Pork Bellies 1 lb USD ($) Chicago Mercantile Exchange Live Cattle 1 lb USD ($) Chicago Mercantile Exchange Feeder Cattle 1 lb USD ($) Chicago Mercantile Exchange [edit] Fuels Light, Sweet Crude Oil barrel USD ($) Unleaded Gasoline metric ton USD ($) $2.13 Diesel (max. 0.035% sulfur) metric ton USD ($) Light petrol (max. 0.2% sulfur) metric ton USD ($) Heavy petrol (max. 1.0% sulfur) metric ton USD ($) Heavy petrol (max. 3.5% sulfur) metric ton USD ($) Brent crude oil

When I got big enough to go to school, my daddy told me, "If you get a whipping at school you will get one twice as hard when you get home" and I never got one. Family discipline and respect for others was central to the culture. That type of parental love has stuck with me throughout my life and carried me a long way. I told my younsters the same thing and they have done well. One of my son's is into "time outs" with my grandchildren so the libs have gotten to them. Had to send him six books on the results on permissive parenting from Amazon. ;D I still have to be a parent. I'll copy the above and send it to him. What can they do, they have to love a meddling old man anyway. ;D

Thanks for the info, obviously, Pelosi and Reid are having a problem keeping the choke collar tight on the even more loony left. I think that they will bide their time in order to get one of their own is as President. They have bigger priorities right now but they will advance their agenda with the complicity of the media on a thousand fronts if they get the Presidency. If they do this Country will begin to die of a thousand cuts, little by little. > Michael Bloom, RHINO Republican and NY's billionaire mayor anti-gun zealot, under the cover of "stopping the flow of illegal guns" is continuing his lawsuits in violation a the Congressional ban to prevent lawsuits designed to bankrupt American gun manufacturers. Brooklin District Judge, Jack B. Weinstein has ordered the appointment of a "master" to supervise every aspect of small, mom and pop, gun stores located in other States. These businesses cannot endure the prospect of years of legal battles in New York. Source: The American Rifleman, Standing Guard article by Wayne Lapierre. Small business in NC, SC, GA, what ever State will be forced to cave in to the draconian oversite of the "master" chosen by Bloomberg, Andrew Weissman, who headed the Enron task force and most recently worked with the Chicago firm representing the Violence Policy Center. Have you ever heard of the VPC, if not inform yourself, it's your Freedom they want to take away from you. In NC, our beloved Gov., Mike Easley (Dem.), has a branch office of the VPC made up of at last count, thirteen University Personnel, who distribute anti-gun propanga payed for by the taxpayors naturally, to our prescious school children. The school system of course gives the VPC time to make their pitch to gullible young minds. If a visiting kid sees a gun in your house he is supposed to report it. They ask them to join a club and sign an oath! We are on to their agenda here and have an organization called, Grass Roots NC, who has been successful in heading off the more egregious state laws proposed by the 'wackos'. Yes, our own 'Breck Girl', ambulance chasing lawyer, John Edwards, may be seen as the most viable Dem. candidate. Don't be fooled by this guy, he is your Quintessential liberal.

I've learned a lot about La. from you folks and I appreciate it. One thing I was wondering is, are armadillo's as good to eat as possums? ;D I heard it called 'possum on the half shell' when I was down there. Do you have any good recipes? This may get an entire new post started. Normally if we tree two or three possums in a dead horse, say, we would put them up and feed them cornbread and milk for awhile before we bake um' up. Y'all eat armadillos natural or have to civilize them for awhile like we do possums? I wouldn't want to prepare one with the fixings and get any off falvors. Thanks

That is a pretty impressive shot of a very impressive highway. I had forgotten the name of the swamp. Atchafalaya, gater got Running Bear swimming to meet Little White Dove there, huh? ;D Just funning. We were told back in about 94 that LDOT was building these bridges for about 4 million / mile. That is cost effective to the max! We built a six mile section of interstate in WNC for 105 million. This was a combination of moving a lot of rock and building a couple of bridges. Does that brown stain reflect different water levels? It was about the level in your shot when we were there in Feb.

Well the cold snap will kill a few bugs that have hatched out or come out of hibernation. I need the excercise of getting out some more wood.

