Good news. The National Weather Service just updated the 2009 hurricane season forecast and dropped the number of hurricanes they anticipate. The reason for the drop is that the waters of the ocean have cooled. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Since it’s easy to measure surface water temp accurately, I have no reason to doubt the ocean has cooled. I know the lake cooled. Whether or not this will result in fewer hurricanes is anybody’s guess.
I can also believe the ocean has cooled since on April 8 I had to cover the garden on a frost warning. Frost in April? What’s that all about. This global warming sure is strange.
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Back when we lived in Utah and Chris still lived at home, he and I used to make home made pasta a few times a month. We had a great pasta machine and made the dough using a food processor. We had it all down to a science and could whip up a batch of great fettucine or linquine in under 30 minutes. We made spinach pasta, carrot pasta, tomatoe pasta – basically anything that grew in the garden was cooked and tossed into the food processor along with the flour and eggs. Alas, he went off to school and with just the two of us at home, the pasta making stopped. When we moved from Utah, Nancy sold the pasta machine, unbeknownst to me, in a garage sale – officially ending my promising career as a pasta master. Then for my last birthday, Chris got me a new pasta machine. I loved it but still, without him to help, it sat unused all this time.

Fast forward to Easter and it was our turn to have a big family dinner. We started discussing the menu a month prior to the event and it became obvious that we were on two different pages as to what an Easter dinner should be. In my family and since we were married, Easter was always a baked ham, potato or macaroni salad, baked beans and a green salad. Hard rolls and cheese so you could make great ham sandwiches. Basically a cold meal. Nancy’s family had a hot meal – ham, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole. So she started polling the kids as to what they wanted for Easter and it was ending up to be a combination of lots of things. Out of the blue, Nancy said we should maybe really go back in time when my Mom and grandmom made ravioli for Easter. It was an all day meal prep with hours spent just making the pasta dough- prefood processor. We broke out the food processor and the new pasta machine and whipped up a spaghetti dinner to see if we had what it took to pull off a big ravioli feast for 10 – 15 people. It went so smooth that we agreed this was a good course to pursue.

So we understood all the mechanics but weren’t sure on the proportions – how many ravioli do you make for that many people and how does that roll back to flour, eggs, ricotta and mozzerela cheese. Each batch of dough is 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs, some salt, olive oil, and water. In our experimental cooking we determined that one batch fed the two of us with enough left over for a big lunch for me the next day. So it made sense that if one batch was plenty for two, then 6 batches would cover a dozen or so. So how much cheese do you need to fill that much pasta dough. We guessed that three 2 pound containers of ricotta and 2 one pound packages of mozzerella would do just fine. Since the weight of all that approached 10 pounds, I had a nagging feeling that we were making way too much food. But nothing is better than day old pasta so the worst that could happen was plenty of leftovers.

We started Saturday morning about 10AM and by noon had constructed 90 or so ravioli and still had some of the filling left over. We speculated that we had enough filling for 100 but decided not to make any more dough – just chuck the left over cheese. We set aside some to freeze for a future meal, some for the neighbors, some for my sister and settled on cooking 50. With a dozen eaters that’s 4 per person which sounded about right. Along with the ravioli, there was a few pounds of Italian Sausage, a couple pounds of pork short ribs, a big antipasto salad and Italian bread. The logistics of cooking 50 ravioli was a bit more than we had planned but we put on three big pots of boiling water and put about 10 in each to start. We guessed the cooking time at 10 minutes in boiling water and as we removed the cooked ravioli, we replaced them with the second batch. So it took 2 cycles with 3 pots going. As it turned out, there were leftovers from the first batch so the whole second pass was excess. We all ate till we could hardly walk and still ended up with plenty of leftovers. But at least now we understand the process quite a bit better and will tone it down a bit next time.

For anybody who wants to try to make the food processor pasta dough, it’s way easier than the traditional method with kneading and rolling dough. You just put in all the ingredients except the water and turn the machine on. The trick is adding the water. You put in a couple of tablespoons and then wait a minute or so. Another tablespoon and wait. The water interacts slowly with the other ingredients and then all of a sudden it reaches the critical point and the dough forms a big ball and starts shaking the hell out of the food processor. If you overshoot on the water, the dough will be too wet and sticky. At that point you add more flour. So you can bounce back and forth between adding water and adding flour until you get it right.

