Travels with Gunther and Kara

Another day…another couple of eagle shots for you. Friday while Connie was working Neil ran down in the mid morning to see what might be available. As is usual once the eaglet gets large enough…most of the time it is alone in the nest while Ozzie or Harriet or both are out somewhere hunting or sitting on a nearby perch. Today it was Ozzie who was out and about and Harriet was sitting just above the nest and didn’t move the whole time we were down there. She was sitting about 6 or 8 feet above and to the right of the nest. Since it was morning all of these shots were taken from the East side.

After exchanging hello’s with the other folks watching…we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well over the past months and from last year…we settled down to wait. Mostly for the first hour or so we just waited…and waited…and then waited some more.

Before the eagle pics…here’s a nice shot that Neil found on his travels about the interwebs earlier in the week…people put down the South a lot but this says it all.

While waiting on something to happen Neil did get a picture of a Mourning Dove sitting in a dead tree near the nest as well as a pretty decent shot of e4. He was also flapping his wings a bit but since he was only doing one of them the photos weren’t spectacular so I left them off of here.

Finally, after an hour and a half or so Ozzie came swooping in from the Southwest (i.e., from the left and behind into the nest). From that particular approach direction it’s almost impossible to get a decent full body picture of the approaching adult (at least from this side…if it had been afternoon and we were around the other side it would have been an ideal approach for pictures)…but I digress. I put this series in anyway since (a) it was the best we got that particular day and (b) you can see the fish that Ozzie is delivering for e4 to eat. I also put in one of her sitting regally over the top of the nest…you can see her on the upper right of the delivery pictures and the last one is a shot cropped in on her. Can’t tell what kind of fish it is but it looks to be a couple of pounds and 16-18 inches long.

Ozzie never moved from that spot in almost 2 hours that we were there. 

We headed home for lunch as Neil was getting hungry. Later on we went off to Walmart and stocked up on vittles. Saturday we just lazed around and had a campfire in the evening. Tonight we’re headed off to Sarasota for dinner and the Alton Brown Edible Inevitable Tour…don’t know what all he’ll do but it really isn’t a cooking show…a little song and dance and who knows what else. Let you know how it was in my next post.

Tomorrow we’re off early to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary…hopefully the water is low enough that we can get some nice water bird and gator photos…but ya never know. Friday we’re headed off to Chicago for a Saint Saëns concert with return on Sunday…luckily the forecast has changed and it’s not supposed to snow while we are there although it is pretty much below freezing the whole time…we’ll have to bundle up. After that we’ll hit it pretty heavy starting next Monday when we’re back…we leave the following Saturday for Jacksonville and have a lot of stowing and other final errands to take care of before we leave.

We also have our vacation for the summer scheduled. Our original plan was for a tour of South Africa…which wasn’t so expensive for the original tour but the air fare was almost 8,000. In order to maximize the economic efficiency of that large a flight bill we looked into extending the trip…but by the time we had enough safari and big game picture time so that Neil was happy the bill would have been well north of 20,000. So we nixed that idea and looked into a trip to Ireland and Scotland. Connie’s high school classmate Margie did some planning for us and the price was much more bearable…but we still felt like we were rushing from place to place on the schedule and couldn’t really do either Ireland or Scotland justice. So we ended up deciding to do the whole 3 weeks in Ireland. We leave on June 12 and get back on July 6…do the first 3 days in Dublin then rent a car and drive ourselves around the island with stops mostly in B&Bs but do have 2 nights in a renovated castle. We have lots of exciting stops planned and will have about 2500 or so miles of driving total…mostly it’s a drive 150 miles then stay for 2-3 nights with day trips to see things before another repositioning. We leave Dublin and go clockwise around the country then into Northern Ireland and then back into Ireland to Dublin the day before we return. We’re looking forward to it…and it will give New Horizons plenty of time to handle our warranty work while we are gone.

Cyas.

Yeah, I know it’s shocking to have another post after just 3 days…that’s been a bit unusual for our stop this winter but with Connie’s troubles with juggling 3 classes at work, trips to AL and GA for a wedding and funeral respectively, cold rainy weather a couple of weeks that’s just the way it’s been for us.

We had originally scheduled a trip down to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary about 50 miles south for later in the week…but with forecasts of rain and fog for Wed through Friday we figured we probably wouldn’t make it. Neil had excellent intentions to get up early yesterday morning and go down to check on the eagles but got caught up in making reservations for our travels through June in the morning and it was almost 1200 by the time he was done with that. Connie had more work scheduled for the afternoon so he decided to hop in the car and head down Ozzie and Harriet’s nest to check on e4 and see how things were going.

Let me show you a map of the local area to see where all the places I’ve been talking about this winter are though.

