There is something a little different in town here lately.  Something decorative and Fancy. Things with exquisite attention to detail.  Pretty things!  It's Mermaids and Seahorses!  And They Are Everywhere!  Well ok, not everywhere, but there are a lot of them.  Fifty-Two as a matter of fact.

It's a project that our town does roughly every 5 years or so.  I know that a lot of other cities do the same thing.  Mermaids and Seahorses suit a beach town such as ours quite nicely but I remember it being cows when I lived in the Ft Worth Area of Texas which also makes sense.

When this particular art project was announced in the newspaper, I was interested. And as updates were printed, I became more excited about it.  When the artistically completed statues, each painted by a different artist, with a different vision and therefore a completely different end product finally were released for viewing, I was kind of beside myself.  I am so easily amused.

All we knew for certain was that there were, as I said, 52 statues, a mix of mermaids and seahorses and that they would be placed here and there around town.  And we wondered where they would be?  Would all of them be on island?  We talked about where they might be placed and how they might be painted.  And then I read that there was going to be a map released that indicated exactly where each Mermaid and Seahorse stood.  Well that feel a little bit like cheating  to me!  

We decided that a fun idea might be to find each of them.  All 52.  Without the map.  Just get out there and find  'em.  Like a treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt perhaps.  Why not?  It's something to do that's a little different.  And so one evening after dinner recently, Tim and I hit the bricks, camera in hand and the game began.

We knew from what we had read that most of the statues would be placed in the general down town area.  And of course since we live here, we had already seen a few of them just running errands.  But that's ok.   It's different to view it from afar and to see it up close.

As it turned out there were, indeed, quite a few of them right in the downtown area.   About 35 of them in fact.  Whew!  That's a lot!    Some of them were easy to spot, right there on the big wide sidewalks in front of shops and restaurants.  Here are a few of them:

Others were a little more hidden away and trickier to find.  There was, for example, one tucked up close to a building in a little alcove area that was completely decorated with shells. I mean totally 100% covered! Wow!  And another by the kids fountain area where we never go because we have no little kids!  We found some in front of murals, which are already pretty darned decorative on their own and almost acts as camouflage for the statues.  (A few more:)

We found them in both expected and unexpected places.  By the Theatre, in the Fountain Park at the top of Miami Drive and by the gazebo in Centennial Park and just about everywhere else you can possibly imagine.  (yet more:)

The backs were often as pretty as the fronts and sides.  There was so much work and effort and imagination involved. We were plenty impressed.  (more!)

By the time we had thoroughly covered the downtown area, the sun was beginning to set and it was time to walk back home. But we weren't done. Not by a long shot.  After all we had not yet found all 52 and them's the rules.  Hey I don't make the rules of the game, I just follow them.  oh wait, I guess I did make these rules.  No matter, when the sun sets that means it's time to go home.  We would search again another day.​

And so we did!  This time by car.  I had a notebook and pen so that I could write the location of each statue as Tim drove.   We notated all of the ones we had already found and then set out to locate more of them.  And we found at least ten more, still on the island just a little further afield.    By the time we finished, we had located and notated 45 of the 52.  Maddening!   We were missing 7 statues.  Where the heck were they?

We continued to search as days went by.   We would talk about it over dinners and come up with an idea then check to see if we were right. (we were not)  It was a puzzle for sure.  We had run out of places on island to look.  So we began a tentative search off island and came up empty.  Dang.

Finally out of desperation, we gave up trying to find them on our own.  I tried to find this mythical online map which was supposed to be downloadable. Except that, the page said, "Coming Soon".  Well how soon is soon?  The statues are all there. All of them. Where the heck is the map?  I groused about that for a few days and the map continued to not be there. Eventually I stopped checking and assumed it was one of those sorts of  mysteries that I would never know the solution to.  And I realllllly hate that.

Tim, however, did not give up. And yesterday  afternoon he handed me a print out of the map.  Finally it was on the website as promised!  We scrutinized it as if we were solving the mystery of the ages.   But there were the answers.  Right there on the map.  So naturally we had to see these last 7 statues with our own eyes. Obviously, after dinner, we jumped in the car and off we went.

To be fair we only laid eyed on 5 of the remaining 7.  Two of them, although we found them on the map, we did not actually see them.  Yet.  We will. One of these days soon, we will see those remaining two statues, and then our mission will be complete!

There is no prize for finding all 52 of the mermaids and seahorses. Just the satisfaction of a job well done.  And honestly, that is good enough for me.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.  Whenever there is a reno project going on, there are decisions to be made.  Some of them easier than others.   For the most part, Tim and I are on the same page, decor-wise,  which makes the decision making process a little easier than perhaps for other folks whose styles are polar opposites.  But if you've ever walked into one of the really big tile stores then you know how overwhelming it can be to make a flooring choice.

We chose tile because that is already what is throughout the house. Every single room is tile. And here, it makes sense. It might not be the flooring of our dreams if we lived somewhere else but  we live just blocks from the beach.  And no matter how hard you try, some of the beach always comes home with us. Sand is really hard on most floors.  But tile is hardy, it's sturdy, it holds up and it's really hard to damage. Also it's consistent with what is already here. If we changed our existing  flooring  to, let's say......wood....now,   we have to change it through the entire house!  Holy Cats,  I'm not ready for that project. Good heavens!

When we bought the house, the entirety of the flooring was one type.  Saltillo.  It's charming and rustic and it begs for big chunky dark wood furniture.  And that is not Florida style at all. So we were surprised to find it in every single solitary room.  If you are unfamiliar with it, here is an example:

But of course ours is much older so perhaps it's a little faded, a bit mellowed, there are big 18 inch squares of it and we cannot find the exact tile anywhere.  We've found things that were close, but if you put "close" next to the original it looks terrible.  You may as well have neon signs and arrows pointing to it alerting everyone, "Mismatched Flooring, Mismatched Flooring!".   So instead we had to find tile that would be in keeping with the feel of it, the rustic-ness of it and yet be different.  Tricky.

We've actually been through this before.  Other work that we've done on the house has necessitated pulling up old floors.  When we had the house replumbed for instance, we had to replace both bathroom floors.  When the pantry was created, once again, new floor.    That's when we learned that we couldn't find tile that matched the original.

In short, we knew this was going to be difficult.  And when this project actually started which was before the pandemic, we had already spent the time going to one tile store after another searching from one city after another and coming up with bupkis.    But we did the work, we spent the time, we had the discussions and eventually we came to a meeting of creative minds and made our choice.  And then there was a lock down and the entire world changed and it was a year before we got back on track.  A lot of things can change in a year.

