Fish Like a GIRL

A few weeks ago, I took a look forward into all the exciting things 2025 has to offer. This week, I thought I would take a look back at the past year and all of the ups and downs it had to offer. I of course cannot cover an entire year in just one column, but I think it is fun and bittersweet, even sometimes, to really take stock of what has happened in the recent past.

The garden

I believe that going into this winter, I had more food put up than I ever have in my adult life. In fact, we had to buy another freezer. Yes, I know. I have talked about getting into canning for at least two years now. Maybe next year will be the year. But at any rate, we have enough vegetables to get us through the winter, for sure, and enough rhubarb and cranberries for me to bake to my heart’s content many times over. We also purchased a half of a pig from Chet’s cousin’s meat market, so we’re pretty well set there, too. 

It is a good feeling, really, to know I have grown food that we will be eating all winter long. Having some venison in the freezer would put a nice cap on that feeling, but that was not to be this year. I do, however, keep threatening to trap one of the seemingly hundreds of rabbits that keeps showing up in my yard, but I have not cooked rabbit since I was a young adult, and I do not remember if I am any good at it. But, from the look of some of my potted vegetables from last summer, these guys around here should be plump and tasty.

I did do some improvements with the front garden area this year, planting a few more native plants such as butterfly weed and some grasses. I tried a couple annual grasses this year, just to see if I liked the look of them as much as I thought I would. So now next year I’ll be planting some little blue stem in that spot - something native and pretty.

I do have to admit that I failed at growing horseradish this year. I did not realize how dry the spot was where I planted them. My plan, actually, was to deter rabbits from that side of the house. But eventually they just dug up the horseradish I planted after it dried out completely (totally my fault).

Then we had the fight for the raspberry plants. I bought five bare root raspberries. Rabbits are supposed to be deterred by the stickers on them, right? That worked just about as well as the horseradish as a deterrent. The good news, however, is that they kept growing back each time they were eaten off. That said, they should have a pretty dang good root system growing by next year. 

I put a decorative fence around them, just a little, cheap one I picked up at Walmart. That did nothing to deter them, of course. I put the little fence up more so Chet would not run the lawnmower over them than to protect them from the rabbits, but I thought it would provide at least a little deterrent. I may have to rethink that next year. It was easier to keep the rabbits out when we still had the dogs.

Our pets

Our pets were the saddest part of the first half of the year. Daisy, our beagle, was diagnosed with Cushing’s Disease. She slid downhill pretty quickly and we finally had to help her cross the rainbow bridge in March of last year. That left just Zona, our rat terrier, or rat terrorist, as I called him. I got Zona the day his litter left their mom, so he’d been with me forever, it seemed. Putting Daisy down was hard, but Zona was even harder. We lost him in June. 

He was so lonely, and I think he finally just gave up. He and Daisy were bonded, after being together for so long, and he just did not want to go on without her, it seemed. He had kidney issues for a couple of years before that, and her leaving just put that poor pup over the edge, I think. They were born only a month apart. They were both 15 when they passed, and they left a hole that will never be filled.

But things were not all gloomy on the pet front. After losing both dogs, the house was too quiet, especially for me working from home most of the time. I just could not do it.

“I knew this was coming,” Chet said when I asked him if he ever thought about getting another pet. “What are you thinking?”

We looked at a few of the shelters and he convinced me to go look at a couple of kittens. The rest, as they say, is history. They are a whole new form of chaos. In fact, a good friend of ours refers to them jointly as Chaos, as if that is their name.

This morning, at 3 a.m., they decided it was play time. Chet had already gone to work, so - why not? Why not get up and do some work? They have decided that it is imperative to open the cupboard under the stovetop so they can walk around inside there with the spices and aluminum foil and freezer bags and whatnot. I have no idea why this cupboard is so fascinating, or if they are just overjoyed with the fact that they can figure out how to open it (no matter how I secure it, and believe me, I have tried many different ways), but this is where we are this morning.

In other news, they are fine with the Christmas tree. They basically leave it alone, but they do enjoy laying under it when the lights are on.

Fishing

Oh the world of bass tournament fishing. There is always some drama there, but nothing truly worth mentioning this year. We fished well enough to make the championship in the two series we fish, which was nice. We had a lot of fun along the way, but we still did not fish as much as we wanted to.

For the first time, since the dogs were gone, we were actually able to stay overnight for our championship on the Winnebago Chain. We got a cute little Air BnB that we shared with the two guys who helped us run the tournaments last year. It was fun. And the kittens did not care too much that we were gone, and a friend stopped in to check on them a couple of times.

Home projects

With the main garage build done, we did not have too many big projects in 2024. Of course, there is always something. We are currently working on a pretty cool storage system Chet dreamed up for storing all of our used plastic for the bait business. There is always left over plastic each time we make baits, so we have a ton of stock colors that a lot of people use that is sitting on the shelf, ready to use. I thought I had a pretty decent system for keeping it all organized, but Chet wanted a more rigid system, so here we are, making 36 boxes that will basically hang on the wall, meaning we can move them around and re-organize as we see fit. We would like to remodel the bathroom in the basement, and thought about doing that this year. But there is always next year, right?

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].