Back pain is only youth leaving your body

Sciatica, I got it . For the life of me I don't know what I did. I'd been feeling soooo good, I have my weight down to where I've wanted it for years and we walk 3 miles everyday and...oh. it's excruciating. Once I get moving it's not so bad but in the morning after I stretch I can't lift my left foot to put my pants on without a severe stinging running down from my left kidney to my butt. I spent 2 days getting my boat out of winter lay up and I guess I just did to much....but  ya know , in this day and age if a  little back pain or even a lot of back pain is your biggest problem that's a pretty good deal. I'll take it.

BUT...having said all that I gotta ask and you know I'm a guy that does everything himself  and never asks for help but this is different. I just can't do the shoveling to get the winters silt off the concrete boat launch surface like I always do and we'd really like to get the boat launch open as soon as possible. So if any of you guides or Kenai people that use Stewart's Landing read this and can pitch in MP and I would really appreciate it. When I do it alone it usually takes about 2 or 3 hours and this year it's not as much as usual...

 I googled '  funny pictures for back pain ' and there weren't any....guess it's kind of a hard thing to make fun of.

So me and MPeasy have cabin fever on about an 8 on the 10 scale so the other day we decide to walk the beach in Kasilof and have ice cream for lunch at the Mercantile along the way, my favorite....chocolate chip cookie doe. Oh baby, it was the first ice cream we've had since going to the movies in Mazatlan in February, made my lips tingle. We pull up to the parking lot at the beach access and see this memorial, I was impressed. It was made of welded aluminum channel and situated in one gorgeous location on gods green earth , for forty seven years now that beach just always gives me pause and this certainly helped that along.

Now the Agates that we all collect aren't exactly gem quality but what they lack in clearness they make up in quantity. Mp , she likes the unusual and the darker colors, me I go for size, it's the fisherman in me no doubt.

The Agates might not be gem quality but the ice sculptures are . They're going fast, it's springtime in Alaska.

So we end up on the Kenai flats looking for those thousands of Snow Geese that used to have a layover here every year. I don't know what happened to them but mother nature is kinda quirky, back then we had thousands of Geese and few Cranes and now it's just the opposite. I call the Sand Hills  Pterodactyls cause they kinda look like them and make that dinosaur  sound, really loud cackling. Here's the best pic I could muster using all the zoom I had....guess it's one of the ' ya gotta be there ' deals.

So tomorrow is May day and the boat is ready and we'll be salvaging and fishing real soon.  This year the ADG+G is actually going to let us start fishing with a slot limit for keepers so all of us river people are excited....but ....in a really  trying to be optimistic way.  After the last 8 years of having to explain the vagaries of our fishery to customers I'm glad that I don't have to deal with this new era but I worry for all my friends who need business and yes , we're in the Kenai up to our necks and would like some business here at Mile 14 as well.  I just don't see people from the 48 coming to fish and quarantining for 14 days before they do and then again when they get home. So, come on Alaska...let's go fishin !  Here's our new neighbors at Stewart's island.

Speaking of guiding. I've been cleaning out my office, so many pictures, so many thank you notes and letters.... the workings of my life's business.  I decided that I needed to burn all my client info and banking info and thought it would be kinda hard to do, erase my life's work . But ya know when I started that fire in my drive way it was a moment....it was moving on...it helped me see the future and know that we, me and MP still got a lot to do. So take it from me, if you're retiring from something you loved, something that defined you the mechanical process of moving one helps...it was kinda fun...adios to the old, hola to the new.

And...my song of the week... I decided to save them for last,mmmm,,,, but maybe there's a good chance I've already lost some of you and an even bigger chance that I'm fixing to , so here goes. I can't figure out why the guitar sounds so tinny , I tried it on the Martin and it was just as twangy. Guess I need a better way. Ty gave me a Go Pro a while back so I really need to get better with that which is the right equipment.

Fish pictures----------SOON