Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Why I Love Human Beings
Because we write things like this:
Date: 2011-07-03, 5:45PM EDT
Reply to: gigs-g7e2t-2475788473@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Reply to: gigs-g7e2t-2475788473@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Debra I lost your phone number. Please call me or drop off the basket so we can talk. By the way I have more ironing to be done.
· Location: Venice
· it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
· Compensation: no pay
- Copyright © 2011 craigslist, inc.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Little Coincidences
The Universe has a habit of checking in with me during unexpected moments. After a restless night, I spent this morning with the drudgery of gathering documents and filling out forms to begin our life in Bradenton next week. While Florida Power and Light thinks I’m brilliant for having a great credit record and thus is not charging a deposit to start service, the City of Bradenton doesn’t care how responsible I am and wants a deposit and a notarized copy of our lease before I can have a wee or wash my hands in our new abode. None of the paper round-up was particularly difficult, it was really just the fact that we had to schlep around town for notaries and copies and money orders and mail everything off with the hopes that we don’t have to repeat it all over again once we are actually living in Bradenton. Basically, I was tired, stressed and trying to quell those millions of small (and big) worries that come with starting over yet again in a new place.
With the move only a few days away, we’ve been going easy on keeping the cupboards supplied and the fridge full and that’s what led me to the cupboard by the sink just now. Thinking it would be good to have a jug of iced tea handy in this heat, and knowing our supply of Yorkshire Tea was gone, I pulled out a box of tea bags that mum had tucked in the corner. It’s a brand called Good Earth and the variety is their Original blend, a “sweet & spicy tea & herb blend.” I make sun tea and usually take off the paper tag attached to the string before dropping the tea bags into the water. Out of habit I read the tags and was totally surprised by the quote on the second tea bag.“The first and great commandment is: Don’t let them scare you.” -Elmer Davis 1890-1958
First of all, it’s a darn good quote. What with the mess in Congress, the tragedy in Norway, the ongoing struggles of people all over the world and those nagging voices we all hear at times telling us we are not good enough, it’s cause to make anyone quiver. It was good to be reminded by a tea bag tag that the world can only scare you if you let it.
The fact that the quote was from a box of tea made me think of that great quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. I sure would have liked to spend an afternoon with Mrs. Roosevelt.
But the more surprising element of the ‘Don’t let them scare you’ quote is the author, Elmer Davis; for you see that was my grandfather’s name. My grampa was not the well-known news reporter, author, Director of the US War Information Office during World War II and Peabody Award recipient. My Elmer Davis worked in logging camps in the Maine woods and in unknown places around Portland. He exists as just a few stories and images for me as he died from emphysema when I was quite young. But I am guessing that he would have said pretty much the same thing to me as his quoted counterpart: Don’t let them scare you.
I’ll try, gramp, but let’s have a cup of tea first. (Photos gleaned from Google Images but do visit this blog for more lovely photos from China http://kahyean.blogspot.com/2010/12/places-in-chengdu-part-2.html)
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Twilight Skies
We had just finished having tea when it dawned on us that all the windows in the house were letting in a very strange light. Nipping outside we were treated to perhaps the strangest sunset we've seen here in Florida so far. Man, it was spooky. Even these pictures that Jamie snapped don't quite do it justice. The bits of blue sky that were showing through the clouds were such a brilliant shade compared to the odd gold, pink and purple that the sky seemed like something out of a child's imagination. Weather patterns move so quickly across the peninsula that you never know what the morning and night skies are going to look like.
Jamie's mum has been watching her skies in England of late and has put together several videos with her photos and music by Mr Bear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwLGnZLCGs&feature=related Look for other videos by Harmoniedot to see more of Melody's sky musings.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Space Shuttles and Sushi
Early Friday morning, Jamie and I loaded up the car with cooler, chairs, beach clothes and whatever else we thought we might need on the way out the door and made the 140-mile trek to Cape Canaveral on the east coast to see the space shuttle lift off. It’s a trip we’ve made several times now.
