Doc didn’t expect any patients before 10 o’clock this morning, so he was up and coffee’d and gone by 6:30. Lewis Creek. The Lunker’s hole on Lewis Creek.

The Lunker is a huge rainbow trout that everyone knows about and no one has caught. So far he has resisted flies, worms, salmon eggs, spinners, and even an imitation mouse that Dud tossed in there one time just to see if the Lunker had a bass’s appetite.

Crappies are one of the most popular fish species across North America. Because they’re usually a schooling fish, when you find them action can be fast. They’ll respond to a variety of presentations, and they’re great on the table. And according to Mr. Crappie Wally Marshall, crappie fishing in many areas is getting better because of regulations that protect the fish a bit.

Well, I’m back home after spending three nights and two days up at Ballard’s Resort on the south shore of Lake of the Woods after enjoying a fishing trip organized by my daughter’s fiance, John Walz. He put together a group of 12 with six of us in each of the cabins. It was a fully guided two-day trip with each cabin rotating the same two guides from one day to the next.

Cable networks went with wall-to-wall coverage of the Independence Day parade shooting in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Six people were killed and 24 injured when a 22-year-old white male opened fire from the roof of a building. If you care about the other details of the event, you likely have already read and/or heard about them and perhaps discussed them.

“How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy,” ― Thomas Jefferson.

Will I ever be good? I doubt it. I always say that my game is “good, bad and ugly.” That way I can also say my round was “more good than usual” or “it was a little uglier than usual.” I am not one to announce my score to just anyone.

Benefits of playing the sport are numerous. Golf provides movement for various parts of my body since I swing well over par for most holes. As a matter of fact, I may start suggesting after a bad hole that I played that way just to get more exercise.

Every garden season is filled with beautiful and tasty surprises along with a few challenges. One challenge gardeners face each year is managing insect pests while keeping the pollinators safe. Fortunately, only a very small percentage of insects in our landscapes are harmful. The rest help pollinate plants, feed upon or parasitize bad insects, or help decompose plant debris.

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach is committed to providing resources and education to improve the lives of all Iowans. As the youth outreach coordinator in Clay County, my goal is to offer programming that is educational, exciting and widely available to youth throughout the county. This summer, we are already 10 camps in, and we're having such a great time.

I'm a tired young newsman, folks, but there's no way for me to not talk about what's happened in the last week. My generation has never known a world in which Roe v. Wade wasn't the law of the land — and in which it wasn't a surefire divisive issue.

Disingenuousness is a nice word people use instead of asserting that someone is lying.

There’s a lot of disingenuousness in our country regarding the Dobbs decision regarding abortion handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court last week.

Racism is a component of the abortion debate in more ways than one. Consider Ben J. Wattenberg's book "The Birth Dearth: What happens when people in free countries don't have enough babies?" in which he explained that white people could become a minority in the United States within a few decades. A GOP nightmare. He had three suggestions to stop it.

1. Pay women to have babies. Because we'd have to pay women of all colors, that wouldn't work.

I read your latest "One Man's Perspective" and felt you nailed it with the one sentence, some 200 words into your editorial: "All life is precious, especially the most innocent, an unborn child." The 100-plus lines of the letter writer whose piece was juxtaposed next to yours was riddled with divisive and derisive comments that seemed to go on ad infinitum. Then again, you do end your literary efforts with the query, "What say you?" I have a few comments to share also.

Elvis was a shooting star in every since of the word.

He burned bright and hot and flamed out way to soon. And that’s exactly how Austin Butler masterfully portrayed the “King of Rock 'n' Roll” in “Elvis,” which offers audiences a look at where he came from, his musical influences and those who shared in his rise to fame and his ultimate early and untimely death.

Although there are scoffers who deny that a great worldwide flood ever occurred, evidence from the cultural, linguistic, and archeological sciences weigh greatly in favor of the historicity of the flood. The arguments against the flood are not truly against its occurrence, but against the Creator’s existence. With the evidence weighing in favor of the flood, our interest should not be about “if” it occurred, but “why” it occurred.

I have been a voracious book reader all of my life but could not begin to have kept up with Theodore Roosevelt who was said to have read a book per day even while president. I may average reading one book per week. I have switched to the more visual media of YouTube for many of my history lessons. I have read some books that I thought could be recommended for your summer leisure, worth the time spent.