July 22, 2007 - Lovers Key State Park, FL
My, how time flies when you're having fun! And we're still having fun in Lovers Key.
I'm sitting here in the recliner reading the news or current events or working on the email or something, and this white station wagon drives in like it knows where it's going. It pulls into the empty RV space across from us and by then I'm out the door ready for battle. This is a private area, not open to the public, and we've got stuff laying around that we want to keep...not the kind of stuff that grows legs on its own, you know? So any time someone wanders in that we don't know, I go out to ask them if I can help them. In other words "This is a private area, staff only, and you don't look like staff so get out!!" Only this time the guy does know what he's doing. He's from CROW which is an acronym for something I don't know, and they repair broken birds. And he's releasing an osprey. Seems the bird got really weak and couldn't fly during the little tropical storm we had a while back. Somebody found it and called CROW and they came out, picked it up, and rehabilitated the bird. Well, well. That's a first for us. Usually the birds we see going to CROW should have just had their neck wrung and put out of their misery. A pelican with a severely broken wing is never going to be self-supporting again, and since there's no shortage of pelicans, why spend the time and money feeding it until it dies of old age, eh?
Anyway, as you can see, the guy carefully sets the box down, carefully opens the lid -- ready for anything. These birds have horribly sharp talons and beaks.
And the bird just as carefully looks around, but makes no move to leave--for quite a while.
So the guy gets brave and "encourages" the bird by gently tapping the box with his foot. Bird just watches. OK, more "encouragement" and he slowly tips the box on its side.
Bird finally gets the point and leaves the box. Sort of. Doing its hobbling act as it walks/staggers around a bit. Mouth open showing us that it's a bit warm and a bit stressed by the change in environment.
It walks/hobbles/staggers over to an old palm frond and grabs hold of it, and eventually tests its wings. Then it actually flies! All of about 8 feet before landing at the edge of the road, still open mouth breathing. Now, about those ruffled feathers. That's pretty normal for this bird. Osprey's are some of God's scruffiest looking birds. They slick down and clean up pretty well, but most the time they really look like they need a haircut or at least a good grooming.
And then finally I walk up on it (camera at the ready -- but with its wide angle lens which is almost useless for things like this) and it flies away and lands in a nice tall tree past the end of the road. HA! Our thrill for the day. And what fun to see a success from the bird rehab place. Encouraging to say the least. Maybe my cynicism is misplaced, eh?
OK. Here's the deal. Your chance to be a hero. What's this? Or rather, what are these? Even our local expert, Pam, didn't know. We all pretty much agree they're egg casings of some kind. These are stuck to the side of our coach (and most of them survived nearly a 400 mile trip at interstate speeds through some pretty heavy rain, so they're really stuck there), and we've seen them on some equipment in the nursery as well. I've done nothing to enhance the little bumps on the sticks in these pictures, other than to mess with the color of the white coach so they'd show up better, and that's my hand as a gauge for sizing. Good mystery. Can you solve it?
Yup. It's enough to make a grown man cry. Or at least cuss his stupidity and climb off the mower, scrub the sweat and dirt out of his eyes, and praise God he's still alive after running over the shore power cord to the motorhome with the mower.
That's a pretty good mower, eh? Sure did a number on our cable, didn't it. And I truly am fortunate that no damage was done to: (1) myself, (2) the mower, (3) the voltage booster/surge protector box, (4) the electrical pedestal, or (5) any of the circuits in the park. So, lots to be grateful about and eventually my knees quit shaking and I was able to continue mowing the lawn after spending time cutting off the shredded wires and attaching the plug some 15 feet closer to the coach. That meant I had to drag out our 35' extension cable and now we're using it. Always something, eh? I'd add this to the "Stupid Stunts" section, but I'm too lazy.
Happy 4th of July, America! What, the 231st birthday? And we got to celebrate it with family. Actual blood relatives, by golly.
Barb's sister Jen and her husband Don have a second home in The Villages, and they'd flown down for a couple of weeks and brought Ma with them. Since it had been a couple of years since Barb & I'd seen Ma, we took some time away from the park and drove up to Clermont where we park in the Thousand Trails preserve, and then drive the 40+ miles to The Villages.
These pictures are of the "Villages Combined Band." I was never able to find out what "Combined" meant, but there sure were a lot of band members! And they played great, too!
I walked to the back of the band and took this shot of the woman who was conducting that particular selection. There were several conductors and, like I said before, the music was great. Maybe I'll drag out the horn and join them someday, eh? Naw, not going to happen. Been too long.
Barb next to Ma, then Jen and Don. By this time, the band had finished and the normal nightly (every night) live music was going on in the Sumter Square bandstand. We're sitting where the combined band had been, and in the picture of the conductor you can see the roof of the bandstand.
Ma might fuss at me for taking her picture, but she sure was enjoying the show as well as the music. She's fun to spend some time with and, at 93 yrs old, we're glad we still have her. She alternates living with four of the six daughters there in MA and NH.
