Summer arrived early this year – May was noticeably warmer than usual, though it didn’t hit horribly unpleasant levels of heat. Somehow though, even with a late/non-existent spring, we’re having a record year for blooming. Remember the pollen carpet we had for weeks? Thankfully that’s been gone for awhile, but everything else has been blooming at a record rate – I’ve never seen our plants so lush.
After fearing last fall that our frangipani was nearly dead, it’s now been blooming for weeks at full foliage and with full blooms. Our little desert rose is so heavy with blooms that the branches are drooping. The oak trees are fully leafed, creating more shade than we’ve seen in ten years (they are also bigger by a factor of twenty!). From my desk I see a massive poinciana tree behind a neighbor’s house over on the next street; the huge expanse of lush, flame-colored flowers has been lighting up the skyline for weeks now. Read more: Memorial Day and more
Life’s been very quiet at the Inlet this last week. The winds finally died, and we’ve had increasingly higher tides, so fishing is non-existent. We’re expecting full-moon high tides on Thursday, which means the tides will likely swamp the seawall. That’s always a sight to see – water in the parking lot, fish coming up through the water drains, seaweed littering every possible surface.
Meanwhile it’s been quiet, quiet, quiet; today not a single soul was fishing and the parking lot had perhaps four cars.
We took a much needed break over the weekend – Chelsea was even more tired than I, and though we got up and headed out on Saturday, we got only three miles before I suggested we quit and return home. After only a moment’s thought, Chelsea gladly agreed. We’ve been doing serious exercise every day for over five weeks, seven days a week. It’s okay to let go now and then. Read more: Tidbits and Catching Up
Bike rides to the Inlet. Weight workouts. Daily tasks. Body for Life. Getting projects done. The last week and a half we’ve kept chugging along steadily.
The Body for Life project is taking over our lives, in a good way. Each day starts at six a.m. or shortly thereafter. Four days a week we head out immediately for the Inlet for a twenty-three-plus mile bike ride. We take about two hours for the whole ride, including a short break at the Inlet.
Riding and the Inlet
The Inlet never fails to entertain us. Last week we saw a local fisherman catch a barracuda. As Chelsea took photos, the fisherman worked to get the hook out; he’d already promised the barracuda to three other fishermen who wanted to use it for bait. I was front and center watching the whole process, and when the fisherman got the hook out, he handed the barracuda to me, on the line, telling me to hold it. Read more: Chugging Along
Mother’s Day 2008 found us at Café du Monde in New Orleans eating beignets and sipping café au lait. We’d left the Lakeview District the previous afternoon with our Couchsurfing host Darryl Goodwin (and his dog Maria), bicycling eighteen miles through New Orleans, taking a ferry across the Mississippi, and spending the night in the Algiers district.
Mother’s Day morning we bicycled back through the same route, but wandered through the French Quarter on our return, stopping for the world famous coffee and beignets at Café du Monde before heading back to Darryl’s house.
Mother’s Day 2009 found us in Oak Grove, right on the Gulf in southwest Louisiana, staying with Jo Ann Nunez. By the time Mother’s Day rolled around, we’d been staying with Jo Ann for over a month and had begun to feel a part of the local community. Mother’s Day started at the Baptist Church, celebrating the first use of the main area of the church after its post-Hurricane Ike repairs. Read more: Mother’s Day 2010
How it happened is not a big surprise, but Chelsea and I have both gained significant body fat over the last two years; I much more so than Chelsea. Stress contributed greatly – it’s not been an easy several years with the economy having wiped out our income sources – but maybe the fried fish, crawfish, shrimp po’boys, cracklins, deep-fried turkey, fried alligator, venison sausage, boudin, beignets, ice cream pistolets, funnel cakes, fried oysters, Blue Bell ice cream, and fried Snickers Bars we consumed on a steady basis during our year in Louisiana had an effect.
Whatever happened, the bottom line is grim. We need to lose inches, lose weight, and replace body fat with muscle weight.
We did well after arriving home in terms of “normalizing” our eating, but letting go of the Blue Bell Moolenium Crunch and Mocha Almond fudge was a struggle. We bought Alex a Ninja smoothie maker and started drinking healthy smoothies; I ordered the herbal formulas LeanCare (helps maintain normal processing of fats) and LiverCare (supports normal liver function); we started taking them regularly. Read more: Body For Life
The siren call of our trip is never far from our awareness – it underlies everything we do. Though we find ourselves currently in the midst of other projects, each one of them gets us farther and farther along the way to leaving for seven or more years, knowing that everything is shipshape on the home front.
