Savannah Smiles


We had a great day in Savannah, beautiful weather, nice people, good food, and no bad health issues. The day started with breakfast at Famous Amos with Tim and Karen. They went on to kayaking and we drove to Savannah. Penny knew the way to the visitor information center where we parked.


We talked with a nice lady at the information counter who outlined a walking tour for us on the map. She told us that the trolley tours were currently having a price war and a 90-minute tour was only $10. That’s half-price. We thought it would be a good way to see Savannah so we started our tour of the town with the trolley. It was a good choice. It covered all of the sites and the driver provided interesting historical comments and bad jokes. It also gave us an idea of where we would wander on-foot later in the day.


The trolley dropped us off at the open market area. We wandered down to the riverfront looking for a place to eat lunch. We asked a tour guide for recommendations and ended up at a place called Huey’s. Penny had shrimp and grits; I had pasta jambalaya, all with a view of the river through the open glass doors.


Then it was off to taking pictures of buildings, fountains and shady parks. It is difficult to get good pictures in Savannah because there are huge Live Oak trees everywhere. If the aren’t covering the subject they are shading it.


The impression of Savannah I am left with is one of gorgeous architecture, beautiful shady parks and a place that we will return to again.


Before this trip my niece, Debbie, suggested getting a GPS navigation unit for the trip. I went on line and found a basic unit for a good price. We didn’t use it to get to Savannah but when we left I punched in the address of our hotel in SC. It guided us beautifully. The only mistakes were made when we didn’t follow the unit’s directions.


We also used it to find the church we will go to in the morning.


It’s our bed time so I’ll post this with no pictures.

Later in the trip I may add them.

Tomorrow is Charleston.

Big Lagoon


Penny and I played hooky today and went on an explore. It was a perfect day and hey, we can do it!


We drove over to Big Lagoon State Park. (http://www.floridastateparks.org/biglagoon/)
During my channel surfing on TV when I was healing I ran across one of those tourist information shows that talked about this State Park. It looked interesting. So today, sort of as a dry run for our upcoming vacation we headed off to the park.


We had no schedule to keep so on the way we drove over to Navarre Beach to see how it looked after the hurricanes. There is a lot of damage still evident out there. Except for a 10-foot berm that they have made the whole area is flat. All the dunes, on both sides of the island are gone. There is an incredible amount of construction in progress also. This includes some very tall condos. The road through the national seashore is closed so we had to back-track back across the bridge and go west on hwy 98.


We don’t take 98 that often because it becomes a parking lot twice a day. Other times it is just plain dangerous. We are always amazed at how much development has occurred on that stretch of road. Where there was once nothing, now there are Wal-Marts, Lowe’s, Publix, new churches and new housing developments. Of course there are many more stoplights.

We stopped on the west side of Pensacola to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. We got to the park just about lunch time, rolled down the windows, listened to our book on tape and ate our sandwiches with a view of the water. The park is just recovering from severe hurricane damage. Most of the walkways were new and the observation tower was freshly renovated. Most of it was new wood. The park is a good place for boating and swimming. It is right on the Florida border and has a view of the bridge to Perdido Key.


As you can see from the pictures it is flat land with saw grass and slash pines. Besides the lagoon there is a small lake and, of course, the mouth of Perdido River and associated beaches. This could be a neat area to kayak too if we run out of places in FWB.

We spent about 2 hours at the park. Then we went to a couple of fabric shops in P’cola to find fabric for Christy to reupholster her office chairs. 2 stores and 2 phone calls later the fabric was ours.


Then it was time to head home. We got back around 3:45. All in all it was a fun day. Penny and I like to go off and explore and take pictures. Penny got a good butterfly picture, too. She got close up and personal with a Blue Heron, too.

I was alone, I took a ride

I drove for the first time in 5 weeks. It was just a trip to the library but as I headed out, listening to the music of 1966 on the CD Karen gave me, I felt a little bit of euphoria. I was surprised to feel it since like I said it had only been 5 weeks, but I guess having the freedom and ability to jump in the car and go somewhere can be something special. So I turned the volume up a little on the Beatles “Good Day Sunshine” and just enjoyed the drive. Coincidentally Kathy sent me a joke today about an 80 year old man who just got married – not for sex – not for money – not for good looks – but because she could still drive. So the next time you jump in your car think about how fortunate you are.


Have you seen the Hummer adds where someone cuts in line ahead of a woman and child so she goes and buys a Hummer and everything is OK. I never understood that add. How does buying an expensive gas-guzzler make things OK? After having my little euphoria encounter in the car I began to wonder if there are people out there whose lives are so empty that the only place they feel good is driving in their car. Given that then maybe the add makes sense.