You can see Seminole Campground just to the right of the middle of the map on the east side of the lake next to I-75. From there down to Ozzie and Harriet’s nest which is the first pin down Bayshore Road heading west is about 4 miles. The Elks Lodge we joined and frequent is the second pin a little farther west on Bayshore. St Therese parish where we have been going to Mass and where Connie goes to choir is about 3 miles north and west from the upper left corner of the map. The pin heading east on Bayshore from Seminole is Hog Body’s Bar and Grill we are frequent wing and BBQ eaters. We usually hit the Walmart a little farther down Bayshore to the west from the Elks for our groceries and other needs. Neil’s favorite bike ride leaves Seminole and heads towards I-75, He takes the road right before 75 headed north and it becomes Pritchett Parkway which he then follows up to the north side and off of this map a couple miles before turning east and then south to get back to Bayshore about halfway between Seminole and Hog Body’s. From there he heads east on Bayshore then turns north into another farming/ranching area by the Echo Inc park and the water treatment plant before ending up back to Bayshore a couple miles east off of this map then he heads for home. That’s about a 20 or so mile ride…he’s been trying to up the distance on his rides and it’s about the farthest he can find without either repeating a section of the ride or having to go on more trafficked roads that he tends to want to stay away from. Anyhoo…figured I would orient ya’ll a little bit to our surroundings here in the immediate North Fort Myers area.

So after lunch yesterday he headed down to the eagle nest. He started on the east side of the nest where the main parking area is…but by that time the sun had gone past the nest and everything was backlit and hence just a silhouette. He got this single nice shot of the horses who live in the pasture underneath the nest before heading around to the west side of the nest for better picture taking. He took along his camp chair to be more comfortable…good thing as he was down there for 2.5 hours or so and almost all of the activity happened in 2 10 minute intervals.

On arrival at the west side…Mom and Dad were nowhere to be found but e4 was up in the nest all by himself looking around and testing his wings. It will likely fledge and have his first flight in the next 3 weeks or so and then the adults will teach it how to hunt and fish before leaving the next in late May or thereabouts…with the adults returning to the neat about October to start remodeling for next season’s eaglets.

You can’t really tell it from those two shots…but e4 is almost as big as Ozzie is. After an hour or so of alternating between flapping his wings and sitting down in the nest Ozzie made a very brief stop by the nest to drop off a fish then headed down to the pond for a drink. He was probably on the nest for 30 seconds before he headed off; and although Neil didn’t get a shot of both Ozzie and e4 in the same frame you can see from the relative size of them compared to the camera on the left (same camera is visible in both the shot above and immediately below) that e4 is g eating pretty large. 

All of the above shots are taking from the west side of the nest looking pretty much due east as seen on the map at the top. Ozzie went on down to the pond which is about 150 yards due north of the nest away from Bayshore, it’s actually right outside of the Dick Pritchett Real Estate office (they’re the folks that provide the Fort Myers Eagle Cam web site). This necessitated a quick run for Neil (and Greg and Lynn and a whole bunch of other folks who had congregated on the west side by this time) up to the pond for some action photos (the ones of the birds sitting on the nest are nice…but once you have 300 of those you want them flying or doing something a little more interesting).

On arrival we got some nice shots of Ozzie having a drink, heading bak to the branch immediately to the right and above the nest, spiraling around again and returning to his perch over the nest.

He flew almost directly overhead of us about 100 feet up. Shortly after he returned to his post over the nest as in the second shot above…and remained there until we left, just sitting and watching…Harriet arrived from wherever she was off to. She and e4 shared the fish that Ozzie had brought awhile back…sorry, no good pictures of that as they were mostly head down in the nest eating…she in turn headed down to the pond for a drink…which entailed another run for the group back up to the pond area.

Other than size…the only way to really tell Ozzie and Harriet apart is that she has the inverted V shaped area of brown feathers on her chest that sticks up into the white neck feather area. This isn’t something you typically see with a female but just an individual characteristic she has. Neil got another couple of decent shots of her at the pond…in the third one below you can see that she’s blinking her interior eyelid to clear out something that got into her eye. 

She then headed back up to the nest after a brief stop on a branch up towards where Ozzie was sitting…e4 was calling her as she landed, probably hoping she had more food and she’s pretty clearly staring him down and telling him there isn’t any more so just shut up.

In these last few you can see the relative size of Harriet and e4…since the eaglet is almost as large as Ozzie already I’m guessing that it’s actually a female eaglet…which is good because assuming it survives it will likely be part of another breeding pair here in the Fort Myers area in a few years.

Neil thinks that she’s really got the “you’re getting on my nerves, kid” look on her face in this last shot.

After the above shots; all of the shots from Ozzie’s return with the fish through both visits to the pond happened in about 10 or 15 minutes…the whole family just sat there until we left about a half hour later.

Getting home…we sat outside under the awning and cooled off for awhile with a beer then headed in for some leftover lamb chops from Sunday along with some mashed taters and some nice gravy made out of blueberry jelly, hot sauce, and leftover lamb juices from the platter on Sunday thickened up with some flour and chicken stock. Pretty yummy. After that we headed off to the weekly campfire down at the rec hall in the campground…it was Paul the owner’s birthday so we had a cake that somebody made and drank some Choc au Vin (chocolate wine) that one of the Canadians brought out. It tasted a lot like Bailey’s Irish Creme and was many calories per sip I’m sure. After the campfire burned down we came home and watched TV until bedtime.

If we don’t get to Corkscrew this week we’ll likely go one day early next week as soon as there’s a sunny day. We have tickets to Alton Brown’s Edible Inevitable Tour on Sunday. He’s the guy that did Good Eats and Feasting on Asphalt on Food Network then moved into doing Iron Chef America and his latest Cutthroat Kitchen which is a cooking competition with evilness involved. The show is a mix of food, music, and jokes…but it’s getting good reviews and Connie suggested we go…and it turned out that it was coming to town so we got tickets. The following weekend we’re off to Chicago for a Saint Saëns concert…it’s supposed to have temps like 8 and 12 and 19 the 2 days we are there so hopefully they’ll get a heat wave and get above freezing before our arrival.

