No termites for us

When we had the home inspection done when we bought the place, the bug inspector said that there are two types of houses in Florida - ones that had termites and ones that are going to have termites - it is inevitable. He recommended that you shouldn't have any wood touching the ground next to the house. That referred to the mulch in all the garden beds around the house, some 2x6 treated lumber used as a border and a couple of palm trees that were touching the house. To fix all those things we ordered 3 yards of stream pebble rock to act as a replacement for the wood mulch, cement borders tiles and a lot of sweat.

These are Red Tipped Bomeliads. We thinned out the plants and had enough to line the driveway.

This is Polly's favorite - a little water and the roses came out almost instantly.

This is the bed leading up to the front door and was the toughest to do - a lot of the plants are spider plants but they just grow right in the ground instead of in pots as they do back in New England.

A lot of firewood

The people that we bought the Florida property from were very proud of how much of the natural landscape they left intact when they built and they did do a good job. Most of the three acre lot was undisturbed native vegetation - Live Oak, Sable Palm, Palmetto and stuff I have no idea what it is called. Well that was the last owners - we are planning to put in a pool - luckily it doesn't require any trees to be removed but I want to use solar to heat the water in the pool and that required the removal of seven trees in the backyard. I cut down the Saw Palmettos - they are called "Saw" Palmettos because of the saw like teeth on their stems - they hurt - ask my arms and legs. This is the backyard after I cut down the palmettos and small trees.

The guy that I hired (low bidder) does not own a lift bucket, he climbs, ties ropes to higher branches as he cuts off the lower limbs. Primitive he may be but he got all the trees down and none landed on the house.

Here he is trimming up the only tree we left stranding in the near backyard.

Al Gore would be proud of me again - cut down all the trees but I'm not burning a non-renewable fuel to heat the pool water - damn the tree huggers.

Weird Fruit

We went to the Red Barn Flea Market which is a great place to buy fruits and vegetables. A lot of the vendors have cut up samples of their produce for you to sample. We tried a slice of Pomelo and it was delicious, kind of like a sweet grapefruit.

The picture shows it compared to a normal sized tomato - it was 7-8 inches in diameter. But when you cut into it you find it has a very thick rind. The actual edible fruit size is about the size of a grapefruit.

Going to the opposite extreme is the Limon. This comes from a Limon tree in Gary and Sandra's fruit orchard (their home lot). This one is smaller than a regular lemon (that's the same tomato used in above pic) but what a powerhouse of taste - it just full of juice.

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Still Fixing things up

Way back in last summer, my son Wayne cut some boards out of a red oak tree and a curly maple tree. I wanted to build some bunk beds for Florida out of the wood but we first had to dry it so we built a solar kiln at his place and a month later the wood was dry enough to work with. So in September I cut up the wood and built a bunk bed out of the red oak. I had a talented woodworking team to help me. Polly had worked at Yankee Remodelers for years so this just came naturally to her.

I took this bed and another one I had built for the Beachpond cottage in Voluntown down to Florida with parts tied on top of and in the back of my pickup truck and here are the two bunk beds all assembled down in the kids room in Florida. (I'll use the curly maple wood to build a replacement for the one I took from Voluntown.)

Another project gets done - We have this long bare wall in our bedroom and couldn't decide what to do with it. We saw these wallpaper like murals in a paint store and decided that that might be a nice treatment. So I order a 8 ft high by 12 ft long mural of a tropical sunset - appropriate for a bedroom, right. You put some guide lines on the wall, apply paste to the back of the panel and glue them up.

It came out OK but not great - there goes our plans to use one on the wall in the dining room.

Weather Report- another cold day in Florida - it's only going to be in the mid- 70's again.

Happy Birthday

Yeah, it happens every year for the past 39 years - I keep getting older and older - but this year we are down here in Florida all by ourselves - will anyone remember? Oh look the UPS guy has delivered a box - it says don't open until Nov. 5th - I wonder what's in it - and then a second box comes with the same instructions.

Well, oh my God, there were 70 presents in them and they were labeled 1 to 70 and the instructions were to open them in order. But why 70, I'm only 39 - if it were 2 for every year it should be 78 presents.

