We’re about to become barbecue central with the addition of another roadside smoker operation. We have an excellent one about 3 miles north of us on US17 and will have one about 2 miles south of us just off US17 on highway 40. Both of these are well known for ribs and give us two places to stop on the way home from Nancy’s bridge clubs. When she plays in Crescent City we often stop and pick up a rack of ribs on Wednesday afternoon. Now we’ll be able to do the same when returning from Palm Coast on Mondays.

On the way over to Palm Coast the feared and dreaded “check engine” light came on. I checked everything I know to check – which isn’t much – to no avail. We were scheduled to Crescent City two days later so I decided to stop at the car mechanic there while Nancy played bridge. The check engine light was still on continuously all the way – in three days it never went out but about 2 minutes after the mechanic took the car out for a check, he returned and said the light was out – never on. Incredible. It had been on non-stop for 3 days and went out when the repair dude hit the ignition. He put on a tester which reads the car’s computer and tells why the light was on. It said there had been a single cylinder misfire but nothing now. He said that perhaps the one cylinder had had a momentary breakdown, an arc over or something and he’d shine a light on that cylinder and see if there was any indication of a misfire. To do that he had to remove a cover. A couple minutes later he said he saw absolutely nothing but I had a rat problem. OMG. Not the rats again. I looked at the engine block where he pointed and I could see lots of debris, wood chips, acorns etc. I picked out the pieces and found what I thought was a 2” x 4” piece of bark – leather like. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be a completely dried out dead rat. If you looked closely you could definitely see the head and teeth so no mistaking what it was. No way that caused the check engine light but………. They suggested that the only way to combat future attacks was to fill an old sock with moth balls and place it on the ground under the parked car. We have done that since the last rat event but not in about 6 months and they must have lost their mojo. I had established a routine of checking under the hood every now and then but dropped it somewhere along the way. Need to get back in the groove on that as routine maintenance.

It’s no coincidence that we went to Costco yesterday and the stock rose $2.50 the same day. We haven’t been there in quite a while and Nancy wanted to make sure we wouldn’t run out of anything for the next 6 months. Both of our outside freezers and the fridge are now absolutely full. It took an hour to unload the car and put everything away. One of the sheds has more paper products than a “Publix”. I did score a fleece line shirt jacket that should work well this winter – gardening or fishing.
I made shrimp scampi the other day. In fact the recipe is called “super shrimp scampi” and (we think) it’s well named. Truly a different scampi than we’ve had before and it’s simple enough for me to make with no hitches or adult supervision. It even used some garden herbs – parsley, basel, and oregano.

This is about when the speckled perch start schooling up. I consider Thanksgiving the official start but like to get the kinks out of the gear on Halloween. The clock actually works for me now by getting dark early. I can go fishing late in the afternoon, fish until dark, and still be home before the designated dinner hour. It also works for me in the morning because I’m an early riser and can be out on the lake before Nancy even wakes up. I went out last night for the first time this season and caught 4 spec’s and a bluegill in about an hour. That’s not spectacular but ok. The fish were all small so I didn’t have to break out the fish cleaning gear. Next day George and I went out and ended up with 2 meal sized bags of fish fillets. Since it only gets better as the season progresses, this could be a really good season.

I got the parts needed to elevate the antenna and so far, so good. It’s wobbly and certainly wouldn’t hold up to any heavy weather but the reception is as good as we ever got. I’ll give it a couple of weeks to see how it performs in rain but if it stays good, I’ll get a more solid, permanent solution. Update – reception back to “spotty” . Not exactly sure where to go from here. It’s just so tough dealing with a 30’ pole and antenna in terms of checking connections etc but I’m thinking it’s more atmospherics and noise interference than local equipment. The other thing that really confuses the issue is that I can manually switch from the old antenna to the new one – sometimes the new one performs better but just as often, the old one performs better. Occasionally they’re both great; occasionally they’re both bummers.

