The fishing has been good this summer. Lots of bass in the backyard pond and few mosquitoes...

Fishing has been a part of my life for so long that I'm no longer consciously aware of all the indicators that I am a true fisher(wo)man. I decided to make a brief self-examination and came up with these tell-tale signs of a serious obsession:

  - Summer mode of my otherwise tidy family room means three fishing rods, two spinning and one fly, sitting in the corner, rigged and read to go. With three tackle boxes on the floor...

  - When I clean up my e-mail, it always seems to be full of pictures of fishing trips. I often don't know the person in the photo, but the fish are always awesome...

 - I read Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It every summer.

  - I say I buy polarized sunglasses for driving, but really, they just make the fish easier to spot.

  - I get really annoyed by that Symbicort commercial, the one where the poor guy with COPD gets to go fishing with his son and grandson...with spinning rods...with fly reels on them...with bobbers on the end of them...wrong...wrong...wrong...

  - The lovely wooden magazine rack in the family room is stuffed with flyfishing magazines, some over twenty years old.

  - Memes like this come attached to my e-mails:

 - There's a book on my shelf entitled Reel Women.

  - A winter craft night often means tying flies.

  - My mid-life acquisition of reading glasses was provoked by my inability to see well enough to whip finish my flies.

  - I've been known, on more than one occasion, to tie customized foam flies with red hearts drawn on the spine, put them in overly cute, romantic little boxes, and give them as shower gifts to fishing couples.

  - I define torture as sitting in Common Grounds at Kenosha Harbor, watching huge fish jump two feet out of the water, knowing that I only have a Illinois fishing license.

  - Linda Greenlaw and Joan Salvato Wulff are my heros.

  - Eating dinner early in the summer is incentive to have more fishing time before the mosquitoes come out.

  - 95% of my mosquito bites are fishing-acquired. (I just don't know when to come in...)

  - Anything that requires 20-60 minutes of oven cooking time allows for 20-60 minutes of fishing in the backyard, provided I remember to put the kitchen timer in my pocket.

 - Lastly, the name of this blog, The Angle, comes from the title of the first book on fishing, written by a woman who was a 15^th century nun. (See blog post #1.)

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

- From A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean