Florida Factoid Friday

Established in 1955, Trailer Estates (in Bradenton)
was the nation's first mobile home subdivision.

The Birds!

On this not freezing, not raining Monday morning, I was happy to open the doors and windows and let in some much needed fresh air. The birds were singing and thousand of frogs were celebrating the pools still lying in the yard. At one point, I thought the frogs were getting awfully loud. How many were there, anyhow?! No, those aren't frogs. Is someone running machinery out on the road? Better check it out. Uh... not frogs, not machines... it's grackles! 'bout 40-leben billion grackles! I ran back in for the camera, missing the best moments... naturally. But I did manage to catch a bit of the sound as they came over. Doesn't quite do it justice, but fairly close.

Mystery Solved

Jena correctly guessed a snake... eating a cowbird. Good snake! Light was failing, so my shots weren't great quality, but recognizable.

Monday Morning Mystery

Florida Factoid Friday

The US community with the highest percentage
of people claiming Greek ancestry
is Tarpon Springs in Pinellas County.

Mystery Revealed

I'm real sorry I didn't get this posted sooner. When it started raining about midnight Wednesday night, our DSL sputtered. After a couple hours of 3-4 minutes up and 20 down, I gave up. It rained... and rained... and RAINED. I woke up to the sound of cherry-size hail pounding on the roof. Our 5" rain gauge overflowed. Our yard is flooded... maybe the worst since we moved here. We can hear the creek from the front door. The creek is about 1/4 mile from our front door. Another creeklet, rarely visible, is over the road. There are flood warnings for 2 local rivers. More rain is expected come Sunday. There are at least 2 nearby phone boxes half submerged... but their brilliant (just ask 'em) young techies keep trying to tell me that - and the terrible condition of the phone lines around here (I can sometimes hear other people's conversations!) - has nothing to do with our problems. Wanna sell me a bridge while you're at it?

Monday Morning Mystery

Florida Factoid Friday

Maitland, one of the oldest municipalities in central Florida, was once called Fumecheliga - Musk Melon Place - by the Seminole Indians.

Mystery Solved

Aw, y'all are too good. Idano how all you Flarda people even recognize such a thing as ice under a dripping faucet. This was taken around 5.30PM! What's wrong with that picture?!


Even the pokeweed we couldn't kill if we tried - and the meter reader tried for 10 years - succumbed.

The blackberries, on the other hand, remain unscathed.


Update: Another 24 hours and it shows no sign of diminishing at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are icicles out there on a broken twig that have lasted nearly a week.

Monday Morning Mystery

Florida Factoid Friday - on Saturday

The first flag of Florida was hoisted on 25 June 1845,
at the inauguration of its first governor, William D. Moseley.
It had five horizontal stripes (blue, orange, red, white, and green)
and a ribbon with the inscription 'Let us alone'.
The U.S. flag served as a canton.

Sorry I'm tardy. Yesterday was Duller's birthday, I got home late, I was tired... 8-}

The fun never ends

OK, so I got fed up with all the funny little things IE8 was doing and downloaded Firefox. Idano why I was so hesitant to do that. It's great! Well, it WAS great... until... apparently some sites are just die-hard IE fans and refuse to let FF in. I tried one site three times and every time it crashed all my browsers. Now I just have to learn which sites require a switcheroo.

In other news, several times just today, I've heard someone say those words our family has come to know and... tolerate... 'never saw anything like that before!' We have to laugh. Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many times we hear that phrase. It's like our purpose in life is to train the repairmen and customer service reps of the world.

I opened a new bank account - for household expenses... plus there was a $25 start-up bonus - and when I went in to make the initial deposit, nobody could find me in their system. Their supervisor had called me just a few hours earlier to confirm that I was coming in, but I just wasn't there. And nobody could figure out what to do about it. It was New Years Eve and the right people weren't there.

I got my new CVS Extra Care card in the mail yesterday. This evening, I went online to register it and it wouldn't recognize the number as valid. Called customer service, got it all fixed, went back to register it and... 'sorry, this account is locked'.