Nancy and her quilting buddy headed up to Savannah for a quilt shop crawl which will include places like Hilton Head SC, St. Simon’s Island GA. It was an overnighter. I think she needs a break from me!
Joey and Mark came up yesterday and spent all day doing chores; Joey helping Nancy doing cleanups and mowing; Mark help me install a new sprinkler controller, clean up the antenna wiring, and replace the ultra high light bulbs in the screened porch. Just so you don’t think I can’t even change a light bulb myself, these bulbs are at a height of 16’. We borrowed a 12’ step ladder from a neighbor and installed 1100 lumen, bright white LED’s. Wow, what a difference. All in all, they put in a mostly full day of helping.

Another winter coming, that makes two in a row. We’re actually supposed to see an overnight low in the 40’s. What’s that all about? Should be back in the mid 80’s by mid week. The garden seems to be enjoying the change and all of the seedlings I’ve transplanted in the last couple of days are looking perky. I thinned a row of lettuce and replanted the ones I thinned so now I have more lettuce than we can possibly eat. Ditto beets although I have a feeling we’ll go through more beets this year than in the past. I learned at the very end of beet season last year that tossing in a whole beet – greens and root – into the Ninja blender made for a great smoothie. Planted additional carrot, radish, and spinach seeds. Between beet greens, spinach, and swiss chard we’ll have an abundance of dark green leafy veggies. What I’m hoping for is a good availability by Thanksgiving so we can bring that to the dinner at Tommy’s this year.

Here’s another observation relating to the cooler weather – the cardinals are no longer attacking the side mirrors on any vehicle that parks here. I don’t know whether they are just less active or have headed south for the winter but I’m fine with it. At the same time, there are loads of large woodpeckers flying around now. It’s not at all unusual to see a woodpecker now and again but there has been a sudden jump in the population. Thank God the woodpeckers don’t attack the mirrors – they could do real damage.
The Bridge Tourney went off as planned but it’s getting tougher for Nancy to deal with the faster pace there as compared to her normal club games. It’s also two days from 9AM till 6PM as compared to 1PM till 5PM on a normal, non tournament day. Right now she’s saying “no more tournaments” but I’ve heard that before. I did more surf fishing and although the surf was rough and roiled, managed to catch a few fish. Then we tried out a new brew pub for happy hour. On Saturday afternoon I opted for the friendly confines of Houligan’s to watch the gators get spanked by Georgia. It was a good place to watch the game since the majority of the customers were Gator fans and groaned at the right times.

I’m still trying to improve on the TV reception issue. It’s been worse since Irma and I’ve done as much as I can with what I have on hand so my next plan is to see how much I can gain by adding height. I think I can go up another 15’ with only a PVC pipe coupler and a 25’ coax cable. The coupler will allow me to add an extension piece to the existing pole and eliminate part of the current hay rig, specifically the sand spikes. The antenna I’m using is the one Tom brought up which has a 50 mile range. If adding another 10’ or so of altitude doesn’t improve things, the next step is to go to a higher gain antenna. I spotted one in Home Depot that claims a 60 mile range and seems easy to install.

The problem I have with Global Warming is that it’s not dependable. We woke up this morning to wintry temps and it’s only October. It was in the 50’s and supposed to be in the 40’s by the end of the week. I had to break out the winter duds and hunt up a quilt for tonight. Maybe some good will come from it if it nails the critters feeding on the garden.

Nancy has another big, two day bridge tournament in Palm Coast this weekend. We’ll go over Friday morning, get a hotel and come home Saturday late afternoon. Not sure what to expect fishing wise. The surf has been way too roiled to fish and there’s a strong cold front moving in with morning temps in the 50’s so I may be forced into a Saturday pub crawl. Saturday is especially critical since it’s the Georgia – Florida football game and I’ll be hanging out waiting for the tournament to end. Do I see a Houligan’s or Buffalo Wild Wings (aka sport’s bar) afternoon?