And now here it is six months later than that even - which is how long it took once we kicked off the start of it all once again until now (red tape and the process of permitting takes time). We decided that rather than reinvent the wheel, we still liked our original tile choice and thought, "Well at least that's one decision we don't have to worry about!"

We were wrong.

Part of the entire world changing due to the pandemic is that some things are just hard to come by.  The construction world has been heavily impacted by it.  And tile is one of those things. unbeknownst to us, a lot of tile comes from other countries.  Then it is shipped to America in those big shipping containers on massive boats.  Eventually it docks in the US, is unloaded and transferred to trucks where it is then driven to it's destination.  In normal times this is not a big deal at all.  In normal times, it was a perfectly, well, normal, thing to do.

But these are not normal times.

Factories are slower to produce things, shipping containers are harder to come by, not as many ships are sailing, the workers to load and unload are fewer and truck drivers, who are already over worked and under paid, are fewer to find.   Apparently the back up in shipping ports is especially bad. So many big ships just waiting waiting waiting to be either loaded or unloaded and meanwhile, just sitting there. 

Which was when  we learned that we could not longer get our originally selected tile. Or at least,  they didn't know when they would be able to get enough of it for our project, all from one batch (important) so there would be guaranteed delivery date.  And that doesn't work for us.  We've waited more than long enough for this project as it is. We don't want to delay the finish of it any longer.  We needed to go back out and look again.

We learned very quickly to ask right up front,  what brand tile can we get X amount of in Y timeframe.  And that reduced the number of choices right away. Initially we were a little bummed about having so few choices but ultimately I think it made choosing a little easier.   If you can only select from a handful of choices as opposed to hundreds of possibilities, decision making is a lot quicker.

One of the places we went was a local shop.  They allowed us to bring the tile selections home (free for nothin'!) to look at it in the light of our own home, instead of that horrible fluorescent light at the tile store, and that alone was a huge help.

We looked at the tiles in all different sorts of light throughout the day.  We considered it on a sunny day and a rainy afternoon.  We looked at it up against the furniture and the tile for the rest of the house. And all of this over a weekend.  By Monday we had made our decision, returned the tile samples and notified our contractor of our choice.  By Tuesday he had ordered it and it should arrive later this week. Hurrah!

Of course the concrete pour was just yesterday which means that we don't even have walls yet so we are still operating ahead of the curve.  But that's how we like it.   No last minute zero hour decisions to be made and no delays waiting for parts to arrive.  Our contractor has our windows in his warehouse, we have our new ceiling fans added to the pile in the guest room.  We know what colour paint is going on the walls and it's the original furniture going back in once it is finally done.  But it feels like it will probably be smooth sailing from here.  

I don't want to jinx it so I won't say anything really stupid like nothing can go wrong now.  I did NOT say that.  But I think things are pretty well in hand.  Everything that can be controlled, is.  Anything that cannot be controlled, I leave up to the universe.

​Universe, please think kindly of us.

As you  may have noticed, I haven't written up a Photo Safari Report in a few weeks.  That's because my partner in crime, my sister Joy, has been away.  Obviously I have missed her, and our hikes and our sister time hanging out together.   Tim couldn't do anything about sister-time but he decided to do something about the hiking.  Sunday, he and I went up to Sarasota to hike a park that we've driven by many times but never stopped to check out.  

We drove up to the St Armands Circle and Lido Key area to Ted Sperling Park which actually has has two parts.  The first is the Nature Park and Mangrove Tunnels, the second is the Nature Trail.  We decided to at least start in the Mangrove Tunnels for this hike.

There is a really nice Kayak Rental and Tours place near the beginning of the Mangrove Tunnels which we thoroughly checked out.  Nice and clean bathrooms, LOADS of kayaks, really nice people and a lovely kayak launch area:

 From there we sought out the start of the trail and dove in whole heartedly.

We did not see many birds. We heard them, but I only captured one and it was near the parking lot,  sitting on a speed limit sign.  So much for birds in the wild.  That would be birds within the confines of law abiding citizenry.  Still before he flew off he managed to poo on the sign.  Rebel perhaps?

There were a lot of boardwalks through the mangroves but also paths that were at times a bit boggy but  those boggy bits are where the Fiddler Crabs live!  Those little critters move so fast that it was really hard to get a picture, though I tried my best.  We would come around a curve in the path, moving quietly, speaking very softly if at all, and spy the dozens of the little guys up ahead.  Before we could get a single step closer they would scramble and scurry zoom back into their little hidey holes.  I don't know if they had a scout keeping eye or if they felt the vibrations of our footsteps, but we did learn that there is no sneaking up on a Fiddler Crab!

There were a lot of wild flowers, always a pleasure to see:

Other very welcome and pretty creatures:

And of course the mangroves themselves.  If you ever wanted to know what was under the water in a mangrove, here is a good example.  It's a lot more "stuff" than you probably expected.  There is this peaceful water on top and underneath.....it's kind of a madhouse.  Here is the river and on the sides are the mangroves. It's a web of vines and roots and muck and shells and , well it's a lot.

When we finally emerged from the boggy mangroves we found ourselves directly across the street from a beach access point.  Of course, we walked down.  After the dank, dark, gloom of the mangroves we were drawn to the light.

It was very light indeed and quite nice.  But we were already kind of toasty from our hike so we turned back and wound up the hike back in the Kayak Rental Parking lot.  We did drive over to the other part of Ted Sperling and found the entrance to the Nature Trail. We decided to save that part for another day.  So perhaps next week I will have photo or two from that hike.  Maybe?  

Meanwhile here are the last of the pictures from yesterday.  My favourite, the Rando File:

How was your weekend?

ARGH!  My Arch Nemesis!  The Bathroom Scale!  Actually I recently lost 8 pounds.  Yeah, I know, big whoop.  Eight measly lbs. Doesn't sound like much an of "achievement" does it? And yet, it kind of is. 

My struggle with the number of the scale has been life long.  As a kid, I'm sure it didn't help that my idea of a good time was either reading, writing or playing the piano.  All rather sedentary activities.  Oh like all other kids of my era, we went sent outside to play.  But my play usually included me sitting under a tree somewhere with my nose in book.  I dabbled in the odd game of tag or hide and seek of course.  And I always enjoyed a good "explore", heading out with sneakers tied and an eye to the horizon. But I was never the kid on skates or climbing trees or  playing baseball.

