Category: Florida

Home Sweet Home Depot

I spent Tuesday afternoon wandering about the garden section of our nearest Home Depot. I don’t garden, but Studly Doright has promised we’ll fix up our courtyard area this week. And not a moment too soon–I feared hurricane cleanup crews were going to mistake our residence for a disaster area and begin removing debris from the premises. 

Studly and I have a great many ideas for improving the courtyard-style entryway. A few of them are even approximately the same.

I know that on the right side I want a garden of low maintenance potted plants and a small potting bench, with a scattering of stepping stones similar to these:



I picture the area as welcoming, and not at all formal. Studly and I can’t quite agree on the material to cover the ground. Do we want mulch or river rocks? 


If we go with river rocks, I think dark ones will look spiffy with the red brick of our home.

And the plants? I just have no idea. The area receives full sunlight for most of the day, so something that will grow well receiving the sun’s ardent attention is a must.


We are edging into fall here in Florida, so I’ll need to take that into consideration. Thank goodness for Google and YouTube and every other modern resource at my fingertips. But if any real gardeners have suggestions I’d love to hear from you.

Peace, people!

There’s No Place Like Home for a Faerie

Our faerie family decided today that they could return to their home.


They still have some cleanup to do, but they gathered in their garden to thank me and all of you for supporting them during Hurricane Hermine. 


They’d so admired one of my decorative plates that I presented it to them as a gift. I think it will be appreciated by the wee folk more than it ever was by me. And it makes a colorful backdrop for their garden.

Quite frankly, it was time they moved out. It’s not that I didn’t want them staying in the house, but the cats were having a hard time remembering that they’d pledged not to eat them. I can’t imagine the bad karma that might ensue from having one’s cats devour a fae family.

Peace, people!

Havana Shopping, Part 2

The Shoppes at Havana Trading Company in Havana, FL, is a fun place to spend a couple of hours. Around every corner one can find something to delight: candles, clothing, tea, antiques, and that’s just for starters.

When I visited yesterday I met Melba Ginsberg, the manager of Melba’s Cafe, and Karyn Burke, the owner of the “Broken Shell Boutique” a purveyor of beachy eclectica. The Broken Shell is just one of many wonderful shops inside The Shoppes at Havana Trading Company.


In her shop Karyn sells everything a displaced beach bum might need: sandals, beach towels, stationery, jewelry, fragrances for body and home, and candles among other things. Mermaids are welcome there, so I felt right at home. 

The vivacious Karyn Burke. She’s a joy!

Obviously I wasn’t the only shopper yesterday, so rather than monopolize Karyn’s time I wandered about The Shoppes and snapped some photos.

i have a hankering for this accordion.
This little three-drawer chest is gorgeous.

I hope these photos make you want to pay a visit to The Shoppes at Havana Trading Company. I’m ready to go back!

Peace, people!

Havana Shopping, Part 1

I discovered a gem of a cafe today– Melba’s Place inside The Shoppes of Havana Trading Company just down the road from Doright Manor in Havana, Florida.


The lovely and loquacious Melba. That’s her as a child in the picture on the wall.

Manager Melba Ginsberg mixes up a mean chicken salad. I had the “Dilly Dally” salad. Oh. My. Goodness. It was so fresh and delicious I darn near swooned. 

I tried a sample of “The Coronation” and found it equally tasty, but I might have a an addiction to dill. I’d start looking for a Dill Anon group, but I’m not ready to give it up.

While I was making a fool of myself inhaling “Dilly Dally” Melba and I visited about her early life in Florida. She was born in South Georgianot far from Havana, but her family moved to the Lake Okeechobee area when she was a child. She grew up in a small town where she was a majorette in the marching band.


Melba told me that when she went to choose an instrument from the band room (everyone had to play an instrument) only the bass drum and baritone remained. Melba isn’t very tall and I giggled imagining her toting around the big bass drum. She chose the baritone, though, which isn’t that much smaller, and played it in concert band.

Melba now finds herself near the place of her birth having returned to the area to be close to her daughter. On a visit here Melba’s daughter fell in so in love with Havana that she opened a business here, The Shoppes at Havana Trading Company.

I took way too many photos of The Shoppes to put into one post, so I’ll continue this later, but check them out online in the meantime. And if you live anywhere near Havana, The Shoppes are well worth a trip. 

If I held my breath just right and chanted in the proper key maybe this link will provide more information. 