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Our first voyage, we were out of the house in the wee hours with the parents in tow to see the last launch of the shuttle Endeavour. Mum and dad have seen a number of launches, including a night launch that remains as their favorite. Back in the day, they would drive over to Titusville in their motorhome and park up with other shuttle spotters in their self-sufficient worlds on wheels. There is a whole subculture of rocket launch watchers in Florida. They will lay out their credentials flight by flight if you have the time and patience to listen. But this time we were making the journey in Traveller, our trusty Ford Taurus. The crowd estimates were expected near 300,000 for the penultimate launch and reading stories of the traffic headaches from the previous last launch of Discovery in February, it seemed sensible to avoid Titusville, where the best views are, and try the approach through Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral. ![]()
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The mood was jovial. People told stories about launches they had seen and reminisced about the US space program. One guy in his late 40s latched on to us and said he was in town to catch a cruise ship out of Port Canaveral tomorrow. It was a bonus to have a shuttle launch while he waited. He said he needed a vacation because he worked with his brother and sometimes just needed to get away from him. He asked Jamie to take some photos of him as mementos of the day. Oddly, he asked for one photo to be of him near a news crew that was interviewing people who had come out for the launch though the reporter didn’t interview him. He was a character and we laughed when we got home and looked at Jamie’s own shots of the day because the guy, whose name we never got, ended up being in several of them.
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It was a nutty coincidence that the following day we had to drive to Melbourne, just 25 miles short of Cape Canaveral, so Jamie could attend the Florida State Yo-Yo Championship. He didn’t intend to compete but ended up in a funny novice competition to see who could make their yo yo spin the longest and he won. The prize was, of course, a yo yo! He did a lot of schmoozing and as the contest was held in a mall, I did a little shopping. It was a great day.
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We loaded up the parents once again when Endeavour’s launch was re-scheduled. With a better idea of what to expect, we left not quite so early, found a good spot on the causeway, enjoyed the camaraderie of the crowd and watched the shuttle go up. Because of the low cloud cover, we could see the rockets for about five seconds and then it disappeared. That was it. And I had missed most of those five seconds trying to find the shuttle on the screen of my camera for a photo.The whole thing seemed anti-climactic but Jamie had a big smile on his face and said most joyfully, “We just saw a space ship take off.” There was little point in trying to get out into the flood of cars leaving the area so we stayed in our chairs for a while looking across the bay at Kennedy Space Center. President Obama and the first family had been in attendance at the scrubbed launch but not this one. Seats in the viewing stands at the space center had sold out months ago for the final launches. Our contemplation was interrupted by the sound of an impatient driver far back in the line of traffic laying on his horn. As a pair of motorcycle cops drove by we heard one of think sternly aloud “Blow that horn one more time…” Everyone within earshot started laughing. We had lunch at a British theme pub, spent a few hours at the beach ,which was swarmed with dreaded love bugs, and again headed for home this time with a shuttle launch to our credit.
I encountered Endeavor again a week and a half later when she re-entered the earth’s atmosphere. A sonic boom occurs as the shuttle zips through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. If you are near the shuttle's path, you will actually hear two sonic booms. NASA states that one sonic boom is generated by the shuttle's nose; the other by its tail. Prior to the sonic boom, you will see an orange streak with a bright white tail if skies are clear. I fairly leapt out of bed from the unexpected noise and checked our dark house for signs of something having blown up or a parent having fallen in the night. It wasn’t until I mentioned it to the folks at breakfast that I learned I had heard Endeavour as she flew over the area on her path home to Cape Canaveral. How very cool.
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As Jamie, Traveller and I sped east towards Atlantis Friday morning full of petrol and coffee, I had a lot on my mind. Mum and dad were safely in Maine, having arrived Thursday night for their summer season as snowbirds with friends and family. I had given my notice at work and was now once again unemployed. I’d become a space shuttle groupie and the words my sweet husband had spoken at Endeavour’s launch resonated in my head. We were going to see a space ship take off. After years of watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and Dr. Who with his little blue police call box that’s bigger on the inside, it was finally sinking in that yes, we were going to watch a space ship take off and with its final mission bring to a close this chapter of manned space flights. I realized how little I’ve paid attention to an achievement that is pretty darn amazing when you stop to think about it.
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I couldn’t tell you when the shuttle program started and what the first shuttle was called without doing a search on the internet. According to NASA, President Nixon formally proposed a reusable space transportation system in January of 1972. The first shuttle was originally planned to be named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from Star Trek fans convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise. President Ford said he was partial to the name Enterprise as he had served aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific that had serviced the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Ford told NASA to change the name. (As an aside, as I followed a research thread to check the accuracy of the story about the Trekkies and the write-in campaign, the document used in a Wikipedia thread was a scanned copy of a page from the Sept 6, 1976 issue of The Lewiston Sun Journal of all newspapers—the Sun Journal being a paper from Lewiston, Maine. The story was an Associated Press story. Funny!) Enterprise went on to be the shuttle from which its sisters were all born, the Henrietta Lacks of the shuttle program.