I opened present after present - had to take a break - when you get to be 39 every thing is an effort. Look what I got - a bunch of tools (everytime I do something down here, I have to go out and buy another tool but not anymore), pictures of everyone so I don't forget what they look like, all kinds of cooking tools - that will help me to become a great chef - towels and all kinds of stuff.

What a great birthday - I have a wonderful family.

What a table!

Hey, we got a new table the other day. I bet it will make a great table for the kids to eat at on Christmas as we adults eat at the big dining room table.

Here we are using it for a dinner party, we men cooked and served the meal to the girls as we always do - they are so spoiled - we men eat in the kitchen in between serving courses.

But after we men clean up and do the dishes we take over the table to play some poker - Hey look at the table has changed into an eight person poker table - like magic.

After I lost all my money to Gary we decide to play some bumper pool - My God, the table has changed again from a card table to a bumper pool table.

While we were playing pool the girls got into the liquor cabinet and started to get pretty rowdy. Good thing they didn't have to drive.

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If you didn't recognize the other couple, it was my cousin-in-laws, Sandra and Gary Fenstemaker, they live on the Gulf and have every type of fruit tree on their property. When they came over to visit they brought the excess fruit from their Star Fruit Tree. They are delicious but there was a lot of them - we gave some to our neighbors (first time we ever met them), went over to the Masonic Campground and everyone we met we gave them a plastic bag of them, Polly looked up a recipe and made 7 jars of delicious star fruit jam and finally we have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, cut up on ice cream and for snacks.

I'm too smart for my own good

It started last year when I was staying in the Masonic Campground. Some of the campers put out satellite dishes and used them for the TV in their camper. When I talked to them they said they had satellite tv back home, took the satellite receiver from their home with them in the camper and just bought another satellite dish to use with their camper. This sounded good to me - just one satellite TV bill and I'd have TV reception in both houses.

So when I got back to Connecticut I cancelled my Comcast cable and had Dish TV installed. I signed up for the option to have two receivers (only costs another $5 to rent the second receiver) and I'd take the second receiver to Florida and leave it there. What Dish TV doesn't know wouldn't hurt them. When I get to Florida I'll unplug the receiver in Connecticut and visa versa when I come back to CT. As far as Dish is concerned they will only see signals being received from one location and they will be none the wiser that I've got two homes hooked up to them.

I went online and ordered another Satellite dish along with cabling and the tools needed to find the satellite and align the dish to it. When it came in, I practiced setting the new dish up in Connecticut, connecting it to the second receiver and a TV. After a day of struggling I got it all to work with a good picture - so I figure I'm all set to go to Florida.

We get down to Florida and before I attach the satellite dish to the house I attach it to an existing pole and do the same setup that I did with it back in CT. Try and try but I couldn't get any satellite to come in. After two days of trying, I give up and call a guy listed as an installer for satellite antennas. I tell him what I'd like to do and he says he could do it for me but why don't I just call up Dish and they will install it for free. So I called Dish TV up and said I had moved and need my antenna installed. They scheduled me for the next day - their tech shows up - spends almost the entire day attaching the antenna, running the wires into the attic, down through the walls into existing cable boxes, and of course in was a 90 degree day and the attic (which only has a crawl space) must have be over 100 degrees. But he did it and everything works. Now I'm still under the impression that Dish TV thinks that I've moved to Florida - the receiver I left in CT is off so how would they know different.

I get an email from Amy where she says she stayed overnight at the cottage and after they found the receiver was unplugged, plugged it back in and watched TV with her kids that night. Wait a minute - I was down in Florida watching TV the same night - and DISH TV didn't notice there were two houses receiving TV under the same billing - Well I guess I made a big deal about nothing - I didn't have to set up my Florida satellite on the QT - I didn't have to buy all that special hardware so I could set it up by myself and I guess I didn't have to disconnect one receiver when I was using the other out-of-state. I'm just to smart for my own good. By the way, how do you like my 50" TV - You can never buy a TV that is too big.

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