@ShoppesHTC
If not, here’s Melba’s card, charmingly posed on my denim covered thigh. This is a fancy blog, don’t you know.



Melba’s cafe features heavenly ice cream, too! I had a scoop of caramel sea salt. So much for my diet. 

Peace, people!

Bed and Breakfast Interlude

Twelve hours without electricity (courtesy of Hurricane Hermine) and the joys that it brings (hot showers, air conditioning) resulted in Studly Doright and I staying in a Bed and Breakfast Inn on Friday night. 

We’d tried to find a hotel in Tallahassee, but the ones with electrical power were all completely booked, while ones without power wouldn’t have improved our lot. I looked farther afield and found the 1872 John Denham House in Monticello, FL.

1872 John Denham House

Even though the grounds of the inn had suffered at the hands of Hermine, this gorgeous home experienced a loss of power only briefly and was an air conditioned oasis on a hot, humid Florida day. The cool air felt so good when we stepped into the foyer that I almost cried.

The foyer

The inn’s registry in the foyer
 

The inn’s proprietress gave us a brief tour of the first floor before showing us to our room. 

The parlor
Another view of the parlor
A view of the dining room from the parlor
Formal dining room
The formal dining room
 

Studly Doright and I were fortunate to book the honeymoon suite. It was a great deal more charming than the room we stayed in at The Camelot Inn in Amarillo, TX, 40 years ago.

I took these photos after our night in the room, so the poorly made bed is my fault. It was impeccably staged for our arrival.

Each room in the house featured a fireplace. This was ours.
The claw foot bathtub made for an interesting, yet surprisingly efficient shower setting.
 

After a restful night Studly arose early to play his Saturday golf game, leaving me to enjoy breakfast without him. I didn’t think to take take photos of the meal, but it was outstanding, consisting of a fluffy soufflé, fresh fruit, yogurt, and homemade biscuits with a variety of homemade jams and jellies. 

I met two of the other guests at breakfast, Gordon and Addison, who are members of a meteorological research team from the University of Oklahoma. The two men used the inn as a base while studying Hurricane Hermine. I pried as much information from them as possible, trying not to be too obnoxious. I’m fairly sure I failed in that regard. 

Sensing my interest they provided directions to their rig parked at the edge of town, so on my way home I stopped by to snap some photos:


I sincerely hope the researchers gained useful information for future hurricane survivors. Specifically, how do we avoid loss of electricity? Now that would be a worthy project.

Peace, people!

Hermine’s Exit

Hurricane Hermine arrived in a fury of wind and rain while Studly Doright and I lay sleeping Thursday night. Downgraded to a tropical storm shortly before impacting the Tallahassee area, she inflicted damage nonetheless. 

The electricity went out around 1:45 a.m. EDT, well ahead of Hermine which hit us at 4:30 on Friday morning, and did not come back on until sometime on Saturday–long enough for all of the perishables in our refrigerator to be rendered unusable, but thankfully before the contents of the freezer could be damaged. I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning out the fridge. 

We still don’t have cable or internet service at Doright Manor, so I’m sitting in a cafe in Tallahassee typing this as Studly plays golf. As long as the links are open life does go on.

We could have stayed at home Friday night, but the heat accumulated during the day made the un-air conditioned house uncomfortable. We looked for a hotel in Tallahassee, but the ones that had power were completely booked. We ended up staying in a bed and breakfast inn in Monticello, FL, and once I have access to my own internet connection I’ll share photos of the beautiful home in which we stayed. 

If one merely glances out the window the world looks perfectly normal.



The sun is shining, birds are singing, squirrels are squirreling. But just a trip around the neighborhood gives clues as to the force of Hermine’s wrath. Unfortunately I’m unable to share any additional photos right now. I’m hoping that’s due to the Internet at the cafe and not something going on with my WordPress account.

Downed trees and fallen branches littered the roadways. Leaves stripped from branches were plastered to the sidewalks. Businesses and homes sustained broken windows. But as far as I know there were no deaths or serious injuries as a result of the storm, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Thanks to all my followers and readers who’ve been concerned with our safety. I received so many thoughtful posts that until today I was unable to respond to. Off I go to the grocery store to buy replacements for perishable items. At least one really good thing came from Hermine–the inside of my refrigerator is sparkling clean.

By the Numbers

Note: No joking in this note, the number 651008 represents the number of brave U.S. men and women killed in combat. God, I’m sick of wars started by old men and fought by young people. I didn’t know the meaning of the number until after the post was written. A sobering thought. Carry on. 