Cyas.

I wish I could say that we did all this super interesting stuff the last 10 days…but I would be fibbing if I said that. Truth is we really haven’t done much at all. Connie’s been working her full 20 hour per week maximum for the past 4 o 5 weeks trying to get all of her students placed. She’s dealing with a total of 3 classes getting scheduled right now and finally has enough spots for all of them but they’re being very slow in getting all of their paperwork requirements completed so that they can go out on clinical.

Beyond that we had Valentines Day dinner out…we went to a place named the Elephant Bar and Grill. This is a chain with about 20 or so locations across the country and we thought it was pretty decent back when we were in our early 30’s in San Diego…but our tastes have changed and the decor, service from the wait staff, and overall vibe just didn’t do it for us. The food was pretty good but overall it was pretty much a bust.

Connie won twice at Bingo in the past week as well. Neil got some new hardware and rehung our sign out front…the original brass plated cup hooks he used rusted away so he replaced them with a pair of stainless screw eyes. We also bought some new solar powered walk lights about a foot high…got six of these to put around our patio and light up our entrance approach a little.

The main data storage drive in our file server died…luckily no data was lost as Neil has lots of backups. It was a 1.5 TB drive and he bought a pair of 3 TB drives to replace it and it’s mirror backup with. He thought he was being smart and just got bare drives with the intention of putting them into the existing cases since bare drives are 80 bucks cheaper each. Got the new drives and discovered that the old cases won’t support a 3 TB drive…so he got an RMA and shipped them back and ordered two new drives with cases. They’ll be here Tuesday or so and we’ll have our IT systems back up to full capability. He also bought a small fan to put up in our overhead storage area (over the fridge) where the drives live to give a little more air flow across them and help keep them cool.

Thursday we decided to head out on a kayak trip; after some discussion we elected to head over to the Jn Ding Darling NWR over on Sanibel Island about 30 miles from Seminole. While the kayaking was pretty decent…the traffic was horrible. When we got over to the entrance to the toll plaza for the causeway over to the island (6 bucks to get over, gotta be rich to live over there I guess) there was a 30 minute backup and then we limped along taking another 30 minutes to get the 2.5 miles out to the NWR parking lot. Had a nice kayak paddle through Tarpon Bay and some of the mangrove marsh areas and headed back only to find out the traffic was even worse. Took an hour to get off the island and then another hour to get home since it was rush hour by that time and we had to deal with commuter traffic. We won’t go over there again, there’s another paddling place a lot closer and easier to get to.

Had dinner at the Elks last night…fish fry night all you can eat for 9 bucks. That and a coupla pitchers of beer (Amber Boch…not great but it’s the darkest brew they have) made a pretty outstanding dinner. Neil took out some lamb chops that he’ll grill tomorrow and then we’ll have leftovers for Monday night since there are 8 in the package.

Sorry, I didn’t get any pictures on the kayak trip…we lost our waterproof camera and have to buy a new one (or else a waterproof iPhone case) for ourselves.

Started working on our post Sevierville travel plans today; we had already figured out from Mar 15 when we leave through the beginning of May and today Connie figured out the plan through mid June when we arrive at Camp Horizons in Junction City. While the rig is getting some work done on it we’re headed off for vacation for 3 weeks. We’re almost completed figuring out what it will be…will post details as soon as they’re finalized. 

Cyas.

Well…lessee. Neil got out and did a whole bunch of under the house and under BAT maintenance yesterday morning…and Connie helped him lubricate the dump valves over the weekend…he crawled into the underbelly and sprayed silicone spray on the valve operating mechanisms while Connie cycled the valves open and shut to help distribute the spray around the cable. The actual valves are right behind the rear basement wall towards the curb side but they have cable operating mechanisms that lead over to the utility console on the street side about half way back. That way you can operate the valves more easily while observing the flow out of the clear discharge pipe to tell when your flushing process has cleaned all the muck out of the black or gray tank.

Last Friday we tried out a new place for dinner/happy hour…it’s called Banana Joe’s and it’s a semi-outside Tiki Bar style place about 5 miles from the campground. Great time, cold beer, pretty decent appetizers and we met some fun folks. Kirk had been there since 1100 when we arrived and sat at the bar…he was ordering Miller Lites by the bucket; they have some sort of special where you get 5 bottles in a bucket of ice for 7 bucks or something like that. Turns out that almost everybody that came in knew Kirk and came over to say hello, hug, and otherwise allow him to act what is apparently his normal perverted self. His wife came in about a half hour later on her Girl’s Nite Out…and sat around the other side of the bar with her lady friends. After our appetizer dinner and a pitcher of beer Neil polished the night off with a Dark and Stormy…since they had both Gosling’s Dark Rum and real Ginger Beer to make them with. The D&S is a British drink popular down in a lot of the Caribbean Islands that were former British possessions back in the colonial days. Sort of like a Rum and Ginger Ale but Gosling’s is a really dark and well spiced rum…and Ginger Beer (although non alcoholic) is way better than Ginger Ale…much more ginger flavor and a lot tarter as well as less sweet. Makes a really fine cocktail. Here’s a picture of the Dark and Stormy he grabbed fer ya’.

Mighty tasty lookin’…eh? You know you want one.

