One fish down, nine more to go

This is one of the easiest fish for me to accomplish, because I fish for these all the time. Since I moved to my new house, by Xavier, there is that one pond with several monster largemouth bass. I also caught my master angler bullhead there, but I wasn’t part of the program at the time while the minimum length was 15 while I caught a stunning 17.5 inches, neighboring the state record. My friend also caught a channel catfish that was 31 inches while the length limit was 30. But once again, we weren’t in the program at the time. There is a huge bass that Josh and I would call Mrs. Texas, she was big and was only ounces off the state record, but we never bothered to tell anyone. This pond is really small, so it was confusing why we had such a big bass, and I figured the oxygen levels are always in the norm because the water table of the creek next to the pond helped it stay stable during the wintery seasons.

This bass broke my line many times, so that is why I hate mono lines. The braided line I have works really well, but she is too smart to bite at it, because she could see the line. The only way to fool the bass, (was the method Josh and I both used to catch our record bass), was to either snag a leopard frog, or catch creek chubs from the neighboring creek and fish with it. As for I, I stood on the stand that allowed me to see tons of bluegills in the water, until I see a huge dark olive colored oval shaped figure in the pond, I would cast my leopard frog right next to it. As the frog skids in fear, the bass takes a big inhale at it, and then I would give it a second or two and set the hook “Jeremy Wade” style, for those who saw river monsters on animal planet. Boom! I just caught my one master angler qualifying fish, Josh joined in and with a rock bass minnow he caught from the creek, he also casted where I had recently, and boom! Another largemouth bass was landed, both identical, both qualifying, and both easy to catch.

That bass above is my friend Josh's first qualifier, which he used a small rock bass to capture it within the first five minuites he was after it.

That fish above is mine, my first qualifying catch while starting in this program. However, I didn't use a minnow or a frog, it was unique fish, because I caught it with a five inch bluegill! That's a big bite for a good sized largemouth bass. I caught this in matter of seconds I used this bluegill, it's not luck, this pound is small and I know every part of it.

The pond monster though was caught two years ago by one of my neighbors/friend. On a full moon, I guided him on a harvest full moon night, while the pond was unusually quiet. I told him to toss his tons of nightcrawlers to this very certain territorial spot that I scared this one big fish away. With a big bang! He landed it and it measured 23 inches. WAAAY over the requirements, and still growing in that pond! A potentional state record we call Mrs. Texas.

My neighbor above, with the tiny Mrs. Texas, she's still out there inhaling big bullfrogs. (585)

Master Angler Stats

There is a thing that my friend Josh and I have in between us. We are now going to try to get the gold medallion in master angler awards. So far only one guy has done this; out of the three million Iowa residents. This may make it sound like a very hard mission for us to accomplish. Josh and I have fished three times a week in the summer, but now school is around. Whenever we have free time, we would fish at the instant. This gold medallion requires ten different species of fish on their “monster” sized length limits. So for example muskies, you must catch a 45 inch Muskie, and that is very hard to accomplish for a place in Iowa. So that is an example of a challenge that we have to beat. Silver medallion is when you must get five different types of fish. A master angler award is simply to catch one type of fish beating the length limit.

As for Josh and I, we both have the master angler award now, with a twenty inch largemouth bass that be both caught at a pond that we fish out often. We are going to now work on catching a green sunfish/hybrid. With a length limit being ten inches, we have to find a good place for our potential to be reached. So we’re going to camp at Walnut acres late October; when they start to bite.

Then we’ll try to catch a 35+ inch northern pike at the Wapsipinicon River late November. The 26+ inch walleyes are really hard to get, you must be really lucky to catch a fish like that, so we’re going to Palo Lake during ice-fishing season, so that way we can fish wherever the other guys can go with their boats in the summer. The muskies will be our best bet there as well; we’ll have to use “slammers” though. The yellow bass will also be our way to success if we fish at Palo during the winter, because in the summer we caught hundreds of them, and we’ve already caught more than ten of them beating the limit for master angler awards, we just didn’t get into the master angler program at the time. Then we’ll go to Belva Deer Lake to ice-fish for a 14+ inch crappie and a 10+ inch bluegill as well. That will be seven of the ten we have to catch, and not only is it for me, but Josh will have to be just as lucky as me, or the other way around.

So this challenge will be a journey that I’ll enjoy, because later on it’ll pay off a lot, and we could both be the second person ever to get into the master angler’s gold medallion awards, while it’s a 24K gold and a big trophy worth preserving. Later in the blog posts, we’ll show you each thing we have done in each location of each trophy fish species we’ve caught.

