Wandered over to the beach again recently and came away with some interesting photos that I thought I'd share with you, if you don't mind.

As I'm sure all of you already know, there is something special about the light at the end of the day. It's called the Golden Hour for a good reason.   And in this particular series of shots, the sky was such an amazing addition to the already spectcular quality of the light that, well, I think it made for some really decent shots.

It was raining way off in the distance, we could actually see the rain out over the water on the horizon and some very impressive flashes of lightening as well.  No matter how hard I tried, I never did get any shots that showed the lightening, dang it.  So you will have to just imagine that part.  It would have been a bit of luck of course since there is no predicting exactly when or where those strikes will occur.  But hope springs eternal. I will continue to try.

Here we go:

At one point there was a very bright rainbow to our east, but I wasn't able to get a good photo of it to share .  So that's minus two for me today.  No rainbow and no lightening.  Ratz.

This isn't a very long post but sorry, it's all I got today. And it's likely to be the only post I do this week because somehow this week is turning out to be madly over scheduled, crazybusy !  But hopefully next week I can go back to at least two post s a week and even better, have something interesting to write about.

So in the meantime, please have a wonderful, fun and safe Labor Day Weekend!

​Hugs all 'round

I'm going to make a statement here that you may disagree with.  And that's ok.  We don't all have to always have the same beliefs or opinions or feelings about things.  Really.  We can be friends and disagree about some stuff.  We can even like each other and believe different things. Honest! It's true!   (or perhaps you disagree with the concept in which case, you probably don't care to be my friends, becoz we disagree about his - see how that works?)

The statement is "  Cats are Magical.

Now I dont' mean that in a Lucky Charms - Magically delicious or Magically delightful sort of way.  Nor do I believe that cats are witches "familiars" or companions. Nope, this is not a black magic, wand waving, spell casting, incantation sort of thing at all.  I mean its more about a cats inherent inscrutability, their mysterious ways,  their inexplicable actions - that sort of thing.  It must be magic for I cannot come up with any other explanation.

For example:  We have two cats.  If you read my blog you already know this.  Brysco and Wyatt, the house panthers.  We got very lucky with these two as they are so very funny and adorable. They almost always prefer to be in whatever room we are currently inhabiting, they cuddle close to us and sweetly request pets, they do not bite or scratch us, they understand and obey the word "no" and they come when called.  Well, they usually come when called.  Every once in awhile it's as if they have either disappeared or we have misplaced them somehow.

Case in point:

Recently, on a day when Tim had been hard at work in his office all day and I had just come home from the museum, I stepped through the door and.......................nothing.  Usually there is at least, AT LEAST, one kitty to welcome me home.  But nope.  No cat.  Odd.  I went in to greet Tim and asked him and he had not seen or heard them in a bit. He had not. They must be sleeping, we concluded.  And while I respect their nap,  I missed my kittyboys and wanted to see them!  All you pet lovers out there understand this, right?  So I went on a hunt.

I can tell you where they weren't:

​They were not in any of the three kittybeds in the house. They were not in the big kitty bed in the family room, not in the grey bed around the corner, nor was there a cat in the hiding place bed in our closet (for when they feel the need to be extra safe):

So I had to think where else they might be.  And once again, I learned where they were not.  They were not snoozing on either the guest bed or our bed:

I was beginning to get a little nervous.  Could they possibly have escaped the house?  Should I be looking outside and calling for them?  I calmed myself down.  That's ridiculous.  No opposable thumbs remember?  They cannot turn door knobs!  They MUST be in the house.  

I redoubled my efforts.  Think, Sam, Think! Where else do they like to catch a few Z's?  They do like snuggling on the various quilts around the house. So I checked those out.  

No kitties.  Ok , clearly I was thinking like a human and what I needed to do was think like a cat.  Where would I be if I was a cat?

Perhaps in one of the cat trees?  

