A Wildlife Bonanza on the LaChua Trail

Our friends Arnold and Ismini are visiting. We hiked in Paynes Prairie, here in Gainesville, along the LaChua Trail. Among the abundance of wildlife, we saw alligators, herons, ibises, wild bison, wild hoses, sand hill cranes, white pelicans, savannah sparrows. See how many gators you can count in the second photo. They were equally thick all along the trail.

A Lucky Warm Day

Gainesville has had 12 straight days now with temperatures below freezing. The 145 grapefruits that we harvested before the freeze from our 3 trees may well be our last ever harvest. The trees look very, very stressed and may not survive. Several neighbors have had pipes freeze and burst--so far two of them were fortunate enough to have the breaks outside their houses but the third is at this moment pulling out and discarding her carpeting because her break was inside the wall of her family room.

A few days ago we left this north Florida cold and went to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge near West Palm Beach. We visited with Richard and Nancy and spent two days at a meeting of the Florida Friends of the Wildlife Refuges. One of those days was warm enough for an airboat ride at the refuge...and that means warm. Those boats are cold even in summer.

New Year's Eve with Jake and Friends

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain for New Year's Day 2010. A day to hunker down indoors, warm and dry. But New Year's Eve 2009 was a day of dramatic skies for walking the beach in St. Augustine with Jake and friends. And the evening was warm and breezy--just right for going to dinner in the Old City with ole friends, and new!