DS was trying to use the old computer - still on dial-up - and kept getting connected at about half the usual speed. (And I use the term speed quite loosely). I made a phone call a few minutes later and could faintly hear someone else's conversation. The phone company sent someone out a couple weeks ago to check on that same problem and the man found nothing.

Kinda gettin' the picher here? We have decided there's an invisible M (our last initial) tattooed on our foreheads and 'they' see us coming. The family joke is... it's the tattoo. And at least one of us says it, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, practically every day. Well, if that's the worst cross I ever have to bear, I'll grin and bear it. 8-}

Y'all have a JESUS-filled day! ^i^

Where AM I?!

I live in Florida, right? So how is it that at 7PM, it was 32.5°?! So much for global warming. I am SO over winter already.

Did you ever look in the mirror and laugh? After a couple days in hibernation, and one browser blip after another, it doesn't take much. I think it's time I took a shower, brushed my hair and went out into the world for a few hours.

PS - Know what else was funny? The sign behind me says 'beware of dragon flies'.

Mystery solved

I was sure FC would know this one. Yes, it's a stinkhorn. The name says it all. I got one quick, squatting, shaky shot and had to back away... quickly! If you click to enlarge, you'll see the flies and other clean-up crew members love it.

I actually had several close-ups from a previous encounter, but I can not find them. After scanning about 12,000 (y'all think I'm exaggerating, doncha?!), my eyes went kinda funny. I really need to label them all. I started a while back... got through about 5-600 and pooped out. 8-}

Monday Morning Mystery

Sorry it's kinda fuzzy.

There was a very good reason for that,

which y'all will understand when the mystery is revealed. 8-}

Entering the 21st century

Well, it took me 10 years, but I finally made it. On 31 December, I hooked myownself up to DSL. I gotta tell y'all, it's a love-hate relationship so far. At first, it was pretty fast, Then, yesterday, it got slower and slower until it was worse than dial-up! Duller finally called tech support and the guy ended up telling us to unplug every phone in the house, then plug them back in, one at a time. The last one was the culprit. Apparently, there's something wonky in that jack, coz it was kinda like speeding down the autobahn and pulling the emergency brake. The engine was revving to beat the band, but the car wasn't going anywhere. OK, no phone in the family room till it gets fixed. WAHOO! The speed was back and I was zipping along with the rest of the Jetson world. When I had to tear myself away to run some errands, Duller decided to give it a whirl. After a while, he called and said he couldn't get anywhere. The browser refused to display any pages. (This was on the desktop on which I had finally downloaded 57 Windows updates that were collecting for about 2 years). DS finally stepped in and did... er... something and got it working. This afternoon, it pulled the same thing on me. DS tried, but it didn't work this time. I finally did a system restore - back to pre-updates - and now it's working again... BUT - there has to be a but - I can't get Norton to uninstall. I keep downloading their removal tool, saving it to the desktop, but it's not there. Tried just running it and nothing happened... just showed the loading progress box, finished and poufe. Oh, and the connection keeps jumping to local only (as opposed to local and internet). Techie says it's likely a bad card in the desktop... or maybe a virus. *sigh* Right now, I'm running CenturyLink's virus scanner. Looks like I'll have to take it to an expert to get rid of the Norton remnants. I did the same procedure on my laptop and it went like clockwork. Then again, I hadn't tried to uninstall it via add/remove programs first.

Am I having fun yet?!

On the plus side, it no longer takes me an hour to download an mp3 file. And I don't have to go to the lie-berry, which is closed Sundays and Mondays, to view little veejo clips. The first one I saw, BTW, was such a hoot! Check it out here, at the end of the post. And I actually read every couponing/money-saving blog in my list in ONE DAY! WOOHOO!

OK, looks like it just can't be all roses and no thorns. Now I'm trying to print two steenkin' coupons and it says thank you for printing, but nothing happened. Did a test print and the printer worked, but won't print my Betty Crockers. Methinks it's their overzealous security program. Never a dull moment! I'll be seein' y'all soon as I get the kinks out. 8-]

Have a JESUS-filled day! ^i^

Florida Factoid Friday

Silver Springs, near Ocala, is the largest limestone artesian spring formation in the world. Its average output is 800 million gallons per day.

Photo credit