A Snowbird's Life Through the Lens
Life on my own, on the Nature Coast of of Florida, and beyond…
Float away with me to a magical world…
Where down maybe be up, and up may be down, and blue bottles grow on trees…
To a place where seashells aren’t always found by the sea.
You might wave to your neighbors as you float by.
Where tiny bees buzz…
And ladies don’t always wear the colors you might expect.
Float away, it’s time to play…
Leave your worries for another day…
The newest little orangutan at the zoo was still being carefully protected by his mother, but the other young ones were carrying on like little monkeys! Two of them were simply a rolling ball of orange fur with various body parts becoming visible here and there.
Not that they made it easy to get pictures since they were under their rope basket, in the shadows, and I had to shoot with the zoom extended to the max to hopefully catch them between all the obstacles in the way. Not the least of which were the crowds of people watching, and ooing, and laughing as one and then the other got the upper hand. I wore my mask for the entire time I was at the zoo, even when I technically didn’t need to. But it seemed like a good idea to me.
I took over 600 pictures and half of them were too dark and/or out of focus to even think about keeping. But some made me smile anyhow, especially the ones where I wasn’t sure which body part belonged to which one of them.
Here’s hoping you like orangutans because there are a few more of these posts to come.
For instance, that’s not the remnants of a horrible accident that are dripping down the windshield of my car. That’s soap suds, evidence of the big excitement of my day, which was a trip to the car wash. It felt good to get that long overdue chore over with. I like that car wash with its free vacuum stations to get the inside clean also. And as I ran the vacuum over the floors I happened to look across the street at the very cute mini-golf course, and from that angle I saw it as a photo op. A visual trip to the Congo River, complete with a plane crash. I’ve noticed it many times as I have driven up and down that road, but I’ve never played golf there. And if I’m honest it wasn’t quite as hot today, not like it has been. I’ve been using the weather as an excuse to myself for being stuck in the house day after day. Those morning and afternoon thunderstorms coupled with the beastly hot days are all the excuse I need to take refuge in my recliner. Soon we will be into the best of Florida’s weather. I can’t wait.
Good thing I was taking my photos from the sidewalk or I might also have stumbled into the quicksand like this poor fellow…
I know why this recipe caught my eye on Pinterest. Its because I always have a container of vanilla Greek yogurt in the refrigerator, and yesterday I had two because they had been on BOGO at Publix. I never dreamed I’d put a recipe on this blog, but it really isn’t a recipe at all. Except to say that you need to line your cookie sheet with parchment paper and spread your Greek yogurt about 1/4 inch thick over all. What you do after that is up to you. Personally I searched Walmart for a package of the Brookfield clusters I see all the time, except for when I actually wanted to buy them. The idea of chocolate and dried cranberry appealed to me, with a sprinkling of chopped walnuts, which are also always available in my freezer. What I did find was Ocean Spray milk chocolate covered craisins, and I didn’t even need to chop them up. Sprinkle with what ever tickles your fancy and stick the cookie sheet in the freezer for a couple of hours and you’ll be able to break it up like bark, and you’ll have a nice cool treat to enjoy straight out of the freezer. 
Chobani makes a great Greek yogurt, lower sugar, with Madagascar cinnamon. I like to mix in chopped apple and walnut and that can be breakfast, dinner, or dessert. It’s very versatile. As is chopped Cuties and yogurt. I’m trying to use stuff up before I shut this place down and hit the road. I have my work cut out for me…
Perhaps the thing for me to do is to always hike with my friend Betty. I’ve known her for a while now, and while I can’t say that every time she goes hiking she is the only one who comes away with ticks on herself, it happens frequently enough that that I can say that going with her will improve your odds immensely!
This hike was at McKethan Park in Brooksville. The way that the live oaks sprawl makes me wish for my younger years because they would have made fabulous trees to climb. Betty and Linda said they saw a face in that tree trunk so I took a picture, and now I see a lion. A stone chimney is the only remnant of someone else’s story that took place in these woods, and those are etchings in the concrete of the sidewalk. Nature asserting that she is only tolerating our intrusion.
But there was an ulterior motive to this hike. It was a chance for us to channel our inner children. Even though between us we are pushing 200 years of living, those little girls came out to play. I would love to know what a person finding these pictures in the distant future would think. Possibly that we had come across a crime scene along the way? No, it was just us ‘girls’, playing in the woods.
I bought this puzzle as a prop for a blog post. It was a while ago and I can’t remember what I called it or what my point actually was at the time. Something about life falling into place. Ha! I’m sure I was convinced at that moment that happily ever after was just around the corner. When will I learn that ‘ever after’ is an illusion and right this minute is about all you can count on?
I dumped the puzzle pieces out onto the table and took a picture, and then put them back into the box and forgot all about it. But while on a trip recently there was a puzzle out on the table and we all attempted to put it together, and failed, but it was fun. I used to buy a Christmas puzzle every year and we’d all work on it, I loved that family activity. Consequently I bought a table just for that purpose, one with sides that fold down, and it sat up against the wall ignored most of the year. Not any more though. That table is now my do-everything table. All sewing and crafts, plus it’s where I stick things that I can’t figure out what else to do with but also feel like it would be a sin to just throw them away. After they sit there long enough they do get tossed, but it’s like the left-overs in the refrigerator, I have to let them age a while before I can feel saintly about getting rid of them.
And so when I got home from that trip I got the irresistible urge to ‘do’ that puzzle, and even though I told myself that I shouldn’t, that I’d wind up mad at myself with a puzzle half-done and some other use for the table in mind, but I dumped it out anyhow. And sure enough, it has taken over my life ever since. This is exactly the reason I shouldn’t bake, because no matter how I tell myself I’ll put those cookies in the freezer for ‘company’, I eat them. I don’t buy candy, bread, and ice cream for exactly the same reason. I really should listen to that voice in my head once in a while, but I hardly ever do.
Then this long, cold, rainy/overcast, weekend arrived, and I was determined to get that puzzle over-with. So I could get my sewing machine out. And by last night I was convinced that the puzzle-maker had screwed up. I had several puzzle pieces that both belonged in the exact same spot, and there was supposed to be a skinny yellow window in one of the doors of the puzzle, and those pieces were simply not there. I was composing a scathing letter to Big Ben Puzzles in my head, and there may have been a cuss word or two spoken. Enter my uncle, who picked up the problem section of puzzle pieces and moved everything one space to the left, and like a miracle everything fell into place! From now on when I reach an impass in life, and am ready to tear my hair out, I hope I remember to move one space to the left and see how things look from there…
I brilliantly took a picture of the puzzle box, which was small and it was impossible to see the details of the puzzle on the image. Then I put the picture onto the computer screen and zoomed in and I could roll over the image and see the details. See the feature photo. And even that didn’t help. I’ll never know if I’d have figured it out on my own. This determination to do everything by myself isn’t always the best idea.