Wildlife sighting of a lifetime. This morning as I’m sitting at the computer, a bobcat came up on the porch. I first thought it was a really big cat coming out of the woods but I quickly changed that assessment to a really gigantic cat coming out of the woods. Finally I realized this was no regular cat kind of cat but a real, live Bobcat – short tail, spiky ears and all. I would say he was about double the size of a normal cat in height. He sat there for maybe 5 minutes doing cat things such as licking his paws. He got to within 3′ before he spotted me and ran off into the woods. Wow! Tried to take pictures with the camera sitting right beside the computer but shooting through the screened window created glare and blur to make the cat barely distinguishable. I saw a bobcat one other time but he was way up a tree, not nearly so close and scooted away as soon as he saw me. I remember being impressed by how high up a pine tree he was and that he jumped down from at least 30′ up and hit the ground running. We have lots of rabbits and an occasional rat running around so being inside this cat’s territory is a good thing.

Most of you wouldn’t draw any connection between the fact that I started a garden a year ago and Michelle Obama started one this year. But I could have forecast it. The second year we lived in Salt Lake we moved to a house that had a great back yard and evidence that at some time way in the past there had been a small garden. I decided it would be neat to try to resurrect it. I expanded it from a 10’x20′ plot to a 20′ x 40′ plot and was spectacularly successful for a complete novice. We lived in a town called Bountiful so it became obvious why the founders had picked that name. A year later the President of the Mormon Church declared that it would be a good idea for all Mormons to have a vegetable garden in their back yard. Needless to say I was the only one in the neighborhood with a garden and the only non-Mormon for miles around. I gave the neighbors bragging rights and told them that if anybody checked up on them they could send them over to my place and I’d claim only to be sharecropping. Now do you see why it comes as no surprise to me that the Obama’s decided to follow that path? I’m going to make a wild ass guess that she will never know about the nematodes or the work that goes into a compost heap. In fact she probably has a resident nematodologist on staff who has access to all those banned chemicals to deal with such pests – The DC Exclusion Act of 2009 – and funded by the Homeland Security budget under the money covering underground terrorist attacks. Also, since I let my Mormon friends claim my garden, I’m letting my Dem friends do the same. So if Michelle calls, just give her my address and tell her you do your gardening there.

I’m in full switch over mode now with a third of the garden still putting out winter stuff, a third sprouting summer stuff and the final third sitting idle just waiting for my planting surge April 1. I know for a fact that the soil is in excellent condition so my only concern this year is the nematodes. I’m going after them with a full across the board attack and no scientific methodology. I’ve read that having a heavily composted soil is a deterrent. The soil in my garden has at least 6” of well refined compost made by yours truly over the past two years. I’ve read that Golden Guardian Marigolds ward off nematodes. I have already over a 100 Golden Guardians on standpoint to be transplanted in the next couple of weeks and lots of seeds to keep them coming. And I have mixed gallons of the secret sugar/clorox brew that is supposed to attract and destroy nematodes by the thousands if not millions. A good scientist would probably cordon off sections of the garden and try each remedy independently to see which is the most effective. Being an engineer, I hit them with everything i have and go for a total knockout. Last season it took maybe 2 months for the nematodes to gain the upper hand and it was all over for me after that. Let the rematch begin.

I’m also getting much more sophisticated in marking the garden. Last year I just stuck things in the ground and had cut up a sherbet container and written the variety with a sharpie pen. That washed off in a week or so and after that it was really no telling what variety we were looking at. This year I bought stakes and an indelible garden pen guaranteed to not wash off. That may sound like an overkill but not all varieties do as well and the plan is to weed out the ones that sound good on paper but don’t perform well in Florida. My system last year totally failed so I have no idea which ones were good and which ones failed. Of course last year, I was happy to see anything survive compared to this year where I’ll be blown away if anything doesn’t make it. Another example of my new level of sophistication, I learned that there are two types of tomatoes – determinate and Indeterminate. I knew that but wasn’t sure what that meant to me. I knew that determents have all the fruit come ripe at the same time whereas indeterminate’s produce over a long season. What I didn’t know was that determents do better in cages and indeterminate do better on trellises. I didn’t know that indeterminate do better with heavy pruning and determents want no pruning at all. And both want fertilizer with low nitrogen and heavy phosphate. That’s not intuitive because if you use fertilizers with lots of nitrogen, the plants grow much bigger and lusher. But, unbeknownst to me, all the plants efforts are going into putting on nice leaves and not to putting out fruit. Drop the nitrogen and pump up the phosphate and out pop the tomatoes.

