We have made it through another year with just a week to go.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day and a week from tomorrow will be the first day of the New Year, 2009.

We all have a lot to be thankful for and are most probably better off than we deserve. So spend that time with your family and close friends. We never know when that time will end.

I know that most of you are more concerned with what your children and grandchildren will be getting for Christmas than you are yourself. But those smaller folks are looking at you and are thinking that when they get bigger they will be getting things like you get. For us that spend most of our time in the outdoors, your children and grandchildren will be looking at the guns, rods and reels, as well as poles that you get as something that they will be getting in just a few years. Brag on their stuff, but also talk about the big folks stuff as something that you really like and something that they will have a turn at getting when they get older.

One Christmas my wife bought me a new shotgun. I really did like it, but a gun for Christmas doesn’t leave much time to use it as the hunting season start going out pretty soon after Christmas. Of course today another gun would be just added to the collection and since most of us have more guns than we need, it wouldn’t have negative effects.

I know when my dad bought my brother and me our first guns, we got them before the fall hunting seasons even came in. We pestered him a plenty wanting to shoot them before the season came in, but nothing was legal. Squirrel season would have been in now, but that was a long time ago when we got our first guns.

I don’t think my brother liked to hunt in later years. He never talked about it if he did. He probably got enough shooting and dodging bullets in Vietnam. One thing we did like and continue to do into later years in our lives was fish and fishing on a circuit is work and not all that much fun.

He was sponsored by Advance Auto and they did right good by him, and I think he represented them very well also. I would send to him baits to try and always something that was not readily available at the local stores in his part of New York state. The other fishermen would still be able to get the new lures and worms, but he would be several weeks ahead of the best of them. I didn’t know those fishermen, but they knew me. They referred to me as your *#!& brother. I guess I was as I helped him and not them.

I was writing my last article on the night that all the rain came. The weather folks said that we would get one to two inches. I knew we had gotten at least two inches so that is what I reported. I as well as they were very wrong. We got five, six, or seven inches depending of which rain bands crossed your area. Since then the water has been coming down the rivers and smaller streams. All the small streams are out of their banks. Even the Flint, though not flooded, is dangerous with the high water, uncertain currents, and limbs and trees floating downstream. What we worry about are the deadheads, which is a tree floating just under the water and making its way downstream. You can very easily hit one of these with your boat and spill yourself into the water.

I hope all of you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It is but a few days before all those resolutions will have a chance to be broken and you can get back to your old self. Well, maybe not. And we will all be the better for it whether we keep the resolutions or not.