Respite

Plans are finally being solidified. I will be spending my weekend enjoying wintertime versions of this.

Historically, I just don't deal with stress. Period. It helps that my life has always been fairly simple, but work and relationship pressures rarely, if ever, got to me. The past month, however, building from somewhat of a crescendo over the past year, completely dumped upon me in both personal and professional issues. What's made it even worse is a complete lack of outdoorstime(c), save to clean ice off my car and take the garbage down to the curb. Even field-time for work has been absent.
Thankfully, things at work have finally taken on a more evened out pace at least. A weekend spent walking nowhere inparticular, swilling sweet distillations, building fires in the snow to talk by, sleeping on frozen wood, should just about return my mental state to equilibrium. If the weather is kind (as we know it is unlikely to be), I may even be able to throw some loops at the nose or tail of my trip.

In case just such an opportunity presented itself, I took my first trip ever to the area last weekend for a couple hours to scout. As my sister used to say, "golly-gee-wilikers" (perhaps from Dennis the Menace?), what an impressive area. Now I see why people love the Berkshires. Sure, they're no 'dacks, but for the price of admission (takes me 2 hours to get to the ADK High-Peaks areas, less than one for Eastern Mass and Southern Vt), it's a hell of a bargain.

I brought my camera, but was too busy enjoying the scenery (and the driving...I'm just glad there are multiple routes to/from the upper Deerfield from SR-2...two-wheel drive wasn't making it back out the way I went in), and too dumb to stop and break it out. Aside from just the terrain, there is some very fishy water back there, and a lot of choices in close proximity to one another. I may very well spend more time fishing MA than NY this summer. I even found a couple potential options, weather (and/or hangover) permitting, to test the new waders in this weekend. If those mountain spring creeks are as warm as I hope, who knows, I might even get some adorable little creature to acknowledge me this weekend.




did i just use adorable to describe.......well, anything......hmmm, yes, i did.......maybe i need this weekend more than i originally thought

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