The downside to all this knowledge is that if it all turns to crap, what do I have to blame. Ignorance was a good excuse in the past.

Seems like spring has sprung. You can tell instantly by the bright color from the azalea’s. The bushes are larger than ever and full of blooms. Overall, this was the most consistently cool winter I can remember but it seems to have finally broken. Technically we’ve actually had a freeze as late as March 20 but I’m going to assume that’s just not possible this year and get on with it. I’ve started attacking those bushes that were nailed hard by the freezes and pretty much chopping them down to a few inches above ground. Some will survive and some are history – too soon to tell which but the hibiscus looks like it might make it and the butterfly bush would appear beyond help. The citrus trees all seemed to have made out ok. The two grapefruit trees actually have blossoms so that means fruit next year. The jury’s still out on the tangerine and the satsuma but they look healthy.

The winter garden is winding down fast and I have seedlings started indoors for the next crop. The new stuff includes 6 different varieties of peppers; 5 varieties of tomatoes; 3 different squash types with about that many more to follow; one type of cucumber that we’ve found to be exactly perfect for here. I started the peppers a few weeks ago, the tomatoes last week, and the other stuff yesterday. Staggering compensates for the longer germination times of the different plants so I can more or less get them all transplanted into the garden at the same time. I usually start about double the number of seeds that I expect to convert into plants. That accounts for germination less than 100%, transplant survival less that 100% and a few left over for friends and family who just want to grow one or two things. We’re about broccoli’d and cabbaged out so the changeover is welcome.

I think I mentioned earlier that I had discovered a large stand of bamboo in one corner of my neighbor’s yard. Bamboo is quickly becoming my next duct tape – the material you can use for hundreds of tasks. The garden is starting to resemble a Hong Kong construction site with bamboo trellises and tripods for tieing up plants or training vining veggies.

The other great changeover is that the big bass are on the beds. The speckled perch gear is back in storage and the lines all rigged for bass. Now all we need is for some rain to fill up the lake.

I’m really confused now. I just saw a report on the tube that the Canadians are contemplating sending an ice breaker up to New Foundland to help a school of dolphin escape a growing ice pack. I thought we were concerned that the polar bears were going to starve because there was no ice. So now there must be plenty of ice, plenty of polar bear food and we’re in the process of screwing the bears. Personally I was never a big bear fan and would always pick dolphins over bears but isn’t this just a bit hypocritical. And is it right to break up the ice and then complain that the ice pack is getting smaller?
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My neighbor George is a Fred Sanford kind of guy – can’t throw anything away and will even stop on the side of the road to salvage things people have trashed. He’ll pick up an old mechanism and tear it apart – not to rework it – but to get the bits and parts for future projects. Sounds crazy but no matter what you need, he has it or can make it from the stuff he has. Some of his creations are total genius. Let me give you an example of one he did just the other day. He built his own boat trailer, long ago and has a really cheap, junkie winch on it. It’s always been a struggle getting the boat winched back onto the trailer. That’s become a problem lately since he has a chest wound which just won’t heal with any stress on it. So George made a piece from an old socket set that replaced the handle on winch. Then he takes a portable hand drill and uses that to crank the winch. Is that clever or what? It worked so well that he built another one to control the winches that lift his boat at the dock. He offered to upgrade my dock winch but I begged off. First I’d have to get a new portable drill with plenty of torque but it would mean that I would have to keep the drill battery charged and I’m not too consistent with that.