While the music is playing, people from the audience get up and mostly (but not always) line dance. This woman on the left was great fun to watch, and she was a good dancer besides. Sure put a major grin on Ma's face too! "The Villages Twirlers Show Team" was hyped by the MC and my stomach began to tighten. I get nervous when old folks make fools of themselves.
Brought into the show area by a Korean War vet, and I instantly relaxed. These ladies knew what they were doing! And yeah, they weren't young, but they were good, and it was obvious they were enjoying themselves, and the crowd was enjoying them too.
I mentioned to Don that it looked to me like some of these ladies had been doing this a long time, and he told me that while some had, some were also beginners, not having had the opportunity as girls to do it. That's great, isn't it. And just one more reason to like The Villages.
Aunt and Uncle Sam were really talented. They'd line dance with the best of them! Don told me they show up every once in a while in whatever costume is appropriate for the occasion. The way they got along on those stilts made me wonder if they lived on them! Jen and Don are dancing in that picture on the left.
I managed to catch them in a quiet moment, and then it was back to work for them. Can't recall ever seeing a woman on stilts like this.
Yeah, The Villages is mostly a retirement city, but that means grandkids and great-grandkids are there too. The little fellow with the blue guitar would strum right in time to the beat of the music, but despite the pleas of the lead guitarist in the band and our encouragement, he'd have no part of going on stage. Missed opportunity, I'd say.
Sorta hard to dance with people when you're 5' taller than they are, but this couple would do it anyway.
Since I wanted to make sure I got a usable picture of Ma with Barb and the "Tall People," I took several shots, and they'd pose for every shot. Very patient and good natured, and so willing to accommodate everyone.
The cloggers were next, and boy were they good! Talk about being in shape, the energy expended by these dancers was incredible. These dancers, like the twirlers, are all residents of The Villages and will travel to various places to perform. They were performing here when the band would take its break.
Now the "Tall People" are dancing with the kids. See that little girl in the striped top? She and the tall lady were making exactly the same moves. I wasn't sure if the little girl was following very close or if the tall lady was following very close, or if it was some kind of dance that they both knew. In any event, we sure got our money's worth. It was all free, of course.
We discovered another state park about four miles from The Villages, and they have a campground with a few sites large enough to accommodate us. Might be fun to stay there sometime. Sure would cut down on the commute. It was in this state park that we found this Live Oak tree.
The tree was covered with this lacy looking fern, and if Don and I stay comfortable like this for much longer, we may get ferns growing on us too. We're in one of the many recreational centers in The Villages. This particular one is where Don and Jen take their line-dancing lessons. For free, I might add.
If it sounds like we're fans of The Villages, you could be right. We'd like to sell the coach so we could buy a home there.
A final dinner with family, and then it's back to the campground where we'll spend another night before heading back to Lovers Key. Great food in all the places we tried there in The Villages, and Don and Jen took us to the places where the prices were modest too.
Could that be the Sandhill Crane family we took pictures of last time we were here in Clermont? (see this page) Sure could be, but no way to know for sure, of course.
Sure looks like it could be. The chicks are almost adult size now, and you can see a hint of red on the face, but they're still stealing food from the adults who let them get away with it.
Our morning walks are always fun and for all kinds of reasons. In this case, a mockingbird is harassing a good sized red shouldered hawk.
Eventually the hawk moved on with the mockingbird pecking at its tail and yelling at it. Poor hawk.
Back "home" doing the Saturday morning turtle patrol, and we see this very sad (at least to us ex-sailors) sight. A beautiful little boat hard aground.
For the rest of the weekend, we speculated what could have happened. The boat is very nicely equipped, has a bicycle tied to the cabin roof, a limp anchor rode hanging from the well built bowsprit, roller reefing on the jib, and a ladder welded to the mast. Looks like a wonderful boat for a couple to do extended cruising in, and here it is appearing abandoned.
Barb liked the birds and the boys all fishing in the same area and all having the same luck. No fish.
What's this? Perching Pelicans? Yup, sure enough. We made sure we didn't walk underneath them.
AHA! Another thrill-a-day project. Without going into details, the green iguanas are unwelcome invasive exotic animals, and not welcome in the park particularly and in SW Florida in general. Some cities have had to impose an "iguana tax" to pay for the removal of the animals. I'd gotten a call from one of the park staff saying they had an iguana up a tree. You can see its striped tail there on the left.
Interesting big lizard and real long toes on it's rear feet.
Always something exciting happening here.
Yup, I'd been riding that cable eating mower again. Only this time it ate my hat! I told Matt I didn't like his mower any more, and when he could stop laughing he told me it looked like the feeling was mutual.
I'd been minding my own business, mowing like I'm supposed to, when all of a sudden some branches I was ducking grabbed my hat and removed it, and then grabbed my shirt and tried to tear it off, and grabbed me as well. Turned out there was a nickerbean vine growing on those limbs. I immediately reversed the mower to get myself unstuck from the very sharp thorns, and when I turned the mower around it ate my hat. Since I've had the hat since January 28, 1991, I'm not sure I can live without it. So, I bundled it up with a letter of protest to Tilley Endurables in NY, and sent it off to see if they can fix it for me. If an elephant can eat one of these hats (happened three times to a certain zookeeper) without it coming apart, it seems to me like a silly old mower shouldn't be able to destroy it either. So, what do you say.....do I have a case? Stay tuned.....
