Yup…we’re actually still alive…haven’t posted in 11 days but that’s just because we haven’t been doing anything. Connie has been working her full 40 hours per two week period the last 6 weeks or so trying to get all of her students…she’s dealing with 3 classes at once…into assigned slots as well as twisting arms of the various affiliates to provide her some spots to send them to. Add to that the fact that almost none of the current students pay the slightest attention to deadlines, what they’re supposed to do, or any of the emails she sends out with instructions and she’s pretty frustrated with them.

Anyway…because of that and the heat we haven’t done anything. Mass on Sunday, choir practice and Bingo on Tuesday, Bingo on Thursday and that’s about it.

Speaking of heat…and I know that those of you up in the cold north (which this month would be pretty much anything north of about Jacksonville) don’t want to hear about it…it’s been brutally hot the past 10 days. Our two previous winters here at Seminole we only need the A/C on maybe 4 or 5 days total each year and never more than 2 in a row. This year we’re up to almost 2 full weeks with the windows closed and the A/C on as it’s been in the upper 80s to low 90s along with humidity and no breeze. Turrible I’m tellin’ ya.

We did get over to Palm Beach last week one day to visit Connie’s mom and dad at the cemetery for awhile…then headed down to see our friend from college Pat who is still living in Miami. She’s from Boston but never went home after college and retired awhile back. She spends summers up there and winters down here and just recently bought a house after 30something years of living in an apartment. We had lunch and a nice visit with her catching up with all the news and such. One of Neil’s Navy buddies from when he was stationed at the Naval Security Group up in DC is down here this month visiting all of the baseball spring training sites…we’re going to get together with Tom and his wife Pam one day next week.

In line with the subject…I want to wish you all a very happy Pi Day. This however…is a Super Pi Day as it’s 3.14.15 and for the geeks amongst ya we celebrated it at 9:26.:53 this morning and got ourselves up to the first 10 digits overall. Tonight we’re headed off to the Elks as we got an invite to the volunteer appreciation dinner. Neil’s not sure what we are being rewarded for…Connie has sold bingo cards 4 or 5 times this winter and Neil has hauled a half dozen or so kegs of brew from the walk in fridge in the back out to the bar area for Marlene (and always gets a free brew for doing so…which he figured was more than enough)…but he’s a bit of a cynic and thinks they’re trying to encourage good behavior so we’ll volunteer for more stuff. In any event…open bar and prime rib dinner means we’re going.

We got all of our tax paperwork finally…the investment reports and the Laubenthal Land and Timber Company K1 were the last ones as they usually are and we’ve got our taxes (fed and VA) ready to go. Still have to go online and do the AL one but we can’t do that until we finalize and submit the federal one. We’re getting a few bucks back…but the estimated tax payments we made all last year pretty much covered it. We have to do the estimated payments as our investments end up making us more taxable income than our pensions do…not because we’re brilliant investors but because we’ve been doing it for 40 years…and there isn’t any withholding on the investment stuff. So we guess every year at how much extra to submit quarterly so we don’t have to pay any penalties.

Alex is continuing to get bigger and show more personality…Connie really liked this shot we got the other day

Other than that…we’re pretty much starting to finish up our winter’s work here in Fort Myers. Neil did a bunch of outside work underneath the house this past week and needs to get on the roof and scrub the slide protectors (little awnings that go over the tops of the slides when they’re out to keep leaves off of the top of them and hence out of the inside when we pull the slides in) as they’ve got a lot of brown gunk on them from the tree leaves since November when we arrived. He’s also gotta get back underneath and check the torque on some of our bolts…but needs to go buy a deep wall socket first as the bolts are sticking too far out of the nut to get the normal sized socket he has onto them.

He’s got a few more items on the maintenance list as well…just needs a couple of serious work days to finish them up and is planning on trying to get in at least 2 of those next week…but with the heat and stuff ya never know. He’s gotta bite the bullet pretty quick though…only 3 more weeks to go before we head out for the summer. I’ll try to get him to run down and get a few more shots of the eagles and eaglet this week too…the baby is getting pretty close to fledging so maybe he can get a decent shot of it rather than just the head sticking up.

Cyas.