Monday-Monday...

Getting back into the daily grind is difficult at best after a couple days off fly fishing. The old adage of needing a vacation from my vacation rings quite true!

The fishing last week, the night fishing, was great. The HEX were on, but just starting. Wednesday and Thursday nights fishing was productive and we had a great time! Friday night...well, mother nature had different plans for us. Rain. Buckets and buckets of rain! The river rose almost 8 inches in the course of a few hours and that pretty much sealed the deal for the evening. In spite of that, it was a great day. Rain, storms, etc, are one of those things we have no control over so we might as well make the best of those situations. And we did. We sat on the camper steps, smoked a cigar, sipped some bourbon, had some pleasant conservation and marveled at the show mother nature provided. At times, it just don't get any better than that! It's all a matter of perspective.

Perspective was something I had to keep in mind yesterday afternoon (Monday) whereupon I found out my oldest had been in a wreck with the car. She rear-ended a Jeep liberty and the car got smacked up pretty good. The Jeep, nary a scratch! Cars can be repaired or replaced and as difficult it is to shrug off an inci-dent, you have to do it. Yes,yes, she's O.K. Just a bruised ego and a 90 dollar civil infraction. I, like most fathers, was trying to find the humor in the situation and thought about giving her the business as fathers are want to do. You know, maybe she was trying to read a bumper sticker or saw a cute boy.... However I mustered up what little will power I had and refrained from doing so...I think I'll just save it for a rainy day! For the life of me I still can't figure out why she called her Mom after the acci-dent and not her Dad....I mean, really, What's up with that? So, the Car:

It was funny though, when I did get home, it took her about 1/2 hour or so to finally come and see her Dad. I gave her a big hug, asked her if she was O.K. and left it at that. Mondays. Yeah.

15 years ago today my middle daughter was born. Now this was one that did not want to make an entrance into the world on her own so we forced her to via induced labor. That was in interesting time. We were told that once labor was induced it would take a while, 4 hours or so, for contractions to start. Yeah...right....more like 20 minutes. It was nothing gradual either. It was more like WHAM! Hard labor! 2 hours later a baby.

Talk about intense....for a period of time things were progressing at a dizzying speed and at one point I felt that way too. I plopped myself down into a chair, apparently looking pretty pale and,well, not sot hot. Everything in the room suddenly stopped and all eyes, doctors, nurses, the wife, were on me. "You O.K?" came the question? "Yeah...I'mjus fine....just get that kid out...I'll be fine" I replied....apparently I nearly passed out...but didn't...pretty tough arn't I?? It was quite the event...and here we are, 15 years later and sometimes I still wanna pass out! In retrospect that was a cakewalk compared to the "teen-age daughter" years we are now, currently, forced to endure... lemme tell ya.

My daughters tell me I'm clueless and that I don't understand girls....come to think of it my wife says that too...I plead ignorance and I, u-mmm, think I'm O.K. with that most of the time!