Week of March 24, 2025

This was my week at work to wrap up and hand things off before starting my sabbatical. I ended up getting a surprise project on Wednesday. It was fun but challenging, and I worked on it for three full days, and delivered what I had at the end of the day Friday. Now I’m winding down and trying to get work out of my head.

I’ve heard it takes about two weeks to mentally disconnect from work. I know I had parental leave, but that was completely different. A newborn and sleep deprivation makes everything else disappear effectively.

This time around I’m planning on doing a lot of fishing this first week. My gear is packed and ready to go.

How did I spend my first weekend?

The first night I made a celebratory drink, an Angostura Colada. A side note: I’ve always wanted one of those large format (16oz) Angostura bottles, so I finally bought one. This drink takes a lot of bitters!

Saturday we all worked outside together. We:

Cleaned out the flower beds

Cut back dead plants

Seeded bare spots in the grass

Moved the compost bin and partially buried it to keep animals out. It got moved when we put the fence in, so we needed to put it back.

Direct sowed some seeds:

Champion radishes

Breakfast radishes

Cilantro

Amaranth

Borage

Nasturtium

Bachelor’s buttons

Put up a new swing for Charlie, replacing the baby swing that he has outgrown. We got him a circular saucer-style swing. It was three times as difficult to put together as I expected. The QC on the pieces is not great…I had to re-drill some of the holes because they were at the wrong angle to get the bolts through.

Ate lunch and snacks outside

My weather station reported that it reached 79.2F (26.2C) that day!

Later that night I also did our taxes. Not fun, but I also didn’t want to waste my valuable daylight time on that.

Burying the compost bin was a success. It rained that night and the next morning we saw little muddy raccoon prints on the outside trying to get in.

I got an out-of-the-blue message from Matt with some kind words about an old blog post of mine that came up for him in a Google search. (Yes, that Matt.) What a delight to receive such high praise!

What would young me, just beginning to blog in 2008, think about that?

Working at a coffee shop with my love.

Charlie loves to dig.

Updates on medical stuff:

I visited a vascular surgeon, who was consulted while I was in the hospital. He reviewed my most recent CT scans and concluded that my vascular system looks completely normal (aside from the kidney blood clots). No cholesterol build-up, no blockages, good blood flow, no structural abnormalities. So that is ruled out as a cause. Good news overall, but still no clear answer on the clots. Next step is cardiology.

“Charlie, do you have dreams when you sleep? What do you dream about?”

“I dreamed about fishing. And daddy was there!”

My heart. I think we’ll spend more time over at the local pond catching bluegill soon! I didn’t realize his first fish made such a big impression.

Fly tying corner

I wanted to tie some Hare’s Ear and Plover, but plover is a bit hard to come by these days. I think the barring on hen pheasant makes a good substitute.

I got a couple hen capes in different colors, so I tied some flymphs, too. More of those to come.

Win: At the secondhand store I found some Belding Corticelli Buttonhole Twist silk thread, which Leisenring mentions in The Art of Tying the Wet Fly. It isn’t Pearsall’s Gossamer, but for $1 each I couldn’t pass it up.

I found a photo from the Trout Unlimited chapter’s fly tying night last month:

I fell down an internet research rabbit hole last week after noticing a cool book plate on a book about fly fishing and fly tying at the Internet Archive. You can follow along here as I go deeper down the hole next week:

Don Horter’s Library