I’ve picked up some of that junk conversion skill and recently scored a success. I had a cheap hand shovel with a nice, long, narrow head. The shaft and handle broke off after just a bit of use. I saved the head just in case. Yesterday I got a new Lee Valley catalog and was looking over the garden tools and spotted the perfect furrow tool which would allow me to make nice rows for planting seeds. They wanted $60 for it, which was totally outrageous. The head on their tool was quite similar to the head on my old hand shovel so I went up to the shop to see if I could conjure up anything similar. I had a 5′ piece of plastic electrical conduit which would make a nice handle but had a head scratcher as to attaching the head to the conduit. Checking thru my stash I came up with a couple of long nylon bolts with nuts that had I had saved from a toilet seat change. A lot of people probably wouldn’t have saved them but George has had this influence on me. The head of the bolt just fit in the conduit so I mixed up some epoxy and installed the toilet seat bolt. Then I drilled a 3/8” hole in the shovel head, slid it over the bolt, and put the nylon nut on to hold it all together. It almost worked perfectly. The shovel head had just enough round that the nut didn’t hold it tight causing it to swivel when I tried to furrow a row. I removed the head, hammered it flat, added a washer and reassembled it. Perfect. The last design flaw was that the conduit was just a little too flexible – it would work but it wasn’t optimal. I solved that by cutting a piece of bamboo from a large stand of bamboo and forcing it inside the conduit. The green bamboo hasn’t immediately solved the problem but my theory is that it will stiffen as it dries.
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The great weather and low water said Poke Boat to me so I broke it out again. The Poke boat is a lightweight, personal boat – a cross between a kayak and a canoe. It’s 12′ long and only weighs 22 lbs. I love to fish out of it because you are so quiet and the whole experience is up close and personal. Since the propulsion is totally manual, you wake up a few dormant muscles each time you start a new season. I made a modification which I think will make it a bit more comfortable. I took a garden kneeling pad designed to protect knees (and jeans), and cut off a strip to cushion the back of the cockpit where it tends to cut into my back. It’s held together with the usual duct tape so instantly recognizeable as one of my creations. Much more comfortable. Fishing out of the poke boat has one interesting feature you have to deal with. it’s very light and narrow and there are no brakes. So when you catch a fish, even a small one, it tends to tow you around a bit. That makes it kind of tough to get a large fish out of the grass since he’s pulling you and the boat into the thick of it. You just have to laugh sometimes when you see yourself being towed under an overhanging tree and know it’s going to be nasty getting back out – with or without the fish. Adds another dimension to the whole experience. And just for the record, the large bass have started moving into shallow water and I’m bagging a big mama every now and again.

I think I’ve mentioned that one of my regular chores now is hanging out the clothes. I’d like to say this is the way we are reducing our carbon footprint but that would be total baloney. We hang out clothes, and always have, because we like the way they feel and smell. Still, it’s a nice arrow to have in the quiver when somebody starts giving me the environmental pitch and I ask them if they hang out their clothes or still use a, ugh, dryer. Shuts them down fairly quickly. Sort of like asking Al Gore which SUV he drove to his private plane this morning.

Doing it has created an awareness of clothes hanging technique and since out here in the country most people hang their clothes, I have a chance to study technique. For example, I can always tell when the family is Mexican. They have a different way of hanging out clothes. Maybe it’s a cultural thing and I can’t be sure whether it’s a Mexican culture, a generic Hispanic culture, or a Pierson Hispanic culture. First, they don’t use clothes pins; just drape the clothes over the line. I kind of like that and started doing that myself with sheets. Second, they can use anything that simulates a line. Most commonly that would be a fence. Even if there’s a clothes line available, certain things hang on the fence. So if you’re riding around Pierson and see a fence draped with clothing, you know the occupants are Hispanic. There’s one family across from the post office that adds a nice touch. Each day they remove the clothes to be worn that day and when the last items go, out comes a new load. In the rainy season, the clothes may be rinsed several times in rain water. You can tell the size of a family, the age breakdown – diapers are a dead giveaway. One thing I do know – they wear nice clean clothes. I suggested this idea to Nancy but was turned down cold. Maybe this is a German – Italian clash.
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Saw something really interesting (to me) yesterday. I was going out onto the porch to check on a grilling meat loaf and noticed a flock of 8 wild turkeys in my neighbors yard. I was no more than 25′ from them. I’ve seen a couple of turkeys before but never that many and never that close. The first thing that struck me was how big they are – maybe 4′ tall At first glance I honestly thought it was a flock of sandhill cranes but the coloring was wrong. And the color. From a distance turkeys have always looked black but up close they’re a very shiny reddish – bronze colo. When they heard me, they quickly started running off and then all took flight. What a wing span! I was blown away by how well they flew and how quickly they gained altitude. I’ve only seen turkeys on the ground and never appreciated how well they could fly. I was under the impression that they were awkward flyers but these guys were literally soaring and executing sharp,hard spirals while at the same time gaining enough altitude to clear some tall pines. Very impressive.