The weather finally cooled back off from the high 80s we had last week…so we were able to open up the house and get back to natural breeze ventilation on Saturday…we like that a lot better than having to hermetically seal ourselves inside to escape the heat and humidity.

Yesterday afternoon we hopped in the car and drove up tower Punta Gorda to visit a couple of friends of ours…Howard and Linda Payne of RV-Dreams. They’re a couple who sold their title insurance business in Louisville almost 8 years ago and hit the road full time. They work camp at various locations, put on educational rallies, speak at RV shows, weigh RVs and probably have another 5 or 6 money making things going on that I don’t know about…but they’re making enough to support their lifestyle. They are in the middle of a boon docking training rally for RVers who want to learn how to live without hookups (that’s what boon docking is). The advantage is that you can find a great number of places, particularly out west where it doesn’t cost anything to park your RV and you may be the only RV you can see in many square miles of land. That’s the good part, cheap or free parking and no neighbors so you can just kick back and watch the world go by. The hard part is that you don’t have any power or water or sewer hookups so you have to work around that. An RV has batteries and an inverter to provide some AC power and you use either your generator or solar panels to recharge the batteries. You’ve also got a fresh water tank as well as the gray and black tanks for waste water…but by judicious use of water you can make it 10 days to 2 weeks before your fresh is empty and the black/gray are full. At that point you hitch up and drive to the nearest RV park where for 10 bucks or so you an dump and refill then it’s back to the boon docking area for another couple of weeks. What Howard and Linda do is train people how to manage your tank and electrical capacities to maximize the amount of time before you have to go and dump/refill.

We got there shortly before the afternoon appetizer pot luck…since we were freeloaders and not paying for the rally we just took ourselves a Subway and box of wine. Along with chatting again with Howard and Linda we met some other old friends Bill and Nancy who retired out of SC and hit the road full-time although they’ve been RVing for 40 years or so. We’ll see them again at the rally in April up in TN near Neil’s baby sister. All of the RVs are parked in a big oval in a cow pasture owned by some friends of Howard and Linda…Neil snapped a pano with his iPhone 5s so you can see what a group boon docking setup looks like.

That little semi cleared area just right of center is where the campfire pit is located and the training, seminars, and meals go on over under the trees just to the left of center. The oval is about 200 yards across so everybody has plenty of space. You can see the rig on the far left has their portable solar panel out on the ground to maximize sun collection. On a good day with lots of bright sunshine like you can see above then you can recharge enough battery capacity without using your generator to cover lights and a couple of hours of TV and internet use…if you need to run the A/C or microwave then you have to kick the generator on for the higher current capacity those devices need but generally only for a few minutes up to an hour or so. On overcast or rainy days you might need to run the generator 3 or 4 hours a day.

After dinner over under the trees the group (there are 35 or so RVs here) moved over to the campfire pit and lit the fire that Neil helped Howard lay earlier and we sat around drinking wine and talking until 2100 or so when we headed home.

Howard and Linda are toying with the idea of opening a co-op style RV Dreams RV park…but with fewer sites per acre than one needs in a commercial park to make a profit. The idea is to have 3-4 sites per acre instead of the 12-15 of a commercial park with lots of trees left in place to make it much more of a state park, camping in the woods atmosphere but with full RV hookups. As a co-op there would be a buy in fee then a couple thousand a year maintenance fee but you would get the right to use one sight without additional charge. We’re not sure if we’re interested in it or not…but will at least watch the possible project develop and if necessary make a decision about what we want to do. The property they’re looking at has river front footage of about 2000 feet and almost 97 acres of land…it’s located only a couple of miles from this pasture…Howard is trying to arrange a group tour later this week so we might have to run back up and take a look if that works out. There’s also a group paddle tomorrow morning that we may or may not go up for depending on how we feel about it.

Today Connie went off to get her toes and finger nails painted…she’s off to choir practice this afternoon while Neil has computer club in the campground…then some chicken for dinner and off to Bingo.

Cyas.

I know that none of ya’ll want to hear about this…what with that snow, ice, and single digit temperatures ya’ been sufferin through…but it was 87 yesterday and 83 today. Really warm, lots of humidity in the mornings and not too much breeze. Neil like to melted on his bike ride.

Connie recovered pretty quickly from her procedure on Monday and by yesterday afternoon was feeling pretty much back to normal. We ate some leftover chicken and stuffing for dinner and then went on down to Bingo. She didn’t win…but kept having multiple places on a single card where she only needed one number to win…but naturally they didn’t call any of the 4 or 5 numbers that would have won her the pot. Drats.

Today she had another preventive maintenance appointment with the OB/GYN (well, only the GYN part I guess) doctor she sees down here. All checked out OK and she’s got her booby smashing appointment set for 3 weeks although the exam by the doctor says that they’re OK.

Neil replaced the motor in our broken fan…which didn’t solve the problem so he talked to the tech guys again and they’re sending him a replacement circuit board; hopefully that will fix the problem.

Our TV part came in…got installed…Connie picked up the TV today and we reinstalled it on the mount. Doesn’t our TV lift look much better with an actual TV installed on it. Connie was worried that it might not b back before the ‘lympics starts tomorrow night…that’s her favorite TV show of all time.

We’ve been stuck with a single channel (CNN on our iPads) for the past 3 weeks and are really glad to have it back and working again.