We continue to work on the fundamentals of preparation for leaving. It’s been a combination of gradually acquiring the clothing, gear, and equipment that we need for being on the road; doing research for what we need; and doing essential organizational projects.
Research projects
Finding what’s out there to make our lives easier feels like a full-time job. That’s my job. I spend hours on the computer looking up products, reading reviews, checking prices, till I find some decent possibilities. Read more: Getting organized for getting back on the road
One of the very best things about being home is seeing our family; on the road we missed them so much at times it was a palpable ache.
Paul and Denise and Chandler
My oldest son Paul lives with his wife Denise and son Chandler in Fort Lauderdale. Paul and Denise are extremely busy and that might be understating the case; they are real estate agents – Denise is also a mortgage broker. With the mess the real estate market is in here in South Florida, they work every day, often up to eighteen hours a day. Sunday is their only day off, and they are usually incommunicado, needing to recover to be ready for the week.
Chelsea and I don’t have a car, Paul and family live forty-five minutes away by car, and it’s a miserable long bike ride down there. That means we see them intermittently at best. Read more: Family
Life hasn’t been all about work, work, work, though it seems like it most of the time. Over the last three months we did get out of the house a few times, sometimes just for errands.
Movies
Late in January an old friend of Chelsea’s (a former boyfriend) called and invited us to a movie and lunch. Needless to say we were delighted to accept. After a lunch at a local Greek restaurant, we watched Sherlock Holmes in theaters. We’ve only seen movies in theaters twice since June of 2007 – hard to believe…! The last time we were in a theater was with Lynn and Hansford Hair (and Lea and James) in Lafayette LA when we saw the new Batman back in 2008.
We didn’t think the movie (Sherlock Holmes) was that great, but we loved getting out to the theaters. Lior, Chelsea’s friend, came back to the house afterwards and talked programming on websites with us.
Meanwhile we signed up for Netflix. For under $10 a month (we’re sharing it with Tyler so it’s only $5 a month each) we can watch unlimited movies online and we get one by mail. Chelsea and I have taken full advantage of that; we’ve caught up on a lot of great movies, watched many classics (all the Bogie movies), and seen some really, really terrific films. It’s our favorite way to end a long hard day, or to “veg out” on our few rest days. Read more: Mini adventures and other stories
Like the rest of the country, we’ve had our fair share of unusual winter weather. We had an all-time record breaking cold spell in January, and one of the coldest Marches in memory – in fact, it’s been the coldest winter we remember in the ten years we’ve lived here. As if that’s not enough, it’s been the wettest winter in years.
Spring came really late, along with a record pollen year – I’ve never seen anything like it. To make matters worse, we had looong stretches of twenty to thirty mph winds, often gusting up to thirty-five mph or better. Not only did it wreak havoc with the pool, blowing an unending supply of pollen, leaves, and grit into the pool (which then had to be cleaned out), but it made riding really unpleasant.
Riding
Despite the cold and very dark mornings, we have kept up our riding, although intermittently. When the alarm goes off at 6:15 and it’s cold and pitch black in the room, it takes a supreme act of will to roll our feet out onto the floor and get ready to go. Once we get out the door we’re fine, because we really love the riding.
We’ve been so tired with our projects that awakening to a fiercely windy day, or rainy day, or 35 degree day didn’t inspire us to want to ride, especially since we had a huge backlog of tasks to do. We figured that when spring really arrived and the weather got better, or we got rested, we’d start our rides in earnest. Read more: Weather, riding and adventures
What we thought was “pretty good” in our pool status paled in comparison to the real thing.
Yes, we finally got the money organized to get a new dirt catcher and filter. (Check out the before and after photos in the blog. It’s really astonishing.) Combined with two rounds of chlorine; running the pool pump with its new filter for forty-eight hours; and a last vacuuming to suck up the remaining bits of grit and leaves on the bottom – voila – a gorgeous pool.
The pool, with its sparkling blue water, looked like an ad for Florida, tempting us to leap in and relax on pool floats with a drink in our hands (picture tiny umbrellas and little chunks of fruit in the drink).
The bad news? We were thoroughly entrenched in a lengthy unseasonable cold spell, and being in the pool was the last place we wanted to be. We had hopes, however, that the weather would change soon. Meantime, Alex scheduled his second annual Eggs n’ Kegs party for St. Patrick’s Day, a month away. Read more: Pool