My right arm is doing much better than my left did right after I removed the sling. I have to be careful because it feels like I can do more than I really should. I guess I was really getting used to the sling. Last night I dreamed I missed catching a ball because of my sling.

Tomorrow is my physical therapist’s birthday. She turns 32 and is starting to feel old. Penny, not missing any opportunity to provide food, baked a lemon cake and brownies for me to bring in today. Everyone at the place thanked Penny and me many times over. Penny does good work!
I had to fix my cat feeder both times it operated today. When I fixed the first issue I misaligned the wheel and thus it did not turn the dispenser the second time. I expected to have bugs to iron out. After I made the second adjustment I ran it through 3 cycles without a hitch. Now we will see if it finally works without a hitch in the morning.

I’m Free

Not free from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, just free from the sling I’ve been in for the past 5 weeks. I have permission to drive again. Physical Therapy goes to phase 2 – range of motion and strengthening. I tried sleeping in the bed last night instead of the recliner. The only issue I had was that I reached out to pet Brie when I was half asleep, forgetting that my arm does not do that right now. It was sore for a while after that, but nothing serious. The recliner is still more comfortable for my shoulders, but I like the normalcy of the bedroom.


My Rube Goldberg adventure continues. Today I completed the new design MOD III cat food dispenser. As promised, it is driven by an electric drill that turns a bicycle wheel (using a circular wire brush for traction). Every revolution of the wheel brings around a bolt that hits the dispenser wheel causing it to rotate in short steps each time it is hit. The rotating dispenser passes under the food supply where gravity fills a cup at the top of the rotation. The dispenser continues to rotate (a sleeve keeps the food from spilling until it is over the dish) until it dumps out at the bottom of the rotation into the feeding dish. The drill is turned on for 1 minute every 12 hours and in one minute the dispenser makes 1 full rotation dispensing the cup full of food. The design actually works. It can hang up, so I am going to do whatever fine-tuning may be needed this week. Hopefully it will continue to work and the kitties will have a food supply while we are gone.


In current events I find it interesting that when the Pope makes a faux pas and uses a quote that refers to violence and killing and Muslims, the reaction from the Muslims is violence (burning churches) and killing (a nun).

So now it is back to catching up on all those things I put off while in the sling and planning for our drive up north.

Yellow Sky

It’s been an unremarkable week. Monday started in a strange way. It was cloudy dark and getting ready to rain. Then the clouds opened enough for some light to get through. Everything was bathed in an eerie yellow light. Now I know about red sky in the morning…. But what does yellow sky in the morning mean? For us it meant imminent rain. I googled yellow sky and found that there was an old western movie made with that name, but no explanation of the weather phenomena and what it meant.


I went to PT on M-W-F this week and can measurably feel my shoulder getting better each day. It is back to the doctor tomorrow to see if I lose my sling and start driving again. The trip up north is riding on my being able to drive.


On Wednesday my auto cat feeder Mod II quit working reliably. I’m going to have to start from scratch with a new design. The problem is not that the thing doesn’t work. It does great for 3 days and then by design, I guess, turns off. So tomorrow it will be Mod III. I’ve got an idea that involves a bicycle wheel, electric drill, and a rotating dispenser. We will see if I can get something to work reliably for more than 3 days. Rube who?


Our homeowner’s insurance bill came this week. It is 2 ½ times what it was last year. I guess that’s the price we pay for living in paradise. It is interesting that the monthly bill for just insurance is almost equivalent to what our mortgage payment was and that included insurance and property taxes! I’m beginning to worry more about insurance cost in retirement than medical costs. Just keep those hurricanes away!

I E-mailed the folks up north and told them our plans. Both Donna and Heidi offered to put us up. We are staying with Donna this time. Penny is going to cook dinner for everyone on Saturday evening when we are there. Donna and Heidi are going to try to gather up the relatives for the dinner. We are less than two weeks away from our trip. The leaves are just beginning to turn up there now. If the Vermont foliage web site is correct we should be up there for peak color from 10-12 Oct. Maybe this year we will see the Sun and not a yellow sky.

9/11

September 11 is the 254th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (255th in leap years). There are 111 days remaining.

1906 - Mahatma Gandhi starts Non-Violence movement

1941 - Ground broken for the construction of The Pentagon.

1962 - The Beatles record their debut single, Love Me Do.

BIRTHS
1967 - Harry Connick, Jr., American singer
1977 - Ludacris, American rapper



There is a lot of media coverage on this 5th anniversary of the terrorist attack. I would have been happier if the most remarkable thing about this day remained as the day that the Beatles recorded their first single – “Love Me Do”- in 1962. It’s also interesting that they broke ground for the Pentagon on this day.