I think the reason I’m so excited about seeing turkeys is that I knew lots of guys who were avid turkey hunters 30,40 years ago. I never heard them ever actually shooting one and they would talk about how wiley they were. Seems they almost never got to see one and would talk about hearing them as a big deal. Each had a turkey caller and instead of bragging about the turkeys they actually got, they’d brag about how they almost got one to follow their call. Eventually they switched over to hunting turkeys with bows and black powder guns. Never got any that way either but I think it was better for their ego to not get one using antique techniques rather than with the latest Italian shot gun. When we first got back to Florida I saw a few while driving which was incredible to me. With the first couple of sightings, I assumed it was my imagination and that they were some kind of unfamiliar buzzard. Now it’s common at a dinner party for somebody to say they saw a flock of 50. I still don’t believe much of that talk but will have to admit that I’m personally seeing them more often and in bigger flocks. So if times really get tough, maybe we can add wild turkey to our squirrel and possum larder. My guess is the reason there are so many of them is that the hunters woke up to the realization that the store bought variety were just better eating.

It didn’t take long, 8 days, before I had to make a call to Vizio about the new TV. As predicted it had to do with the remote. One of us, really could have been either one, put the remote into a mode in which it wouldn’t control anything except the volume. You couldn’t even turn it off. I did all the obvious stuff – changed batteries in the remote, turned the power off with the wall plug and let it sit for a while before repowering it. None of that worked. Hell, I even read the manual – not a clue. It wasn’t a total disaster because all the normal buttons on the set worked so we could change channels that way. That would be a bummer if we were on cable or satellite with 1000 channels but as over the airwave purists we can zip through in a minute and in the back recesses of my mind, I was already adjusting to life without a remote.

Since I hadn’t bothered to send in the registration card, I was reluctant to try customer service. Then I noticed in the manual it said you could register online. Great. That meant I could register and then call, all within a couple of minutes or hours depending on how the dial up service was and how gigantic and fancy the Vizio site was. Even doing the online registration brought a surprise. The site brought up the usual registration form with all those fields to be filled in, some identified as mandatory, some optional. There was one unusual mandatory field – purchase price, not including sales tax. I’m thinking this is the manufacturer’s way of learning exactly what the retailers are charging. I filled in $800 which was very, very close to what I actually paid. My registration attempt was rejected with a note saying that there was invalid data in the form. I looked closely at all the complex fields – such as the 300 digit serial number field – working my way down the form to the purchase price field which was flagged for invalid data. I changed the data to $799.99 and the registration went right through. I would never have guessed that the manufacturer and the retailer were that tightly hooked on price.

Registration complete, I called tech support. I was fairly sure it was going to be an American support operation since they worked regular peope hours in Pacific Time and sure enough, a gal named Bobbi came on fairly quickly to help. I explained the problem and she said “don’t you just hate it when stuff like that happens”. I was instantly gratified that this was not going to be one of those tough tech support calls. She walked me through a series of steps and suggestions and eventually we got it working. Turns out that there are two eeny teeny buttons on the remote with exactly the same label. One in the upper right hand corner and one in the lower right hand corner. The lower right hand corner button is in with all the DVD controls. I had never noticed the lower one and honestly, even if i had, wouldn’t have pushed it. Turns out that button selects “TV” from among a selection of other devices and I guess one of us had inadvertenly pushed that when we picked up the remote. I had pushed the upper button labeled TV since I suspected that was the problem. Bobbi did tell me something the manual didn’t – better if you use the bottom button instead of the top one. Bad engineering/programming. So we’re back in business.
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After pulling out a harvested broccoli plant yesterday, I spotted a large weed in the garden. When I touched it I got a stinging sensation on my finger. I pulled back my hand quickly and reassessed the weed – must be a stinging nettle of some kind but I had never seen one like this. The weed had to go so I worked my fingers under the surface and grabbed it by the root and yanked it out. My fingers still stung from the first encounter. When I pulled it out I noticed a small, low growing weed remaining. It had been hidden from sight by the bigger guy. I grabbed him and quickly learned that it was not the big weed but this little guy who was the stinger. I had fairly well wrapped my hand around it so my whole hand was instantly on fire with thousands of needle pricks or fireant bites. I ran in the house and soaked my hand in alcohol. That was at 10AM. Would you believe that my hand was still hurting at 10PM? I have never encountered anything like that before. George called it Fire Weed; Joey called it thorny nettle; can’t write what i call it.

