Howard.

I have a big announcement. It's news too big for me to hold in. It's so exciting that, if kept to myself, I might implode...

I caught my first fish. Ever.

Yes, you read that right. Go ahead and re-read it anyway. Yeah, it's even better the second time, isn't it?

Six in the morning came too quickly, and those of you who know me know that it takes an earthquake and a gallon of coffee for me to get out of bed that early in the morning for anything. But for Tommy Widmer I set the alarm and and only smashed it with a hammer twice. I drove to meet him at a little pond on a friend's property, looking quite lovely, I might add. I consumed the remainder of my gallon of coffee while he explained how to cast the line and reel it in. After practicing a few times, he sent me to one end of pond to begin my fishing adventure. I became a pro in no time. A pro at casting and reeling, that is.

Eventually, I got a strike (that's fisherwoman language for "bite", don't worry if you can't keep up with my professional self. Not many can.). To my surprise, I was a screamer. Betraying my typically calm and balanced self, I jumped up and down yelling, "I got one! I got one, Tommy! I got one!". Surprising, isn't it?

So I set the hook (meaning I yanked on the line so that the hook would jab into the fishies mouth and poke through his organs), reeled him in, and there he was, wiggling all over the place on my line. Tom told me to take him off the hook. I looked at him like he just asked me to dig through feces to find a lost gummy worm. But I did it (not the feces part, the hook part). I shoved my thumb down my new friend's throat, immobilized him, worked the hook out of his lip (okay, so it didn't go into his organs exactly), named him Howard, and released him.

Whew ... what a great day.