Neil forgot to give me this picture to post of a wood stork that he got the other day down by the eagles nest…so I made him hand it over.

Tonight is Italian Sausage sammy’s…we got a loaf of french bread for a buck at the Elks…they get all of the leftovers from the Publix to support the lodge. Fry up a couple of sausages, add some pizza sauce and Parmesan cheese and toss on a toasted baguette and it will taste mighty fine. After that it’s the park wine tasting…we got a bottle of white to drag down and we’ll see what else is worth drinking while we’re down there…who knows, we might find one that’s really good to add to our usual Two Buck Chuck.

Not much else doing; so I’ll head off now and cook.

Cyas.

That’s Navy talk for re-enlist or to convert it to civilian-speak she’s ready to sign up to do it again. Not!

That’s because today is Colonoscopy Preparation Day. She’s been on a no meat, no corn, no nuts, no seeds diet since Thursday and got to eat her last meal last evening as a “light” dinner. After that it’s the old multiple doses of laxatives starting last night and this afternoon she’s into the GI tract flushing system of a gallon of Gatorade mixed with (you guessed it) even more laxatives. Clear fluids only, no caffeine and no alcohol. She does get chicken broth and yellow jello but that’s about it for her.

We’ve got to be down to the doctor’s at 0730 in the morning for her procedure…and Neil has already scheduled a stop at the Golden Arches or whatever else she feels like eating as soon as we get out of there around noonish or so. He’s also given her priority access to the bathroom for the remainder of the day.

This morning he did some more troubleshooting on our ventilation fan that quit working. According to the manual there’s a self resetting fuse on the board that resets when you remove power. He tried pulling the fuse for the fans (at least the one that’s marked Ventilation Fans) and while this fuse does kill the living room fan the bedroom (broken) one beeps constantly with the fuse removed. Since there is only one power supply to the fan and the beeping needs power…he’s a bit confused as to whether the power was really removed or not. He went ahead and tried opening the battery disconnect to kill all DC loads in the house…the broken fan doesn’t beep when he did that and beeps once when the disconnect is closed…which according to the manual means the fan has power connected properly.

He sent an email to New Horizons to see if they have any other ideas…and will call the MaxFan people in the morning while waiting on Connie’s procedure to see what to do next. They already sent him a replacement motor but that wasn’t the problem. Hopefully we’ll get it figured out and fixed soon as no ventilation in the bedroom is a downer.

He finally tracked down the status of our TV repair as well…they ordered the replacement parts 10 days ago with a 3-5 business day estimated delivery…as of yesterday it was still in CA…must have been shipped from overseas and is scheduled for delivery on Tuesday. So, hopefully it will get installed, tested and be ready for pickup by Thursday and we can watch TV again. We’re going to have to go up to the clubhouse to see the SuperBowl and it’s commercials this evening since ours doesn’t work. We might be able to stream it on Fox to our iPad but that’s a pretty small screen.

I sent Neil down to the Eagle’s nest for some pictures; turns out that e3 (the larger of the two eaglets) died early this morning. The biologists are unsure what happened but it started acting weak and barely moving a couple of days ago…must have had something wrong with it as both e3 and e4 were gaining weight so it doesn’t look like it was insufficient food. On the other hand; the adults started feeding e4 more about 2 1/2 weeks ago so maybe they sensed something was wrong with e3 and that was part of the reason that e4 started getting more food.

He took a few shots…these are all of Harriet as Ozzie was not seen the whole two hours that Neil watched…and Harriet sat on the nest or adjacent branches the whole time except for one brief fly around right after Neil arrived. He also got a couple of shots of a peregrine falcon which just happened by; one of the local birders told him that it nested in the area and he had seen it a couple of times. Too bad it wasn’t stooping on some prey…that would have been a good shot. None of his falcon photos were worth a darn…so he included one he scrounged from the internet so you would know what he had seen. He also got one of the horse in the field and one of a cattle egret stalking bugs.

Harriet coming in for a landing.

Then hopping over to the adjacent branch.

An a couple of her regally perched around the nest area.

The horse who came over for a scratch and a cattle egret.

And finally a peregrine falcon…a much nicer photo than how his turned out as it wasn’t all that close to him. He could identify it pretty easily but with the distance and having the long telephoto hand held his shots just weren’t in focus very well.

That’s about it. 

Well, still not anything going on down here. It’s been a whole week since I posted…and we’ve done pretty much nothing. Went to Bingo a couple times, grilled some burgers one night and chicken another night, went up to the campfire on Monday evening, worked, bought groceries, did a few minor jobs off the maintenance list but otherwise pretty much did nothing.
 

I’m blaming the weather…it’s been pretty cool ever since Eagle Sushi night a week or so ago. We had one day yesterday that was warm and great for sitting outside in the recliners but it’s otherwise been cool, windy, and generally not really up to our standards. At least it’s not the sleet/ice/power outages/traffic nightmares that we’ve been seeing on the news. Neil’s brother in Mobile AL and sister in Knoxville TN are stuck with all of that crap. Neil suggested they move down here with the rest of the snowbirds but they’ve got that whole job/work/life thing that’s preventing that brilliant idea from taking root.

Connie was supposed to go on a boat/casino/gambling trip today out into the Gulf  but the wusses that were organizing the trip decided the weather would be too bad so they cancelled it. It’s only going to be in the 60s today and it’s overcast and breezy so it would be a pretty yucky day out on the water I guess. She’s bummed that it got cancelled though.

