Steven Brust

Hey, did I ever mention that my favorite author, Steven Brust, is from Minnesota? I already knew that but was reminded of the fact when he mentioned it in in his latest blog post.

Brust is most well known for his Vlad Taltos series. The first couple come off as pretty cheesy -- the "gimmick" of the series is that it's kind of a Mafia saga set within a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world. Also, the main character has a pet miniature dragon with whom he has a lot of corny-as-hell dialogue. But if you can get past these things there's some depth there, and it's really not the typical Tolkien rip-off. For example, the fifth book in the series ends up dealing with socioeconomic issues like "Hey, aren't all those peasants who support the romantic and swashbuckling nobility, like, totally being oppressed?" Brust is a bit of a socialist (these left-wing Minnesotans!), but he's a damn great writer.

Brust only has one book set in Minnesota -- Agyar -- but I definitely wouldn't recommend that one as a starting point. He currently lives in Las Vegas and is very into poker :-)

Ice Fishing!!

Okay, after my hard-hitting posts on the napkin-and-silverware glass and our street covered in snow, I now bring you, my patient readers, the ice fishing post.

As you may or may not know, ice fishing is pretty big out here. When I think of ice fishing I think of Chilly Willy sitting around a big hole in the ice, piling up fish.



But here in Minnesota they really do it up. My friend John at work has told me several times about his father-in-law's ice house. It's got a heater, TV, radio, fridge, microwave, game table for playing cards and such, and the whole thing lifts up on hydraulics. John and his wife spent Christmas up at "the cabin" and the father-in-law spent much of it not in the cabin, but in the ice house. Everyone agrees it's maybe 10 percent about giving fisherman (fishing in general is huge out here in the land of 10,000 lakes) an outlet in the winter, and 90 percent about giving yourself an excuse sit around and drink beer all day. We had to try it.

This was way back on Saturday, January 28. Although January was unusually warm this year, we got lucky that Saturday and it was actually below zero. Which provides a certain peace of mind when you are out on a frozen lake, in a small house, and everyone around you is drilling holes in the ice.

B had taken the lead on this little adventure. She found a place online, Minnetonka Outdoors, that rents ice houses by the day or half-day. You show up and buy some bait, pay the rental fee, and they provide you with poles and everything else you might need for a day of ice fishing. (I had the brochure and was gonna scan it in for you, but I seem to have misplaced it.) So we showed up at Minnetonka Outdoors, got our bait, then headed over to the Crystal Bay area of Lake Minnetonka, where their ice houses are. We arrived about 2pm. On to the pictures.

This was our ice house:





As you can see it has wheels on it. People literally haul them out onto the ice with their trucks or SUVs. And every year someone loses a truck hauling their ice house around. Or so we've heard :-)

It was part of a little cluster:







As you can see, the ice houses come in a variety if styles and sizes. I was particularly impressed by the guys in little one-man tents. The tent pretty much just protected them from the wind as they huddle over their hole in the ice. Hard core.

But we had an actual shack with a heater and a radio (although not a TV). Our ice house could accomodate 4. Why 4? Because there are 4 holes cut into the ice in the corners of the house, one for each occupant:



If two people fish the same hole, well, that just results in a tangle.

Here's me fishing away:



And here's B:



How do you make those holes in the ice? You use an ice auger:









Here is the big guy we are after, the elusive pike:



And the type of fishing pole we're holding in the above photos is an ice rod. It's pretty small compared to a regular fishing rod:



We also had another type of rod that I forgot to photograph: The jiggle rod. It's more of an old-fashioned thing since it doesn't have a reel. If you've seen the movie Grumpy Old Men, they do some ice fishing in that, and a jiggle rod is one of the things they fight over.

There's two main types of bait you use on an ice rod or a jiggle rod: minnows and grubs. Forgot to get a shot of a minnow, but you all know what they look like. I'm guess fewer of you have handled grubs:



B kept referring to them as maggots. I asked her stop since I was the one handling them. They do look like the stuff the Klingons eat in Star Trek though:



So we fished all day and only caught one damn fish: B reeled in a sunfish, or sunny. We threw it back cause it was pretty small. Our Minnetonka Outdoors "host" for the day, Gary, said we could've kept it, but that there would've been very little meat on it. It all happened kinda suddenly and I forgot to get a picture. Doh!