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Silent thoughts

This is the time of the year I don’t want to think about things a lot, just to keep things simple. The leaves turn golden; like a rich colored forest, saffron colored too, with a golden texture to it, and the creek is clearer and oxidized more than usual. I would just sit to watch the creek chubs, bullheads, rock bass, shiners, gold-eyes, moon-eyes, darters, and varieties of minnows in an aquarium-like creek. Sometimes I would take my hearing off, and things just seems more beautiful than usual, (probably because of the cars, lawnmowers, and so fourth).

I fish some of these fish out, because they are just like picking fruits out of the trees, you get a closer look at them, and enjoy the fight they put up. The “fruits are always up high on the trees” so that is the reason I have to fish. I want my house to be like a garden, where you get to see everything that you’ve caught, and hunted. Just to take a moment and review all of the amazing things you’ve earned with your passion.

But why fall? It is the most active season that I’d get these trophy deer and walleyes, northerns, muskies, e.g. I just like to see them, to show that I’ve earned them, and to not think and stress about so many things. I would always take the background as an important theme just as equal as the “fruit” I’ve gotten. So to say, if I caught a big walleye, it has to look good, like it can inhabit in the area, and scenic to us, so it would be more decorative to what I would call “my garden”. Here are back to back examples of these fish mounts that would make sense me, including all of you.

So as you can see above is a picture of a walleye, just plainly setting up on a white wall; the best way to describe your background. Just claiming you caught it, with no scenery. But the picture below is more ideal, it shows more of an inhabited place for walleyes, and has aesthetic value; all of the perch, bluegill, and crappie minnows with nice wooden background as well as the logs the minnows use for shelter as these big noticeable predators hang out there.

So in the fall, I just think more about these things in nature in life. I just like to look at these things and imagine more about what the potential is in my future, if I would ever catch big ones, or remember this specific day because something amazing happened. Cabelas outdoors stores would show you all of these things that I have always been in awed with. It’s your outdoor story that you have the lifetime to make. I’ve already started one young, because I caught the optimistic views of them. Just one sense of optimism of the beautiful outdoors, you would be snagged to this obsession I already have.

(497 words)

Jobs?

Jobs determine the wages you will receive annually not your high school grades. Sure the good grades will help you get the good job you want, but it all comes down to the resumes eventually, you could be doing well in school for ages, then do bad on a ten minute job interview and not get your job you wanted. Which is why I am currently working right now, and managing decent grades, but it all comes down to seeing what your future manager would want to see in the resumes.

The highlighted things you want to have in the resumes are the community involvements you have participated in, your previous work experience, like saying that I worked at Hy-Vee for more than four years, job shadowing with the jobs you want to have; which could be internships, and your degree that you’ve earned.

I would work hard, because I always fear that the boss would warn me that I was working slow, which would put a reputation among them, and I don’t want these people to have a “Jamias vu” within the next shift they view me working simply because my work error only happened once. It just annoys me when the assistant manager only sees bad things happen, not your prestigious work that you’ve done.

However, the best job you can get is if you were an employee of some career that had no managers, shooting your potential through the roof. Such as working as a resort owner (which I want to be one), small businesses, and making rents and growing money off of mortgage loans that branch off of your other vehicle, house, and so on rents of things that have a very elastic opportunity costs.

So pretend you’re a manager, what would you try to hire in a person, because a manager is a person just like us, well some are just not human beings, but they are people too, they want to do what’s best for their business, so they need to hire people that they think would best benefit their business, so ask yourself why do you think you should be hired? Why would you best benefit your new career? Was it all of the community services, internship, previous jobs, all of the things that factor in your reality smartness, not the book smart side of your own, which would be a nice additional too, such as high school grades, college degrees, and things that involves grades or seminars. (420 words)