The jury is still out on the garden this season. It’s stayed hot, humid and buggy way too long and the continuing rains kept the ground too wet. It’s showing in new plant start fatalities. Some broccoli plants and some cauliflower plants seem to be taking but every cabbage and swiss chard plant I put out is eaten within a couple of days. Ditto lettuce. Ditto cuc’s. I waited until the 15th to put in spinach and beet seeds. Nothing happening with the spinach yet (too soon) but the beets popped right out and will need thinning in a couple of days. The great thing about beets is that they are a 100% crop – we eat both the root/tuber and the green tops. This cold snap can only help. The green pepper plants are looking good and loaded with peppers but the zucchini plants are suffering and I’ll probably just yank them out this week and start something new in the space they’re occupying.

Ever since I lowered the TV antenna before the last hurricane, our reception has been marginal. Tom came up last week and I think we fairly well restored the positioning to where it was pre-storm but we’re still getting too many signal drop-outs. It’s more aggravating than being a total wipeout. When he came up, he also brought a new technology antenna to see if that performed better than – worse than – equal to our old tech version. It was close but the edge went to the old antenna. Part of the problem with the test was that the old antenna sits up about 30’ above the roof whereas we were just slightly above the roof with new one. George and I put together a PVC pipe to hold the antenna but it was only about 8’ long so it wasn’t really a fair comparison. In either case, the reception was problematic. So I decided to “hayrig” a way to increase the altitude of the high tech antenna so it’s now about 12’ above ground level, 3 or 4’ above the roof line. Still not as high as the old antenna by a long shot, but higher than just on the improvised pole. I will catch quite a bit of heat when George or any of my kids see’s the way I have it improvised. This is one of those times when Nancy’s vision problems works in my favor or I’d really be catching heat. I broke out a 6’ ladder, two surf fishing sand spikes and a couple of small strap wrenches and was able to get enough elevation on the new antenna to see the difference. It’s not pretty but seems to be working. It’s fairly easy for me to switch between the old antenna and the new one so I can make comparisons and right now, under current atmospherics, they seem to be equivalent. It would also be fairly easy for me to get another 8-10’ of altitude on the new one by getting a 20’ PVC pipe so that’s the next step. I’m also going to hit Walmart in Palm Coast next week when Nancy’s playing bridge to see what kind of antenna’s they have. It’s a large, extra large Walmart and services a much higher population. also that area would require higher gain antennas to be effective since Palm Coast is quite a bit farther from the transmitters in Orlando than we are. My thought is that any antenna that works in Palm Coast should be very good for Barberville. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I mowed the lawn again with the new, all wheel drive mower. This would be the fourth time and the first where I felt I was calling the shots, not the mower. It wants to mow much faster than I can walk so trying to steer it around plants, shrubs and trees while the wheels are under power is a real trick. But I think maybe I’m getting the hang of it. When you want to do anything but go in a straight line, take power off the wheels, reposition the mower and then reapply power to the wheels. Sounds simple enough but if you’ve been mowing lawns for 70 years, you have a way of doing it. The other complication this time was that Nancy decided the cars needed washing and she could do it herself. I knew it wasn’t anything that simple and would require my attention to get the hose hooked up to the pump and find the buckets and brushes etc. And it had to be done simultaneously with me mowing the lawn. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. My suggestion was to wait until it rained again, maybe a day’s wait at the longest and then break out the soap and rags and go at it. Non starter. I finally walked away before WW3 erupted in the Kingdom of Barberville. What would the Donald say? To make matters more unbearable, it’s Saturday – college football day.

