All is quiet. And I mean so quiet that I can hear that 440 electrical buzz sound in my head. This is so different than the airplanes rushing overhead every thirty seconds and a major interstate right in my backyard. My neighbors used to be The United Parcel Service by way of their world-port and my other noisy neighbor was the main traffic vein of the Eastern U.S.A, Interstate 65. There is an occasional sound of a car going down my street. There is home sounds like the sound of my laptop fan, but these sounds are the noises that I never heard before it got all quiet. This morning I woke up at 6:30. Went to bed aww, about midnight, slept all night and woke up to a dark, creaky old house suggesting to me with every step to the kitchen, that the coffee is so good. So, coffee brewing, time to roll a smoke, and pick up the cell phone and scroll the morning news paper screen.

The weather report around these parts is simple. Can you see the mountains? If you can’t see the mountains in the morning, prolly ain’t gonna be no sun all day. I do this every morning. I look out the kitchen window as I open the blinds and gaze at the far away Swiss Alps. The snow cover fluctuates from day to day. The ever changing colors are so different from the only other mountains I have ever seen. The Great Smoky Mountains are great sure, but this is another thing all together. Now that I have passed my German Language test, I think it might be time to get out and walk around some. The other day, I went fishing in lake Constance (Bodensee.)

Going fishing was the first time I had driven anywhere by myself. I woke early, got all layered up because the temperature was going to hover right around freezing for most of the day. Working as an engineer on the Steamer Belle of Louisville got me trained to handle some pretty harsh weather, but this was going to be the opposite spectrum of the heat of being a boiler fireman. I did pretty good, all for the battery powered heated vest my captain had ready for me. My captain is my wife’s best girlfriends man. And he is quite the feller. His boat is a trolling boat, nothing fancy, however we went in style with sandwiches and lots of layers to keep us warm. I didn’t bring coffee was my mistake and he forgetting the hot tea was his. We talked for eight hours or more and got to know each other pretty well. We caught eight lake trout and all of them were massive. (hehe) in eight hours we caught one what he called small, but big enough trout. To me, a lake fisherman from Kentucky used to bass, it was pretty big.

And pretty tasty I might add.