A friend from childhood posted a number on Facebook several days ago and asked what we thought it represented: 

651008

My first guess was the mileage on a vintage truck. No, it wasn’t that. My next guess was that it is the number assigned to an automotive part. So far, my friend hasn’t provided the answer. I’m waiting impatiently for a response.

In the meantime I’ve been contemplating numbers. Did you know you can google your exact age and a calculator will determine the number of days and months you’ve been on this earth?

On Wednesday, August 31, I was this old:


I feel like I should have more days than that to my credit. Surely nights spent pacing the floor with a cranky baby count for more. And if I’ve been alive for 3,125.7 weeks, that means I’ve survived over 3,000 Mondays. Doesn’t that alone deserve a medal of some sort?

Logically, my brain skipped to wondering how far we are from the planet Neptune. Thanks again to Google, I found this information:


Too far for a weekend destination, and I hear the weather is terrible there this time of millennium. The average surface temperature is a balmy -218° C. Still, that’s a lovely group of numbers.

Much closer to home, did you realize that humans have an estimated 32.7 trillion cells in their bodies give or take a few trillion depending on the metrics used?

I still have no idea what 651008 signifies, but if I google its properties, I get a page chock full of information:

And the above showed only a part of the page. Well, this made me wonder what properties the number 1 has.


Kind of fascinating that the lowly number 1 has so much going for it.

Life is good here at Doright Manor. Good enough that I can spend my morning fiddling with Google and contemplating numbers as a possible hurricane approaches from the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of approximately 504 miles. 


Maybe this would be a good time to visit Neptune.

Peace, people.

Snapshot #’s 16 and 17

Note: This post was written several days pre-hurricane. Carry on.

Would you look at this? The faeries agreed to move in with three conditions: 

1) They can stay on the screened in porch.

2) The cats have to stay at least 15 yards away.

3) A suitable temporary home be found.

The cats were willing to give in to the distance provision, and I’m okay with the faeries using the screened in porch as long as the storm doesn’t threaten that area. 

I had two bird houses from which to choose, and after looking at photos of both, the faeries said this one would do. 


I asked if I could snap a photo so that everyone would know they were safe. While they agreed to the photo, they were surprised that anyone even knew of their existence.

I assured them that a great many folks were concerned about their welfare. 

The cats are keeping their oath to refrain from eating our guests. I’d say in the realm of human-faerie-feline relations this experiment has been an unmitigated success.

Peace, people.

Housing Crisis

Note: This was a pre-prepared blog post. For all you know I could be lying trapped beneath a downed pine tree in the neighbor’s yard, having been tossed there by Hurricane Hermine. Carry on.

On Saturday I purchased a special house at the Farmers’ Market in downtown Tallahassee.


Notice anything unusual? No door! But that’s ok, because it’s a house for bats.


And the entryway is in the bottom of the house. Cool, eh?

I figured with our do-nothing GOP controlled congress and our equally lame GOP governor ignoring the Zika crisis I should do my part to cut down on the mosquito population. What better way than by inviting bats to live in the neighborhood?

Of course in order to attract bats the house probably needs to be hung. Preferably outside.

Studly Doright isn’t in the mood to hang my new purchase (we are in the middle of a huge storm right now, so I suppose I’ll forgive him). It could be awhile before we’re ready to invite bats to Doright Manor.

In the meantime, I’ve been researching bat houses and ways to attract the flying mammals at https://batconservation.org/.

Apparently Florida is host to at least 14 different kinds of bats. Hopefully at least one kind will like our house well enough to move in. I’ve been told that none of the commercial attractants are effective, so one has to mount the house on a sufficiently tall pole, in an area of the yard that receives ample sunlight, and wait for occupancy. 

Locating the bat house near a lake is supposed to increase the likelihood of the house being occupied, so we’ve got that going for us, but the literature indicates it could be months, maybe even years before we have bats living in the house. 

Considering their inability to take decisive action, these bats might be Republicans.


Peace, people!

The Calm Before the Storm

I’m a bit fascinated by our approaching storm. Hermine is still rated as a tropical storm; although, meteorologists expect to upgrade her to a hurricane when she makes landfall tonight. 

I shot a brief video that I hope you’ll enjoy. And hey, if I get blown away, you’ll have something to remember me by. I do have two or three posts queued up, though, so you won’t know I’m gone for a bit. 

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Peace, people!