Talk about fast germination. A couple days ago I realized I hadn’t started any Chinese cabbage yet, so I did. When you start seeds indoors no light is necessary but as soon as they germinate, you need a good light source to simulate sunlight. For whatever reason, I went into the guest room, aka seed starting room, and saw that the Chinese cabbage had already popped out. I quickly turned on the grow light but hadn’t planned to visit there for a few more days so I was lucky to catch it so soon. That would have been a bad thing since light at an early point is very important for the future well being of the plant. Also very fast – radishes. Today I was thinning them after planting the seed less than 2 weeks ago. I told Nancy to break out the radish recipes because we have loads coming in about a month.

I also put in some celery plants and put an eyeball on the carrots which will need thinning in a week or so. Ditto the beets. With radishes you get 100% yield on the thinning process, meaning they all survive. With carrots it’s more like 50%; beets 25%. The reason beets are so fragile is that several beets germinate from one seed – actually a seed cluster – and when you try to remove one from a cluster, it disturbs the others. The recommended approach is to take tiny scissors and clip off all but one in the cluster but it’s just too tempting (for me) to try to delicately extract each one individually. Besides, Nancy won’t let me use her tiny scissors to cut beet stalks.

George went out spec fishing and caught a mudfish along the way. Mudfish are a rough fish, very nasty teeth, and generally difficult to deal with. They can get fairly large but this one was small, maybe a pound. He kept it just to rid the lake of the pest but it looked like fertilizer to me and it is now resting peacefully between a couple of small broccoli plants. Call it a science experiment. Will those plants do better than the others in the row? Will the broccoli have a slight fish flavor? A muddy flavor?

Obama has not lost one iota of credibility with me as a result of the Healthcare rollout. The move to allow people to return to their old policy gives him two new scapegoats when it doesn’t happen – the insurance companies and/or the individual state’s administrations become the bad guys. When he says he didn’t know the web site was screwed up two weeks before the launch, either he didn’t ask any questions or he was lied to when he did. I think they’re taking the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy to cover broadly everything. Personally, over my career I attended hundreds of executive level project reviews and would have nightmares before and after based on the intense grilling involved. It’s just not believable to me that those kinds of sessions weren’t being held daily all summer long.

In my last post, I missed an opportunity to plug my favorite plant. I mentioned that Nancy had roasted a chicken on a bed of carrots and parsnips. It was in a cast iron skillet and cooked in a 350 oven. So the skillet was 350 degrees when Nancy grabbed the handle without a pot holder. We (she) remembered that an aloe plant was about 15 seconds away so I chopped off a leaf and we coated the burn with the natural gel that oozes out. Inside a few minutes the sting left and there was never a blister – just a redness for an hour or so. Message to readers – go get an aloe plant and keep it handy. They’re easy to grow and virtually indestructible. If you live in a cold climate, bring it inside in the winter and place in a window sill or some place where it will get some sunlight now and then.

I’m just not a winter person. Today we’re only reaching the mid 60’s and the wind is howling – white caps on the lake. Personally I need much more global warming and I need much more sunlight per day. The silver lining to the wind and the season is that it brings down a load of pine needles onto the driveway. We have dozens of large pines along the driveway which equates to jillions of needles to be raked up and spread on the parking area in front of the house and under the clothesline. This keeps both these area virtually weed free for about 6 months. In doing this job, I noticed a low area that would be improved by filling with wood chips. Two hours and twelve loads of chips later, the job that I didn’t know existed when I woke up this morning is done.

And since cold weather usually ushers in spec season, I decided to try for the first time. George had gone out with a friend last week and between them they caught 5 very small specs so I know they’re starting to school up. I went out about 3:30 and had two small ones in the first 15 minutes. I fished for 2 hours and landed 7, none worth keeping. There was enough action that fishing with two rods proved to be a problem and I lost a couple trying to deal with two on at the same time. The lake is loaded with lily pads this year which also makes trolling with two rods trickier. I use two rods, each with a different kind of lure, to find what works. In this case, both lures worked equally well. So for sure the specs are out and about but only the juniors. It’s really early in the season-normally the peak is January/February. This is the earliest I remember catching any at all so I’m stoked about the possibilities.

I put in a few rows of lettuce seed and noticed that the carrot, beet, and spinach seed planted last week is starting to germinate. That seems a little quicker than I recall but probably not. Ditto the radishes planted just a few days ago. I also started some more cabbage and cauliflower indoors. You have to plant at least a month in advance and my guess is that in a month, I’ll have garden space when the tomatoes finish.