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I can tell you I was sitting in a lecture room on the USM campus in Portland waiting for my music history class to begin when students started arriving saying that the shuttle Challenger had exploded during launch on that January 28th in 1986. It seemed like a bad joke until Professor Bowdren arrived and confirmed that the shuttle had exploded, killing everyone onboard including Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher whom all of New England had embraced when she was chosen as the first teacher astronaut in the Teacher in Space Project. We spent some time talking about the space program and its future then Prof Bowdren let us go. He’d pick up with class next week.
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I am ashamed to admit that as I did a search to find out where the shuttle Columbia is now, I was stunned to learn it had disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003. As I read articles about the disaster, bits of memory returned. When I moved to Texas, the name Nacogdoches seemed familiar. I couldn’t recall why but as I looked at film footage of the debris field, I remembered the numerous interviews that had come from Nacogdoches in the days following the tragedy and strange way the word Nacogdoches felt in my mouth. Memory is such a delicate thing.
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We arrived at Bennett Causeway to find the place rammed with people at eight o’clock in the morning waiting for the final countdown for Atlantis. We parked far down the causeway and walked to a spot near a bridge perhaps half a mile from where we had watched Endeavour launch. People were sat in chairs on the roadside, balanced on guardrails, spread out on blankets on the banking and high a-top big RV’s. There was no shortage of updates thanks to cell phones and radios. Cameras with massive telescopic zoom lenses were trained on a spot far out at the horizon. Binoculars were passed back and forth. It didn’t matter who you were, what you looked like or where you came from, so long as you were not blocking anyone’s view we were all just citizens of the planet here to send our love and good wishes to the Atlantis crew and be part of history.
A flotilla of watercraft bobbed in the small bay before us. There was a no-go zone being enforced by the Coast Guard keeping boats a defined distance from the launch area. A pair of manatees came to view the gathering, surfacing over and over to the delight of the crowd. During prescribed minutes prior to launch, fighter jets patrolled the airspace, gathering climate information that was being sent to the command center according to several seasoned spectators who were near us.
And then the final few seconds of the countdown. Everyone looked to the horizon. Someone with a camera announced, “There’s the steam clouds!” and suddenly we had lift off. Even from 13 miles away, we could see the billowing clouds of white against the distant gray and then the deep orange glow of the rockets forcing themselves and Atlantis skyward. There was awe-inspired silence and then applause. Then more silence from the crowd as the sound of the rockets moved across the water towards us and we watched Atlantis climb higher and higher, through a layer of clouds and into another patch of blue sky, her rockets still blazing, finally disappearing above another layer of clouds.
There was a final round of applause and then that was that. Some kept watching the sky, watching the exhaust plume spread out across the blue as upper level winds caught hold. Others dashed to their cars,hoping to get on the highway ahead of the exodus. Jamie and I stood by the guardrail holding on to each other, smiling. We had just seen a space ship take off, the last of her kind.
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Godspeed, Atlantis. May we all make it home safely.
(As for the sushi mentioned in the title, we had lunch at Cocoa Beach Thai & Sushi and it was amazing! If you find yourself on the Space Coast, get your sushi here! Oh, and most of the photos in this blog are sadly not ours. Most are from NASA, some are from news agencies and they are images I found through Google)
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Our first voyage, we were out of the house in the wee hours with the parents in tow to see the last launch of the shuttle Endeavour. Mum and dad have seen a number of launches, including a night launch that remains as their favorite. Back in the day, they would drive over to Titusville in their motorhome and park up with other shuttle spotters in their self-sufficient worlds on wheels. There is a whole subculture of rocket launch watchers in Florida. They will lay out their credentials flight by flight if you have the time and patience to listen. But this time we were making the journey in Traveller, our trusty Ford Taurus. The crowd estimates were expected near 300,000 for the penultimate launch and reading stories of the traffic headaches from the previous last launch of Discovery in February, it seemed sensible to avoid Titusville, where the best views are, and try the approach through Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral. We were scanning the area news stories and the Brevard County website for road closures and tips when Jamie remembered that he had a yo-yo contact on Facebook who lived in Cape Canaveral. We were on my poor husband like a pack of hungry dogs, urging him to contact Bradley for information on where to park, perhaps even at Bradley’s family’s house. As so often happens in the yo-yo world, Bradley came through like a star. He gave us directions to his house, saying there was an extra parking spot we could use, and told us where we could meet him on the beach a block away. He said there was a small parking lot where we could unload gear at beachside and we might even get a spot there if we were early. We couldn’t believe our luck.
