California Health Insurance Quotes and Blog

When six old friends headed to a trout stream near Yosemite, Pete had no idea that he’d be hooked instead of a trout. But because of a timely prior visit to a California Health Insurance agent, the point of this painful fishing yarn turned out to be the one that got away. 

Fishing Accident!!

Pete Wafsleger was an expert fisherman. Using bait and a fiberglass rod, he usually caught his limit. One day in May, Pete and five old friends, all experienced fishermen sans one, headed up to Pete’s favorite stream in Yosemite.  They drove up in an SUV, if not exactly fuel efficient, the vehicle was “fishing efficient,” according to Sam, the SUV’s owner and driver.

The vehicle’s onboard GPS worked swell, and within an hour, the group of friends arrived in the park. Within a few more minutes, they’d found Pete’s cherished stream. “Here we are!” he yelled. Sam stopped the car. The men felt like kids playing hooky when they got out their poles, and baited their hooks. Everybody was in a good mood. Five casts, expertly launched, went out into the stream.

Before Sam sent his own cast airborne, he spoke a red flag. “How do you even know for sure there’s even fish in this stream? It’s only about six inches deep!”

Pete and the rest turned to face Sam and flashed him looks. Every trout fisherman worth his tackle knows that a trout stream is seldom more than a foot deep. Besides, they’d all pulled stringers of writhing trout from this very stream. But at that very instant, Sam launched his cast. It sailed into the air like the others – for about seven feet – until Sam hooked Pete with considerable force – right in the forehead. “Geez Sam,” they all cried in unison, “now look what you’ve done.”

For his part, Pete just stood there bleeding profusely.  Sam drove in a quite a hurry back in the way they’d come, in fact, even further, all the way to Barstow. An emergency room gurney lay waiting for Pete. As he was wheeled off into the bowels of the hospital, his friends followed along like grown puppy dogs, and Sam seemed especially bedraggled. Pete lay there bleeding and repeating in the manner of a mantra, “Thank heavens I got health insurance coverage.”

Sure enough, Pete did have a plan in place. He’d purchased it a few months back from a California Health Insurance agent who was also a fisherman of sorts.

A few days later, the friends were all having a good laugh amid a few beers, even Pete, still wearing a bandage to protect the stitches.  “Still my friend?” Sam asked Pete.

“Sure,” Pete said, “Can’t help it. I’m hooked.” At least he wasn’t the friend that got away.

It was a good thing that all of the people at the office were covered by policies purchased from a California Health Insurance agent. The irony is that they were just trying to lose weight.

Everybody who is overweight, not grossly obese necessarily, but even those who find themselves pleasingly plump, get the urge to lose weight right after New Year’s. Diets are taken up like Bibles, and gymnasiums and sauna rooms are filled with perspiring people of every age and description. The offices of Turtlebaum & Turtlebaum, a Sacramento accounting firm of considerable renown, was no exception. Joe D’Angelo by his own estimation needed to shed twenty pounds worn around his middle like a girdle, Patty Provencal seemed to possess a double stomach along with her double chin; Betsy Boopora’s ankles had morphed into cankles, and Irving Iso, although quite conventional in most ways, possessed arms like an elephant’s trunk.

At the beginning of 2009, they’d all made New Year’s resolutions to lose the excess flab. Each was about to be weighed to learn just who might be winning the “Biggest Loser” prizes which had been offered by management as weight loss incentives. But the results were disappointing.

When Joe hopped up onto the precision scale, he’d lost only two pounds, and Betsy had lost just under a pound. Patty had actually gained forty pounds, and Irving had gained almost sixty. To describe any of these losers as “winners” seemed a stretch, but throughout the entire year, stress and anxiety about the “weigh-in” had been bubbling in their bloodstreams like lava from a volcano, and during the celebratory feast something was bound to give. People watched in abject horror as Irving turned red as a beet and actually “popped,” like in that Monty Python movie, and as he was whisked away in an ambulance, the same medical emergency to lesser degrees struck Betsy, Patty, and Joe.  While Irving had suffered some kind of massive stroke, his co-workers were merely hospitalized; thanks to a California health insurance agent who’d issued them all policies, they at least got to stay in separate semi-private rooms.

Joe grasped the prize he’d won in his left hand, the sinister one, while lying in bed and staring at the funny whorls in the hospital room’s ceiling. A nurse coming by with a bedpan happened to glance downwards and discover what it was: It was a ticket for the balcony as a member of the audience for the television show The Biggest Loser.

When Stanley heard the sound of one hand clapping, nobody else listened until a California Health Insurance agent decided to play along.

Because of his manipulative personality, his tendency to steal other children’s toys, and his predilection for tattling, other boys avoided eleven-year-old Stanley. When he was outside, he played solitary games like one-hand-clapping, and worse, he’d listen to that hand. Stanley’s mother, a single mom, could be accused of being overprotective, but she had contacted a widowed California Health Insurance agent named Ralph just to make sure her odd little cherub was covered by an individual child plan. This precaution seemed prudent, even prescient, once she started dating Ralph.

Let’s go camping up in the Sierras, Ralph announced one weekend. The three of them headed for a snow-covered campground in a rented SUV. After their tent was pitched, Stanley grew accustomed to the canvas structure’s fetid air and began his characteristic clapping game, which annoyed the heck out of Ralph. “Hey, let’s go out and throw some snowballs!” he announced. Pushed out into a winter wonderland as if re-emerging from the womb, Stanley, who had never really seen snow, began making a snowball with one hand. Ralph noticed. “You have to pack it – use your other hand,” he instructed. All too soon, Stanley had made his first-ever snowball.  But instinctively returning to his familiar game, the one-hand-clapping, the uncoordinated snowball became a projectile and smacked Ralph surprisingly hard on the side of the face.  Before he realized it, and because he assumed Stanley had meant to throw the snowball, Ralph retaliated with his adult strength. He may have thrown several. In any case, Stanley eventually screamed, “He broke my glasses! Ralph broke my glasses!”

Stanley’s mom drove at breakneck speed for forty miles out of that canyon until she made it to the nearest ER, hardly glancing at her newfound boyfriend.

Stanley had been cut below the left eye by a shard of glass, requiring three stitches. Afterwards, Ralph apologized. “I’m sorry kid,” he muttered.

Stanley was quick to forgive. “Want to play my game?” he asked. Ralph was initially repulsed, but decided, “Oh what the heck!” As the SUV sped along a narrow rural road somewhere north of Sacramento, two elusive hands chased each other while never touching.