So rather than being short and slim I was short and, well not slim.  Looking back at old photographs I was never actually fat, but there are no photos of me looking wispy either.  I guess I was just regular with a stocky, sturdy little short person's body that had long slim legs.  I've said it before, my body shape can best be described as a box on sticks.  When I am thinner it's a smaller box, but a box nonetheless.

And I've heard my entire life that it wasn't good enough.  Pudgy, chubby, chunky,  plump, hefty, tubby, round.....the list goes on and on and I've heard them all and more.  I heard it from "friends" and relatives and adult neighbors who were "helping me".  Teachers, random strangers,  movies, television, fashion magazines all pointed out to me, over and over, that I needed to lose weight.  And the group of people who talked about it the most were doctors and people who work in doctors offices.

It's the same thing every time, "you need to lose ten pounds".  Always 10.  No matter what the actual number on the scale was, I was told I had ten extra pounds that Had To Go!  There was one doctor office in particular  whose office was populated by exceedingly beautiful and thin women (a male doctor which comes as no surprise I know) where I dreaded my appointments.  Every single time, one of the beauties would ask me to step on the scale, then compare that number of the number in my chart, sigh loudly and look at me sadly, shake her head and say to me, "You still haven't lost those ten pounds". Every. Single. Visit. I failed my appointment once again.

It got to the point where I so dreaded upcoming annual doctor visits that I would be consumed with anxiety.  Not because I was afraid that there might be something terribly medically wrong with me but because I had to get on the scale. How warped is that thinking?  Not concerned that I might learn that I had a dread disease, but that I'd be told, one more time, that I was too fat. Crazy.

My current doctor hasn't ever said a single word about my weight to me. He is awesome.  He is also an excellent physician but I no longer dread my annual well patient visits and, my goodness, that is such a relief.

So about  the 8 ell bees that I am down currently?  A small miracle I assure you.  I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong in all honesty.  I just wanted to lose a few pounds for myself.  Making my clothes fit a little better really, loose and comfy fabric in hot weather is much better than snug fabric.  That was my goal. Not a specific number just a feeling.  So I looked at what I ate.

I bake a lot, but I don't eat much of what I bake.  I give a lot of it away. I stuff the rest it in the freezer.  So while I talk about eating cookies and ice cream and cake (cake!)  it's the exception rather than the rule with me. Let's call it the 80/20 rule.  80% of the time eat healthfully, 20% of the time throw the rules out the window.  Even my Pilates teacher agrees with that idea.  And that's kind of what I do.  I eat lots of salads, very little meat, less and less bread as time goes by, I love veggies and fruit.  So what's wrong with that?  Nothing.  I walk miles every day and do Pilates at home soo I am getting exercise too.  It was a mystery.

And then I realized something.  It wasn't about what I was eating.  It was When I was eating and Why I was eating.  It turns out that the biggest and best change I made was so easy.  I had to stop eating just because it was time to eat and only eat when I was actually hungry.  

We have been trained since we were babies to eat 3 meals a day.  Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.   Well as it turns out, I don't actually need to eat 3 meals a day.  And in fact, I don't pay any attention to meal "times" for myself anymore at all.  I wait until I'm hungry and then I eat until I am comfortably full and then I stop and I don't eat again until and unless I am actually hungry.  Wow!  I cannot believe it. What a simple logical idea.

Oh I still cook actual meals for Tim and anyone else who happens to be in the house, but unless I am hungry I politely decline.  I will sit with whoever else is eating. I will talk and laugh and have my ever present glass of water, but otherwise nope.  And if it makes them uncomfortable, I'm sorry, but this is working for me so I'm not eating just to make someone else feel less awkward.

I'm old now so I can make my own, possibly unpopular, choices, my own decisions.  This is what I am doing.  It is working for me. I cannot say that it would or should work for anyone else, but it absolutely did the job for me.

My goal was not met. I was shooting for those damned 10 pounds that everyone seems to think I need to shed and I fell short by 2 lbs. Oh well.  Apparently this is where my body wants to be.  And so here I shall stay.  

So yes, I lost 8 pounds. Please do not bother looking for them. I do not want them back.

Speaking of baking (who was speaking of baking?), check out this cutiecute new baking pan that Tim surprised me with!  Squeee!   I love it so much :)  A long time ago, middle son and his wife bought me a similar pan and I loved that one too. And somehow it got lost in a move (along with an assortment of other things) and, at the time, even though I missed it terribly, I opted to not replace it.  Not because it wasn't useful or  wasn't loved, but because sometimes I try to edit my life. Which primarily means my belongings.  But now I have one again and it's very exciting!

So exciting in fact that the day after this came in the mail (surprise!) I used it. Of course I did.  Do you know me at all?  Have we met?

The entire reason that Tim ordered this pan for me was that a few weeks  back,  I was craving cake.  It's all I could think about.  You ever have those sorts of food cravings?   Nothing else is going to satisfy you except that thing you crave?  Where it totally dominates your thoughts?  It kind of goes like this: 

him:  "What do you want for dinner?"
me:  "cake"

him: "so & so just bought a new house so what should we get as a house warming gift?"
me:  "cake"

him: "think it's going to rain?"
me:  "cake"

Yeah, like that.

I try to not give in to those sorts of yearnings because it's always bad for me foods that I desire. Always.  I never crave broccoli.  I like broccoli, I like it a lot.  But I never hard core crave it. Same with salad.  I eat salad nearly every day. It is a staple of my daily diet. But I never dream about it. I do, however,  occasionally dream about cake. Or pie. Or ice cream. Or home made bread. Or....well you get what I'm saying here.

So days went by. Days became weeks.  And still the most important thing in my head every moment of the day, from my first waking thought to my last, was cake.  And specifically I wanted chocolate cake with white icing.  Rich, dense, moist chocolatey cake with thick creamy real vanilla frosting. Yeah, that's the stuff.  Nothing else tasted good to me. Nothing else mattered. I just wanted a piece of cake damnit.  So last Friday evening we finally went out in search of cake.  And honestly around here it is hard to find.  There are ice cream places aplenty, but cake is harder to come by.

There are bakeries of course, but they close early.  There are restaurants that offer cake, but never with white icing. Have you ever noticed that?  It's always chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Which isn't a bad thing,  but not what I wanted.  My craves are very specific.  Google and I searched far and wide and were very disappointed in the results;(

Ultimately, we stopped at Publix and checked out the bakery department.  They did have chocolate cake with white icing, which was a surprise but hurrah!  So we snapped that baby up and took it home.  I was so eager to eat it!  Finally, satisfaction!