We arrived in Cape Canaveral around 6:30am. The launch was scheduled for 8:56am. After getting slightly turned around , during which we saw a beautiful sunrise, we found the lot at the beach, parked up and lugged chairs and gear out onto the beach. Looking north,
we could see the largest buildings of the Kennedy Space Center and what might be the launch pad. Bradley and his brother were yo-yoing nearby and Jamie was soon throwing yo yo with a champion thrower. Bradley’s family had moved to the Cape only a few months earlier so this was to be his first shuttle launch. Mum was straight off down the beach looking for shells. Dad was trying out the video camera we had brought with us from Texas and the driver, me, plopped herself into a chair for a short nap.
The weather did a 180-degree turn and within the hour there was a howling wind off the water and dark clouds galore. It began to spit rain. Bradley and his brother said they were going back to their house for some jackets and left. Mum returned from her walk with the information that the shuttle would launch from a different area of the Kennedy Space Center complex . We wouldn’t see lift-off from the beach That explained why there were no crowds of people camping out. As we had the time to make a move, we decided to try getting a bit closer to the launch site and toted everything back to the car. Jamie texted Bradley a thank you and we were off.
We ended up on the Bennett Causeway with loads of people, including the mobile emergency unit for Brevard County. The makeshift parkinglot/campground was not more than a bit of field filled with RVs and autos. Enterprising locals had set up stands selling watermelons, Italian ices, baked goods, hot dogs and t-shirts. Mum and dad stayed in the car out of the wind while Jamie and I looked for a spot to set up our chairs near the water. Though the launch pad was 13 miles away, we were assured we would have a good view of the shuttle’s lift off. We set up our chairs and settled in to wait with the growing crowd.
The mood was jovial. People told stories about launches they had seen and reminisced about the US space program. One guy in his late 40s latched on to us and said he was in town to catch a cruise ship out of Port Canaveral tomorrow. It was a bonus to have a shuttle launch while he waited. He said he needed a vacation because he worked with his brother and sometimes just needed to get away from him. He asked Jamie to take some photos of him as mementos of the day. Oddly, he asked for one photo to be of him near a news crew that was interviewing people who had come out for the launch though the reporter didn’t interview him. He was a character and we laughed when we got home and looked at Jamie’s own shots of the day because the guy, whose name we never got, ended up being in several of them. As the launch time neared, news spread through the crowd that lift-off was being pushed back several hours due to technical problems. Again consulting the parents, we decided to just stay and see what happened. Jamie and I watched dolphins and pelicans feeding in the bay. We eavesdropped on conversations while the wind blew fine beach sand into our eyes and every crevice or fold of skin. Near 1:00pm NASA scrubbed the launch due to further technical troubles. Ah the best laid plans of mice and space men. We drove the 140 miles home.
It was a nutty coincidence that the following day we had to drive to Melbourne, just 25 miles short of Cape Canaveral, so Jamie could attend the Florida State Yo-Yo Championship. He didn’t intend to compete but ended up in a funny novice competition to see who could make their yo yo spin the longest and he won. The prize was, of course, a yo yo! He did a lot of schmoozing and as the contest was held in a mall, I did a little shopping. It was a great day.I encountered Endeavor again a week and a half later when she re-entered the earth’s atmosphere. A sonic boom occurs as the shuttle zips through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. If you are near the shuttle's path, you will actually hear two sonic booms. NASA states that one sonic boom is generated by the shuttle's nose; the other by its tail. Prior to the sonic boom, you will see an orange streak with a bright white tail if skies are clear. I fairly leapt out of bed from the unexpected noise and checked our dark house for signs of something having blown up or a parent having fallen in the night. It wasn’t until I mentioned it to the folks at breakfast that I learned I had heard Endeavour as she flew over the area on her path home to Cape Canaveral. How very cool.