We went ahead and reserved our site 101 for next winter…we’ll arrive back here on Nov 1 but aren’t leaving until Mar 31. Next summer’s plans are to head back up to the New England area again…since we don’t have to go cross country it’s a lot shorter distance to drive than when we headed up towards Alberta in Canada last year…and we don’t want to get too North too early or else the weather will still be too cold for us. We remember one spring when we still lived in Fairfax VA when there was a foot and a half of snow on the ground on Bryan’s (the human kid) birthday on Mar 11. We ain’t doing that, no sirree not at all…so we’ll just meander out of here on April Fools Day next year and wander slowly northwards so that we get to the DC/MD/VA/PA area around the first of May…we should be safe against winter by that time and then we’ll head on up for more fun in the Northeast. 

It hasn’t been a decent enough day on a non work day for Connie to get out and do any Fun Stuff© and get great pictures. However, the weather is supposed to improve some starting next week so hopefully we’ll get to pick a day and take an early morning run out to Shark Valley for a bike ride and some pictures. Corkscrew is closer but there aren’t very many wood storks there anymore…but we did get some other good bird pics last year so maybe we’ll head out down there instead. In the meantime; here are a couple of shots from last year’s visit to Corkscrew.

A female Anhinga followed by a male with his brown head/neck feathers.

A Red Shouldered Hawk and then a shot of a mother raccoon followed by a raccoon family portrait.

A Black Crowned Night Heron.

That’s about it for today…mostly I just wanted to post and let ya’ll know that we’re still alive, have survived the Polar Vortex, and are really, really hoping the snow doesn’t make it this far south.

Cyas.

As I mentioned the other day; after I got done posting the eagle pics Neil decided to take Connie out for sushi. She’s had a hankering for it for months now and what with Neil’s broken foot and indecision up in the Seattle area (where there is lots of really good sushi we had heard) we just never got a round tuit. So she scouted out this local joint named Ichiban #2…Ichiban is Japanese for Number 1 and it’s the second location of the establishment in the area; the other is downtown somewhere. Just before they left…he decided it would still be light enough when they went by the nest for some more pics on the other side…that’s the west side of the nest so would be illuminated by the late afternoon sun…the normal location at the church parking lot is to the east of the nest and everything would be silhouetted from that direction at 1730 in the afternoon.

So we stopped by there for a few and grabbed some shots. Right after Neil got out of the car but before he was setup for picture taking  Ozzie flew off from the nest to another tree a hundred yards or so from the nest…and he was carrying part of a fish with him…guess he decided that he wanted sushi for dinner as well and figured if he didn’t take some and leave it would all get ate up by the young’ins. So Neil got a bunch of shots of him chowing down interspersed with a few of Harriet both sitting right near the nest and then a little away from the nest by herself…guess she got fed up with the kids as well and needed a little alone time.

Neil ran across this photo in his net travels today…it’s from an optical illusion mailing list that he’s on. At first glance it looks like some sort of tropical, parrot or colored owl but on further view it turns out to be a rather well constructed fake from various things around the produce section.

Really well done he thought…particularly the carving of the face and beak sections.

Anyway…after the eagle shots…it was almost dark by the time he was done they headed on down to Ichiban #2 where the Sapporo beer was cold and the sushi was excellent. After that they stopped by the Elks Lodge for a small pitcher of beer since they weren’t quite ready to go home and our TV isn’t repaired yet. We did get the estimate and authorized the repair this morning but it will probably be another week before we get the repaired and retested set back. Luckily…even though it’s a 46 inch set…it’s actually not very heavy since it’s an LED flat panel, maybe 25 pounds tops. It attaches to a bracket that locks into our TV lift so it was pretty easy to get down and out of the house to take to the repair place. Hopefully it will be back by the time SuperBowl comes around or else we’ll have to schlep down to the clubhouse for the game.

Today is the 30th anniversary of what has consistently been rated as the best television commercial of all time…Apple’s famous 1984 spot introducing the Macintosh. Here it is on youtube for your viewing pleasure. It was filmed in Germany and all the guys in gray are skinheads…the young lady in the red shorts with the hammer was a discus/hammer thrower for one of the California colleges (USC or UCLA I think). It’s a take off on George Orwell’s novel 1984. The Macintosh itself was actually introduced on the following Tuesday Jan 24, 1984…but Happy Birthday Macintosh anyway. The commercial was only aired twice as I recall…once in early December of 83 so that it could be entered in the 1983 advertising award season…but to maintain secrecy it was run at 0300 in the morning on some rural VHF station in Idaho so that nobody would see it…except for one guy that called into the station and asked them what the heck that was.

The Mac has come a long way from the original toaster Mac days…it shipped with 128K of RM and a single floppy drive with an 800 KB capacity and powered along at an amazing 1 MHz…or 0.001 GHz as computers are rated at today.  Neil’s Retina MacBook Pro is now almost two years old and runs at 2.3 GHz, has 8 GB of RAM and has a 250 GB SSD hard drive…today’s laptops are about 1000 times more powerful than the computers that ran the Apollo program and about 500 times better than the ones on the Space Shuttle craft. Quite amazing…and to think that Bill Gates said way back when that nobody would ever need more than 640K of RAM (that’s geek humor).

