My house is quite often a hurricane of activity. My kids, ages 7, 5, and 2 have boundless energy and are involved in any sporting activity that includes a ball, a club, a stick, or a puck. That means I’m often rushing from one floor of the house to another to be the intervening referee, sometimes the goalie, sometimes the pitcher, many time the retriever or objects thrown, batted, shot or kicked too high. The point is, I rarely have more then 5 minutes of time in a row to spend on any activity until after the kids go to bed. Nonetheless, one day this spring, I was getting organized for a week long get away.
My various rods, normally stored in my gun cabinet to keep the kids from tangling all the lines together, were in the living room. My tackle box was sitting on my desk. My fly boxes, 3 of them, were in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. I was testing the sinking rate of some of the flies in a tub full of water in the bathroom when I was summoned to solve a “who hit who back first” argument in the toy room. At the same time, my wife was busy cleaning the living room for some company coming that night, and swearing at me for leaving my rods all over the floor.
After getting the hockey game back on track, I decided to sort through some of my dry flies in the kitchen. I pushed the rest of the stuff on the table aside to make room for the flies and began to remove them from the fly box one by one. I organized them by size and colour, knowing full well after the first full day of fishing my box would be in complete disarray again. With about 10 flies out of the box, a crash was heard from the downstairs toy room. I arrived moments later to discover a broken light fixture but no broken kids. No opportunity to try out alternative uses of head cement today! Shop Vac to the rescue and the game was back on.
I started back upstairs, but remembered the sink rate experiment going on in the bathroom and resumed that activity for another 5 minutes before I had to rush to referee the next dispute. I finally returned to my fly sorting about a 1/2 hour after I had left it, to discover all my dry boatsmen were gone from the neat row I had placed them in. I also noticed the supper dishes had been removed from the table and the dishwasher was running. I quickly surmised that my wife had whirl winded her way through the kitchen on a cleaning spree, and swept the table free of debris. “Wife!”, I called out. “Did you clean up in the kitchen, ’cause I was just about to?” Her reply was “Yes. I don’t have time for you to get to it.” “Where did you sweep the stuff from the table?”, I inquired. “Into the empty corn flakes box by the back door. Why?”, came her puzzled reply. “Because you just swept $20 worth of my flies into the trash.”, I answered. “I thought they were crumbs from the kid’s plates.”, was her guilty reply.
I dumped the flies out, back onto the table, along with a few crumbs the kids had left, and continued my sorting and replacing back into the fly box from which they came.
Other places not to leave your flies (and you can imagine why):
- your bed
- the living room floor
- seat of your truck
- floor of your truck
- your pocket