Had a great trip to Gulf Shores AL for the Shrimp Festival. On the way down the only excitement was when a trailer I was following on the interstate blew out a tire. Pieces of it were flying thru the air and it was impossible to dodge them at 75mph. Luckily we did miss the big pieces but it definitely got your heart started. The other good thing about the trip was finding a new (to us) place to eat in Marianna, FL. We stopped for gas around noon and decided to find some place to eat close to the interstate and spotted a place called Po Folks. It was right across the street from a Ruby Tuesdays so we decided on the unknown. There were plenty of cars in the parking lot so how bad could it be. Wow! great southern cooking. We made sure to time our return to hit there for lunch.

We hooked up with Simon and Amy who had rented condo less than a block off the beach for two days. The place was within walking distance to the big events and there was a shuttle bus system that ran continuously from 10AM until 10PM. If you like seafood, this was the place to be. Visualize a typical arts and crafts event with lots of food and drink trucks, each specializing in some treat. Plenty of live music and brews to keep things hoppin’. We arrived on Thursday afternoon, almost simultaneously with Simon and Amy’s arrival, and within an hour had purchased our shuttle passes and started the festivities. We caught the last shuttle back on Thursday. We were back in business Friday morning on into the afternoon. The plan was to meet Amy’s mother and grandmother in Mobile proper for drinks and snacks. We found the place which was the top of a high rise building in downtown Mobile. Very fancy! It was glass all around so anywhere you sat you had a complete view of Mobile and the surrounding area. Fancy drinks, fancy food, a piano bar – totally first class and a complete opposite venue than the shrimp festival. I know I was the only guy in the place wearing cargo shorts and a Guy Harvey shirt. Oh well! We really enjoyed meeting Amy’s family – lots of laughing and story telling. I don’t know why but I thought they were tea totalers. They had arrived before us an I saw immediately that her grandmother, Shirley, was drinking a margarita. I wasn’t sure what her mother, Dawn, was drinking but it was in a standard bar old fashion glass and sure enough she ordered another Black Jack on the rocks. I knew right away we were going to hit it off. We didn’t have a full meal but rather ordered excellent appetizers, shared deserts and enjoyed the company and the ambiance. We were back at the beach by 9PM where Nancy and I crashed while Simon and Amy headed back to the festival to catch a band they were fond of.

Nancy had a bad night – serious gastric distress about 3AM until we left at 9AM but is fully recovered. I suspect it was food based – maybe either a particular item or the wide combination we consumed. Other than that, nice ride home. No tire explosions.

One of the things we did to prepare for Irma was lower the TV antenna. It’s on a telescoping pole and we dropped it about 20’. I say “we” but I mean my young neighbor, Andrew. We still had reception but it would frequently break up on certain channels and when atmospheric conditions dictated. It’s a big deal to do since it involves getting up on the roof so I wanted to leave it down for the duration of the hurricane season. I could live with the less than optimal TV. Nancy was not so understanding. This weekend Tom came up and I asked him to bring his high ladder so we could work on the antenna. He did, we did, and we now have reception that is equal to or better than pre Irma. Hopefully I improved on that by exchanging the cable splitter that takes the antenna cable and splits it in two, one for each TV for one that is powered. That should strengthen the signal. The surprise is how much difference a few feet of altitude makes.

Another Mr. Fixit job that I got done this weekend was to reinstall the rear view mirror on the truck. The rear view mirror on that vehicle (and I suspect many more) is attached by gluing a bracket to the windshield and then hooking the mirror to the bracket. Sounds simple enough but due to the cramped working space, it’s a real challenge to get it all aligned properly and held in place while the glue dries. The way I’ve done it before is to put the mirror in the bracket first and then glue the assembly to the windshield but it’s just too difficult for me to hold it still long enough for the glue to dry. You can get the special glue at Auto Zone but I found a Gorilla Gel that has done the job before and is more generally useful than the Auto Zone product. I gave up on trying to deal with the mirror and bracket as an assembly and just glued the bracket to the windshield. It worked, or at least it’s working so far.

