Gone Fishin'

We got back from our annual family reunion trip to Fish Lake, Utah yesterday. It was boat loads of fun, like always. People always ask me how many fish I caught, and the answer is always that I didn’t even go fishing. My new joke is that not going fishing at Fish Lake is my new annual tradition. I used to go fishing there. The first nine or ten times we went to Fish Lake I went fishing and caught a grand total of less than zero fish. How can you not catch any fish at a place called Fish Lake? Well I pulled it off. I was the only one too, because my relatives always caught plenty of fishies. Then one year I caught two fish, and unceremoniously retired from fishing.

Now I spend my Fish Lake days sitting around with the other non-fishers shooting the breeze, and catching up. It’s the only time I see a lot of my extended family, so it’s fun. I also have a tendency to play a little volleyball. Some people don’t like to be on my team, because I can give people a hard time for screwing up if they’re consistent at it, but I just like to think that mediocrity isn’t my thing, and they can play on the other team if they want to be satisfied with not being good. Of course that attitude can backfire when everyone gets too mad at you to play right. One of these times I’m gonna remember that it’s just a fun pick-up game of volleyball, and I’ll try not to take it so seriously.

Last year my brother Kevin and I put a bunch of useless crap in a root beer can and buried it in the dirt. We called it our buried treasure, and referred to the junk inside as “highly valuable”. We marked up a bunch of trees with clues on where to find it. The clues are mostly arrows pointing in the right direction and a number, indicating the amount of steps to take in that direction. I dug it up this year. I had to do it myself because Kevin’s on his mission to the foreign land of Colorado, but I buried it again, so he can dig it up with me in two years. I got a pretty good chuckle out of seeing what we had put in there, stuff like matches, jelly beans, and coupons for toilet paper. What really made me laugh was a note that I had written on a napkin. It was a quote from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. It goes like this (try to read it with your best French accent, it’s much funnier), “I fart in your general direction! Your Mother was a hamster, and your Father smelt of elderberries!”

After I was done with last years buried treasure I made a new and improved buried treasure for this year and buried it in a different spot. It’s so much fun that I think I’ll bury at least one treasure a year from now on.