Nada.  Where else can I possibly look?  Well maybe inside one of the playcubes.  They do love those and it has happened before that they were playing in a cube and fell sleep inside.  The tricky part there is black cats in a black cube are pretty much invisible.  So you have to look very closely and/or just reach in and hope to encounter something warm and soft.  I bravely checked those out.

As you can see, no kitties.  Dang!  This was beginning to feel like the Where's Waldo of kitties!

They do have a couple of unusual sleeping spots. Every once in awhile on a very hot day they make their way to the bathrooms.  Brysco prefers the sink in our bathroom

Wyatt on the other hand, can occasionally be found in the guest bath shower:  But as you can plainly see, no kitties in either location.  Ratz!

I could feel the panic creeping up again.  Wait a minute.  Remember that old adage about hiding in plain sight?  Could it be as simple as, they are right in front of me and I just am not seeing them?  I checked windows.  Kitties do love windows.

Zippity Do Dah, kitty-wise.   Ok they aren't right in front of me, so maybe I should look in less likely spots?  I checked under beds, behind chairs, under coffee tables and moved on to other things like, the top of the fridge

All locations were catless.  Where on earth could they possibly be?  This is a small house.  There are just so many possibilities.  Where are they?  

I said to Tim, " Rumor has it that we own a couple of cats but I see no evidence to support that" .  He chuckled and assured me that they must be around here somewhere and went back to work.  Dang!  I couldn't think of anywhere else to look and I was about to start at the top of my list and begin searching all over again when, suddenly, there they were. As if they had been there the entire time.  Watching me.

I rushed to cuddle them. "Where were you guys? I've been so worried about you" I gushed.  They slow blinked at me, purred mysteriously and meowed for their dinner.  As I fed them I concluded that one of three things must be true, 

Either :

1:  Cats truly are magical creatures

2:  There is a portal somewhere in this house to another parallel dimension that they are able to step in and out of at will

3:  Cats are aliens and who knows what sort of powers and alien might have

I'm not  sure which is true, but it's gotta be one of those three.   I think it's the first one.  Cats be Magical.

Hot Dogs. Frankfurters. Franks. Weiners. Sausage. Brat. Footlong. "The Legendary Tube Steak". Whatever name they go by in your house, hot  dogs are pretty basic and ain't nothin' wrong with 'em.  There are a lot of different brands of course and some manufacturers get kind of fancy and have different additions  - cheese, jalapeno's, various herbs and spices.   None of them are wrong but I'm sure you favour one sort over others if you have the choice.  

We lean toward all beef hot dogs that are big enough that the bun/doggie ratio is balanced.  Don't want too much of one thing in each bite.   Tim prefers natural casings hot dogs which we find at our local farm market and he absolutely loves them cooked on the grill.  

I don't usually make them very often, even though they are easy peasy for a meal.  I try to get as much variety as possible in the menu rotation which means that good old hot dogs just somehow don't happen very often.  And because of that,  I usually do not have proper hot dog buns on hand, which further means that I would have to make a special grocery store trip to buy them for that one  meal.  And therein lies the issue.  I just don't want to go to the market for One Item.

I don't want to grocery shop at all. I just don't care for it very much.  And quite honestly, I think it probably has more to do with the current price tags than anything else.  Sticker shock at the end of each trip is jarring.  It has gotten to the point where I have stopped looking at the total. I just zoopzoop my card and head out the door with my few measly bags. Avoidance technique.  It's working for me.

The point here isn't to whine about the high cost  of every freakin' thing in the world right now.  It 's about getting creative with something as basic as a hot dog.    Over the weekend, I thought hot dogs would be a great idea for dinner.  I never know for sure what we are doing on the weekends so a dinner that is quickquick and easypeasy sounds like a smart plan, right?

When it came time to cook the hot dogs I realized (a little belated and shame on me)  that what I thought was a bag of hot dog buns from the freezer was actually a bag of hamburger buns.  Dang.  Sometimes I move too fast and don't investigate enough. (which is why, on a number of occasions, I've returned home with raspberry jam instead of strawberry. Right brand, right size, right colour, wrong flavour)

It's not and "end of the world" level problem.  It's easy enough to cut the doggies in half long ways and use the hamburger bun, right?  But then I remembered a little video I happened to see recently and yay!  Fun!  Perfect opportunity to give it a whirl.