Anyway…on to the eagle sushi pics. As you can see from the golden hues of most of these shots…it was getting pretty much toward sunset and the sun was very low on the western horizon. I thought about color correcting them to take the sunset tones out…but decided that since it was sunset and those were the actual colors to leave them in. You can just make out the fish he is chowing down on in several of the shots…but it was good to get some from another angle…gotta keep it interesting ya’ know.

Ok, gotta go and help Neil make some spaghetti sauce now…we’re having tomato and Italian sausage sauce with some tricolor penne pasta and he’s going to put it in a casserole and melt some cheese on the top for eating.

Cyas.

This is ridiculous as Daffy Duck would say…just ridiculous. Make sure you’ve engaged your lisp and cartoony voice and that sentence will sound just right😊. The low temperature Saturday night was 39 degrees here in Fort Myers…thirty freekin’ nine degrees and tomorrow it’s only going to be 37…that’s within 4 degrees of freezing and most excruciatingly definitely absolutely positively not what we signed up for. Neil had to scrape ice off the windshield of the car before we could go to Mass on Sunday…he had to dig all the way to the bottom of the trunk to find the ice scraper first. This is completely udderly insane and absolutely unacceptable…we are in Southern Florida for goodness sake…temperatures here ain’t never s’posed to start with the digit 3 or 4 ya know. We like it when it gets all the way down to a bone chilling 65 with highs up to a blistering 75…much beyond that and we ain’t happy campers.

Neil’s been working steadily on his maintenance list…over the weekend he got the A/C units cleaned up on the roof, lubricated a bunch of stuff, and today he cleaned out the furnace blowers (they were pretty clean since we don’t use the furnace much, but ya gotta check and make sure) and rotated the tires on the Mazda 6 front to rear. The rear ones are in better shape and we had a little slippage last week when it was pouring so he moved the better pair up to the front drive wheels. He doesn’t have any jack stands or a floor jack any more so he used the little crummy scissors jack that came with the Mazda on the front and backed it up with a cinder block and chunk of 2×8 lumber just in case it slipped off while he was changing the tires. Jacked up the rear end with the hydraulic jack that comes with BAT…it’s a lot more stable. He jacked up one side at a time and flipped the tires front/rear then lowered away and torqued them correctly. After doing the other side Connie drove the car around the block and he re-torqued them to make sure all were seated correctly; and he’ll have to do them once more after they drive 20 miles or so to dinner (sushi) and back.

Connie got her part time job up to 38 hours for the last 2 week period and it looks like she’ll be up in the at least 30 range this period as she’s scrambling like mad to get enough spots for all of her students.

Early this morning (well, relatively early…it was 0920 by the time he left…but that’s about all the early we have these days it seems) he did get down to the eagle nest and got some really great shots of both of the adults as well as e3 and e4…these are eaglet #3 and eaglet #4 (this year’s brood)…don’t know if they’ll get actual names or not. Before I get to those I thought I would share a couple of interesting shots that came across our twitter feed and daily blog read list.

An photographer named Alessandro Cancian posted this one on his 500px page; the url for it as well as the rest of his work is http://500px.com/photo/31817649. He’s apparently got a fence post outside of his house and here is a shot he entitled “The Standoff” with a bird and a chipmunk squaring off over a bit of food that Alessandro left on top of the post. Neil thought it was a pretty interesting shot. 

I hate to tell you this…but we’re now up to the third post of the new year and I _still_ don’t really have much to say for ourselves. We have had two colder snaps here in the past 2 weeks with overnight lows below 50…it ain’t s’posed to be like that down here ya know.

Anyhoo; Connie has been really busy with work, she needs to do her timesheet for the past 2 weeks today and will be pretty close to her maximum of 40 hours for the period…she has students going out in a few weeks and is still way short on the number of clinical rotation spots she needs. She keeps having great ideas for how to get more but none of them have been put into effect yet…so she doesn’t know what to do at this point. She’s a working on it though…and hopefully will figger it out.

Neil has been steadily chipping away on his house maintenance list ever since the holidays were over…killed 2 days washing the house, changed water filters, lubricated this and that, re-stained some scratches on our floor and cabinets that we got from slides moving and doors popping open while we were moving. He’s still got about half the list to go but whatever day he picks to get out the creeper and crawl under the house he’ll take care of a whole pile of them. Won’t be any trouble getting them all done though.

He’s also been working on our spring and early summer plans…and has turned the dates and destinations over to Connie so she can pick out parks for him to make reservations at. We’re heading from here to Jacksonville then up to Charleston for a Saint-Saëns concert, then to Fairfax to visit some friends and have a 2 day excursion to Philly for another concert. After that it’s down to Midlothian to see their human kids for a bit then over to Sevierville for the RV-Dreams rally and a visit with Neil’s baby sister. Then on to Louisville for 10 days or so followed by 3 weeks of as-yet-undetermined stuff before getting to Junction City in mid June.

From there we’re headed off for a vacation…still working on the details but will post them as soon as we finish figuring them out. Connie’s high school friend Margie is working them up for us…we’re currently looking at probably about a 3 week break while New Horizons fixes some minor stuff on the house and then they’ll just park it in their lot somewhere…as long as it’s got power for the fridge all will be good and it won’t cost us anything for storage. Score!!

After that we’re doing the upper Midwest in some sort of fashion. Connie has her ASCLS convention in Chicago the last week of July…Neil might go with her or might just stay home while she’s gone. We’ll end up after seeing WI, MN and whatever else we might run across in Amana, IA for the New Horizons rally in mid September then make our way back down to Fort Myers in some fashion. 

