March 30, 2010

friends in low places

Much can be said about your coworkers. Everyone has a few horror stories to share, and there always seems to be a Milton Waddams, Tom Smykowski, or Bill Lumbergh in the crowd. Love 'em or leave 'em, every once in a while one of them will come through and hook you up.

hackle stash
sharptail
mallard flank
The beauty of working in a co-located office are the perks with working alongside other sections and divisions. One of my wildlife cohorts surprised me the other day by bringing two boxes of feathers into my office. When I opened them up, I discovered a bounty of pheasant, grouse, turkey, and mallard feathers. Now this was the mother lode. Now I've got more hackle than I could ever use in 20 years. Once I sorted, treated, and packed all of the feathers, I managed to fill up an entire grocery bag, to the top. That's over 7 gallons of feathers.

starling skin
golden yellow pheasant rump
Speaking of sweet ass hackle, I couldn't pass up a chance at picking up a starling skin when I was over at the Fly Angler last week. Thanks to Justin over at WFF for piquing my interest earlier this winter. One major bonus at the shop: they had pheasant rump in golden yellow! Hot damn! Been looking for this stuff for a couple years now, and this is the first shop I've come across that actually had some in stock. I was just about ready to mail order some from a company in the PNW, but luckily I was able to procure some "locally". That is if you consider a 200 mile distance local. Unfortunately for me, that's the closest fly shop around. Now I can finally get started tying up a patch of carp carrots, but that's for another story.

Has anyone seen my red Swingline stapler?

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