Angling is an art, and an art worth your learning.
I’ve been sitting at home - what can there be to report? How about…
Today the garbage man came and emptied the bins and threw them all over the nature strip. Later on one of our downstairs neighbours, the green monkey, gathered the bins from where they lay strewn like children waiting to be picked up from school, and put them back in their rightful spots. First time for everything…
I’m still working on climate change and trying to nut out what happened 5000 years ago. It’s a little difficult. I’ve also been watching episodes of A River Somewhere and getting excited about the possibility of standing in streams again, remembering the reasons I got into environmental science in the first place - to get paid to go to really nice places, and catch the fish there. Luckily that’s exactly what fly fishing is about: you don’t have to get dirty, or smelly (although sometimes you end up that way, especially in the tropics). You just get to go, and to be, and to catch fish.
Unsurprisingly I’m not the first person to ponder over this, Sir Izaak Walton wrote the following pearl, almost a four hundred years ago.
[T]here be many men that are by others taken to be serious grave men, which we contemn and pitie; men of sowre complexions; money-getting-men; that spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemn’d to be rich, and alwayes discontented, or busie. For those poor-rich-men, wee Anglers pitie them…
Never a truer word was spoken.
March 3rd, 2006 at 7:56 am
I hear you flyfishing mate, I love the modern world, I have been tracking down my sage rod, using the fedex website, it has been to Memphis, Honolulu and is Sydney at the moment ETAed for monday.
http://www.fedex.com/Tracking?ascend_header=1&clienttype=dotcomreg&cntry_code=au&language=english&tracknumbers=855989853573
March 3rd, 2006 at 7:59 am
I got everybody at work cheering on it, we have one monitor and a secretary checking the website for updates.
I think I will get fired eventually.
March 3rd, 2006 at 9:13 am
You won’t get fired, it’s a “team building exercise”!
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:49 pm
I can’t find the book right now but there is a little passage from mountains of the mind that goes, “men lack the ability to fly but always have the strength to fall” as far as I can remember it. It’s a pretty interesting book which we can tie ourselves in with, it tracks the history of the philosophy of mountaineering. How they changed from feared and not often visited places to revered and dominated places (either by the mountain or the dominator). I’ll find it and whip out some more gems since we are pondering what it is that makes us do the things we do in this post (kind of)