I know that I posted our states visited, provinces visited, and countries visited last time…but as it turns out all 3 of them were incorrect.

For the state map I had our lone holdout of North Dakota as the state we haven’t been in…but Connie has been there already so that makes us having been in all 50 states. So I changed the map and we’ll keep track of all the states we’ve been in with the RV since June of 2011…up to 36 so far and we’ll hit probably 5 or 6 of the remainder this summer…but I’m guessing we’ll only make it up to 48 maximum as I know we ain’t getting the house to Hawaii and it’s unlikely we’ll get it to Alaska…that’s so far that we’ll just take a vacation up there sometime instead of the long trip up and back. We normally do about 8,000 miles per summer travel season and it’s over 4,000 miles round trip just from the Canadian border with Montana to the Canadian border with Alaska. Add in another 1,000-1,500 miles for the trip around Alaska and 5,500 for the round trip between Fort Myers and entering Canada in Montana and we would be talking 11,000 to 12,000 miles that season. While that is doable…it’s really a lot of driving and from Neil’s research the portion across Canada and Alaska is the hard part. We would need to do 5,500 to 6,000 miles between the end of May and the middle of September. Most of the roads up there have lower speed limits and there are lots of unpaved roads so 200 miles per travel day is about average. At that rate we would need 30 or so travel days and since there are only 110 days or so between June 1 and the middle of September we would end up driving way more days percentage wise. Still though…friends that have gone say it’s well worth it so perhaps we’ll reconsider things. I guess if we were to winter over in southern California two years that would cut the US portion of the trip down from 5,500 to 2,500…but it would still be a pretty travel intensive summer…not to mention the extra wear and tear on the house and BAT. So we’ll probably spend a month or so one summer and fly up there, rent a 4WD vehicle and see Alaska that way.  Here’s the revised States we’ve been in with the RV map.

Here’s the revised Canadian Provinces visited map…I missed New Brunswick before.

And finally the Countries visited map…missed Gibralter and Tunisia the first go round. It’s looking pretty good that we’ll expand this list on our upcoming summer vacation though.

I’m certainly glad I got that right now:-)

I keep reminding Neil to get up early and go get some eagle pictures but the eaglets are still too little to show up above the top of the nest…they’re bigger than Mourning Doves and smaller than chickens. They’re still only able to waddle about the nest and aren’t capable of feeding themselves yet…but they have gotten enough feathers that Ozzie or Harriet doesn’t have to brood them and keep them warm all the time. Neil just checked the eagle cam and they’re almost big enough to see from ground level…I’ll keep nagging him and hopefully he’ll get up early one morning and drive over for some shots. It’s only 4 miles or so from here but ya gotta get up early for best light and the adults ‘round here ain’t so good at that. In the meantime…here’s a shot of Harriet sitting right above the nest that I haven’t published before. You can see about the upper half to third of the nest at the bottom of the picture and the camera for the eagle-cam is on the limb to her left. You can tell it’s Harriet (a) because she’s bigger and (b) because she’s got that inverted V-shaped section of brown feathers sticking up into her white head area feathers…it’s just to her right from center. Neil did check the eagle cam and she was feeding the eaglets some fish this morning and their heads are almost up to the edge of the nest. As soon as they are walking around in another 10 days or so he should be able to get at least some shot of them.

Not much else is new…it’s only going to be about 60 today so Neil thinks he’s just going to do a couple of simple/easy jobs off of his maintenance list. Connie won $33 at Bingo at the Elks on Tuesday and Neil got his new membership card for the lodge here in North Fort Myers…this means he doesn’t have to push the buzzer to get in any longer, just slide his card in and the door opens. Dinner will be the end of the Rotisserie Chicken (Lemon Garlic flavor) that he got from Walmart the other day. We’ve discovered that those things taste pretty good and are amazingly economical. He only paid $4.80 for it and they got 2 full meals so far and chicken sammys for lunch yesterday…and has enough meat, the rest of the tasty skin, and all the gooey gelatinized chicken deliciousness from the bottom of the tray left over for tonight. We’re having it with some Farfalle pasta and he’s going to make some sort of sauce to hold it all together for dinner. Connie’s got Bingo here at the park tonight as well.

Our TV died last Friday…looks like it’s the power supply and Neil is still trying to figure out whether it’s worth fixing or whether we need a new one. It’s out of warranty of course but we figured if it’s less than about $250 or so for the repair we’ll have it fixed as it’s over $600 for a new one in 40” size and almost $1000 for the new one in the same 46” size as this one. We can’t really use the new 46 inched on our lift though…the size is slightly smaller and while it would physically fit the sensor for the remote would be behind the edge of the cabinet and we would have to get up to turn it on and off. We’ll have to wander down to the Walmart and look at a 40 and 46 side by side to make up our minds if we end up having to replace it…hopefully we’ll get the final word from the repair place today and know whether fix or replace is the right answer.

This paragraph and photo were added later…this is the best tweet I’ve seen in a long time. A big shout out to @mcfuckingduff (whoever he is), it was retweeted by one of Connie’s bike  racing podcasters and we both thought it was great. The tweet said

“Look at this fucking squirrel. He is completel *over* all your bullshit and has no more fucks left to give.

Cyas.