Santa was good to me

This was waiting for me under the tree......

The Louder the Better or maybe not

I like my music loud. I like to play my guitar loud. Gotta feel the music, man!!!! Well for the last year or so, after practice my ears ring really loud for about 24 hours. As a matter of I have noticed that my ears ring just about all the time.

So I decided to go to the doctor (man she was hot, I hoped that she would give me a physical but she only looked in my ears), who confirmed that I have some hearing loss due to tinnitus. They asked me if my drummer is to the right of me when we play, which of course he is, because they noticed more hearing loss in the right ear than the left ear. I have been told that I should be wearing earplugs if I mow the lawn, run the snow blower etc. They also said it might not be a bad idea to wear earplugs when I use a hairdryer, although this won't be a long term issue, not because of my ears but because of my hair line. I give myself another 10 years.

Now, this is not all bad news, as it explains why I don't always hear the kids when they are talking to me. But more importantly I now have a built in excuse when I don't want to listen to Momma Musky. I see nothing but upside there.

They took a mold of my ear canal so that I can have some custom ear plugs made for playing with the band. They basically take a big syringe filled with some putty and blast that in your ear, and then you sit there for 10 minutes and let it set. I wish I could explain how it feels, very strange. When they took out the molds it felt like they were sucking my brains out.

I do know some sign language, I can flip somebody off several different ways so if the hearing completely goes, I can still get my point across when driving. So I have that going for me.

The Silverburst

I have been to lazy to post picture of the new Gibson Custom Silverburst that I purchased a few months ago. This is now my favorite, which I play with the band.

Closing out the season

So reading the weather report on November 29th noting that we were supposed to get 4 inches of snow on the 30th, so like any sane 40+ year old I decided to go fishing. I met my buddy DVD at 6:00am to make a run up to Wisconsin to fish a small lake west of Madison. Usually it's a 2.5 hour ride and we figured we would get up there before the snow started falling. Temperature was about 28 degrees when we left.



As we got about 1/2 way there the snow that wasn't supposed to start until after noon started coming down. We were driving DVD's rig with his boat and since I had never driven with him I was interested to see how he would handle the weather. Trailering a boat on slick roads can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, and I was happy to see that DVD was conscious of the conditions and kept us at a safe speed. I have a few buddies that would drive through that kind of crap as if there were no issues. If you have ever fish tailed a boat trailer I can tell you it can be a bit scary.


Anyways, we got to the park at around 10 am and started heading to the landing. As we headed down the final hill the lake was covered with snow. Well, there is only one way to cover a lake with snow and that is to first cover it in Ice. For those of you who don't have a clue, if the ice is to thick a boat has problems floating on the water, it just sort of lies on top. As we geared up, when you see one of the pictures I would like to note I am not color blind, I was happy of two things. one the ice wasn't to think and two it wasn't my boat.



Probably 75% of the lake was iced over, but we dumped in the boat anyway and proceeded to break through about 200 yards of ice to get to some open water and did this a couple of times to get to where we wanted to fish. It snowed most of the day, got windy towards the end and was an absolute disaster on the drive home through a blizzard.

Caught this nice 36" musky. Notice the Christmassy Green and Red jackets.

Me enjoying the snow, wearing just about everything I own. One more layer and I probably wouldn't have been able to put my arms down. Damn there is a lot of grey in the goatee.

A good shot from DVD capturing the snow and the ice. At this point we are about as far away from the landing as you can get. You can see the ice.

All in all it was a great day on the water. Thanks to DVD who does read this blog occasionally, which means I am up to 4 confirmed readers.