Ok, so many of you know that I celebrated my 55th birthday with some other firefighters at a local lake that included some fishing. So why not another fish story? Here's mine...

We drove down to the shoreline and saw a boat anchored off the shore and assumed it was owned by a friend of ours. With this being the mind set, I went out to the boat, climbed aboard and noticed a fishing pole in the water with some slack line laying on the surface... What an opportunity for some quick down and dirty fishing I thought. So I picked up the pole and just the movement of the pole enabled me to snag a catfish. I yelled to my buddies, "hey, I caught a fish!" Of course they replied bull$hit... Kind of hard to argue the point when the pole is bending and the fish is jumping out of the water...

It wasn't until later that night that I was speaking with whom I thought owned the boat and tackle only to find out that it wasn't his... it was someone visiting... whoops... The catfish tasted like chicken. I did feel some remorse however... : )

And now for the rest of the story...

So I bring the fish back to the cabin and place it into the kitchen sink with water running. That's when it hit me about the cool cat thing... I know that this sounds off the wall but a very dear friend of mine also has an "off" sense of humor and in fact, I blame him for influencing me so much when I was younger. Just last week, I was over at his house and he was telling a story about a cool cat that he new.

So, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity seeing that I had caught a catfish and all... Just add some ice cubes and you get a, "Cool Cat"... When you are dealing with a world class comedian, you have to reach a bit sometimes.

And here's a test, who's my adopted dad? Hint, he came to my Captain's promotional ceremony and he is most certainly a cool cat!

TCSS, Mike