You remember the groundhog who jumped back in his hole? I have a mental image of him bumping into Al Gore on the way down the hole.

We had 3 days of serious, freezing weather. Not sure exactly how long the temps were below freezing but I got up at 5AM Thursday and the thermometer on the front porch was 32 and a pan of water on the deck had a thin layer of ice. The fields around us were white with frost. By 10AM, it was nice and sunny but the thermometer was still reading 32 and the ice had not melted.

I uncovered the garden on Friday afternoon mentally prepared for a total disaster. Amazingly, no problems. Not the first sign of any damage so the frost covers really did work. I hope that’s the last time I’ll have to use them this year. Today I’ll plant some lettuce starts and onion sets.

Won’t know about the fruit trees for a while. They look ok but you can’t always tell right away. Might just lose a few leaves or might lose next seasons fruit. It’s even possible the tree dies off but don’t think that happened. They normally blossom in March so that will tell the story. I have four trees so my guess is that it will be a mixed bag – some ok, some will lose a season.

The big loser is the lake. The farmers pumped for 3 days and pulled it down another x inches. The problem that gives me is twofold. First when I lower the boat, it’s a real circus act getting in and out. I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance that at some point I’ll end up in the drink. Good news is that the water will only be a few inches deep so I’m not likely to drown. The other problem is that I had calibrated everything down to a gnat’s ass with respect to trolling for specs. My hot area was about 6′ deep, a nice grassy bottom, and I had found the exact right lures, the perfect distance to troll behind the boat and the right trolling speed to keep the bait at fish level without catching onto the grass. Drop the water a foot and the whole thing goes down the tubes. The lure hooks the grass at exactly the wrong place. Increasing trolling speed lifts the lure a bit shallower but moves the bait too fast for the fish. Decreasing the distance from the boat could help but it gets the lure too close to the boat and motor for my liking. I’m thinking my spec days are over until next November. Another couple of inches – normal for this time of year – and I won’t be able to use the boat. I can live with that because I use a kayak for bass anyway.

Speaking of spec’s, Joey and Mark came over yesterday for a fish dinner. They love cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower so Nancy made cole slaw, brccoli-cauliflower salad (using purple cauliflower) and fried cabbage to complement the beer batter fried specs. They worked for their dinner. Helped me get the frost covers off the garden, mowed the grass/weeds, chain sawed some branches that were hanging over the dock, and removed pine needles from the roof. It took the three of us a couple of hours but would have taken me a full day and the pine needles would still be on the roof.

It’s switched over from cold to damn cold. Gore you’re a jerk.

The frost blankets are getting quite a workout this year. With them we’ve been able to keep a steady stream of tomatoes and green peppers all winter long. I really didn’t expect that, especially the peppers. I suspect this batch of artic air will take out all but the hardiest and maybe even those. When we planted the winter garden, I really never gave too much thought to frost protection, assuming that the tender stuff would be history in December most likely; in January for sure. Next year, I’ll revise the layout making it easier to get the tender stuff covered. and locate the tall stuff totally away from low stuff. This year I didn’t give any of that much consideration and made my life a little tougher than need be. Live and learn. I was too focused on nematodes to worry about frost.

One of my favorite cold weather stories – I have several – came in the early 90’s. Our friends, the Sherlin’s, were visiting from California over the Christmas season and I had picked up tickets to see a Ute basketball game. They were having a great season. We were having a stretch of weather that was unusual, even by Utah standards – days and days on end with temperatures hovering around zero. A few years prior to that my brother in law had visited Russia and brought me back a great fur hat. I wore it regularly and the kids all made fun of me, as did co-workers, wives etc. If I took Chris anywhere wearing the hat he would walk about 10′ or so ahead or behind me and wear an expression saying that he had no idea who the guy with the hat was. But it kept me warm and I can deal with harrassment. I was wearing it on the night of the game. We ended up having to park a couple hundred yards from the arena in a parking lot that was piled 8′ high in snow and the temp -10 degrees. When we got out of the car, I started worrying that Chris would get too cold so I offered him my hat. No way, what if somebody saw him wearing it. By the time we were halfway to the arena, he meekly asked if my offer was still good and he joyfully put the hat on. When we got within 10′ of the doors, he took the hat off and handed it to me – did not want to risk somebody in the crowd spotting him. We watched the game and then left. Within 10′ of leaving the building Chris asked for the hat. I gave it to him of course, but we pulled his chain about it the whole way to the car. I knew then that in a pinch, Chris’s common sense would prevail over outward appearances.