And no, this isn't going into the Stupid Stunts page either. But maybe it should.
You know, whenever we're running around in low light conditions taking pictures of pretty things like bridges reflected in the water, or cloud reflections on the water, or brilliant colored clouds and what have you, I'm always at a loss as to how to treat the picture. So this time I took the same shot and left it "as taken" on the left, and then spruced it up a bit so the foreground would show up better, and still not destroy the reflections. And in this case, I think I wasted my time on both these pictures. In the picture of the bridge, the original seems to have unnatural tinges of purple, while the "improved" version is more natural. And in the picture with the bench, the "improved" picture has an unnatural color cast to the bench and sand. sighhhhhhh
These last three, I'm just going to leave as Barb's little Canon Photoshot A520 thought they should be. All shot in JPEG format of course.
And that brings up a happy Canon story. Well, mostly happy. We bought the little point 'n shoot camera because Barb has a better eye for pictures than I do, but I'm a bit quicker on the technical end. She doesn't like to see things she can't capture and neither of us likes to be told what to take pictures of and how to do it and where to stand and all that. Having two cameras that perform at two different levels just makes sense to us. My camera is an older Canon D30 (3 megapixel) with interchangeable lens', very fast recovery & storage, and the option to use it totally manually or as a point 'n shoot. The burst rate is good, and there are all kinds of reasons I like my old camera. My standard lens for it is a Tamron 28-200mm zoom lens.
Well, I was getting error messages with my camera, and after doing everything Canon suggested in their knowledge base (which is extensive for this older camera), I contacted Canon and they suggested I send it in. I got the camera back after spending $305 on a cleaning and adjustment.....with the same error message! When I told Canon that, they suggested the problem was with the lens, so I sent it in after some communication with Tamron. So I'm essentially without a camera, only having the wide-angle lens available.
When we first bought Barb's camera, it shortly developed the problem of the lens cover not always opening. And since it's not a SLR camera, she'd take a picture anyway, not knowing the lens cover was not all the way open. We sent it in under warranty and got it back in short order only to have the problem repeat itself just the week before the warranty was up. I'd mentioned this to Canon in an accompanying letter, and we got a call from Canon customer service, extending our warranty another six months, and telling us that if the camera hadn't already been fixed and shipped, we'd have been given a different one. And wouldn't you know it, a month after that extended warranty expired, the camera lens cover started to stick again for the third time.
Called Canon, and they said to ship it to them, and they'd ship a Powershot A530 back to us! Well, that made us happy indeed. Only now for a while we're without any cameras, and it's driving us nuts!
Barb went mud-bogging in her boots the other day, and came home with these nice large, well encrusted shells. The shell on the right had this odd skull-shaped mixture of oysters and barnacles, and it eventually went back in the drink because of the work involved in cleaning it. I did like the "skull" though.
Talk about high and dry. Poor old Kiwi! This is the last time we saw her before the vandals began to do damage. I'm not sure I have the complete story on what happened here, but what I was told is that the boat was the subject of a dispute between the buyer and the seller. Apparently the buyer gave the seller 1/2 the money and was supposed to get title, but after the transaction the title wasn't forth coming, so the buyer abandoned the boat, and it dragged anchor up onto our beach. The seller was contacted, but felt it was the buyer's responsibility to take care of the boat. The Coast Guard has been called, but apparently since no danger to anybody is imminent, they're not going to do anything. The sheriff is apparently going to have the boat taken to an impound if it's not gone tomorrow. When we saw her again today, Kiwi was missing the bicycle, the dingy and all the gear from the cockpit and deck, but the lock was replaced on the hatch. Somebody must care for her. We know we sure would. It's going to be quite a project getting her back into deeper water, too, as the sand has packed in around her pretty good by now.
This young black racer (about 8" or so) sure was aggressive! Shaking its tail in a false rattle (it has no rattles and is non-venomous) and striking at me. Sure different colors than the pitch black it'll have when it matures.
This is called "Sensitive Plant" on the placard, and we have no idea if that's the real name or not (yep, it is. Barb). We do know it's fun to play with! When gently stroked, the leaves on the plant will all tuck up inside themselves. It really is a sensitive plant. Pretty blossom too. It was pointed out to Barb by Jeffrey, one of our Butterfly Garden caretakers, and she's pointed it out to several others ever since.
Now all she has to do is remove all the barnacles and the mark their glue makes, and Barb will have some pretty shells. Man, that woman sure does put in the time on her shelling! She's out there boxing up some more for our little cargo trailer as I'm writing this. She keeps them pretty much ready to go because, in the event of a hurricane, we're going to grab the trailer, hook it behind the motorhome, and drive off with her driving the Jeep. We'll definitely be outa here!
That's it for this time. Got some pictures from a "tourist trip" we made, but that'll be in the next update.