As many of you already know today is the Fish Festival in Wheatley (only The Freshwater Commercial Fishing Capital OF THE WORLD!)

They had a pancake breakfast, a parade, the Grand Unveiling of the new sign and tonight a fish fry.

This morning we went in for the pancake breakfast (we were the first ones in line – that's a hazard of being awake at 5-something-am-in-the-morning every morning). And we found a nice place to sit right across from the only other guy in the place.

We had a nice chat about what goes on – our friend wasn't able to participate in the Smoked Fish competition last year since he was feeling under the weather for quite a while.

I asked if they figured out what caused it. He said "Three heart attacks".

"Ya, that'll do it" I said. "I'm glad that you're here this year".

We chatted for a bit and I asked his name. "They call me Oscar" he said, "but my real name is.."

"Aahh! Don't confuse me! If they call you Oscar then I really don't want to know what your real name is!"

The lady that was listening in told us a story about someone saying that Uncle Allan looked a lot like Oscar. Turns out that when Momma named Oscar and his nine siblings, Poppa would give each of them nicknames. Oscar was called 'Allan ' by his Momma and 'Oscar' by his Poppa.

Makes you wonder is Poppa nicknamed all of the kids 'Oscar'. That way he could point in the general direction of one of his ten kids and say "Oscar! Get over here!" and whoever he happened to be pointing at would come rushing…

Hmmm…

Turns out that Wheatley (the village that we live closest to) is famous for two things – being in the Board Game 'Trivial Pursuit' (the question was where do the most Millionaires Per Capita live) and being the World's Largest Fresh Water Commercial Fishing Port.

Cool.

Millionaires and fisherman. I like 'em both. And when you meet any Wheatlian and tell them you're new, they'll tell you the two things their village is known for – and you don't even have to ask!

Last weekend we made a swing down Deer Run and saw some of the Millionaire's houses (and I would suspect that some of the people outside those houses could be said Millionaires). And ended up at the Wheatley dock (I wrote about this in my article This Isn't Normal, Is It?). It would seem that all of the commercial fishing boats are made from the same basic blueprints – they all look like the boat in the official sign.

At least some of them were painted differently (and they all had different names).

Anyway, we get to go to the Official Unveiling of the sign tomorrow and in celebration they're having an all-you-can-eat fish fry for supper – I'll have to bring my camera and let you know how that goes.

Perhaps we can incorporate the fishing culture in some of our B&B ideas… and for a Wheatlian discussing fish is certainly Bound To Please.

You give a guy a little success and it goes straight to his head.

If you don't remember my Zamboni story, read it first.

I have a really 'square' side yard and a mostly triangular back yard. The trees are in a straight line and there are very few of them. I just sort did an ad-hoc mowing between them and things went startlingly well. And it was a lot of fun.

Tonight I needed something to go well. There's been some pressure at work and the renovations are adding up faster th an I can allocate budget money to them (we're thinking about scaling some of our projects down and my hot tub has already been scrubbed!) I needed to have something go well.

Then I remembered how much fun it was to cut the grass!

Sherry's been doing it recently and it's been fun to watch her, but I needed a quick win.

Well, she had just cut the side yard and the back yard isn't as noticeable from the road as the front yard, so I set my sights on the front 40 instead of the back 40.

Ya. Right. Who put all these trees here? The first strip or two were pretty fun (aside from going the wrong way and blowing a bunch of grass into Dan's yard (sorry, Dan – I'll buy you a beer on Saturday!))

Then I went around my first tree and it was like getting punched in the face by Mike Tyson. I was all spun around, nothing was straight anymore, I staggered around the lawn like a drunken bumble bee.

Yikes!

I've included an artist's (!) sketch of our lawn for your reference. The squigglies are trees and the box on the left is the front of the house. The front 'river' is our ditch just before the road. I didn't take a photo of my yard because I didn't want you to see how many strips of grass didn't get cut or how many were cut more than once! It sort of looks like a evil madman's go-cart track.

I need to offer Ken a couple of cold beers in exchange for him showing me the secret to mowing the front lawn, because a freshly mowed lawn is certainly Bound to Please.