As Jamie, Traveller and I sped east towards Atlantis Friday morning full of petrol and coffee, I had a lot on my mind. Mum and dad were safely in Maine, having arrived Thursday night for their summer season as snowbirds with friends and family. I had given my notice at work and was now once again unemployed. I’d become a space shuttle groupie and the words my sweet husband had spoken at Endeavour’s launch resonated in my head. We were going to see a space ship take off. After years of watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and Dr. Who with his little blue police call box that’s bigger on the inside, it was finally sinking in that yes, we were going to watch a space ship take off and with its final mission bring to a close this chapter of manned space flights. I realized how little I’ve paid attention to an achievement that is pretty darn amazing when you stop to think about it.
I couldn’t tell you when the shuttle program started and what the first shuttle was called without doing a search on the internet. According to NASA, President Nixon formally proposed a reusable space transportation system in January of 1972. The first shuttle was originally planned to be named Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from Star Trek fans convinced the White House to change the name to Enterprise. President Ford said he was partial to the name Enterprise as he had served aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific that had serviced the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Ford told NASA to change the name. (As an aside, as I followed a research thread to check the accuracy of the story about the Trekkies and the write-in campaign, the document used in a Wikipedia thread was a scanned copy of a page from the Sept 6, 1976 issue of The Lewiston Sun Journal of all newspapers—the Sun Journal being a paper from Lewiston, Maine. The story was an Associated Press story. Funny!) Enterprise went on to be the shuttle from which its sisters were all born, the Henrietta Lacks of the shuttle program.
I can tell you I was sitting in a lecture room on the USM campus in Portland waiting for my music history class to begin when students started arriving saying that the shuttle Challenger had exploded during launch on that January 28th in 1986. It seemed like a bad joke until Professor Bowdren arrived and confirmed that the shuttle had exploded, killing everyone onboard including Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher whom all of New England had embraced when she was chosen as the first teacher astronaut in the Teacher in Space Project. We spent some time talking about the space program and its future then Prof Bowdren let us go. He’d pick up with class next week.
I am ashamed to admit that as I did a search to find out where the shuttle Columbia is now, I was stunned to learn it had disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003. As I read articles about the disaster, bits of memory returned. When I moved to Texas, the name Nacogdoches seemed familiar. I couldn’t recall why but as I looked at film footage of the debris field, I remembered the numerous interviews that had come from Nacogdoches in the days following the tragedy and strange way the word Nacogdoches felt in my mouth. Memory is such a delicate thing.
We arrived at Bennett Causeway to find the place rammed with people at eight o’clock in the morning waiting for the final countdown for Atlantis. We parked far down the causeway and walked to a spot near a bridge perhaps half a mile from where we had watched Endeavour launch. People were sat in chairs on the roadside, balanced on guardrails, spread out on blankets on the banking and high a-top big RV’s. There was no shortage of updates thanks to cell phones and radios. Cameras with massive telescopic zoom lenses were trained on a spot far out at the horizon. Binoculars were passed back and forth. It didn’t matter who you were, what you looked like or where you came from, so long as you were not blocking anyone’s view we were all just citizens of the planet here to send our love and good wishes to the Atlantis crew and be part of history.A flotilla of watercraft bobbed in the small bay before us. There was a no-go zone being enforced by the Coast Guard keeping boats a defined distance from the launch area. A pair of manatees came to view the gathering, surfacing over and over to the delight of the crowd. During prescribed minutes prior to launch, fighter jets patrolled the airspace, gathering climate information that was being sent to the command center according to several seasoned spectators who were near us.
And then the final few seconds of the countdown. Everyone looked to the horizon. Someone with a camera announced, “There’s the steam clouds!” and suddenly we had lift off. Even from 13 miles away, we could see the billowing clouds of white against the distant gray and then the deep orange glow of the rockets forcing themselves and Atlantis skyward. There was awe-inspired silence and then applause. Then more silence from the crowd as the sound of the rockets moved across the water towards us and we watched Atlantis climb higher and higher, through a layer of clouds and into another patch of blue sky, her rockets still blazing, finally disappearing above another layer of clouds. There was a final round of applause and then that was that. Some kept watching the sky, watching the exhaust plume spread out across the blue as upper level winds caught hold. Others dashed to their cars,hoping to get on the highway ahead of the exodus. Jamie and I stood by the guardrail holding on to each other, smiling. We had just seen a space ship take off, the last of her kind.
