Posted by Ryan
November 7, 2008
I started writing the title of this post with a specific thought in mind (apartment hunting), but that changed as soon as I had it typed. The imagery in my mind went from a big city and lots of buildings to an apartment complex being chased down by a hunter with a gun. You know, hunting. Hunting for apartments. Like deer hunting, only different.
I don’t own a gun and I’ve never been hunting. Unless, of course, you count the years of my early adolescence when my days consisted of going down to the local river and trying to trap birds with homemade cages and other contraptions (rocks on tree branches that were supposed to fall on unwitting fowl who stepped on some string). We also made some sweet bows and arrows that didn’t work very well (but they were still sweet). We even tried throwing rocks. I hit my friend in the head once (on accident). Our hunting/trapping attempts always failed, but we did manage to catch a lot of fish. I’m good at catching fish. We even made a fish trap, placed it in a deep fishing hole, and came back the next day to quite the catch of 3 or 4 fish. It was awesome. I think there were a few sucker fishes and a rainbow trout.
So I took the day off today to find a place to live. In the process, I discovered that the nearest Wells Fargo bank is in Illinois. I was told, though, that that will change in January when Wells Fargo’s acquisition of Wachovia is finalized. Or something like that. I fly back to Salt Lake City tomorrow (the 8th) so not being able to deposit checks isn’t a huge deal. By the time I get back to NY direct deposit will be setup and I won’t have to worry about depositing checks. Good timing.
Anyway, apartment hunting. I did a lot of looking on craigslist. While I don’t have time to go look at much, I am going to look at a place tonight. If it’s not trashy then it’ll work out well as it’s a month-to-month lease and quite cheap. That way, I could live there for a few months while I find a better / more convenient place to live.
I could go on, but I must end this here so I can go make a sweet bow and arrow for my apartment hunting expedition this evening. Wish me luck… or happiness. I like happiness.
Posted by Ryan
July 2, 2007
Not long ago a few friends and I decided it was time we took a fishing trip. We planned on leaving Friday, June 29th at 5 PM. The plan was to drive out to Pelican Lake, a small lake about 25 miles from Vernal, Utah, set up camp, maybe do a little fishing, go to bed, wake up and fish all day and head home Saturday evening. But since when do you actually leave on time for a road trip? When you’ve got a flight to catch it’s a lot easier to be on time, but when you’re driving, it’s far more likely that you’ll leave behind schedule. Such was the case with us. We ended up leaving about 7:30, only to realize we’d forgotten something so we went back and didn’t get on the road again until around 8:30, and then we had to go pick up some other people so we didn’t really get going until 9:30.
Oh but it gets more fun! We got to Roosevelt, Utah and stopped at Crumbo’s Sinclair gas station to ask for directions. Two very helpful men at the gas station gave us good directions and we headed for the lake. If it had been light outside we would have seen a road sign, but it was dark and we missed it completely. We drove around the lake for 1 1/2 hours looking for the camp ground. Below is a beautifully colored map of our travels around the lake. The key in the bottom left corner explains the colors. The color blue got mostly covered by the other colors at the top right of the image despite my efforts not to cover it. Also, the key is sort of hard to read because I saved the image, closed everything, then realized I forgot to mark the “X” in the image so I opened it up again and added that, which degraded the quality and I wasn’t about to do it all over again. blah blah blah, here’s the map:
Basically, we drove around and around and around, trying all sorts of little roads that led to nowhere. I did have a great time driving in reverse up narrow dirt roads we’d gone down. Are there driving in reverse driving competitions? That’d be awesome.
We really had no idea where we were going. That is, until we got to the “X.” At the “X” we found this huge road sign:
We had a good laugh, figuring that this was the only sign and that it was ridiculously inadequate since we’d been lost for so long. It wasn’t until Saturday evening when we were heading home that we saw the bigger sign on the main road. Oh well. This sign is still funny.
I bet most people, upon seeing the sign pointing to the left, would go left. We, naturally, went right. Why? Because we’d been told on the phone that when you get to a fork in the road, the boat dock is one way and the camp grounds are the other way. This, however, was the wrong fork in the road and we quickly discovered that when we ran into a locked gate.
I probably should have added another color for “driving around looking for a camp spot we liked,” but the map I already drew will have to do. We built a fire, put some chili on the coals, roasted hot dogs, had chili dogs, set up camp, and went to bed.
The next day was beautiful, but really hot. We were all up by 7 AM, but it took us a long time to get everything taken down, to get our fishing stuff ready, and to eat breakfast. We got on the lake by 9 or 10 AM, and stayed out there until about 8 PM. My face and arms got torched (sunburned).
We were told by many before we got to the lake, and while at the lake that a good day of fishing there will yield about 80-100 fish caught per person. We only caught about 30-40 per person, which the Camp Host said was better than anyone else he’d seen come off the lake that day. We kept about 30 of them and are going to have a fish fry today or tomorrow.
We got home late and after filleting the fish (my friend did it all) it was after 3 AM and we were all super exhausted. We wondered if it was really worth it with all the driving around, getting sunburned, and getting home really late, but I think it was. If we ever do it again we’ll plan better, get off the lake in the middle of the day when it’s really hot, use more sunscreen and go for more than a day.
Posted by Ryan
March 17, 2007
Thanks to one of my visiting nephews I woke up this morning at the amazingly early hour of 9 something o’clock.
Amazing.
I’m going fishing.
