We had a fun evening last Thursday night. For Christmas Tom had bought us tickets to a show in downtown Orlando at the new Dr. Phillips performing arts center. Along with the show tickets came a voucher for dinner, a room at the closest hotel – a block away- and a voucher for breakfast the next morning. In addition he was the designated driver and car parker so it took all the potential problem parts away. The original plan was that we’d take the train from Debary to downtown and eliminate the whole car issue but they don’t want you parking overnight at the Debary station. That worked out fine too because we hit Costco on the way home to pick up a few non-essentials and gassed up at $1.69. The hotel was incredibly nice and we had a luxury suite – ditto the dinner and breakfast spots. The show was a “Conversation with Ina Garten”, a famous cook. Nancy has at least one of her cookbooks and every once in a while cooks something from it. The last success was the meatballs I wrote about several posts back. I expected a cooking demonstration but it turned out to really be a conversation with an individual followed by a Q&A from the audience. I did laugh when somebody asked her for a substitute for garlic in her recipe entitled chicken with 40 garlics. I really wanted to ask if something could be substituted for the chicken. I’d have rather spent the night at the hotel bar but seeing the Dr. Phillips Center was a real treat and the show actually wasn’t that bad. Nancy loved it – mission accomplished.
Our local newspaper is the Daytona Beach News Journal. It services a population base that must be close to 500K and is a full fledged paper with multiple sections and one full page designated “Business”. I read that section every day but was blown away the other day with an article labeled “airport delays”. It was a 6” column and reported that there were 3 delays at the Daytona airport; two forty five minute delays on flights to Charlotte and another 45 minute delay to Atlanta. This was on the same day there were literally thousands of delays nationwide. The article wasn’t in the context of how good the airport was or how flying in and out of Daytona was a good thing but rather as real news. Wow – an you imagine reporting on that! slow news day
It happens that sometimes if you bring in an armload of greens from the garden there’s a lizard hidden way down deep in the foliage. I view that as a positive – a built in insect trap that actually hunts down critters – but my view is decidedly in the minority (here). Trying to capture a small, quick lizard in a house is no easy task and if you’re patient enough it will either starve or do the job he was born to do.
Tropicals got banged by the frost – that would be the pineapples and bananas. Too soon to tell but I think they all survived although hit pretty hard. The pineapples are interesting. I have 6 plants in the garden and 2 in a planter on the concrete deck. The planter is sitting about 10’ from the structure but still out in the open. The ones in the garden turned from green to yellow in two days whereas the other two look just fine. It must be that the concrete holds enough heat to overcome the cold air.
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