Crude Oil futures are coming down, around $50 a barrel for oil delivered in Feb., why aren't gas prices immediately lower? Refiners are not going to price today's product on future prices that are lower when the refined product was made from higher priced crude. Gas is likely to come down as the $50 crude goes into inventory. The quandary refiners have is how to process the high cost crude in inventory and at the same time match market prices for products which have gone down. So their profit margin begins to narrow. About time huh? ;D Gasoline prices are likely to continue downward as the price of imported products made from less expensive crude oil puts pressure on US refiners You and I search out cheap gas and wait to buy before filling up. I don't keep as much on hand for my farm equipment hoping that the price will come down and just buy enough to keep everything going. Everyone is probably doing that and gas inventories are way up. Even though the refiners decreased crude oil processing rates from 91.5 to 87.9 % capacity and made less product, and cut back on product imports, gasoline inventories rose steeply in every US region. Consumer pressure like this is the best way to push prices down in a free market. ;D The decrease in crude oil prices seems to be primarily driven by futures speculators who think they see the end of the rainbow and are turning their investments to other areas or it could be the dreaded Bushes and Halliburton. ;D The fundamentals of the international supply-demand market really have not changed much over the past couple of years. So futures prices, which set a measure for spot and contract crude oil prices, are simply returning to a more normal level. The question is, "what is normal?" If the crude oil price goes below $45 dollars a barrel the economic incentives to pursue alternative energy - a la all the recent government initiatives - go away. Who would want to keep us hooked on oil? Maybe the Saudis? They have been pushing the price down. There is now real reason why crude prices should be $45, $25, or $10 a barrel. We have seen wild swings in the market before. The oil producing countries, OPEC, try to keep it as high as they can as would anyone trying to sell a commodity. The oil industry is going into this spring with large inventories of expensive crude and refined gasoline. You and I are waiting them out as best we can for lower prices. A cold Feb. and March will help them to reduce inventory but some will have to sell product below cost to maintain their normal market shares. ;D It is a complicated issue. There is a lot of crude oil available in the world at $45 per barrel and above (as well as alternative energy). As the prices drop lower, some crude oil fields cannot be found, developed and produced at the lower market price, so supply dries up. Ironically, as prices drop lower, alternative energy sources also become less economically feasible. Hopefully, some day, someone is going to find alternatives to oil and the internal combustion engine that will be so inexpensive that we will see the entire oil market disappear. It only took a few years for Ford to erase the horse and buggy, which had been the primary mode of transportation for hundreds of years. There went the "buggy whip" industry and many others. Do you remember how fast vinyl records went off the shelves? How about eight tracks? Pagers? I don't know about you but I can hardly keep up! I've got a bag phone that weighs 10#. Anybody need a doorstop real cheap? Decreasing crude prices puts a damper on Iran whose entire economy is based on the sale of oil. That's a good thing! That is one kind of diplomacy that they understand. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to overthrow the Saudi Royal family; maybe they would like to tone him down some.....

Now wait just a minute here! I'm a life member of PETA. PEOPLE WHO EAT TASTY ANIMALS

That's rich ;D Now let's see.....there are many reasons to not trust the UN to be effective at anything, do your own research. Here's a start. Support for United Nations Justifiably Weakened by Financial, Sex and Human Rights Scandals by Ryan Balis A few excerpts: "Oddly enough, there were a lot of Europeans and others implicated in taking bribes from Saddam who haven't supported the US in this conflct." ;D 1. U.N. Corruption and Ineptness Leads to Oil-for-Food Scandal "The scandal leaving the blackest mark on the U.N. is the Oil-for-Food scandal. After the ousting of Saddam's Iraq in 2003, accusations emerged that the Iraqi government, politicians from the U.N. and various nations, as well as companies doing business with Iraq, illegally profited from the sale of Iraqi oil. According to the U.N.-backed inquiry into Oil-for-Food corruption charges, "Iraq manipulated the [Oil-for-Food] Programme to dispense contracts on the basis of political preference and to derive illicit payments from companies that obtained oil and humanitarian goods contracts." " Even Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, has been investigated and accused of lying about his work with a U.N. contractor that had a $10-million-a-year contract to monitor Oil-for-Food shipments to Iraq." "According to Volcker, blame for not preventing Saddam Hussein's manipulation and $1.8 billion extraction in kickbacks and bribes falls squarely on inept U.N. administration." 2. Emboldening Executioners The U.N. has been incapable of preventing some of the most gruesome human rights violations in the 20th century. In one well-publicized failure, at least 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Srebrenica by General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb army.37 The U.N. had intervened in the Balkans conflict in 1993 to establish one of five "safe havens." Yet, a thinly-spread force consisting of 350 light-armored Dutch peacekeeping troops did not protect - nor deter - Bosnian Serb forces from overrunning Srebrenica and committing what has been described as the worst massacre in Europe in half a century.38 The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies. Srebrenica was not simply a case of the international community standing by as a far-off atrocity was committed. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided, and emboldened the executioners... The fall of Srebrenica did not have to happen. There is no need for thousands of skeletons to be strewn across eastern Bosnia.41 3. And then there was Rwanda This year marked the 12th anniversary of an enormous U.N. failure: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.42 An estimated 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in 100 days in a systematic government-sponsored slaughter.43 Except for a token number of U.N. peacekeeping troops sent, inaction largely ruled the day at the U.N. as Rwanda was turned into a killing field. The Rwandan genocide occurred on the heels of the U.N.-ordered mission in Somalia the year before that left 18 American Rangers and 312 Somali dead.44 Remembering images of U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu to cheering mobs, President Bill Clinton was reluctant to send American troops or supplies to Rwanda to stop the genocide.45 Moreover, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali says in a PBS documentary that he requested additional forces but "nobody wanted to send troops."46 Perhaps only 5,000 soldiers were needed, according to Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander of the United Nations Mission to Rwanda.47 Yet the Security Council rejected Dallaire's plan for a determined military presence and ordered him not to intervene in the conflict.48 After ten Belgian peacekeeping soldiers were ambushed and butchered, Belgium withdrew its roughly 2,500 troops.49 Five weeks into the genocide, the 5,000 U.N. (mainly African) troops and 50 U.S. armored personnel carriers eventually authorized by the U.N. were of little consequence. The death toll had already counted over 300,000 Rwandans, and the slaughter continued for another eight weeks. 4. Sex Scandals: These are serious crimes. Another U.N. scandal involves allegations of sexual misconduct. There have been 221 investigations of sexual misconduct by U.N. civilian and military peacekeepers from February 2003 to October 2005.51 A 2002 classified U.N. report characterized the problem of sexual misconduct in West African nations by U.N. personnel and representatives as "widespread," with evidence of pedophilia, prostitution and rape at gunpoint. Although allegations of sexual abuse stretch back to U.N. peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea,52 allegations of sexual misconduct doubled from 2003 to 2004. The UN has strayed a long way from its original mission statement. "In October 1945, 51 nations signed the U.N. Charter. As the preamble to the Charter describes, among the purposes of the U.N. are "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights... to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress." Ryan Balis is a policy analyst for The National Center for Public Policy Research. He can be reached at rbalis@nationalcenter.org. We get some return from funding the "bait monkey" but not from funding the UN.

