Happy New Year

This being the last day of the year I thought that this day of all days deserves a post on the blog.

New Years Eve is a time of reflecting and I have to be honest with you all, I am not all that jazzed about reflecting on the past year.

Each year as take down the Christmas tree I place all the fragile ornaments in their holders/tubs/wrappings, usually the last thing to go is the angel at tree top. As I remove her I wonder to myself what will my life be like the next time I see her, lately I add to that wonderment the question, "will I even be around next Christmas?". I think that it is a legitimate question when you reach the half century mark and beyond, especially when I think to myself that my late husband was just 50 when he died. In a few short months I will be older then he ever was. He died just a week shy of his 51st birthday. That is a strange feeling since he was always older then me by 6 years. So my own sense of immortality is called to the forefront as I march into this year. Don't ask - if you are not a widow you won't really get it, like most things having to do with widowhood its a "had to be there" situation if ever there was one.

Warning off topic rant below......

In the widowhood community there is a label given to non-widows, and that is "DGI" aka "Don't Get Its" for the most part it is a very appropriate label, but the widow community tends to be overly sensitive and tends to label anyone who attempts to make us feel better and falls short simply because they don't know what to do, as a DGI. And it is not always used as a nice thing. Widows like to isolate and elevate themselves. They want to think that they belong to an exclusive club that no one can get membership to unless their SO has died, and that is ok and true mostely - but some widows look down their noses at non-widows and like to chatter amongst themselves about how no one can POSSIBLY understand, so why even try "just keep your mouths shut and leave me alone"...of course these are the same widows who get very upset with the people in their lives (non-widows) who don't call them/come over/do things for them, in other words they DO leave them alone - so it is a can't win for losing situation.

End rant.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts running through my head. This is probably the worst Christmas/New Years I have ever spent in my life in so many ways I will not list - it is too depressing to see the words pour out of my head onto something as tangible as this blog. Don't get me wrong, my life has not been a bed of roses, I have had one or two of these things happen to me during many of the holidays of my life, but all of them at once? Never happened, so I am a bit overwhelmed right now and attempting to keep a common sense approach to things - but it is hard.

I hope that at least one of the things (and there are quite a few of them) that is making this a rough time for me manages to change this new year. I would appreciate it if you would also hope that for me as well.

Thanks for reading and hope everyone has a wonderful celebration and new year.

The wild life in this swampy part of the world is quite amazing and there is rarely a week that goes by that I don't see something that makes me go "wow" and run to find the camera.

Currently, we have a little red headed woodpecker ( think Woody) making what seems to be a nest in an old dead palm tree that happens to be center stage in the back yard. It appears to be a home that over the years either many woodpeckers have used or the same one winters here, and then I am assuming, in spring brings his/her little brood into the world. Lately when we take the doggies out for potty time most of the time, this little woodpecker is sitting cozy in his hole/nest and all that is visible are his/her little head and eyes closely monitoring us and the dogs. We are trying not to get too close to the nest so as not to scare him away forever and I have yet to get a decent picture of him/her. All day he spends working on the opening and cleaning out debris from the interior and, I believe, replacing it with new debris to line the nest with anticipation of what might be to come in the next few months. So don't worry I am working on that little photo...but until then I discovered a very pleasant surprise during the last rain.

I have noticed that during, as well as the first sunny day, following a rainy day the wild life comes out in droves. The last rain we had I noticed that we have red breasted robins...a whole flock of them were out in the front yard, I assume digging for worms that were attempting to make their way out of the saturated soil and I noticed something else - a little family of cardinals... wow. I haven't seen cardinals since I lived in Nebraska back in the late 70's. I am assuming that they migrate down here from a colder part of the country and spend the winter here.

Sadly, by the time I changed lenses, set up the tripod for a zoom shot, a school bus had gone by and the noise scared both the robins and the cardinals away.

Luckily, I think that this little family of cardinals is living in a tree that is adjacent to our back yard and I found them later in the day when the sun came out in the back yard. The shot was taken with my portrait lens so there is some distance ( portrait lenses don't zoom very well lol) so that is another goal - to get a better photo that you can actually see the bird and not just a red blob in the yard.

Anyway, trust me, these are cardinals and of course click on the pic and it will show up a bit larger on your computer screen.

Enjoy

A murder of crows

I often wondered why a grouping of crows was called a murder, now I know.

We seem to perhaps be the wintering ground for every North American Black Crow that exists within 10,000 sq miles and we all know what crows do best, they caw. and caw, and caw and caw and when they are not cawing randomly, they do it in unison to provide hours of listening pleasure. I am not kidding, I have to turn up the volume of the TV when they are soaring nearby. It might lead me to murdering a few crows if they don't move on in the near future. Oh and lets not forget they poop too.

When I am outside and they blacken the skies I half expect one of two things to happen, either Tippi Hedren is going to jump out of the bushes and scream at me (re: The Birds), or a tripod is going to break through the trees and point its ray gun at me and disintegrate me ( War of the Worlds the most recent version with Dakota Fanning), of course Tom Cruise should be nearby if that happens, so maybe that is not such a bad thing...

The pictures that I took and posted here represents a mere fraction of the crow population that has been gracing our neighbourhood for the last week or so, but there is only so much that a lens can capture.