The idea in the video was to make the hot dog go into a circle so it fits round on the round bun.  "But how?",  you may be asking yourself.   Well, it turns out to be much like a carpenter puts a lot of tiny cuts into a straight piece of wood to curve it.  Put a lot of tiny cuts into the hot dog.  So Clever!

So here is what it looked like...tiny cuts, then bent round and secured with a toothpick that I soaked in water (so it wouldn't catch fire):

,Obviously I had a little difficult determining how far apart the cuts should be AND how deep they should be.  Experimentation  eventually led to better circles :)

Once I had them all cut and secured, I put them on the grill, just like an ordinary hot dogs and in short order (one of the best parts about hot dogs is that they cook quickly) they were ready !  Here they are hot off the grill:  Tim loves the char!

The next part, putting them on the bun of course was easy.  Tim likes his with mustard and pickle or relish.  I made the executive decision to use pickles this time so there would be something filling that middle bit of the circle:

Then I served them with deviled eggs and baked beans.  It was a perfectlyeasy summer dinner and so dang cute too.  Come on, aren't those adorable? :

I am constantly amazed at other people's creativity!  AND I learned one more new thing.  My dad always told us to learn at least one new thing every day.  This was my one new thing on Saturday!

And if you've never heard of the idea before, now you have learned one new thing too. Whether you ever try it or not, you know it now. One new thing a day!  Done!

Happy Friday to you!  This post will be relatively quick and painless, just a little something to get your weekend started.

Earlier this week, after dinner, instead of just settling in to relax 'til bedtime, I decided that I wanted to walk over to the beach.  We used to walk over around sunset multiple times a week but we kind of fell out of the habit.  Which happens every year right around this time.

Part of it, I think, is because by the end of the day we are pooped.  I mean well and truly knackered.  The idea of walking from the family room to the bedroom to sleep is almost more than I can bear to contemplate.  But also, the heat and humidity makes even the short walk to the beach, a sweaty miserable trudge rather than a lovely evening stroll.   During the summer we tend to visit the beach via car which, considering how close we are to it is honestly, a little silly.  But silly or not, the fact of the matter is, we haven't walked over in a bit.

However, on that night, when I told Tim of my intentions, he volunteered to come with me. What a nice man he is.  Indulging me in my insanities.  

We donned sunglasses, I grabbed my camera and we pointed ourselves to the west.  It's less than a mile walk through pretty neighborhoods and we actually do enjoy seeing what is interesting (to us) things along the way, "look at the  beautiful hibiscus blooming", "what a pretty colour they chose to paint their house", "Check it out, Big White Bird at 2 o'clock",  "Oh look, the pink house is for sale!". Yeah we chittychat as we walk.    Then in no time at all, we are at The Esplanade and the entrance is just ahead of us:​

Up and over and all of a sudden, there is a wonderful breeze upon us and the Gulf of Mexico before us.  It's a beautiful thing to behold.

While there were some small groups of people further down at the main entrance near the lifeguard shacks, there was only one lone fisherman by us.  That's the way I like it best.  Not to be anti-social or anything, but sometimes when I go to the beach, the only music I want to hear is the sound of the surf and the birds, y'know?

We did wander for a bit along the edge of the water and then returned back up higher where it's more level (easier walking) and I took more photos.  There was still a bit of flotsam from last weeks' storm that had washed ashore and that caught my eye along with some other things:

We didn't stay long enough to watch the sunset, but headed back home instead.    There was one last look of longing:

And then it was back up and over the little bridge and we headed home.  So glad we went.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to you before, but my husband is a freakin' genius.  I'm serious.  If ever there is an issue, a problem, a conundrum that I take to him, he has an answer for me.  For anyone really.  He doesn't intrude into situations uninvited, but if you ask him a question, he will find an answer.  It's very cool.  And I guess I am so used to it that I don't really think about it anymore.  I suppose you could say that I take him for granted.  Shame on me!