Except, it wasn't satisfying at all.  It was blah.  Too light, too airy, too practically non existent!  The chocolate taste was very meek and the rather thin icing had no vanilla flavour.  It just tasted sweet, very very sweet. I had a few bites and threw it away.  Not wasting calories on something I'm not enjoying.  Tim asked what I was thinking and I responded that, I suspect that what I was actually craving was my own chocolate cake.  Because I make a damned good chocolate cake.  BUT I'm not going to make an entire cake just because I'm craving one slice!

I know how it works. If I make a cake, we eat a cake. And we don't need to eat an entire cake. Nobody does.  And I sighed and figured that was the end of that.

And then this pan showed up!  What a great idea! I can make a lot of small cakes and freeze them.  When I want to use them, I'll thaw them and frost them and give them away, share or just grab a fork and go to town!  Brilliant Idea Tim!

So yesterday I hauled out my old recipes  and for the first time in over a year whipped up my oh so very good Chocolate Cake (Thank you Sandy!)  It's a lot of batter so I ended up making the six mini bundts and had a lot of batter left over. What to do, what to do?  I didn't want the batter to dry out and I absolutely did not want to throw it away (what a waste that would be!)  so I had the smarty pants idea to make cupcakes with the rest. (don't know why I didn't think of cupcakes before?)

Aren't those the cutest little mini-bundts you ever saw?  They will be even cuter, frosted and decorated ;)

I did taste test a cupcake. Of course I did. Quality Control is essential.  Surely you figured that out already.  And so did Tim.  YES!  Finally my cake cravings was satisfied.  The rest are in the freezer, just waiting patiently.

And now I am thinking about all sorts of other wonderful things I can make in this pan.  Mini gingerbread cakes, pumpkin bread, banana nut bread, Blueberry cake, fancy cornbread!  Why not?  Oh I have ideas aplenty!

I predict that this pan is going to be used A LOT!  

This is a view from our front hall of our kitchen and  my "office" space which is also part of the living room.  In current parlance it is the Great Room. I spend the vast majority of my days in this space.   There are the obvious things like cooking and baking (and then cleaning up from my cooking and baking) and writing my blog. You can just see the monitor of my computer  on the back side of the wall between the kitchen and living room and my chair laden with various things which constitutes my "office".   But I also use this space for ironing, reading the newspaper, writing pretty much anything, folding clothes, doing puzzles, wrapping gifts and more.  There is my stack of library books ready to read, my camera - always at the ready for a photo, my absolutely essential calendar so that I not only know what day it is but also what I'm doing that day, and a few notebooks.  One notebook is for random notes, another notebook is for blogpost ideas and the third is for lists. I always have multiple lists running.

The important point here is that this is my space, my comfort zone, my happy place.  When I'm working here I'm humming or singing or maybe even dancing a little bit.   Tralalala.

As I said, the  way our house is set up, which is not at all unusual here, the kitchen, dining and living rooms are all one big space.  The Great  Room it is sometimes called.   And in ordinary times, it is indeed, a pretty great room.   But currently, with this big project going on it's a not so great space.  And I have to admit, any negative feelings are all in my head. I hate admitting that.

Because our wonderful construction guys are so very hard at work rebuilding our family room (which is off the Great Room) there are some very temporary issues.  The first of course being that all of the actual living room furniture is stuffed into the guest room.  The second is that the family room furniture is crammed into the living room.  All of our furniture was very specifically selected for the space it was intended to be in.  So while it's functional and not horrible, it's also not right.  But it's temporary. And I know that. It means that we are living in a much smaller space than usual but it's ok.  It's short term and we know it so we suck it up.  It's the third issue that is my biggest problem.  And again, yes, I know, it's just me.

The third and final (but biggest) issue is that our fabulous, wonderful amazing construction guys are right there on the other side of the big glass sliders. Right there. Right. There.  All of the time.  

I am going to show you what I mean.

​Here I am hum dilly hum, doing my stuff in the Great Room:

And here are our industrious construction guys doing building magic:

Let's look at that again.  Here it is, side by side, inside looking out and outside looking in:

There is just enough space for me to slide in between the  table and the piano with a rolled up rug acting as a canopy above me.  There is a sofa and coffee table piled on a bed to one side  of my comfy chair and a wide table with an ottoman atop it  to the other .  It's a cozy comfy nook, a perfect spot to hide and just my size.  As Virginia Woolfe wisely observed, every woman needs a Room of her Own.   While all of this very important work is going on, this will be mine.  

Oh I will still spend the majority of my time cooking and baking and cleaning and writing and all of the other stuff I do in the Great Room, but when I need to step away from the chaos for a little bit, now I have my little retreat,  my hiding space to get away.  

And thank you to Tim for making it happen. And for understanding why I needed it.  And sometimes, not understanding but accepting it as true.

Poor Tim.  I killed another one of his coffee cups.  Dang.  This is the second one in less than two months.   The first one was a total smashola.  I was emptying the dishwasher and somehow that cup just slipped right through my fingers and crashed against the tile floor becoming roughly  5 zillion teensy tiny pieces.  Butterfingers!

This break was a tiny bit different. I mean it's still beyond useless now but I didn't drop this one. I misjudged the distance between the counter top and well, not the counter top. Which I suppose would be just air.  Somehow I clipped the cup against  the edge of the counter. The countertop is granite of course and one measly coffee cup doesn't stand much of a chance against stone.  sigh.

I felt terrible when I broke the first one.  Because he is a very nice man Tim said, "don't worry about it, there are other cups".  But because I at least try to be a responsible person, and the broken cup was, after all, my fault, I attempted to replace the cup.  I looked at cups where ever I already happened to be: the grocery store, the drugstore and once at a Hobby Lobby.  The grocery store and drug store actually did have cups but none of them really appealed to me and the one I actually really liked at Hobby Lobby was pricey!  And my feeling, at that time, was well heck if I'm eventually going to break it anyway, why would I spend that kind of money on it?  

And then I broke the second cup.  If I felt terrible last time, this time around I felt far worse.  In an attempt to right this wrong, instead of just sort of hoping to happen across a suitable cup I intentionally sought one out.  And the whole money thing?  Right out the window.  This time I was determined to try to make it right.  Not just a half arsed effort. Nope, this one would be fully arsed.

If you peeked into our cabinet you would notice right away cups and mugs are very random.  There are over sized cups that say "Queen of Everything" and "King of Everything Else"  and a Jolly Christmas themed Snoopy & Woodstock mug.  There is a plain black one and one that bears a photo of Tim and I from a trip to New Orleans.  I believe there is one from South Dakota with a wild west sort of theme and set of smaller cups (my size) that, while an actual set, are each a different colour.   The cups shelf looks like a box of crayons. So you would think that any old coffee mug will do.  You would be wrong.  Every single mug/cup on that shelf was selected specifically and individually. Even though they do not match,  although I'm sure right now you find this impossible to believe, somehow they all go together.