Went to Flagler Beach, the first trip since hurricane Maria passed a few hundred miles offshore. I’ve been seeing that there was more erosion and extreme tidal activity but I wanted to see for myself since I have a good perception of what “normal” looks like. Well it had definitely changed dramatically from only two weeks back. The beach has restored itself to a large degree with soft, shell sand and started creating a second berm about a 100’ from the original. Previously the sand texture was finer grains, densely packed. I saw it at mid tide so it will be interesting to see what it looks like at low.

We’re heading to Mobile AL later this week to hook up with Simon, Amy , her mother and grandparents at the Shrimp Festival. It’s about an 8 hour drive and we may also see our nephew Glenn who lives in the Pensacola area. As soon as Nancy heard there were booths set up selling shrimp po boys, she was in and locked. I’m hoping they have draft ShockTop to go along with it.

Sorry for the hit and miss postings but there’s hardly a spare minute!

I’ve been spending a couple of hours in the morning cleaning up after the storm and I’m ready to call it done. There are still huge piles of dead brush lining the road but that’s up to the county to deal with.

Nancy had a big week – Bridge in Palm Coast; Bridge in Crescent City; quilting with Esther at the house; eye shots and an infusion, both on one day; day trip to Brevard County with Esther to buy quilting material etc. All this is good but for every good deed………… This week she does the endoscopy and colonoscopy to find out why her blood levels are still not right after all the infusions and iron pills. The good news about this is that she’s taking one for the team by trying out a new “prep” regimen. The doc introduced her to a new (to us) prep that eliminates the nasty tasting gallon of mix. This prep requires 5 oz of water mixed with a powder that resembles Alka Seltzer followed by drinking 5 x 8oz glasses of any clear liquid (non alcoholic) over a 6 hour period. Then 7 hours later she takes another shot of the powder mixed with 5 oz, chased with 3×8 glasses of clear liquid. That’s about half the liquid and it’s the liquid of your choice – so long as it’s clear. Things like broth, seven up, sprite, water – all those count. The 10 oz with the powder are not bad at all – taste wise. All of us are hoping this stuff works as advertised for the next time we have to do it. Results – Nancy preferred the gallon of mixed fluid to the new approach which she claims is more “violent”. As a witness, I think the new stuff went down easier. One interesting thing was that when you mixed the powder with water, a packet of powder in 5 oz of water, the mixture generated quite a bit of heat. I mixed it and had to actually set the cup down because of it. A very exothermic reaction. The tests themselves showed nothing so the next step is swallowing the “camera”. Not sure about the mechanics of that but supposedly you just swallow a capsule and let it work itself thru your system while it transmits data. I have a lot of technical questions about that.

Of course the next day was a bridge tourney and the day after, a crochet club meeting followed by another infusion. So she’s maintaining a fairly active social life. And I’m driving miss Nancy – the seeing eye driver.

The garden is struggling to recover from the storm and we’re still getting some real drenching storms. I’m holding off projections. One of the cucumber bushes has a couple of micro fruit starting and the green peppers are putting on new foliage and a couple of blossoms. The field where the garden resides is a quagmire. The garden area is raised about a foot and seems to support seedlings just fine. The question is what happens when the main roots grow down into the saturated soil. We just haven’t had any really dry weather since the storm.

The scariest sight – Nancy sitting at the computer, nose up against the screen which is open to amazon.com and the words “add to cart” flashing. The next scariest is to see the UPS truck pulling up and wondering exactly what she ordered. So far, so good.

We’re just about cleaned up from the storm but I’m leaving some things tied up and stored away until the hurricane season is really over. I’m replanting the garden but not sure how successful this will be. The timing is such that I’m late for some veggies and early for others so the work I’m doing now could come to naught. That plus the soil is “soggy” so as soon as the roots get any size, they’ll be down in muck. Not holding much promise for this season.

