Relaxing After Thanksgiving Dinner

Friends of friends staying at the house of their friends, and invited over for Thanksgiving dinner, is probably the least confusing way of explaining the reason that I was sitting out on the pool patio with Paula. Paula and her hubby Lee live in the Tampa area, but they were here (well, not really here, but only about thirty km from here) at the southern end of the Miami metropolitan area, house sitting a friend's house. I'd met Paula through a mutual friend that used to live in Miami but now lives in Tampa.

When Paula called and discovered that I had no plans for Thanksgiving she insisted that I join them. I jumped on it! I brought some of Helga's delicious German pastry from her German bakery, Ness Knditori, and headed south. Paula and one of her lady friends were cooking up a storm. Lee and I got thrown out of the house to keep from being underfoot and in the way. The two of us got to spent an hour or two sitting out by the pool talking Men Talk, discussing the really important stuff, like our favorite lures for trout fishing, he in Tampa Bay and me in Biscayne Bay. We discussed the fact that redfish were a common catch in Tampa Bay but in fifty plus years of fishing Biscayne Bay I'd only ever caught one redfish, and under present day regulations it would have been too small to keep, but that it was delicious. We concluded that if all of the state's marine biologists never could figure out why redfish eschew the waters of Biscayne Bay, and even resisted the state's efforts to introducing them by releasing fingerlings in the bay waters, we weren't going to let the conundrum destroy the conviviality of the occasion.

Lee prefers using jig heads with plastic tails while I fish mostly with bucktail jigs that I tie myself because I can't buy them already made up in the colors I prefer. The plastic tails are readily available in those colors. We agreed that a slow retrieve seems to be most effective. He uses spinning tackle while I prefer to use a light bait casting (revolving spool reel) outfit. Well enough fish talk for now.

The girls beckoned. The turkey was the tenderest I'd ever eaten, slow roasted for hours and hours, and the side dishes scrumptious. As usual I probably ate a bit too much, but I survived and the discomfort soon passed. Paula had put in a long busy day already and wanted to just stretch out and relax a bit. She put her feet up on the table and we enjoyed a cigarette with our coffee. As an aside, it's the distortion of the ultra-wide angle lens that makes it look like Paula's legs are two meters long and that she must wear size sixteen shoes. She's really an attractive and well proportioned woman. I drove home a happy man.