i use goosehead insurance, they are a broker and basically reshop each year. just saved me 1000 bucks a month ago for the next year.

we run dubuque rigs on the river a ton and on my dropper i’ll often put a big ole plastic on it. a 5″ bfishn tackle grub or a hanks walleye slayer +. those big baits will either catch slot fish (20+”) or small saugers for some reason.

yeah aberdeen hook is all I use when i’m running a plastic on the trailer. otherwise i use octopus hooks when I know i’m running live bait.

So I now just hose our lem off basically soap it down and have a brush and get all the nooks and crannies and then use the sink spray thing. let it sit out in the open for a bit and its never given me much issue over the past decade i’ve owned it.

so here is the thing. I’ve gone through this whole thing. luckily we get deals through other services like verizon but we run:

netflix
prime
hulu+espn+disney
peacock (my daughter is a college student and gets it for 1.99)
Sling (in truth we share this with my parents) they like a few channels and I use it for espn.

its not crazy expensive yet but I see how some might be irritated.

But here is the thing. My inlaws have dish. 90% of the dish channels are pure garbage channels you would never watch in a million years. dish/direct tv is so overbloated with crap that it makes almost 0 sense in my opinion.

We have recently discovered all of the xtra channels on Roku TV and my kids love them. they’ll watch 4 hours of bob ross, 80’s price is right, cooking shows, etc if we let them.

So for us if we didn’t get special deals on most of these streaming platforms they’d be gone.

we have had chickens for about a decade now. We built a coop inside a barn similar to what you are planning on and it worked really well. our birds are free range and we have a timed door.

they now have a dedicated coop.

we layer hay in the winter.

we put lights on in the winter to keep them laying.

have about 15 along with 2 roosters who seem to get along

X500+ and you’ll be set.

I heat a 25x30x11 garage with an electric 220v 7500 watt heater from like fleetfarm/menards. walls are insulated with R19 (2×6) and ceiling has about 10″ of blow in. At night when i’m watching tv, I hear it kick in like once every other hour for about 15 minutes. set at 40 degrees.

this happened with DHL to our neighbor like a decade ago. a neighbor and his wife also said they saw it DHL said to pound sand. So they called the police and filed a report. DHL sent them a check.

The only issue with zero turns is they can be rough on your yard. if you have a lot of stuff in the way, you’ll tear up the yard. if you mow like a ditch or around trees on a slope you’ll tear it up.

I switched from a all wheel steer to a X540 to a eXmark zero turn. I don’t care about my hard from a how good does it look standpoint as long as it is cut, so the zero turn is nice from a speed and efficiency standpoint, but you can tell I have one. When i begin to care about my yard and have time to, i’ll probably go back to all wheel steer.

MX1825 wrote:

I upgraded to zero turn for speed purposes.

Not to derail the thread but can someone explain to me why you can go faster with a zero turn?
I understand the turning radius and quick turn around capabilities, but why can you go faster in a straight line and still have quality of cut versus a tractor style.
No one has been able to explain it to me yet including mower salesmen.
[/quote]

tip speed. most zero turns run the blades faster because its a single purpose drive. even your X series JD’s run the mowers of a mid-PTO which slows things down. most zero turns unless they are like from lowes are considered commercial and osha allows them to run faster tip speeds.

I had a X465AWS for a few years. I liked it and it never really required any additional maintenance and enjoyed the ability to go full circle around my trees wihtout having to make wider turns.

I upgraded to zero turn for speed purposes.

since you are getting int the X series, expect the build quality to be exceptional.

If you haven’t found him yet AnglerX on youtube is fantastic.

Tournament coverage has stunk IMO since the NWT started. FLW coverage I thought was great. I get it, this industry is different than it was. but I worry for its future.

H2H was probably expensive to put together i’m sure but it was also horribly run.

the headline failures are unique banks. one is heavy in VC/Tech funding. The others got caught up in crypto lending.