One thing that has happened as a result of the storm is that the fire ants have come back with a vengeance. It’s making nearly impossible to work in the garden. They are so tiny that you don’t know you’re in them until there are hundreds of them on you and they set off the “bite hard” command. Some of the bites turn into boil like protrusions that I have to break with a needle and then apply Neosporin.

Went to the beach yesterday, the Palm Coast Monday bridge event. I wanted to see the impact of the new large storm a few hundred miles off the coast. It was high tide – really high tide- and I was not able to walk on the beach at all so couldn’t get much of an assessment of new erosion but it actually appeared that maybe sand was being redeposited rather than eroded. I drove down to the place we used to stay and spotted the owner. He said it was a mixed bag – some of the restoration attempts worked, others failed. He had put up a “fence” – the same kind of fence you see in Wyoming to hold back snow drifts. The fence was fairly well beaten up but the dunes they were protecting looked good to me. He had also planted a few yards of sea oats but they didn’t survive. All in all, so far, so good. I’ll get a better handle on it next Monday when the tide will be low at noon. Of course it was too rough to fish! Big boomers.

Sorry for the gap but we’ve been busy dealing with the pre-storm events, the storm itself, and the post storm cleanup. The net of it all was that we sustained no damage and that goes for everyone we know all over the state. Everyone has the same story – lots of downed branches and debris but very little actual structural damage and a multi day power outage. In our case we were out 4 days but our discomfort was assuaged by our trusty generator. We can pretty much run the house with a little usage management and no air conditioning. 
This time around we figured out that we could use the hot water heater periodically so we even had showers. So, all in all, it was like a comfortable camping trip.

The lake – highest I’ve ever seen it but a couple of feet below flood problems. My neighbors dock was actually overtopped. It naturally drains at about 1”/day. The water temp dropped from bathtub warm to cold springs as I found when I jumped in to cool off from my brush clearing project.

The beach – took Nancy to her bridge game at Palm Coast yesterday and
proceeded on to check out the beach. Hurricane Mathew last year really clobbered the beach with a large loss of dune sand. I was concerned that this storm would further that loss and perhaps cause some homes to lose their total buffer so I was pleasantly surprised to find the erosion was maybe a couple of feet. After Mathew I had worked with friends building a wooden seawall, covering it with sand and planting shore grass so I was anxious to see how well that fared. It did the job but suffered some structural problems and needs to be recovered with sand. They were hard at it so in a day or so, it will be back to normal. The beach itself looked really good and I saw no damage at all to houses along the beach road. All of our watering holes were open for business. One interesting thing – after large storms the beach and surf are normally heavy with seaweed which can take months to degrade or wash away. None at all with Irma.

The garden – wipe out. I have two ratty looking tomatoes out of a dozen, 3 ok looking pepper plants out of 10 and a total wipeout of the eggplant and okra. Pineapples look perfect. One surprise loss was Rosemary. The wind must have burned all the leaves; maybe it will come back but it sure looks dead. Ditto the basel but I really expected that. The good news was the cucumbers and squash look just fine. These had only popped out a week before the storm so I guess they had such a low profile, that the wind didn’t tear them up. Planting this time of year is alway iffy so anything we get will be classified as a bonus.

Just to round off the week, my lawn mower died. The drive wheel gear box stripped and it wasn’t worth repairing. We stopped in to Lowes and there was an all wheel drive unit on sale so we were back in the mowing business in just a few days. Here’s the good part – The heavy rains we’ve had for a few days before the storm and then along with the storm had the grass way high. What I didn’t realize was that the cutting level on the new mower was much lower than on the old one – which cleared the sprinklers. Yep, crunched a pop up sprinkler with the new mower about an hour after putting it together. I cleared out the pieces wrapped around the blade and tried to restart it. Nope. I live very close to a dealer for that brand and took it right over to have them see how bad I had screwed things up. No problem and I came home and finished the job. I’m going to assume that this past week was truly the week from hell!!

Bright spot – Persimmon Hollow is up and brewing.