So I set out on my mission to find replacement cups on Friday.  I headed downtown Venice which is just a few blocks away because that area is a veritable cornucopia of cute little unique shop.  I was in and out of every single store that might possibly have cups & mugs.  Many of them did too.  But at first, while I liked them, none of them were quite right.  There were lots of cups with flowers on them and while Tim likes flowers just fine, I just couldn't picture him waking up with his morning coffee in a dainty floral cup.  Nope.

Then there were mugs with animals on them.  Ducks, Fish, Horses, Dogs and the like.  They were fine but none of them spoke to me, y'know.  We were not quite there yet.  As I went in and out of each of these shops I saw cups with hearts, cups with a lot of words (too many words for first thing in the day) and mugs with pictures of boats on them.  There were tiny little espresso cups, giant over sized - seriously way too big - mugs that were practically been steins and precious demitasse cups.  All of them were very nice, none of them were right.

Until, finally, I found this one:

It's colourful without being of any particular subject and honestly it looks so much better in person.  The handle is sturdy and big enough for his hands and it's just the right size.  It's real china, made in Germany, far more expensive than I would normally buy and dishwasher safe.  Supposedly the handle will stay cool, through some sort of magic, even if you reheat your drink in the microwave.  Awesome. Sold!  

Ok that's one mug.  Now I needed to replace the second one.  And here was my thought process.  This first mug is beautiful and expensive and no matter how hard I try not too, odds are good that somewhere along the line I will drop and break this one too.  So, perhaps I could balance that out by finding a much less expensive one that won't break my heart when I am sweeping up the pieces of it.  

So naturally I went to one of the souvenir shops on the avenue.  And they did not disappoint.  There was an entire wall of cheesy, kitschy, cheap mugs all of which said Venice Fl on it somewhere.  Some of them had fish or mermaids.  Some of them said things like:" I'd rather be fishin' ".  There were pictures of sunsets and pelicans and cartoony things and of course flowers.  Lots and lots of flowers.    And in the end I bought the least objectionable one:

It's not great, but it'll do.   This new one was not made out of china, but it was made in China. I looked the brand up online.  It's sold primarily in souvenir shops and Walmart.  So you kind of have an idea of the quality.  Since the only requirement really is that it hold coffee, it will absolutely do the job.  

Over the weekend Tim tried them both out.  Both of them work just fine and, as my beloved reminded me, it's  a vehicle for his morning coffee, that's all. The fate of the world doesn't hinge on the design of his coffee cup.  But he appreciated the gesture and for now, we are fully loaded with cups and mugs once again.

Wanna take bets on which one I break first?  At least I know where to go to buy a replacement now.

We are still Under Construction, my friends.  This is the view from our sliders currently. It seems that this is a big job and a messy one and now and again, an inconvenient one.

You will notice that I haven't posted much this week.  That's not because I have nothing to say. I never have nothing to say.  It's because sometimes our power pops in and out.  Sometimes our internet comes and goes.  And then we have to make choices. 

Right now, for example, Tim had to re-route the router (funny) with extension cords from one of the few rooms that has power so that he can continue do his work here in his home office.  Luckily for me, at least this time, that means I have internet right now once again too. Yay!  But next time?  Who knows.    

It's the sort of things that happens during construction projects, both large and small.   Tim is good at finding ways to work around problems and I am good with making do, so between us both, it's no big deal.  Stuff Happens and It Is What It Is.  

Just kind of wanted you to know that I'm here. I haven't quit the Blog. At least not yet. I promise to warn you in advance if I do.  But for the duration of this house project, my presence may be, shall we say, sporadic.  When I can be here to post, I will and when I can't, I won't.  That sounds pretty straight forward eh?

Meanwhile,  Y'all have a great weekend and hopefully, I will be back on Monday!

Hugs all 'round

 The amazing human skeleton.  All two hundred and six bones of it. It is the infrastructure to the human body.   We all have one and most of us at least attempt to take good care of it.  We probably take it a little bit for granted but our skeletons do not seem to mind. Our bones hold us up and hold us together and heal when they get bumped or broken with little quibbling.  And then we get older.  Dang it all.

Ever since I started being ordered by doctors to report for duty at the bone density station I have come to know that I was Osteopenic.  That means that my old bones do not create new bone as quickly as they reabsorb old bone, which frankly, sounds a little cannabalistic to me.  Ewww  Creepy. 

 I was told to get more exercise of the weight bearing type  and to eat more high calcium foods. At the time I was already running at least 3 days a week which sounds to me pretty high on the weight bearing scale, but I upped it to  5 days a week.   As far as the high calcium foods go, I had to do some research. I'm fairly lactose intolerant so it wasn't just a matter of eating more ice cream!   But I found other foods, that I actually liked, and put more of that in my diet.  

I was sure that these changes would improve my bone density numbers.  I was wrong.   The next bone density test showed, not only no improvement, but further decline. Ratz!  I added a calcium supplement. But it still didn't change those numbers.  And at some point my knees were having serious discussions with me about all this running nonsense so I had to switch over to walking which is, at least, still a weight bearing exercise.  So I was seriously trying.

But honestly,  I wasn't at all surprised to eventually  hear the dreaded  but inevitable diagnosis of Osteoporosis.  Talk about feeling old.  Osteoporosis is when the body has reached the point when the bones are very weak and brittle.  When you hear about someone falling and breaking a hip, that's someone with osteoporosis.  

So my current doctor suggested a once a month medication that supposedly would help my body to build new bone.  Once a month doesn't sound so bad, does it?  Of course I said, "sign me up".  As clumsy as I am, it was the smart decision to make.

What I didn't take into account were the side effects of the medication.  Ooof!    I already do battle with constant heart burn (for which I take other medication) and this new medication ramps up the dragonfire to about 1000.  Yikes!  That increase in heart burn only lasts a few days, but it's a few miserable days every month unless I make it a point to eat very very VERY carefully those days.  So that's what I do.  

The bone medication also makes my body ache.  It seems that the construction going on inside my body which is the medication helping to build new bone, hurts!  In the beginning, it was my  entire body that hurt.  For about a week every month I felt as if I had fallen down a hill, or perhaps been hit by a small car.  I read the insert that came with the medication and yuppers, that's perfectly "normal".  Ack!  I wasn't looking forward to doing that on repeat every month, but, I rationalized with myself,  if I was going to give this a fair trial to see if it worked, then I had to just grit my teeth and do it.