That said it will drag down the sector. when you have your money tied up in bonds/debt that is paying you back 2% yet all new money is earning 4%, you can get yourself into trouble.

also, banks fail….all the time. we work with a firm that does nothing but bank/CU liquidation when they do. they’ve been around a long time and are plenty busy. and its a 50 person law firm.

These ones were just big (one being VERY big)

I would let some stuff settle out a bit before you guy plopping down money on some bank stocks. if you do consider a broad sector based etf like IYF. won’t hit a crazy home run but a nice single or double to fund that new trolling motor.

KFC is iconic but I always feel like everything is so small. like are these cornish hens?

Popeye’s sides are the best. – their chicken is very good too. and the chicken sandwich is very good. The issue is that our popeyes are basically warzones. I’ve not yet had an experience out of the dozen or so where there wasn’t some emplooyee fighting with a customer. screaming and shouting. I actually stuck around once because the manager literally got in a fight with a dude and the cops had to be called. https://www.kwqc.com/content/news/Employee-punched-in-the-face-at-Moline-Popeyes-police-search-for-suspect-570277041.html

Chickfila basically wins by a small margin because you will likely not have to get into fisticuffs with someone there. and chickfila sauce is better than kanes sauce.

I have kanes a few times. Its ok. it seems like standard fare chicken strips and I do not like krinkle fries.

Re DQ. I refuse to eat there on principle due to the “$5 Buck Lunch” promotion. which essentially reads “Five Dollar Buck Lunch” which doesn’t make any sense. This had to go through corporate and a board room full of marketing execs and noone was like guys, you can’t do this. “5 Buck Lunch” is basically “5 Dollar Lunch” and if you put a $ before the 5 in that sentence it would be “Five Dollar Dollar Lunch”

Anyway that might seem a bit ridiculous of a reason to boycott DQ but I’ve never claimed that I was not a ridiculous person.

Here is kind of where I’m at.

If you have a drill already and don’t use it in the winter for projects, buy a light flight and be done with it. here is the thing, you will wear the drill out. I’ve got 4 years on a 2704 and towards the end of the year having drilled thousands of holes with this thing can tell its a bit weathered. I now have a 2804 that is its replacement and have the 2704 as a home project drill.

If you have a 2804 and use it all the time for projects, get yourself the 24v and have a dedicated unit for ice fishing.

Netguy wrote:

I see Jon Thelen is sponsored by TUCR this year.

I’d rather watch banjo minnow infomercials. he and jason mitchell are insomnia remedies

i bought the og ifishpro and it was ok, but the finicky fooler is 2 for the price of one of the new ifishpros.

its easier to pack and it works just fine. we love our foolers. I literally had guys ordering them on their phones while fishing the river in northern iowa last year.

i fish occasionally with my buddies lx6 and he got it when it first came out. the only issue he had is its awkward holder. it fell out of the bag once and he had to send it in. but other than that he’s really liked it.

i still use my LX5 and have a VX1p as a backup. i went to marcum from vexilars (had a fl8 then a fl18, then upgraded to a vx1)

i’ve put lithiums on them and then run a livescope to find fish.

FinnyDinDin wrote:

I remember all the marcum love on here and just never understood it and that was all gone when sponsorship dropped.

the marcum love stopped when their product quality went to pot 2013ish time frame imo way before james stopped using them. james continued on with the lx6/7/9 and then the tablet jobby for some time.

We don’t know that story and maybe won’t ever.

All I know is that Marcum had an opportunity. the LX5 is probably the greatest flasher unit ever made. if you went to a NAIFC tournament or any of the other tournament trails, it was mostly marcum. but they started having motor and ducer issues and became unreliable. really shot themselves in the foot.

not all knockoff batteries are the same. even from the same vendor. they are using cells that are who knows. sometimes good cells they got for cheap, sometime crappy cells they paid regular price for.

