It's Friday...

O.K., it's 2:30AM and I should be heading to bed, but it's the end of the work week and I'm ready...I've had enough...! If only I didn't have to get up and go to have it be over with!

3 grandkids spending the night tonight and tomorrow. Saturday will find Grandpa in the backyard holding casting practice (better in the driveway than the boat) and letting them climb around in the boat one at a time to let them get used to the idea-and teach them to stay away from the edges! When they tire of that Grandma has some seeds she wants to have them help start in planters for later in the spring, and I will start cleaning and rebuilding reels.

Jordan's birthday party is on Sunday, so we'll be springing Mom from the nursing home and taking her to my sister's for the afternoon.

Hopefully you will all forgive me if I'm not around much 'til next week!

Meanwhile, I keep thinking of an old "friend" who left us a couple of years ago: Harold Ensley. He was "The Sportsman's Friend" and had the first "fishing show" I ever saw. Harold became so well known that he went national. In one episode he took Milburn Stone (Doc from "Gunsmoke") fishing, which led to him appearing on "Gunsmoke" as one of "Festus" cousins. As a boy watching him, I never would have dreamed he would warrant a piece on NPR when his time here was done! Something about 48 seasons of broadcasts, and inventing a genre does that I guess...

He came and spoke at our high school when I was a junior, of growing up and his Mom teaching him to fish; of getting in trouble for coming home with his catch in his pockets and forgetting to take them out when he was 5 or 6...

He was injured in a plane crash in Costa Rica several years ago and that ended his television days, but not his fishing. When Dottie was going through therapy for her hip and knee replacements we were in line at the hospital, she was using a walker and I heard a familiar voice call out that he'd like to trade her out of those pretty new tennis balls (on the feet of her walker). It was Harold Ensley, using a walker himself, and while I stood there awestruck and speechless this wonderful man stood there and talked to her for a few minutes about her surgeries and therapy and making sure she did what they told her to so she would be 100% again. She had no idea who he was until I told her after he walked away.

Harold's theme song was (of course) "Gone Fishin". He would close the show by talking about how his fever was starting to rise and get the best of him and when that happened there was only one thing to do. Then he would put up a wooden sign that said "Gone Fishin"...

I'm almost there...and in my mind I'm gone...already!



:o)

alan