And so I did.  I look a lot of Advil, used copious amounts of Icey Hot and Bio Freeze and just sucked it up. 

At long last, it was time for another bone density test!  I held my breath.  Was all that time of feeling miserable truly worthwhile?  The results were clear and significant.  There was an enormous improvement!  Hurrah Hurrah!    It wasn't turned around 100% but it was good, really good.    So my doctor and I decided to do another round of it to see if we can make things even better!  

It was put to the test earlier this week.

On Mondays and Thursdays in the early morning, I walk with my friend Sally.  She lives fairly close to me so we meet about half way between our homes and then walk, at least, to the airport and back, sometimes farther, a nearly 4 mile loop!  We walk  and talk and laugh and solve all of the problems of the world.  Ok we don't solve them, but nobody else is solving them either so I do not feel remotely guilty about that.  The point is, we walk.

On the way back, probably within a mile of home, I stepped off a curb into what appeared to be a puddle of water but turned out to be a puddle of mud with a skim of water on the top.  Uhoh.    My right foot slid hard left and my left foot, in an effort to correct stepped wide to the right. And it almost worked too.  According to Sally, I did a lovely deep curtsy just before I hit the ground hard on my right hip. Ouchie.  

Actually I was more embarrassed than anything.  I quickly pushed myself to a stand, dusted the pebbles off my palms and the mud off my shorts, oddly (though not at all odd for me) apologized to the couple walking their dog across the street that looked so very concerned, and reassured Sally at least a dozen times that I was fine.  And we continued home.

To my surprise and delight, I really was fine! Absolutely positively totally fine.  Not even a bruised area.  It's like a miracle!  If my bones weren't healthier and stronger that would have been one ugly scene and I would, most likely, be having hip replacement surgery right now instead of writing this post.

So if I ever had any doubts about the medication, it is now officially dispelled.  I will not complain ever again about indigestion/dragonfire or achey bones.  I will take the damned pill and keep my trap shut and be grateful that such a thing exists!

Thus ends the tale of my old lady bones :)

I thought I'd start out this week by writing about last week's Photo Safari.   I'm calling it the High Water Hike because, well, the water was pretty darned high.  Which makes it a good/bad thing.  Bad because the trails were mostly underwater.  We manage to get out of the car a few times but mostly we were faced with trails that looked like this:

The good part was that everything in the park was so flooded that we could just open the car windows to take pictures of nearly everything.  Also being in the car means that it was an air conditioned hike.  And honestly I returned home cleaner than I ever have before  from a hike.

Photographable things were so close that the photo at the top of the page is a reflection of a dragonfly in the water.  Dragonflies are pretty small so to get a picture of it's reflection from the car?  Crazy! There were times when the water was just about lapping at the tires.  The water was so so high that alligators were swimming right alongside the car.  You think I'm joking?

We went to Myakka State Park.   It is such a beautiful place and as a bonus, there is a road running right through it.  Usually we just park the car and hike all over the place. This time, mostly, as I said, we just stayed in the car.  Lazy hiking. But we saw Awesome Stuff.

It is an exceptionally beautiful drive through the park with a gorgeous canopy nearly the entire way:

Because of the high water there were deer everywhere!  Poor little things were wading through the water at times and having to risk crossing the road to find slightly dryer ground.  So Joy drove slowly and carefully.

We saw birds as we almost always do. Maybe not the usual wide variety, but still birds iz birds. And we love taking photos of them :) You will notice a great many photographs of white birds of various sorts this time.

There were a stunning  number of dragonflies. I know they all look  like the exact same dragonfly but I promise you they are not.  There is also one wasp, one lady bug, one lizard and a few squirrel photos.

And of course the beautiful Mayakka River and Park itself.  On a high water day like this, it's hard to tell the difference between the river and the park. They kind of run together:

It was a different sort of hike. I suppose technically it was a non-hike.  I guess it was more of a drive.  BUT a drive with gorgeous scenery and beautiful things to take pictures of.  Maybe the next hike will be an actual hike?  Who knows?

​

So this is in the front yard now.  And no, it's not a new lawn ornament.  This means that the reno project has begun!  Woo and Hoo!  Very Exciting!

It'll be awhile before it's done so I won't bother you daily, or weekly (or even monthly) with updates but I thought, since I mentioned it in an earlier post, you might like to at least see the beginning.  And at some day in the future, the end product.

Ok, bear in mind here that our house is just a little one story beach bungalow built way back in the early 60's .  And apparently in that era, nobody gave two craps or a hoot about how the back of a house looked. They focused any design style on the front.  And I completely agree that the front of our house with it's cute little courtyard is adorable.  Perhaps they assumed (thought one should never) that there was no point in fiddling with the back since most people are going to put in a patio and a pool anyway at some point.   

 But the thing is, with our house, for some reason, nobody did.    I'm not positive exactly how many people owned this house before us.  I know there were at least three.  And for whatever reason, none of those three cared enough to bother doing anything in the back of the house.  To be fair, we've lived here for 5 years now and we haven't either.  It's on the list, but there are other, more important, things we had to get out of the way first.  Like  replacing all of the plumbing.  Updating the HVAC.  Reno-ing the kitchen and bathrooms.  Stuff like that.   It's a process guys.  

At any rate, this is what the back of our house looked like before reno began:

The part that's being reno-ed is from the left side of the turquoise thing to the right.  That turquoise thing, by the way, is a hurricane shade. It's a VERY heavy weight canvas that ties down to prevent window destruction via hurricane.  The reason we have it down, however, was to prevent leaks around the windows every time it rains.    Which was just Delightful. (insert sarcasm here)  Here's a better look at  just the reno project portion of the house.

This is the part that is being worked on.  You might notice a strange thing to the right of the door.  This is how we knew the house was sinking.  It clearly indicated that there were no footings (no footings!!??)

Stucco doesn't normally buckle like that.  Tim filled the hole with spray foam for the interim just to keep the outside, outside.  So you see it wasn't just a leaky roof that might require a few tiles or shingles replaced.  Nope.  The entire room has to be torn down so that they can put in a foundation and start over.  sigh.

But hey, it is what it is. And right now what it is is a construction zone.  And the back of our home currently resembles a haunted house.  You doubt me? Here's a few pictures to illustrate.

What A Mess!  But it's like cleaning out the garage. Before you can make it better, first you have to make it worse. 