Now I don't mean that I expect him to solve all of my problems.  I don't go whining to him about every little piddly thing. I have a perfectly good brain of my own, I am reasonably well educated and well read.  And I have always lived by the adage that if you don't use your brain it'll go bad on ya.  So I use my grey matter on a regular basis.  However, now and again, things come up that are just beyond my own capabilities, knowledge or experience.

This weekend was one of those times.  

Now I have to back up a little bit.  When we first bought this house, one of the things we did immediately was get a new HVAC system.  It was June in Florida - a hot and humid place - and we had newly arrived from Colorado - a dryer far cooler place.  Good AC was paramount.  

Originally the  HVAC  in our newly purchased home was rather old and inefficient.  It also lived in the kitchen (of all places) in a teensy tiny closet squished in next to the washer and dryer.    It was a terrible place for all of it.  So Tim had them construct the new system in the adjacent utility room instead.  Brilliant idea right off the bat.    So that's what the HVAC did.  

The brand new HVAC system was built on a plywood platform that they constructed and goes all the way up to the ceiling.  I don't think I've ever seen an HVAC system built that way before but in my head it sort of made sense.  Hot air rises, Cold air sinks.  So if the cold air in each room starts at the top of each room and sinks slowly to the floor, the entire room would feel cooler would it not?  Ok.   Maybe I'm wrong as to the why of it, but that's how I worked it out in my little head.  I've never actually asked.

And at any rate, the only part of it that figures into this story is the platform part.  That is essential.   You see, Thursday we found a little water on the utility room floor.  Not that big a deal, it's happened before and usually it is corrected by Tim replacing the filter and bleeding off a little water into a bucket, adding some vinegar, I mop up the water and then all is well with the world again.

This time it was a little odd tho because he had already replaced the filter recently. Hmmm.  Oh well.  And we went about our day until I found water on the floor again and again and again!  Grrrrr.  Each time I would sop up the water with towels, then dry the towels to be used again. For his part, Tim would look the system over, fiddle with this or that, look into things and hmmmm again.  The filter, interestingly was all bent up.  It went in nice and neat and straight as a pin but came out bent over like an old man with osteoporsis.  Not Good.

Tim's diagnosis was that the HVAC itself was somehow bending.  That's very weird and not good at all.  We spent that first night, every two hours, replacing soaked towels with dry ones, running the wet ones through the spin cycle of the washer then the dryer, then folded them and stacked them ready for their turn to keep the water at bay.

Friday, after doing just a few absolute essential things for work, Tim took the day off to really concentrate on this issue.  One of the things he discovered was that the system was leaking, not directly onto the floor but into the box platform.  Which, as I said before, is made from plywood which then bleeds it out onto the concrete floor of the utility room.  The scariest part is that the entire system rests on this box which is now compromised, that is weakened, by water.  We were terrified that the entire thing was going to kind of collapse into itself.

Now obviously, an HVAC repair guy needs to be called, but nobody in their right mind wants to pay emergency rates, I promise you.  If you've never had to do that, I'll just  say this, it's sort of like taking out a second mortgage on your home.  You really want to avoid an emergency visit.

So first order of business is to make sure the platform continues to hold up!  Tim dove in and checked it out and ultimately put together supports via lally columns and 2X8'sto prop it all up securely.  He then shop vacced/toweled out the wet inside the box.  Great!  Whew!  

Next up was rerouting the leak.  He found a way to force the leak to exit at the front of the contraption into a bucket.  Once the bucket was full, we could easily empty it outside.  Taadaa!  Great idea!  Except,   you have to constantly pay attention to how full the bucket is which means, you aren't leaving the house for very long and you are absolutely going to wake up  multiple times during the night to be certain it isn't over-flowing.  And then too, it's a HEAVY bucket. Water is phenomenally heavy.