The Media are asking if we are any safer. There is no way to answer that question. The only real information we get is filtered by whoever is spinning the data. The whole topic has been so politicized with the upcoming elections. I would rather see a unified patriotic front in this war. There are people out there who simply want to kill us because we don’t think like them. There really is no room to negotiate here. But I am a dreamer if I think our “leaders” will put our country’s security above their political and financial ambitions. They don’t know how to do it.


There is total agreement that 9/11 changed us forever. There is no more going back to normal – this is normal. On 9/11 we went from a people who, upon seeing and airplane intentionally crash into a building, wondered what technical problem could cause that, to being immediately suspicious of any anomaly as being caused by terrorists. On that day it took the 2nd airplane hitting the other tower for it to sink in that we were under attack.

They that know no evil will suspect none. ~ Ben Johnson
In a way I am pleased to see the replays of planes hitting the buildings and the towers falling. It is uncomfortable to see, but we need to be reminded about the type of people we are dealing with. They simply want to kill us. They are smart, patient, well financed and numerous. The 9/11 terrorists, learned to fly commercial aircraft. They studied the airline’s procedures and learned how the crew would likely respond. They trained in how to most effectively kill in a confined space with a small sharp instrument. Most of the teaching came from the infidels they planned to kill. The letter of inspiration they carried instructed them to make their weapon sharp so as to not discomfort the animal (infidels) they killed. They waited for a day when Allah provided perfect conditions. They used our commercial aircraft and brilliantly executed a successful attack – finally bringing down the towers they hated so vehemently. They have no government, no territory or population to protect and their enemy provides them with the training and weapons.



There are confusing issues in the mix. Why are we in Iraq and Afghanistan? Nobody really gives a logical explanation. Are we there for oil? Are we trying to “box in” Iran and have our forces in the area if needed? Are we simply teaching our troops how to fight this type of war? Are we safer because we are there? Every day some of the cream of our American youth is lost. I often wonder how different the world would be if those who were killed in WWII, for example, lived out their lives, made their contribution to society, had more children and passed their values to this Boomer Generation. Would it be any different? Ah, but I wander from the topic.


Are we safer? I don’t know. No one really knows. Our leaders try to reassure us, but if we have learned anything from history we know they will hit again. They waited 8 ½ years to hit the trade center again. Any attack will likely be something we didn’t expect. It will be more spectacular than 9/11. It will be well planned and unless we get lucky more effective in hurting this country. President Bush said we have to be right 100% of the time to prevent another attack and they only have to be right once. There are so many ways that a clever enemy can take advantage of our open society and freedom that it is impossible for us to protect ourselves completely.


So besides feeling hopeless what can we do? As in so many issues the only answer is “have faith”; faith that we will prevail; faith that the American people once again will defeat a difficult enemy, faith that there are a sufficient number of good people to defeat the terrorists and faith that much good will eventually come from this. Some good has come already. Most of us have a deeper appreciation for our loved ones. We better understand just how precious they are.

Happy September 11th!

Necessity is a mother

We are planning to drive up to New England in a month to see the relatives and the foliage. This will be our first true retirement road trip. I will just be getting my arm out of the sling and being allowed to drive again.


I’m having trouble with the planning only because I’m used to working around constraints caused by work and how much vacation time we had. Now the animals in our lives cause our biggest constraints.


We are going to leave our cats, Brie and Sunshine with Christy. As you know if you’ve read my earlier blog, Brie is very skittish and when we leave her it takes a remarkably long time for her to settle back down when we get back. Obviously the longer we are gone the more of Brie is lost. She eventually settles but is never completely the same. So one factor in our planning is the “Brie Factor”.


Penny also feeds about a half dozen neighborhood cats each day. We can’t just leave a big feeder full of cat chow out because we get nightly visits from voracious opossum and they would quickly devour the food and/or destroy the container to get to it. The birds also eat a surprising amount – and one stray dog will eat till he explodes. We have found our neighbors unreliable in the feeding of cats. So I have my first engineering challenge for retirement – build a cat feeder to dispense food reliably for up to 3 weeks while protecting the stored food from weather and predators.

We did have a 3-day battery operated feeder. (Bought at 60% discount at Tuesday Morning 2 or 3 years ago) It is a bowl partitioned into 3 compartments that rotates to expose the food for 3 intervals (8-12-24 hrs). The challenge was to design a cover and large bin that would refill the compartments on a daily basis without jamming. I built a prototype yesterday, using some wood; duct tape and a coffee can to see if the feeder was powerful enough to rotate under the weight of the food in the bin. To my surprise, it worked! Tomorrow I design and add the bin to hold 3 weeks of food and then set it up for a 2-week trial run while we are here.


