While those visions of sugarplums dance through most people's haids, I'm feelin' mighty blue that I did not get out once to go fishing this year.

I know...it's downright humiliating....

So I just saw those two words that I personally never thought would get my motor revved: Ice Fishing.

So now all of you guys up in Wisconsin and Minnesota are, no doubt, make sport of us guys from Illinois...hell, you seem to do that all the time anyway...what are we...the comic relief for the Midwest? (I thought that was Iowa...)

I know that you lot get enough ice up there that you can build condominiums out on the lakes and move your whole families in for the winter....dining on walleye and beer and pike and beer and bluegill and beer and beer. We're lucky, in these days of global warming (thank you very much , Mr. Gore...Nobel Prize or no, I am holding you personally responsible) to get enough ice hereabouts to be able to walk across Saganshkee Slough without crashing through into the frigid waters to re-visit the empty long-necks that the teenagers threw in there last summer.

So I may go look at augers later on today...damn....I'm desperate!

Best

AA