A change in trance

Freshman year I wanted to be the fastest 5k runner in high school, I was only 100 pounds during that time and was always looking forward to getting better. The weightlifting room seemed tempting to me to hang out around. Then I made a jump to 130 pounds around the winter of my sophomore year, realizing that my running time was staying consistent. I realized I could’ve run faster if I didn’t try to gain muscle weight from the weight room. Thirty pounds was like carrying a back pack with an exception that the weight was on my lats and pecs while running. But the weight room was still a tempting place to hit. I ran faster and faster and tried to work hard in cross country to get a good 5k while gaining muscle weight, I dropped two minutes junior year, scoring times in every varsity meet, I was proud, but the following winter got the best of me offseason. I lifted more weights and jumped to 160 before I knew my senior year came by. I grew too, not all muscle gaining during my freshman year. So basically, I’m a 5k runner that is barely in the varsity league, and lifts weights just as much as the senior football players could. It’s a clash, but as the final year of cross country passes, I decided that I should do intense weightlifting, because I’m doing it for the retails. I’ve planned on reaching the 200 pound mark, and for track season, I would only do 400 meter dash, and possibly 800 meter dash, depending how the cardio/weighs would go together. I’ve done two mile races within the mile runs I would normally do. I also have three college classes with a job at hyvee that I work 20 hours weekly as an employee as a senior in high school, I also hang out with friends almost endlessly, and I literally never have time to watch TV for two hours straight at home. So that’s why next term I’ll be taking early bird and getting out 4th hour to work and all of that jazz, and I’ll head back to Kennedy high to do weightlifting until nighttime, I take this opportunity as a golden one, because weightlifting at school is free. My heart rate is 40 bpm; the only problem is that my cardio muscles are a tiny bit imbalanced, so I’m not at my full potential as a cardio runner. Otherwise I would’ve surpassed every cross country runner with a heart rate greater than 40. That is another reason why I’m going to hit the weight room, I’ll get better at something else other than the running.

My sisters wedding

My sister is getting married! This following weekend this graduated student with a master’s degree and my soon to be brother in law with a bachelors in engineering, and someone who started business in his early twenty’s will get married on September 22, 2012. My sister chose this unique day, only because the world is claimed to end on this day, if not; December 21, 2012 would be the next guess. So they pretty much gave us a wedding invitation letter, saying “save the date”, with two hypothetical meanings, to literally save the date, and to schedule the date as the first priority. Party potatoes, tons of food, drinks, and at a beautiful park are going to be included. There will be at least 400 of our closest people attending this wedding, while this would be my first time for me to visit at a rehearsal dinner. Since this is a direct family member of mine. I am looking forward to tons of food, to be a brother in law, to get to know all of the people there, and to congratulate my sister for another major event accomplished. If I were to have a wedding, I’m not the guy that’ll make the plans, it’s always the girls planning on limo, food, where, when, theme, songs, and so on. I think that is how the tradition is around here. Same thing to my sister, she made more than half of the plans, while my brother in law and I would talk about how awesome life is. The songs were easy to make, because we all are obsessed with music and we would constantly put songs on the playlist that goes well in order, the food wasn’t an issue, just the pricing we had to decide on, the theme was made almost at an instant, where they want to set up a wedding out in the country, because all they have been doing the past years were going into big cities for travel, and living in Washington D.C. Mostly because most of us live in Iowa too. The only thing different that a traditional wedding wouldn’t have is the fact that we don’t use a limo, but a normal car ride. This wedding would go well I’m pretty sure, because they planned this for a year; they couldn’t do it months after their proposal, because she is still getting her degree at the time. I’m looking forward to it, and to induct Mike, my new brother in law into our family.

Big Appetite

I’m hungry all the time! Before school, during school, before lunch, after lunch, after school, during work, and during my sleep! It’s not to a point to where I am feeling weak because I hardly had any food to eat, but my stomach is always growling because it digests food so fast. My parents are a little frustrated that the food bills are going through the roof. So we had to compromise, because my parents want extra money to spend on other things, not for my appetite. So we made a plan that instead of donating deer meat during our hunting season, I would filate the whole deer and eat the whole dear through the winter, maybe eat two.

I could buy tons of potatoes, because they’re cheap, and put any slab of deer meat on the grill, or on a frying pan, I would also eat tons of fish that I could filate in matter of seconds, I just need to learn how to cook it like a chef would, and yes I’m picky about bones in the fish meat, it’s hard to keep the northern meat pure. So instead, having tons of crappies and bluegills are ideal to me because they take only seconds to cut up and half an hour to prepare the whole meal. As good as they sound being free; we could now save the opportunity cost of our grocery bills of more than a thousand a month, to the average cost of an average consumer.

This way of method is good, but there is one problem, the ice-cream, as an addict, I would eat lots of them and the cost for them is high, and I don’t know any alternative eats for ice-cream. So I would have to pay half of the ice-cream bills per month, if I continue this. You would picture me as an overweight eater with an appetite shaped with a “beer gut”, however, I weigh only 150 pounds, lean, and does cross country with a competition in weightlifting. This plenty of food source helps me with my cardio to work on while being able to lift so much weight. I have been close to setting pound for pound records in high school, but I have done tons of pull-ups that determine your strength ratio.

Otherwise I cannot imagine a world without plenty of food; I would be starving like a wrestler in season. Oh and I just got done eating twenty rolls of tootsie rolls as I typed this blog.