With the current state of things in the contracting world, shortages  of product, shortage of tradespeople, delays for every conceivable reason and a few inconceivable ones,  we are honestly not positive when it will be done.  But at some point, it will be.  Like I said, it's a process.  And at some point  it will be finished and then it will all have been worthwhile.

Have A Great Weekend!  Hugs all 'round.

Empty.  Vacant. Desolate. Deserted. Abandoned.  That was the museum yesterday. 

There was not a single phone call.  Not a single visitor. The place practically echoed. It was very unusual and strange. Especially when compared to last week which was  overloaded with guests!  I would barely get through my opening spiel when other folks would come in the door and then others and then more and more and...give me a break people!  HAH!  After awhile the lobby felt a little like a clown car and I had to actually put a limit on how many people could, safely and masked, be in the lobby at one time.  The new rule only held folks up for a few minutes outside but current circumstances require at least a few protective parameters.

Last week, we had guests from all over this country, most of them visiting the museum for the first time.  They are almost always smiling and relaxed and excited to learn about the history of Venice.  I am always tickled to bits to welcome folks and answer their questions.  Not everyone wants a guided tour - and that is perfectly fine - but for the ones who do wish for it, I am delighted to show them around. 

I like hearing about where they are from and telling them about not just the town we live in but the entire state of Florida. It's a pleasure to make suggestions of places to eat and fun things to do in the area.  At times it's a little hectic.  When I'm the only person there and we have mega visitors plus the phones plus the constant Covid related cleaning plus the gift shop plus whatever else is going on!  Yeah it gets a little crazy sometimes.

But I vastly prefer Crazy Days to the Big Empty.

Good thing I brought a book.  I always bring a book.  Yesterday it was an entire museum shift of just sitting and reading.  Which meant the time flew by of course but still...very strange.   My footsteps sounded so loud. Heck turning pages sounded loud!  I kept thinking...are we open?  Has the town been evacuated?  Am I in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode?

I've noticed a few  different things this year at the museum.  First of all, suddenly,  most of our guests are newly arrived residents to the area as opposed to tourists.  What?  Yeah, it's true.  So far this year easily 75% of the people who walk through our door have moved to the general vicinity during the pandemic from somewhere else!  The second thing is more age range.  A lot of the newbies are younger people.  Up until now Venice Island was primarily populated with jus old folks.  But now,  we have young families, newly wed couples, some middle agers with older kiddos and of course some retirees too. But that is a new balance and I like it!  

This 75/25 split will probably change as the snowbird season/high tourist season arrives in the winter but for now, it is just new and different and a very good thing.  New blood, new energy, new ideas!  Things need to get shaken up now and again or else the area will get stagnant and stodgy with no spark!  Gotta liven it up and make it exciting and new again.

Maybe that's one of the reason I enjoy working at the museum.  Because everything I am telling and showing people is new to them, it becomes new again to me too.  I get to see it all over again through their eyes, through the lens of their life experiences. It helps me to appreciate our town and fall in love with it all over again every single day.

Hopefully yesterday's empty museum was an aberration and not a new trend. That would break my heart.  I suppose time will tell.  And in the meantime, at least I got to read my book.  The entire book.  Cover to Cover.  Sigh.  I guess I had better get my butt to the library for more books.  I have no idea if next week's Museum Day will be feast or famine.  Hence the book.   Once everything in the museum is clean, all of the pamphlet racks are filled, emails are answered,  new bulletins read and old bulletins reviewed and the displays activated and operational, if nobody comes in what on earth would you do?

Book.  Always bring a Book.  

So, how was your Labor Day Weekend?  Hope whatever you did you had a great time :)

In looking back, it seems that our long holiday weekend was about two things: Food and Water. Seriously, we are so wierd.

​First of all I made this:

Brioche Bread!  My first time making it, too!  Tim found the recipe and showed me. I read it over several times and then realized that I had, on hand, every thing necessary! It was surprisingly easy (I really assumed  - though one should never) that it was one of those tricky sneaky recipes but it honestly was not.  What it did require though was time. Lots of time. It's a two rise bread. Totally worth it. It was so good. Was. Past Tense. It's long gone.  Which is always the problem when making bread. If I make it, we eat it.

And then we seemed to have eaten out a lot more than usual.  Oh on the weekends we usually manage at least one meal out, occasionally two. But I guess we took the idea of celebrating labor day by not laboring and ate out more than usual.

We had breakfast at Burgundy Square, a local place that is so close we can walk to it.  The food is simple, but good, the service is friendly and we have no issues with any of it.   Which is why it's so odd that we haven't been there in a few years.  And there is absolutely no reason to not go.  It was really good!

Saturday we had lunch at a new to us place down in Cape Coral, called Keg & Cow.  It's a short and relatively simple menu but with some great innovative thinking. For instance, if you order fries or chips, since both are made fresh and in-house, they ask you what sort of seasoning you want on them?  The options, I believe were, parmesan/garlic, sea salt or cajun.  What???  That's pretty awesome.

The rest of our eating out was more typical for us, our usual stuff,  local pizza and local chinese food.  Nothing wrong with any of it. It was all good :)  We gobbled up the pizza too fast for me to remember to take a photo.  Oink.

Between moments of happy gluttony, we spent a lot of time at the beach.  We were there early, mid day, evening, and every hour in between.  The sunsets were beautiful, the birds were plentiful, the waves were impressive,  and that awful Red Tide stink is gone.  Hurrah!

Some days the seas were a big moody but that's ok, we love to watch the crashing and smashing of the water against the rocks at the Jetty.

The Sunsets were magnificent!  Some evenings it looked as if the sky was on fire!  Other times, it was more a gentle colour show, and occasionally so soft it was almost pastel.

There were kayakers and motor boaters, surfers and fisherfolk, people like me with cameras in hand and sometimes no sign of any humans at all.

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good weekend!  It's a wonderful thing to occasionally have a break in our routine.

But  for now it's back to our regularly scheduled program.

Just a quick little story today to round out the week and to illustrate what a truly nice man Tim is.  I mean, I already knew it but now you can know it too.

Yesterday morning started off kind of gloomy.  It looked like it might rain but around here you can never really tell.  Sometimes it's just grey and threatening to rain all day long but sheds nary a drop.  Other times it's beautiful bright sunshine that turns to rain without loosing a single bit of the sparkling sun rays.  So it's tricky.

I was ostensibly writing my blog but between paragraphs and thoughts I often move to the kitchen to do a small chore while thinking.  I will ruminate while emptying the dishwasher. I  contemplate at the same time that I am refilling the coffee machine with water.  I might be cogitating while folding towels.  I don't recall what the chore was yesterday, but I know I had just gotten up from the computer and was in the kitchen when the sky opened up and began to pour.