Godspeed, Atlantis. May we all make it home safely.(As for the sushi mentioned in the title, we had lunch at Cocoa Beach Thai & Sushi and it was amazing! If you find yourself on the Space Coast, get your sushi here! Oh, and most of the photos in this blog are sadly not ours. Most are from NASA, some are from news agencies and they are images I found through Google)
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Austin in the Rearview Mirror
Well, we’ve done it. After three and a half years of getting by and being tossed around by the whims of the capitol, Jamie and I made the decision to cut our losses and leave Austin. Of course it’s a fine line between cutting one’s losses and being booted out on your ear, which is pretty much what we were facing with our apartment lease coming up for renewal and no job prospects in sight beyond our limited work for Busted. But at some point you just have to accept that a place is not good for you and that your personal growth has been limited to extending the boundaries of how many rude people you can stomach on a daily basis and how many nights you can drag your bed into the living room to get away from the neighbors partying and puking outside the bedroom window. Simply put, we were ready for a new start.
Our last few days in Austin turned out to be some of the nicest. We saw friends for goodbye coffees and beers and dinners. We met friendly strangers. We became tourists, people who were not staying. As we packed and sold furnishings, 
we thought a lot about why we were leaving a city that epitomizes cool, hip, groovy and weird and we realized that aside from a few dear friends and a few favorite spots, most of our enjoyment in Texas took place outside those famous Austin city limits. Austin is great if you are a student and have daddy bankrolling your life. Austin is great if you have a job you love and the income to take advantage of all those hip, cool and groovy things. It’s a city of pleasures and privileges, cliques and clubs. If you fall outside those parameters, it’s a tough to make connections that actually mean something to everyone involved.
we thought a lot about why we were leaving a city that epitomizes cool, hip, groovy and weird and we realized that aside from a few dear friends and a few favorite spots, most of our enjoyment in Texas took place outside those famous Austin city limits. Austin is great if you are a student and have daddy bankrolling your life. Austin is great if you have a job you love and the income to take advantage of all those hip, cool and groovy things. It’s a city of pleasures and privileges, cliques and clubs. If you fall outside those parameters, it’s a tough to make connections that actually mean something to everyone involved.Perhaps it is the same in any city. It certainly didn’t help that we seemed to keep bumping up against neighbors and work situations that demanded far more than they ever gave in return. In the end, we realized we were losing faith in humanity and indeed in our own abilities to remain the caring and good people we know ourselves to be. It was those moments of needing clarity that would send us off on adventures to Enchanted Rock, Abilene and the coast. If being away was better, then why stay?
Bless their hearts, my folks drove to Austin with their truck and cargo trailer to help us with the move. Jamie and Dad packed that trailer with surgical precision while mom and I vacuumed and scrubbed in the hopes of getting the security deposit back. We set off for Florida at 6 am on a Sunday morning and watched the sun rise over Round Top as we drove. Breakfast was at Denny’s in Cypress, a new experience for Jamie. There was a bacon celebration underway, a Baconalia. How could we resist! The first day’s
drive took us through Houston and Baton Rouge.
There was no time for snapping photos but Baton Rouge made us laugh when we spied a sign for a pizza shop called “Schlitz and Giggles.” http://www.schlittz.com/Brilliant. I emailed them a few days ago saying we wished we could have stopped because we loved their sign. The owner wrote back that the pizza was even better than the sign and when we were in Baton Rouge again, stop in—the first beer and pizza was on him!
drive took us through Houston and Baton Rouge.
There was no time for snapping photos but Baton Rouge made us laugh when we spied a sign for a pizza shop called “Schlitz and Giggles.” http://www.schlittz.com/Brilliant. I emailed them a few days ago saying we wished we could have stopped because we loved their sign. The owner wrote back that the pizza was even better than the sign and when we were in Baton Rouge again, stop in—the first beer and pizza was on him!
We saw another great sign along the highway in Ponchatoula. Cretin Homes. We were in tears from laughing. Urban Dictionary defines cretin as “A Person that is: brainless, stupid, child-like, and full of pointless information that makes no sense and appeals only to other cretins. They can be found in abundance in every single populated internet forum, where they race to post as many mind-numbing messages as possible in a single session. In addition, they seemingly interbreed with other cretins, ensuring that their cretinous genes continue long after they end up dead meaning the Internet will never be rid of their kind. More's the pity.” It’s good to know that even cretins get to have custom-made homes. http://www.cretinhomes.com/
Louisiana along Routes 10 and 12 was fun and friendly. We had dinner at the Olive Garden in Slidell, Jamie’s second of the three forays into popular American eateries that you find along highways and in mall parking lots. Miceli, our young waiter, brought Jamie the biggest draught beer he’s had in America (everything is bigger in Texas except the beer glasses) and I shared a tip for getting a ginger ale in places that don’t serve ginger ale, which is most places in the south it seems. This tip comes from a very nice waiter in a bizarrely posh restaurant in Austin called The Cheesecake Factory http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/ when we met with the Jewish bookkeeper from the library who was certified online to perform marriages to discuss our wedding vows: fill a glass with Sprite then add a shot of Coke. Honest to goodness, it’s a suitable ginger ale substitute in a pinch.
