Gainesville, Again

Betsy arrived from Switzerland Thursday evening. We picked her up after attending a dedication of a statue in a pocket park along the West Orange Trail that is maintained by Bloom and Grow members. Amazing how beautiful an area can be if 5-6 women work on it every week. Inspiring, but beyond my ability, even with CC’s help every 2 weeks.

But with that in mind, Betsy and I weeded out the area by the boat house fence, laid newspapers, and mulched with pine straw. Looking good. We also went to Target to get her a bathing suit and a SIM card and data for her phone.

Back to Target: somehow neither of us noticed she’d bought the wrong bathing suit, having placed the one she actually liked, and looked good in, back on the rack. The home is calling us. Plus, the SIM card wouldn’t work. Wrong suit returned, right suit bought, and tough luck on $40 data, no returns allowed. We moved on to Verizon, where Nick tried and tried, but couldn’t get the SIM card to do its thing, in the phone Betsy has used over and over in her travels.

Regrouped on Saturday and tried T-Mobile, where the phone and SIM card worked seamlessly. Who knows?

While relaxing in the pool after our yard work, me in my gardening shirt and underpants, Betsy in her lovely new and correct suit, I noticed a squirrel skipping through the tree tops to the banana bunch I wanted to ripen a little more. We jumped into action, cut down the banana stalk, and also retrieved the lychees I’d bagged to prevent the crows from eating them. Three bags were fine. The fourth had only the tree branch, seeds and like sawdust from the peels. I think the carpenter ants ate the fruit. There was no way a bird or squirrel could get inside. Weird.


Sunday, we drove to Sally’s. Monday morning we met Sue and Daryl at Sweetwater Reserve. The usual few summer birds. The limpkins have gotten used to people walking by them.

Three or 4 gators were booming and bellowing. We could hear 2 thrashing right under the boardwalk, making love or war. Sally actually got to see 1 arching up out of the water. 

Tuesday morning, Betsy and I returned for a repeat performance. Only 1 gator to be seen, and not a peep from any. The limpkins were still unimpressed by us.

After lunch at Sweetberries, I took Betsy to the airport to pick up the rental car she taking to visit friends in Tallahassee. As I left, an older faun thought about running across the 4-lane road. I laid on my horn and scared it back into the woods, I hope enough to keep it from being roadkill in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Month of Garden Club

Image
April seemed to be all garden club, all the time. I started with the zone leader’ walkthrough for Spring Fever on Friday, the 5th, then 2 whole days of that event. Whew. April 11th was the Windermere Garden Club’s monthly meeting, a field trip to Southern Hill Farm, a you-pick and wholesale blueberry farm. We were inspire to add blueberries to our garden. Friday, April 12th, I was the speaker at Bloom and Grow’s monthly luncheon, touting the value of becoming a citizen scientist, specifically, downloading the iNaturalist app and participating in the City Nature Challenge 2024: Orange County. I was pleased with my talk, the first one I’ve given in person in 5 years. I still attend EarlyBird Toastmasters, but we’ve been on Zoom since early 2020. Before that, we’d moved to Key Biscayne for a year, and I didn’t drive up to Fort Lauderdale often. On the 21st, we toured Jeanne’s almost-all native, completely grassless yard, a B&G social with the mandatory wine and lovely appetizers and d...
Read more

Whew

Crisis averted? Every Thursday, I Zoom with 5 girlfriends, all 1967 graduates from Naples High. One I’ve known since early elementary school, perhaps it was first grade; the others moved to town by junior high. Sixty years of friendship. My high school class was the last under 200 graduates. We all knew everything about everyone, or at least we thought we did. In our last Zoom, at the very end, our most conservative and quietest member said, not once, but twice, “You all are too radical for me.” Wow. It passed without comment. We said our I-love-you's and goodbyes, but that stuck in my head. For her to say that was a big deal. What to do? I let it buzz around in my brain, several nights waking up and thinking about my response, because I knew I couldn’t just let it be ignored. This was an opportunity to deepen our conversations. I decided to write the group early in the week about how important I felt it was to hear each other’s political opinions. Not to try to change one another,...
Read more

Massage

Image
The vibrating massage ball being rubbed on my sore tendon at physical therapy seems to be helping. Or it’s a darn good placebo. Either way, I’m happy and have signed up for 6 more sessions over the next 3 weeks. I am also being sure to sit on a big, soft pillow every time I sit down, working in the yard, dragging it to restaurants, etc. I am actually starting to feel better. On Sunday, we drove to Weeki Wachee Springs to see Clara perform at Mermaid Camp, a 2-day affair at the state park. Her show was after the regular mermaid revue, this time the story of the Little Mermaid. Why, in this day and age, we have to still be celebrating a 15 year old wanting to change her body for guy is beyond me. I had hoped there would be a modern twist, but no. Well, Weeki Wachee was created in 1947, so I guess there is still a retro vibe, but still, really? In any case, the girls had fun and lots of exercise. Swimming as a mermaid is definitely a core workout. Because the attraction is now a state par...
Read more