The obvious (to Tim not me) and logical next step was to put wide circumference tubing into a hole in the side of the bucket toward the bottom with a valve so when the bucket is full, the valve can be opened and the tubing can be pointed out the back door and the water emptied super easily right back into nature where it belongs.  Awesome.

But that wasn't good enough for my man!  His last tweak was having the tubing go directly outside on it's own so that nobody has to mess with it at all.  What a relief!

The utility room is dry, the dang leak is draining outside directly and nobody has to be awake and on duty all night long ready to leap to DefCon 4 at any moment.  

Now we can just go on the schedule of the repair guy and he will get here whenever he gets here (who knows?) and fix it, as he fixes it, and the only stress with be the price tag of the repair.

I could have been a very different scenario.  If Tim wasn't such a smarty britches and figure out how to at least put a really really good bandaid on this problem I cannot even imagine what today would be like.  I might have been writing this from an ark.  Or underwater.  

Like I said, My husband is an absolute genius!  Reason number 356 why I adore him.

​

With all the furor  over the big Storm, my planned Photo Safari Report got lost in the shuffle!  Oh dear!  I try to write those up as quickly as possible so that I don't forget to include any of the little thoughts I have while hiking.  But alas, since Joy and I hiked last Thursday, nearly a full week ago now, I probably have forgotten a thing or two that I was originally planning to say.  Drat.

BUT  I will write it up as best I can anyway.  Please Bear With Me.  I'm old, I forget things sometimes.

At any rate, as I said, Last Thursday, before we knew there would be a doggone storm, Joy and I headed out to Carlton Reserve, which is one of our favourite places to hike as it has loads of trails and we always find interesting things to snap.  We arrived nice and early, as we'd hoped, with not one other soul in sight. Which should have been our first clue.

We chose our first trail and headed on down, snapping a little of this and a little of that along the way:

And then we rounded a curve and dang, nothing but muck and water as far as our eyes could see.  We couldn't even go around it because the water pooled in every direction.  I mean, this time of year it's not unusual for there to be some trails flooded, but this was a little unexpected.  Oh well.  We turned around, headed back to where we started and set out along a different trail.  Once again, capturing a few photos as we strolled along:

Sadly we didn't get very far before we found a lot of this:

Double Dang.  "Water, Water Everywhere, Not a Drop to Drink" so sayeth I while quoting the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Coleridge).  Every direction we looked, every trail we attempted was flooded.

Now what.  Sadly, we trooped back to the car and debated what to do next.  Shall we just give up?  Or try somewhere else?  Part of the issue here is that if one preserve is flooded, odds are that the others are too.  One of the things that Florida has a lot of is water. Loads of it.  Not just ocean and gulf, but lakes, rivers, ponds, streams, creeks.  You want water baby?  Florida's got it!

We decided to at least try one other local hiking spot.  It's a small preserve and we've been there roughly a zillion times, recently!  But a hike is a hike is a hike  AND it was on the way home so why not.  Joy pointed the car to Curry Creek Preserve.

We were greeted by a guard Lizard.  We assume he was the guard.  He was the strong silent type and didn't say so,  but he had that look about him y'know?

Honestly, I did not have high hopes for doing yet another Curry Creek hike, but on the other hand, I do love being outside tramping around in the forest and I love spending time with my sister soooo what the heck, why not.  Gave myself a little attitude adjustment and was rewarded with some nice birdie shots.  Not a lot, just three or four I think:  (turns out it was five, sorry)

A number of bugs, one of which I didn't even know what was (still don't):

Much drier trails, thank goodness.  It turns out you can only bleach your socks so many times before they disintegrate. Every time we hike through muck and wet, I come home with socks that are beyond disgusting, hence the bleach.

The only water we saw stayed right where it belonged, right in the Curry Creek basin.   Excellent Job

Found a few more botannicals:

And that's about it.  It was not what we planned but it was still lovely.  A bit of a stutter-step at the start though so that's what I'll call this one, The Stutter-Step Hike.