It was a torrential rain like only Florida in Rainy Season can produce.  They are referred to locally as "gullywashers".   If you are caught out in it, within seconds you are soaked through to your skin. Your fingers get as pruney as they would if you had been soaking in the tub for hours. Your eyelashes become so heavy with rain that it takes effort to blink.  I've been caught out in rain like that here and the question of what to do becomes a real conundrum.  The instinct is to duck under a nearby tree (there are always plenty nearby).  However, standing under a tree when there is a possibility of lightening is never a good idea.  On the other hand, standing away from the tree,  feeling as if you are going to drown on land while standing up, doesn't seem sensible either. What to do, what to do.

As I glanced out the window at that sort of rain a woman came into view pacing across the end of our driveway.  She stood next to our mailbox, looked at the numbers  while fruitlessly attempting to wipe the rain from her eyes, as she spoke to someone on her cellphone.  It was at this point that Tim walked into the kitchen seeking a coffee refill.  He looked out the window because I was. Naturally he was curious about what held my attention.  I indicated the unfortunate and drenched woman who had finished her call and resumed pacing, first under the tree then out from under the tree, back and forth.  "Poor thing", I said.  "We should do something".

Tim immediately walked over to the umbrella stand (yes we have an umbrella stand, doesn't everyone?) selected the red umbrella and without a moments hesitation walked out the door.  She explained to Tim when he approached that she had just called her husband to come pick her up.  Tim offered her 3 sheltering choices.  She could join us inside and watch for her husband out the big bay window in the kitchen. She could stand under the sailshade in the courtyard. Or  he would loan her the big red umbrella.  She thanked him politely and chose the umbrella.

Which meant Tim then slogged back through the driving rain and was utterly and completely saturated when he came back inside.  He dried off and went back to work,  I waited a minute longer and watched her standing, far more comfortably at the end of the driveway under the big red umbrella, no longer pacing and then went back to my computer.

The next time I peeked out the window, the mystery woman was gone.  But she made sure to leave the umbrella in the courtyard.  How very nice!  

The point here is that I said we ought to do something.  Tim actually did it.  And it's the doer's of the world that make things happen.  We should always try to be more like him.

So that's the red umbrella story.  

Now go forth and enjoy this lovely Labor Day Holiday Weekend!

Roughly a million years ago when I was a very young child in downtown Chicago, I actually do remember being in a large department store.  Instead of the escalators we see now in shopping malls, there were elevators.  Each elevator had an official elevator operator who announced at each floor, the sorts of things one might shop for on that floor.  "3rd floor, Ladies' Lingerie"  When I typed those words above, that was the first thing that popped into my head. 

Called it lingerie or underwear or the fancy french 'dishabille'  or unmentionables, it's all the same thing and I'm going to mention it.  Why?  Because I have questions. So many questions. And perhaps you do too.

My first question is, why is it so dang expensive?  Ok, yes, I am famously tightfisted with money. We all know that.  But even so, the dollar amount they are charging for very little fabric (though often considerable engineering) seems excessive.   And I am curious why this is so.

I gathered up every pair of underpants that I own and weighed them.  Collectively it was still less than a pound in weight and while I admittedly do not know much about fabric, I do know that there is very little fabric involved in their creation.  Because I am such a cheap arsed soul, I generally buy mine at the outlet store.  The ones I prefer I can usually get as a batch of 2 or 3 for eight to ten dollars.   I just looked them up on line.  Turns out that if I bought them one at a time in a regular store they are twelve bucks each!  EACH!   So if you only do laundry once a week that means 7 pair which comes to $84 dollars!  For Panties!  That nobody sees!   Don't you find that insane?  So if my house caught fire and everything I owned was gone and I had to start over, the first thing I would need would be $84 bucks worth of fabric that together weighs mere ounces and I wear under my other clothes.  What? 

Bras are even worse. And by that I mean even more expensive and often not very comfortable.   History tells us that the first brassieres existed way back in the 14th century. I'm sure they were even less comfortable than they are now. Especially when you consider the evolution to corsets. Torture devices.  Glad those are long gone.  (though I understand that some women are voluntarily wearing them again.  To each her own I suppose).  Still I will be among the first to admit that my clothes look better on me when I wear a properly fitting bra. But dang, it is just not very comfortable.

Starting with the permanent grooves on my shoulders from the straps and the underwires often breaking loose and stabbing me you would think that for the cost, they would be a heck of a lot more comfortable to wear.  So I guess my second question is, why can't they be made to be more comfortable? Nobody yet has been able to answer that one for me.  the Comfort to cost ratio is not good.   And speaking of the cost (once again) holy cats!   

I recently had to finally throw a few old bras away which means I now have to replace them.  First I waited until there was a sale.  Love a good sale.   It was a BOGO, which is every better.  The price still makes me crazy but buy one, get one makes it marginally more palatable.  I think I got them for about $25 dollars each.  But that means ordinarily it would have been Fifty dollars for one?  One?  What the actual hell?

Yeah, there are cheaper ones, but they either don't have decent support or they just don't last very long.  I expect an article of clothing that I paid fifty bucks for to last more than two washings.   As it is, I don't just throw an old bra away, willy nilly.  Nope.  As they start to stretch out, I move the hooks over and the straps up.   I've been known to sew over a poking escaped underwire to lock that baby down. All in an effort to postpone the lingerie expenditure as long as possible. 

Still, as it turns out, fifty dollars for a decent bra isn't a bad price.  They kind of go up from there.  There is a brand called La Perla that routinely charges hundreds (plural!) of dollars for one. ONE!  And of course there are high end brand fancy schmancy bras that cost upwards of a grand. Each. I will not be owning any of those.  Ever.

It  is what it is I suppose.  Nobody is forcing me to spend money on underwear.  If I chose to go commando, who would know?   If I refused to wear a bra ever again in my life, I don't think anyone would give a ratz patootie.  I don't know if it's habit at this point in my life or what. I'm officially old now which means I'm fairly invisible.  I can pretty much do as I please.

But you don't have to be old to fling your undies to the wind and say, Hell no!  I remember back in the hippy dippy days when women were burning their bras in protest.  They wanted freedom and a say so over their own lives and their own bodies!  Yeah!  Good for them!  And since things in life are so cyclical, I'm reading again of famous women who are eschewing the wearing of a brassier in favour of comfort.  Good on 'em I say!  

It's a personal decision and I respect yours.  But I will never understand why the heck underwear costs so much!