Three pages more than "hobos" got

Harper Perennial, for an unknown reason, elected to tack an index on to the end of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels In Small-Town America. This is a bit unusual, but wonderfully amusing.


Faux poo aside, I wish all books did this. It would be so much easier to find memorable passages and lines when needed.

Old Pages

I am so happy to finally begin this old family document project. So to begin this undertaking that will take a considerable amount of work I would like to say: Merry Christmas from 1916!

The Season of Orange

Some fall photos from this week's pumpkin festival to get the cooler weather started.





It was not as cool as the photos suggest -- I got a sunburn, mosquito bites, and had broken a sweat once the Florida sun had punched through the morning clouds and roasted the afternoon as it always does this time of year.

At least he still has good circulation!

I am so pleased to see HFCS Obesity Epidemic Baby making the rounds! Here and here. Go Fatbaby, go!

The glassy, vacant stare still haunts my dreams.

Alafia Asskicking

The Alafia River -- perfect for canoes and inner tubes. Sea kayaks? Only if you're going downstream. That's important, here, and I want to underline it. Those three sets of unexpected class 1 rapids you encounter along the route? They're fun and harmless, but, once again, only if you're going downstream. Try to fight the current in an effort to return home and you're in for a fight. Try to do it in a 13 foot sea kayak and you'll likely crack a paddle in your attempt. ...which would be exactly what happened to Russ as we fought our way back inland, today.

Carbon fiber paddle. Busted. Destroyed. By the sheer force of water and paddler alone. It was amazing, laughably so at the time. Russ would have to be gentle with it -- it was still barely holding together -- but how, given the river's wish to push us to sea? What other option did we have? What if the paddle gave way and shattered completely in half? Float with the water all the way to the bay and yell for help, we assumed. There would be plenty of Miller-fueld inner tube pilots willing to offer their assistance, if still sober enough.

That, failing, would leave us in the hands of nature. The predators of the Florida wetlands would strip us of our flesh.


Tiny frogs, Florida banded watersnakes, hawks, lizards, and vultures -- all of them eager to feed upon the bloated corpses of dead boaters that didn't have a ride waiting for them at the bottom of the river. People struggling against the flow of the Alafia soon find themselves overtaken, the last image of them being their glassy eyes staring out from the tangled branches of some fallen oak that blocks the stream, their lifeless bodies conscripted into the natural effort to make the river even less navigable to boaters.

Next time, we bring rope. And a pulley. Something to tie to a tree and assist in the haul back when the rocks threaten and refuse to let us pass. At rapid set #2, my kayak got caught by the swift water and turned a sudden 180. I had to exit the boat and walk it upstream, legs wobbling as my feet slipped on mossy rocks and punched deep into sucking muck holes. Just ahead of me, Russ made it past the roiling waters, only to flip his boat as he turned to check on me. We somehow made it back into our vessels, but Russ's lifeline, his Aquafina bottle, had been washed from the cockpit.

The Alafia was trying to stop us in any way it could, including dehydrating us to exhaustion.


Russ unlocked and turned his failing paddle 45 degrees, only to have another crack develop as we battled on. The river seemed endless, the bridge marking our entry point failing to appear as we rounded each bend. Did we somehow miss the turn? Onlookers sunning on the banks called to us, asking why we were going the wrong way. "Because we enjoy nature's punishment", of course. What else could possibly drive us to do this?

We did, thankfully, make it back before Russ lost his paddle and before either of us lost our will to live. With boats dry docked on the grass and hammocks deployed between the palms at the canoe launch in the summer heat, we raised imaginary cocktails in a toast to another river survived with zero near drownings, no snakebites, and successful avoidance of lurking alligators. Life could not be better. Our conversation drifted to war stories involving the treacherous Junpier Springs run of '04, but not before we agreed the Alafia run deserved a return visit.

Perhaps, even, with a waiting car at the bottom.

Swamp for Rent

The story of our apartment complex changing to condos, then being rented, then being sold again has finally come to a close, although it is a sad one.

Village Oaks at Tampa, an apartment complex unsuccessfully converted to condominiums, has sold for $21.2 million — nearly $14.8 million less than a Boca Raton developer paid at the peak of the market nearly three years ago.

....

Last February in the midst of the condominium decline, Berdugo was visiting his homeland of Israel when he unexpectedly died of a heart attack at 55. The South Florida Business Journal reported the businessman had suffered high blood pressure compounded by stress from troubled commercial real estate investments.

I feel kind of bad for calling him crazy and telling him that I would consider the condo if he reduced the price by $100,000 when he and a realtor knocked on my door last year as they were trying to convince renters to make the leap to apartment owner. Poor guy.

Business is business, though, as is made evident by The South Florida Business Journal's article concerning Berdugo's death that never makes mention of any family left behind and, instead, chose to close with the heart-felt line in memorium: "As of March 18, Ofek shares were up 3 percent since Berdugo's death."

A most peculiar gray

That's Florida up there, hiding in the explosion of clouds just to the north of Gustav. This NASA image taken by GOES 12 earlier today is impressive, beautiful, humbling, and frightening all at the same time.

Living along the gulf coast is certainly an odd experience with regard to these storms, to say the least. I doubt I'll ever become accustomed to it. As soon as we're in the cone of uncertainty for anything above a tropical storm, the locals buzz forth in a flurry of activity as they attempt to purchase bottled water, batteries, canned goods, and flashlights. A handful of shopping carts in isle six will contain nothing but gallon jugs of Zephyrhills, while another already past checkout has a sixpack of liter Gatorades, frozen pizzas, and box of tea light candles. Each time, every time, it is as if no one has ever done this before, as if the threat and fear of a new storm wipes away the memories of all the ones that came before it. 48 hours prior to landfall, the gas pumps run slow as they try to pull from the depths of the underground tanks. 24 hours before landfall, they're dry. People rush online to see what flood zone they live in, others look to their roof and ponder the possibility that they might dwell in a house built in the pre-Andrew era without hurricane braces. Even more go about their daily business, having done absolutely no preparation at all.

Today, the run on the grocery store bordered on madness. Charcoal, beer, food, and supplies flew off the shelves and filled the carts of shoppers as the clouds began to roll in. Boxes of ponchos were eagerly grabbed at as a steady stream of cars flowed through the parking lot just outside. Bags of ice left the store, coolers were filled to capacity. Rain from Gustav had just started to fall, pickup trucks filling the hardware store parkinglot as residents refilled propane tanks.

But people along the north side of the gulf coast, today, aren't getting ready for a college football game tailgate party as the hoardes of USF fans are doing today. As the major hurricane churns out at sea, having intensified to a category four storm, the computer models HWRF and GFDL twitch and shift by hundreds of miles as they reevaluate eddy currents and the steering forces created by upper level lows. The evacuations began even now, long before the lines will begin to converge. Contraflow will commence. Tampa overcast skies above make the labor day weekend a sleepy, relaxed one. Will the game be rained out?

The stops and starts, the on and off terror of Atlantic conveyor belt continue and will through November.

It is so strange, living on the coast, during hurricane season.