If we have another freeze, I’ll come up with a new cold weather story. I’m hoping we hit warm weather before I run out of stories.

I was walking up the road this morning to get the paper when a piece of pine bark hit me on the shoulder. I looked up and, sure enough, there were a couple of woodpeckers chopping away up top of a 50’+ pine tree. I also noticed that the tree was dead. And while staring up I noticed that a very large branch of an adjacent Live Oak was also dead. Both the pine and the oak limb are directly across from the carport and sheds on one side and the spot where I have my truck and boat parked on the other. If either the tree of the branch came down unexpectedly, chances are something would be cratered. Living in the jungle, I have the name of a tree guy at the top of the phone list so I called to get him here to bring these guys down in a safe manner. I also have an old, nearly dead, Bay tree hanging over the dock – a disaster waiting to happen too. My man Milton came right over and gave me an estimate of $500 to take care of the whole thing. I do have a chain saw but my track record of dropping trees accurately is poor – I dropped one on top of myself a few years back and was trapped for about 10 minutes trying to crawl out from under it. No doubt that a bad fellilng of the pine could cause about $5000 in damage so I guess the $500 is a sensible move. So I made the deal and alerted my neighbor George that there was a firewood windfall coming his way. George had just taken down 3 old, dead oaks at the top end of the property yesterday but is burning his fireplace at a rate of about 1 tree per day. The dead pine is worth about 3 regular size trees so he’ll probably have enough to make it a couple more weeks. I’d like to think he’ll have enough for the rest of the winter.

Cruise ships and Ice Breakers trapped in the St Lawrence Seaway with 3-4′ thick ice. Wonder what’s happening to the Artic ice flow and those ice bergs that were disappearing? Wonder if the Polar bears are happy campers or hoping for a little Global warming? Haven’t heard a word about it so I guess we only hear when the weather’s warm. Sort of like the opening in the ozone layer that just kind of went away, never to be heard from again. Sure glad I have my frost blankets for the garden.

Good Eatin’. Nancy made spec’s in a beer batter the other night. Man was that good. And we have so much broccoli that she made a broccoli-cheese soup. Wow! Served that with a salad that had been residing in the garden an hour before. With spec season shutting down, I need to be sure we’re stocked. After the next full moon, they will shut down until next November. Then it’s back to bream, bass, whiting and pompano with maybe a couple bluefish in the next month or so.

We attended Joey’s graduation from Jetblue U Wednesday. Not sure how many graduations of his we’ve attended starting with his pre-school grad but this one was certainly different. Lots of spirit and rah rah rah. If these graduates live up to the instructions given by the commencement speakers, flying Jetblue should be a pleasant experience – maybe even a return to the 70’s flying experience instead of the Greyhound bus atmosphere that developed. He had a checkout flight Thursday night to Ponce, Puerto Rico and then went onto reserve status – which means no defined flight schedule. Reserves are used to fill in for slots opened by illness, vacations etc etc. The first call came Saturday at 8 AM for a 10 AM flight to Santa Domingo so it didn’t take long to be pressed into service.

We took the leap and bought a flat panel TV. Nothing at all wrong with the one we had but the digital transition was causing some grief watching the set in the bedroom. We have the digital converter box and it works just fine – better picture and more channels – but the downside is that the physical size of the picture is shrunk because of the difference in the format. The set in the bedroom was a 26” set and we are about 15′ from it. That was fine when the world was analog but with the smaller digital format, it became difficult to read any of the trailers or the details of weather maps and the like. The lowest cost solution was to move the 32” set in the living room to the bedroom and replace the living room set with a new digital model. I knew this was coming so had been watching Costco for a particular set to hit my price target. We happened to stop at Costco on our way home from the graduation to pick up a few things and they had just made the reduction to the TV that hit my goal. When we arrived at Costco there were 5 sets; an hour later there were only 2 so we pulled the trigger. Truly a coincidence that the Super Bowl is on Sunday.