After this big storm, we definitely won't be attempting any preserves this week so you are safe from another Photo Safari Report any time soon.  Hope you enjoyed this one tho!

Just in case you've been hearing in the news about Tropical Storm/Hurricane Debby down in  what used to be the Sunshine State (now relabeled the Soggy State) and were concerned in regard to our welfare, please be assured that we are all good.  The house is dry  (inside at least) and we are fine. 

And today, as Debby makes landfall north of us as a hurricane (upgraded from tropical storm) I am less and less enamored of it as the day goes by.  It begins to feel as if we will never again see the sun!  I know that's not true, but you know what I mean.  AND I feel so badly for those folks at hurricane ground zero and hope they are all safe and sound.

But meanwhile, where we are, dang it all folks, it's seriously wet outside. I mean wetwetwet.  The gullywasher/thunder/lightning/full orchestration kind of wet.  Geez.  It started raining about mid morning yesterday and really hasn't stopped yet.  Sometimes the rainbands are heavier than other times but still  rain is still rain and that means wet.

I have new appreciation for rainbands, by the way.  Whenever the storms calms the heck down for a little bit, the ground can absorb the water more, the storm drains can catch up and the run-off that goes out to the bay and the gulf can adjust to just a wee little bit more.

At the beginning, it just felt like a very normal summer rainstorm honestly.  No big deal.  We even went out to lunch yesterday to just a little local place that we like and watched the rain come down out the window while we noshed.  

We kept thinking,  Little Tropical Storm  Debby having a cute little tantrum and we spent the day  doing inside stuff.  We kept thinking it would all pass by and be over soon.  We considered going to the beach to take pictures (but didn't) or the jetty for pictures (closed).  Guess I was feeling a little rainy day lazy.  

You know that delicious rainy day sleepy feeling where all you want to do, as the rain pitterpatter (or sometimes tap dances) against the house and all you really want to do is drink tea, eat cookies, nap and read alternately.  It's cozy and lovely and kind of gives permission for not doing much at all.

And that's all fine and good for awhile, but when it goes on .....and on...AND ON!  Well let's just say it gets old, quickly.   Flood watches, Tornado Watches, High Surf Advisories and Rip Current Statements just kept coming.  Dang.  It was a long night of listening to the wind whistling through and the thunder rumbling and now and again crashing (sometimes it sounded like it was literally on our roof),  lightning crackling and rain relentlessly pounding down.  We had a few minor power flickers though no full on outtages, thank goodness. At least so far!

We've been getting notifications of things being closed today.  No garbage pick ups today for example. Normally Monday and Thursday are our days.  Not This week! But since I had already taken the bins to the curb (after checking on line and it saying..yes go ahead, pick up is today like usual) they have since changed their minds and that meant I had to schlepp through the downpour in rain jacket and wet sneakers to haul it all back in.  Oh well.

Starting to get a lot of other notifications now too.  Stay off the streets , the notifications say, Limit water usage, the notifications say.  Okay, we can do those things. So...no more laundry is being done today, can't turn on the dishwasher, limited cooking and cleaning will be happening. We have bottled water always (learned that the first year here!) so we won't die of thirst.

I know that there is some local flooding on the roads by the beach (which is the entire west side of the island) and we also read that the part of the road that goes to Caspersen Beach (the southest point of the island) has washed out!  Oh My Gracious!    Our neighbor's mailbox fell down, there is a lot of deadfall from trees and shrubs that will eventually need to be picked back up and binned.  The courtyard has become a pond and the backyard a lake.  But otherwise, it's all good.  Thoughts and prayers go north to the people being effected now by the storm (and on into Georgia and the Carolinas!)

Soon this will be over and things will go back to what passes for normal.  But in th e meantime, just wanted to reassure everyone that all is well.  Wet, but well.

I'll attach a few photos I took between rainbands on our property.  If it lets up later, I'll head to the beach and see what photos I can get there!  

​Hugs all 'round.