One Fish, Two Fish . . . SO MANY FISH

Hey, remember A.'s friend J.? The one who fishes ALL THE DAMN TIME? Well, yesterday he and A. went out in J.'s boat for some fishing. And of course, when fishing with J., "some fishing" means an all-day marathon of fishing. They pushed off from our beach at 8 a.m. and didn't return until 4 p.m.

But when they DID get back . . .

HOLY POSEIDON. Did they leave any fish in the lake?

That's walleye, pike, pickerel, trout, and perch. That's a shitload of fish. Big fish, too. In order to give you a size comparison, I will make the supreme sacrifice of posting what may be the worst picture ever taken of me.

Babies are bad for your posture, and recoiling from a BIG-ASS UGLY PIKE makes for serious double chins on both mother and baby.

J. didn't want to take any of the fish home, so A. gutted them all and I wrapped them in plastic wrap and butcher paper to join the half-cow in the freezer. The MiL ran off with the fish heads. So she could make a recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking that she's been staring at for forty years. The recipe is Soupe du Poisson. Strained Fish Soup, in English. It calls for fish carcasses, but the heads can't have the gills. So the MiL actually removed the gills from the pike and pickerel heads. Pike and pickerel are the two ugliest fish on the planet, and their heads are scary-looking. They are also, according to the MiL, lethal. All spiky and slippery and she's lucky she didn't cut a finger off while she was snipping out the gills (GROSS). The resulting soup, however, was quite lovely. Especially considering the nastiness of the main ingredient.

The kitchen sink, however, was distinctly UN-lovely after the MiL had strained the soup and deposited the resulting solids into the sink. I did not take a picture of the sink. Trust me, you should thank me for that.