A buddy runs a home building company and supplies all his guys with power tools. its not a giant crew. for a while he tried to save money and use cheap batteries. he found that 75% of them had a pretty early failure rate. in the winter in the cold it was worse. he said some of them were just fine.

he ended up going back to OEM.

from a business perspective it makes sense. when ya’ll made the H-bird switch from marcum I thought in all likelihood, this wasn’t a more lucrative gain. bigger companies don’t really need to pay more for you to sponsor their products.

same here IMO. and you are 100% correct. prior to the custom rod craze, rods were awful in the ice fishing world. like an afterthought. manufactured rods now are lightyears better than they were.

and it makes sense to market a product that is more affordable to everyone.

My only hope is that you forever avoid the Clam scam, James!

I still hold my allocation to BTC and ETH and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. I’ll likely add to it come January when i fund my Roth.

I don’t know what asset classes will do best. I like a little skin in the game all over just in case.

a while ago I listened to AP on a barstool outdoors podcast. he kind of went through the progression of his career. what I got out of it is that he’s kind of a grifter. The moment there is any kind of structure or organization he’s just done. like he’s the perfect definition of a midwest beach bum.

the contrast between him and Jon B is staggering.

I’ve subscribed if you will as a fellow il fisherman like for a good 8 years.

lol wtf.

Clayton should of been like “you think not having Aaron releasing videos is a big deal? you ain’t seeing anything yet!”

i redid the elastic on my bibs myself a few years back. i ordered heavy duty stuff on amazon along with new clips too.

I used my wifes regular ole sewing machine.

I run the 12AH for drilling holes with my kdrill. I don’t see any wonkiness.

3Rivers wrote:

Clayton did a live stream last night and briefly talked about the Uncut situation. He seems to be getting very annoyed by all the attention directed towards Aaron/UnCut. I don’t blame him, yet on the other hand if the roles were reversed and he was AWOL, everyone would be asking about him too. It’s not necessarily about Aaron, rather a person they keep talking about as a participant in the contest yet strangely NOT part of it. It’s really weird actually.

If Uncut’s portion was not going to be included then they should just drop them and re-edit or make some sort of announcement that they dropped out from the contest. At any rate, Clayton and Aaron are pretty good friends and even Clayton doesn’t know what is going on other than a group message saying “I hope I can make it up to all of you”.
He talks about it here at about the 26:00 mark

<div class=”ido-oembed-wrap”><iframe loading=”lazy” title=”Live Chat!! Let’s Talk Game of Inches!!” src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/cL9aEXOcw1M?start=2330&feature=oembed&#8221; allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen=”” width=”850″ height=”478″ frameborder=”0″></iframe></div>

yeah I get the frustration but when you still plaster the dudes name all over the promos and scorecards and stuff AND THEN SAY NOTHING ABOUT WHY THERE ARE NO VIDEOS, what do you expect? put something out ahead of time and there will still be speculation but not to this extent.

I like it. anything that is new will keep my interest. interesting to see if they knew everyones scores each night or what. I guess we’ll find out.

as for the who’s who of these channels, I think they did a good job covering the gambit if youtube fishing entertainment. Peric gets a lot of crap poured on him and maybe its for good reason but I think the kid pushed the boundaries of the “youtube fishing personality” and credit him mightily for that. sure there were other people who were also doing it but he grew it way faster and was very successful early on.

I’ll be honest, early on i really enjoyed aaron wiebe stuff. but i would say midway through his show (like 5 years ago) it became so few and far between and they just weren’t that great. then obviously all sorts of personal problems and of course everyone wants to know everyones business so its been kind of meh since then. like I take him or leave him.

who knows what happened to him, i don’t know him certainly but he seems very easily flustered and agitated. But yeah it seems odd they include that team in the promos and stuff still. maybe an FU to aaron or some crap.

Frostbite as a company does nothing for me, i really have no opinion. seems fine. But like that they put this stuff on.

I’ll be watching. 39 hours was fantastic.