Now the trip planning gets interesting. The animals are settled. Now, how long will we be gone? Do we want to make hotel reservations in advance or just wing it? We called Nana today and we will be stopping there (NC) on the way back. We will stay with relatives in CT and Debbie’s cabin in VT. (Donna also offered us her place in VT) That’s where it stands. We stopped by AAA and the library and got a wheelbarrow full of maps and books. Now I’ve got something else I can do while I recover that won’t stress my arm.
I can feel a trip planning blog coming up.

Working my way back to me

Here it is 2 ½ weeks since the surgery and 1 week since I started daily physical therapy (PT) and I’m slowly coming back. The doctor was happier with the surgery on this shoulder because the muscle was torn but not completely separated. That all sounded good until PT began. For whatever reason the stretching of the muscle that is involved with this phase of PT is much more painful than it was on my left shoulder. This is the part where the movies play inspirational music and show clips of steady progress as the hero works his way back into shape. I’d like to fast-forward through this phase if you please.

I am working both shoulders in PT and the good news is that the strength and mobility are returning to my left arm. It is still stiff and a little painful to reach or lift above my shoulders. It is comforting to finally have some aches and pains actually getting better. So many conditions only get worse as we age. It will be interesting to see how far I do come back.

I’ve also started walking again – not on the beach but on the treadmill. Before the surgery I was only 1 week away from finishing my 10K walking program, putting in weekend walks covering 5 miles. Now I’m starting off at 30 minute (1.5 miles) to see if the bad arm can take it. So far, so good. I’m going to ramp up as quickly as practical so I don’t lose everything I had. The shoulder will be the determining factor. The big picture is to do a 10K walk in Jacksonville in January and then continue a vigorous program. It looks like 1-2 hours every day will be spent on strength training and aerobics for the foreseeable future.
So, as I’m struggling through my early PT on my right shoulder, I grit my teeth, listen to the inspirational background music in my head (Maybe I should watch “Rocky” again.) and visualize how well I will feel 6 months from now. My first year of retirement will be logged as my “comeback” year. Now I have to keep from breaking something else.

Another one bites the dust

Today marks 2 weeks since my surgery. Since I’ve done very little more than sit and lie around and heal (except one trip to restart physical therapy) we decided to do something today. Being Labor Day weekend and living in an area that thrives on the tourist dollar we decided to use our “local advantage” and hit the Labor Day sales early. Neither Penny nor I need much right now so we do a lot of looking and only some buying. I personally have a general rule to pay no more than $10 for shirts or pants. Retirement has left me with a surplus of dress clothes (anyone need any ties?), and the casual and “knock-around” wardrobe is in good shape. The only stuff I’ve been buying is nice soft T-shirts to wear during recovery and to PT and today we bought some button-up short sleeve shirts. They are easier to get on and off with my wounded wings and I didn’t have many of those. We also are looking at driving up to Vermont this year, so we are looking out for useful stuff for the drive and stops along the way.

We did our normal Friday morning visit to Target, and then went out to Beals in Destin. Beals was having a 70% off plus take an additional 40% off that sale. That’s where I got the button up shirts. We lunched at Cracker Barrel and then went out to Silver Sands Outlet Center. Our plan was to hit the Black and Decker outlet, the Gap, and Hank and Dave. To our disappointment when we got to Black and Decker they were on their last day of closing out the store. Everything was 50% off, but since this was week #3 of their closing very little was left. That’s the second store to close out there this year that we actually bought stuff from. The other was a discount bookstore that had inexpensive audio books. Pretty soon we won’t have good reason to go out there. We spent about 5 hours out today and that was about my limit.

Sleepless in my chattel

So what does one do when for some reason his healing body that has been allowing sleep any time anywhere decides to reverse itself? Well I went and searched on Sept 2nd just to see what happened today.

What I found of interest was that it is the day Bob Denver died. Most people think of Gilligan when Denver’s name is mentioned. I like to remember Maynard G. Krebbs from the Dobie Gillis Show. Bob played Maynard, a beatnik. He always entered a scene with “You rang?” Whenever anyone mentioned the word “work” Maynard would shudder and back away shrieking “work” in a high-pitched voice as if it were a disease. What made the show different was that it was the first TV show that centered on teenagers and portrayed them as people. It was a silly show, but it had its moments.



I don’t know what it is about the famous Denvers, Bob and John, but at times in my life I have been told that I either looked or moved like them. Bob Denver even got drafted and flunked the physical – scary!