I had measured everything so knew my switchout plan would work but I hadn’t even come close to estimating how much the living room set weighed. George and I were able to get it into the bedroom without heart attacks but could not get it up to the level where it would be perched. We called his brother Rick and the 3 of us managed to get it into position. The only casualty was the giant remote control Tom had gotten for his mother. It doesn’t work with the new set which means she’s stuck using the new remote with the micro keys and micro – micro printing. So occasionally when trying to change channels or adjust the volume she sends the set off into never never land and we have to try to figure out which buttons she hit and how to get back to a normal picture.

I keep hearing about a stimulus plan but it all sounds like bunk to me. Do you know any road construction people? I heard about a big tax cut for corporations so they would take the money saved and hire people and build new plants. Hey guys, corporations hire and build if business is good, not because they have lower taxes. When business is bad, it wouldn’t make any sense to hire or build and they already pay lower taxes by virtue of having lower profits. So I devised a surefire stimulus plan and most importantly, it would solve the biggest problem – housing. The gov’t mortgage agencies, Freddie and Fannie, will offer a loan auction plan. They will offer thirty year mortgages on existing inventory for zero per cent interest. I would define existing inventory as any home on the market and ready for occupancy the first of January 2009. I might consider a one month grace period so that homes close to completion would be eligible. Each month the interest rate increases by one point. I would be ok letting the total amount of any single loan be $350K. One loan per customer. My thinking is that this plan would suck up the available inventory quickly and jump start the home construction business. The regular banks and mortgage companies would sit on the sidelines until they were ready to jump in – say in 5 months when the gov’t rate reached 5%. That caps the duration of the program. Buyers would have to be qualified buyers – no loosened credit requirements. I might consider a refinancing program along the same lines- offering zero point, no cost, refinancing starting at 3% to increase 1 point per quarter phased out in one year. That would put money in people’s hand quickly and permanently. It would also take the sting out of an underwater mortgage because in affect, people would have a monthly payment equivalent to a much lower principal value. That would help stem the foreclosure rate for many people just walking away from upside down mortgages. With this approach, I’m thinking the housing problem is history in 6 months and mostly done in 4. The gov’t sells off all the loans it originates at a 2-3% discount from face value so the program cost is more or less defined by the discount and is contained in short order.

Don’t know whether i mentioned that Nancy got me a new filet knife for Christmas. It’s a Cutco boning knife which means two things – very expensive and very sharp. It’s like cleaning a fish with a razor so I have to be extra careful and count my fingers with each fish I do. The blade slices thru fish with almost no pressure at all which translate into really high quality filets (compared to my usual chop job) and cuts the cleaning time significantly.

Not sure how much longer I’ll be able to get into the boat from the dock. One of the factors that comes with freezing weather is a dramatic drop in the lake level. You know when you see on TV how the farmers and nurseries put a blanket of water/ice over the plants to insulate them from temperatures under 32. Well we’re surrounded by ferneries and orange groves and the farmers pump water from the lake to protect their crops. These pumps, I think there are 4 of them, are giant diesel driven pumps with 2′ intake pipes and they run basically all night when a freeze is expected. In the past 3 days they’ve probably pump 24 hours and dropped the lake a foot. The lake is 60 acres so a foot of water is an awesome amount. Plus this is our dry season so we’re not likely to see much replenishment until May or June. In my quest for scientific knowledge, I wondered if the spec’s would be impacted by so dramatic a change in their environment. The only way to really tell would be to go fishing so I sucked it up and went again today. No problem. Got a dozen or so in a couple of hours.

Added a new ingredient to the compost pile, Elephant Ears. Around here they grow wild and get as large as 8′ tall with 4 ‘ wide leaves. The only thing that controls them is an occasional freeze and since we haven’t had one in several years, they were taking over. The leaves and stalks are mostly water – which is why a freeze is so devastating to them – so a 6′ tall pile shrinks down to nearly nothing -but really moistens the pile. The freeze also brought down the few remaining maple leaves so it finally looks like winter here.

One plant variety that I thought for sure was gone were the Bromiliads. These are airplants with succulent leaves which I thought marked them for disaster. But they all seemed to make it just fine. Boston fern hammered – good riddance to another out of control plant.