Our neighbourhood is defo going to the birds.

Rain

Whelp, it is raining.....all day.....again....

and thats all I am gonna say about that.

Flori-duh driverz

I have driven in various parts of the country in my life, being 50 years old, having acquired my first license when I was just a month or two past my 16th birthday, and someone (a woman no less) who is a pretty good driver and actually likes driving, has given me the opportunity to see a lot of things in my driving career, both good and bad. Of course it is the bad things that stand out and up until my relocation to Florida I thought I had seen it all. I had come to the conclusion that Phoenix and most of California, have the countries worst drivers.

HAH! Not so fast.

They ain't got nuttin' on Florida drivers!!! You people have no clue about safety or being a defensive driver. You are the worst lot of drivers I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and bare in mind I think I have driven a total of MAYBE 5 days since I have arrived, all fraught with moments of terror and disbelief at the ineptness of driving abilities here ( having driven just a handful of times here is a minor inconvenience due to hubby and I just having one car at the moment).

As often as it rains here you would THINK that Floridians would be well versed in the fact that you have to modify your driving habits a bit, you need to turn on your wipers and generally just be careful - not so, rain has the opposite effect here in Florida, drive as fast as you can, don't bother with the windshield wipers ( your speed will wick the water away just fine) and weave in and out of traffic like a well made tartan skirt.

On the other hand when the weather is nice and dry, going 45 mph on the expressway (local interstate system) where the speed limit is 70 AND doing 45 in the fast lane is the norm. Floridians either don't bother getting the turn signal "option" on their cars or if they do it is just some odd thing that sticks out of the steering wheel that is to be ignored ( I honestly didnt realize that turn signals were an option. I have to wonder if speedometers are considered an option on a car as well and not part of standard equipment).

Child safety seats seem to be a nuisance to most families and it is more fun to let the kids climb all around the interior of the car as the driver does 45mph in the fast lane, in the rain (no wipers) down the expressway.

Floridians seem to be in a world of their own when they sit in the enclosed boundaries of their cars. They ignore most other people on the road and do as they please no matter the consequence, that is until you try to pass one. You then, and ONLY then, seem to show up on their radar and the race is on. 45mph now turns into 85mph just to keep you from catching up and passing them.

I don't consider not having a car to drive around in the majority of the time necessarily a bad thing, it has probably kept me alive.

Maybe this is the reason that everyone drives around on their riding lawn mowers. Too expensive to fix a full size car in an accident.

Speaking of drivers here is my Flori-duh story of the week...sad but a wtf moment as well I can't get much past the title....

Tampa woman, 75, dies hot-wiring her own truck

TAMPA — A 75-year-old woman who was authorities say was trying to hot-wire her truck died when the car started suddenly and ran over her.

At about 10:40 Sunday night, Jacqueline Cloward popped the hood to her 1989 Ford F150 truck and was using a screwdriver to start it. The truck was parked in the Sweetbay parking lot at 4519 Gunn Highway and was in drive, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

When it started, it rolled forward over a parking block, knocked Cloward down and ran her over.

The joys of peanut butter

Every morning I am greeted with this...

Recently I was at my doctors for one of my (seems like weekly) appointments and she jumped me pretty good about my eating. By her calculations I am ingesting about 500 calories a day...I sat like a good patient knowing that no matter what she said there was not going to be much of a change in my diet, not if I want to keep my blood sugar under control. I promised to try and do better, but when everything that you think of to eat either leaves your stomach churning or you feeling very indifferent about food, well what are you suppose to do? About the only thing I can tolerate and tastes decent for me lately is toast with peanut butter. I would say that that is my largest meal of the day and I can usually manage to just fource down half of a piece before I deposit the rest of it with a look of disgust in the rubbish. So this has become my morning ritual coffee - first days injection - one hour passes - toast with peanut butter - 2 other oral meds and I can settle in for my day of barfing and trying to work in between throw-ups.

The choods look forward to this ritual as well, they seem to enjoy following me into the bathroom as I deposit my daily intake in the toilet, I dunno maybe the rug is really soft to lay on in there or they are just sadistic dogs? But before that they have come to anticipate the treat that they get while I force feed myself - I always put some peanut butter on my plate and as I am eating they get a little bit of it as well.

So I was sitting there today watching them as they lick the remanents of the peanut butter off my fingers and then off their tongues and thought this is cute, let me get my camera! Ok so they are not technically very good pictures, but you get the idea and I couldn't fit Rikki in the picture she seems to have an aversion to getting too close to the choods so her 15 minutes of fame will have to wait. I just snapped a few before running to the bathroom for the last part of my ritual and thought I would post them here.

The 2nd thing I would like you to notice in the 1st picture are their feet. I had them groomed recently and I was complaining to the groomer about the sort of grass that "you Floridians" think is grass. How it sticks to dog feet and faces and I am tired of picking it all off. So she suggested poodle feet. They are shaved completely, but the legs are left with that teddy bear look.

I owe her my sanity, clean up after the daily outings has become very easy with nothing more then a quick towel to the paws when the grass is covered with dew, rather then spending the next hour picking off vegetation from their feet as well as vacuuming up after them.