It seems like we swung down off the interstate right down to this place. Catt, you would probably know of it if it isn't one of the above. Well worth the money and the stop if anyone happens down that way. A word of caution if you are traveling between Baton Rouge and Lafayette at night, "Plan on holding your water". You wouldn't want to step over the guardrail on your way out to the bushes. ;D It looked like about a 40 foot drop. Never seen so many bridged highways. I have friends in Slidell who had a wall of water hit their home and it has taken them until now to get everything rebuilt and in order, but they did it all themselves. I have to hand it to them, they are retired, not young, not in the best of health, but they worked their way out of a bad situation.

If you research a subject to support your position, you run the risk of proving yourself wrong. Besides, it's much easier to just proclaim, "thus and so". TINC

My kind of people (all the time) and my kind of place (in the winter that is). ;D Friends took us to a crawfish restaurant down in the swamp out near Laffi---et, I believe they called it. Edwin Edwards was there with a young lady and the women at our table were looking daggers at him, some of the remarks were, "that's probably his neice" or "I believe that it must be his daughter". LOL ;D We had good food, good music, and good company! Would love to go back sometime!

AMERICA'S future depends on an energy strategy that combines using known oil and gas resources, developing new fuels and technologies and common-sense conservation. It would be great if scientists discovered a wonder energy source that's clean, inexpensive and inexhaustible. Absent such a breakthrough, it would be wise to use available resources while continuing the hunt for the next generation of practicable fuels. For the United States that means developing domestic oil and gas reserves. Unfortunately, many known reserves lying beneath federally owned lands are completely off-limits by law or are effectively inaccessible because of stringent leasing requirements. The largest and best known of these is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), on Alaska's northernmost shore. More than 10 billion barrels of oil are believed to be there. With the United States consuming about 21 million barrels a year, ANWR should be opened for sensible, environmentally friendly development. A recent Bureau of Land Management (BLM) survey of 99 million acres of government lands, estimated to hold 21 billion barrels of oil and 187 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, showed about half the oil and more than a quarter of the gas are blocked from full development. It makes little sense especially considering the lead time required to put a potential reserve into actual production to heighten America's energy vulnerability by keeping domestic sources out of reach. Only the 1.5 million acres or 8% on the northern coast of ANWR is being considered for development. The remaining 17.5 million acres or 92% of ANWR will remain permanently closed to any kind of development. If oil is discovered, less than 2000 acres of the over 1.5 million acres of the Coastal Plain would be affected. That's less than half of one percent of ANWR that would be affected by production activity. That's roughly equivalent to developing or working in a 2000 acre area in a State the size of South Carolina. There would be no negative impact on animals. Oil and gas development and wildlife are successfully coexisting in Alaska 's arctic. For example, the Central Arctic Caribou Herd (CACH) which migrates through Prudhoe Bay has grown from 3000 animals to its current level of 32,000 animals. The arctic oil fields have very healthy brown bear, fox and bird populations equal to their surrounding areas. Our advanced technology has greatly reduced the 'footprint" of arctic oil development. If Prudhoe Bay were built today, the footprint would be 1,526 acres, 64% smaller. The oil companies should be commended for their environmental stewardship of Prudhoe Bay. By applying that knowledge they will do even better in ANWR. As practical environmentalists we can all support oil exploration and development in ANWR.

Very nice! This will be helpful.

Nice bow. Mine was something like that, 45 #. I knew bow hunting might not be for me when I plunked an arrow into the ground in the middle of a group of six deer standing directly below my tree stand. ;D I was just thankful that I didn't plunk one in a non vital spot. That's when I learned that you have to practice from the tree as well as the ground. I should take it back up, we have a long bow season and a short gun season.