Told You So....

See what happens when no one is challenging me to blog every day? I forget. I knew this would happen. On the other hand, I do keep trying to remember. I think about blogging, but I just never quite get around to it. kind of like checking my email when there are tasks I want to avoid.

I would like to tell you about a few things though. I would have told you yesterday except I didn't get home till close to midnight.

As a part of my focus for the year, I am trying to work on getting in shape. To facilitate this, the Superstore across the street is renovating and, thus, clearing out a lot of stock to make it easier. Some of these things happen to be exercise equipment. So I now have some resistance bands, an exercise ball and a nice leather jump rope with weighted handles.

I tried to jump rope today and discovered that even if I keep a beat, I cannot jump for a full consecutive 60 seconds. Seriously. I am fail. I'll get better though. I would like to get back into the habit of exercising at least 3-4 mornings a week.

Now all I need to do is load some GOOD music on to my ipod. Right now, it's just a bunch of random songs. What I need is some good exercise music - something to keep me going. Something upbeat - because I love something that makes me feel like dancing first thing in the morning.

The other thing I wanted to write about was ice fishing. WAIT! Don't go. It's a good story. I promise. Yesterday I went out ice fishing. In a blizzard. Yes, you read that right. In a blizzard and I had fun - even though the fish weren't biting.

My buddy called me to say that he and his friend had finished building the shack and it was up on the lake if I wanted to go. With nothing else besides cleaning house that needed to be done, I said yes. The blizzard wasn't even a consideration.

When he showed up in his little Mazda3, I was a little surprised. No truck, and we were supposed to be driving out onto the lake? Sure enough, we made it out to the shack without too much of a problem. Unfortunately, the shack was not as originally advertised.

The friend of my buddy had told us that he had some plywood for the siding, but he didn't. And since my buddy had already spent enough money on other more important things he just decided that the easiest thing to do would be to make the walls out of tarp. That's right. Tarps for walls.

To be honest, with the propane heater in there, it was pretty darned cozy. Other than one interruption by the fisheries officer to check our licenses, it was great. Although the door didn't want to stay closed properly in the heavy wind.

At one point when it opened, there was no differentiating between land and sky. Everything was the same all consuming white. It was pretty darned amazing and made us feel pretty isolated, even though we knew that there were other shacks not that far away.

Eventually the wind picked up more and a chill began to seep in despite our heater. We called it a night and headed back to the car. The only problem after that was that the wind had picked up, which meant more blowing snow, which meant worse visibility.

We couldn't find the ramp that we had originally used to access the lake and so we had to searching for another one much further down the lake that we knew had a good landmark for orientation if we could get close enough to be able to see the landmark - a lighthouse.

We almost got stuck once out on the lake, but we manage to get out of it and we did find the lighthouse. It took us longer than we expected and with no landmarks and poor visibility, getting lost out there was a very real possibility.

Just as we were almost off the ice and on the ramp, we hit a drift that we hadn't been able to see in the weather. It was over the bumper of the car and we got stuck for the first and only time.

Thankfully, we had the shovel and we began to dig ourselves out of the drift after a failed initial attempt to rock the car out. We were pretty much done shovelling when a kind stranger stopped and helped us finish pushing the car out of the drift. Although, he did admit that we would have had it without his help.

So that is my ice fishing story. I prolly won't get to go out for another couple of weeks, but I am looking forward to it. And that, my friends, is what you have missed.