We stopped for the night in Diamond Head, Mississippi, at the Diamond Head Resort http://diamondheadresort.ms/which was decidedly un-resort like. Creepy was more like it but we were tired and dad doesn’t like to drive with the trailer much past dark. The folks’ room was ok but it took the desk clerk three tries to find us a room that was made up. We ended up with a suite because he got tired of trying to decipher on the computer which rooms had been cleaned. The suite had a complimentary cockroach in the refrigerator. I didn’t sleep well, which made two nights in a row because our UT neighbors back in Austin the night before had decided to have 60 of their closest and drunkest friends over for another all-night party. It was a blurry-eyed Wren that stumbled into the Cracker Barrel in Spanish Fort, Alabama, for breakfast at 7:30am but a happy one that left an hour later after a rousing breakfast delivered by Debbie Lee and a nice chat with Jackie in the gift shop. Jamie had his first taste of grits which he pronounced “quite gritty.”
Breakfast saw us through until Gainesville, Florida, in late afternoon. It’s safe to say that the panhandle of Florida goes on forever. It’s like Pennsylvania without the mountains. What kept us occupied for surely 100 miles were signs for Café Risque. 
We had been marveling at and lamenting billboards from the minute we crossed into Louisiana. They are everywhere, most of them trying to lure you to Gulf Coast casinos. My folks stopped at Gulfport, Mississippi, on two of their trips out to Austin to have a flutter in the casinos. By the second trip, the casinos had gone completely high tech, not a one-armed bandit in sight. Gone was the sound of quarters dropping, levers being let loose and jackpots spilling into buckets. Now you get a voucher if you win, a piece of paper you take to a person or another machine. What fun is that? However, Café Risque was sizing itself up to be a winner. There was one commercially produced billboard with some coquettishly positioned seemingly
We had been marveling at and lamenting billboards from the minute we crossed into Louisiana. They are everywhere, most of them trying to lure you to Gulf Coast casinos. My folks stopped at Gulfport, Mississippi, on two of their trips out to Austin to have a flutter in the casinos. By the second trip, the casinos had gone completely high tech, not a one-armed bandit in sight. Gone was the sound of quarters dropping, levers being let loose and jackpots spilling into buckets. Now you get a voucher if you win, a piece of paper you take to a person or another machine. What fun is that? However, Café Risque was sizing itself up to be a winner. There was one commercially produced billboard with some coquettishly positioned seemingly naked ladies but the majority of the billboards were made with a lot of big stencils and paints. The first one was a bit surprising but by the time we saw the thirtieth one, we were laughing and praying we could see the café from the highway.
We stopped at Sonny’s Real Pit BBQ http://www.sonnysbbq.com/to get fueled up for the final push to Sebring. It’s never a good idea to stop somewhere that has ‘Real Pit’ listed in the name but Sonny’s is a Florida chain and the folks knew it would be ok food, which it was. After dining at The Salt Lick, a legendary central Texas barbecue joint that has earned every single kudo it’s received over the years (it’s where we had our après wedding party), nothing else quite measures up, but we managed to clean our plates and leave with a stack of wet-wipes for future adventures.
It was with great joy that we soon discovered we were closing in fast on the exit for Café Risque. I slowed down to 60 mph and Jamie craned his neck to both sides of the bridge but to no avail. We couldn’t see the café. But we saw something equally hilarious. The billboard beside the on-ramp after the bridge read:
Again, tears of joy. What clever marketing for that lawyer.
Florida delivered us to our journey’s end with a spectacular sunset followed by a starry sky and here we may settle. For now we are in the spare room at my folks’ place, enjoying the quiet at night and re-acquainting ourselves with the importance of sun screen during the day. We’re quickly finding that our new state is very different from our old one but that’s why they call it Florida and not Texas. Stay tuned for adventures in bike shopping, catching escaped parakeets and buying fruit at roadside stands. Florida promises to be every bit as nutty as the Lone Star State. 
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