But here's the thing: You don't usually catch pike with a jiggle rod. Turns out the "sitting around a hole with a jiggle rod" [giggle] part of ice fishing is just part of it. In your ice house you've also got a rattle reel:



This is a reel, with some pretty thick line on it. It sits above one of the ice holes in the ice house, and if you've got less than 4 people you "fish" this hole with the rattle reel. You put a pretty big minnow on the rattle reel's hook and lower it in. If a fish bites, the reel rattles -- it's got ball bearings or something inside. Gary explained that when icefisherman spend the weekend on the lake, they use the rattle reel to fish while they are sleeping, and the rattle wakes them up!!

But that's not all. You've also got your tip-ups. (State regulations allow one rattle reel and one tip-up at a time per fisherman.) A tip-up is a little contraption with a fishing line on it and a bright orange flag:



You place the tip-up over a hole in the ice, and when a fish bites, the flag pops up. So you can sit in the warmth of your ice house and just look out the window to see if you've caught anything:



Seems like cheating, but there it is.

Gary was pretty much in charge of the tip-ups. He had set up one for each person in one of the Minnetonka Outdoor cabins, but he didn't really assign one tip-up belonged to which person. One of the cabins was being rented by a family with 3 kids, and so when the first tip-up hit, the kids (who were bored as heck after a while) went wild, and Gary asked us if it would be cool if we let the kids get the first fish. Of course we said yes, but several tip-up hits later, that family kept claiming the fish! Oh well. I have to admit that I wasn't pressing that hard for a fish because I knew I'd have to clean it! Friends told us later that those pike are actually one of the toughest fish to clean, so just as well.

Here's the kids looking on at one of the first tip-up catches:



And here's a guy showing off a very big pike he had caught earlier in the day:



Here's B investigating a tip-up that had tipped up. False alarm.



In between investigating tip-ups, and pulling frozen grubs off our lines and replacing them with new ones, we relaxed, enjoyed the pretty view of the lake, and drank some Grain Belt Premium Beer!



We had the ice house until 7pm. Sunset was very nice:



Dusk was even nicer:



Once it really started to get dark (and I could no longer take pictures) a fox crept out onto the ice -- Gary pointed it out, and we could just see its silhouette. It crept along the ice from abandoned ice hole to abandoned ice hole, stopping at each one. I had seen a few guys preparing to leave for the day, and each one of them took their bucket of bait and, rather than pouring it down an ice hole, had thrown all these minnows onto the ice, where they quickly froze. So Gary explained that they were sort of feeding the local wildlife.

We came home tired, and smelling like bait, but happy, and started a fire going, which Mojo loved:



So that's it, our big ice fishing expedition. I'd do it again, but never without beer :-)

March Snow Storm

This is the view looking down the street from outside our front door this morning:



This started as small hail yesterday afternoon, and by 10pm or so there was thunder and lightning accompanying the wind and snowfall.

And where was all of this during January and February? Damn crazy weather.

The Napkin-and-Silverware Glass

I have not posted in a few weeks, and I feel bad about that, especially because I've got lost of good stuff to blog about. For example, way back on the Saturday before the Super Bowl, B and I actually went ice fishing!! I took about a zillion photos, but as my buddy Brian has blogged about recently, it's a little time-consuming and tedious to transfer a lot of photos off the digital camera, compress them for the web, upload them to a server, and then link to them in the blog.

I promise I will get to the ice fishing photos, but for now, a photo-free post:

They are big on the napkin-and-silverware glass here in Minnefabulous. At a very large proportion of restaurants, they do not set out your silverware and napkins on the table, with one place setting per person. Instead, there is usually a pint or similar-sized glass on each table containing a bunch of napkins, knives, forks, and spoons. When this runs low, the server simply gives you a new glass.

I know this may seem like an odd thing to notice, and I know I've seen the napkin-and-silverware glass in the occasional bar or diner in other cities, but they really do this at a lot of restaurants out here (definitely the majority of restaurants we've been to), including some rather nice ones. I prefer it: You don't need to ask the waitress for extra napkins when you're messy or if you spill anything, or for an extra fork if you drop yours, or for an extra spoon if you want to split a bowl of soup.