The fill and cover project is officially over. I used the last shovelful of fill dirt down by the dock, leveling off an area that wasn’t too bad but just wasn’t right. I could have closed it out a couple days ago but decided to do just a little more work around the picnic table to make it more hospitable. George is planning a major fish fry event next month and those always flow over on our dock so this year it will be the best they’ve ever seen. Also better for whatever graduation parties take place here this spring. I wasn’t sure whether I’d run out of dirt, chips, or energy first.

Did some more winter planting in the garden, taking advantage of the cooler weather. The new stuff includes beets, radishes, Swiss chard and parsnips. Parsnips? Nancy has been popping up with new recipes that use parsnips and, it turns out, they’re fairly expensive. For example, on Thursday she roasted a chicken set on a bed of chunked carrots and parsnips; on Saturday she served a fantastic short rib recipe with pureed parsnips as a side. I’d never eaten or grown them before so this is an experimental crop. The first surprise was the seeds. Since parsnips resemble carrots, I expected the seeds to resemble carrot seeds. Carrot seeds are really micro which makes them hard to deal with and insures that there will be extensive thinning after germination – a back breaker. Parsnip seeds look like oat meal flakes so they’re quite easy to plant and maintain the right separation. With the Swiss chard, I’m putting in a few plants that I started indoors a few weeks ago and also some seed directly in the soil. If it works out, that means a continuous, longer season.

For the first time ever, I’m afraid I’m going to be pulling for FSU to beat Florida. First off, the Gators are a bad team and need to get this season over and done with and all game films burned. Second, a Florida team , FSU, has a chance for the national championship if it can win out the rest of the season. So as it stands right now, the national champ will be either FSU or Alabama, an SEC team. If Florida can’t do it, then either of these results is acceptable. And finally, losses to FSU, Miami, and Georgia, not to mention Vanderbilt, should be it for Muschamp. There’s a better than likely chance that Florida will have it’s first losing season in decades since the two teams remaining on the schedule, FSU and South Carolina, are clearly better teams. Bye Will. And besides, with Olivia heading for UCF, I have another Florida team on my radar.
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I have to comment on Obama care – Any technical person knows that there will be glitches in new software programs; the more code involved, the more glitches and there are literally hundreds of millions lines of code involved; the more independently developed modules to be integrated, the more glitches. So it should come as no surprise that there would be bugs in the program and I would bet that the walls of the developer’s cubicles are totally covered with emails to managers alerting them to problems with the code and requests for schedule delays. So no surprises to anyone working the program. You can be absolutely certain that the decision to release (or unleash) the code on the public with inadequate testing was not made by any technical person in the loop. Purely a nontechnical, customer driven management decision; in this case a political decision.

Aside from the technical issues which will eventually be beaten to submission, the core of this program is fundamentally flawed. It depends on young people with little need for insurance to sign up. Instead of dating and bar hopping, buy health insurance when you know you feel great. And let those same young people hang on their parent’s insurance for 5 more years. Surprise, surprise – who are the first people to sign up. Older, sicker people. Young, healthy folks will quickly figure out that it’s cheaper to pay a fine than sign up for insurance. The demographics are exactly what any modestly intelligent forecaster would have predicted but to hear from the administration, this is unexpected. Either they are very stupid or flat ass lying and I don’t think they’re stupid at all.

It’s been nothing but busy since getting home. On Sunday we had a great day courtesy of Tom and family. They got Nancy and I tickets to the musical Book of Mormon for Nancy’s birthday. We met up with them after the show for an exhibit of hand crafted Florida birds at the Rollins College Art Museum and then din din at a new place (to us), Jimmy Hula’s. The show wasn’t my favorite, a little over the top, I thought, with offensive language. Parts of it were humorous but other parts were a bit too mocking of another religion. Now the birds were magnificently crafted from paper so, although we expected more of them, they were worth seeing for sure. Jimmy Hula’s is very casual dining with fish taco’s being the trademark meal. Great draft beers and really good food. It could easily be a destination place for us – especially considering it’s proximity to Costco.

The garden did suffer while we were gone and it’s taken a couple of days to get it back in shape. It’s really amazing how quickly weeds happen. I started planting seeds again and got in a row of snow peas, spinach, scallions, and two varieties of carrots including red carrots. The good news is that since planting the seeds the weather has been perfect, mostly overcast with light showers on and off, and temps between the mid 60’s and low 80’s exactly what I like to germinate new seeds. I picked several pounds of green beans. The other big job was staking tomato plants. They were fairly small when we took off but within a week had put on numerous branches and added at least a foot of height. My neighbor watered while we were gone but he uses a sprinkler which loads the foliage with water and causes the branches to droop, sag, and take on weird shapes. It’s hard to get them growing straight again without breaking off shoots.

I picked up where I left off filling with dirt and covering with wood chips. I finished off the path along the lake towards the north and the two view areas accessible from the living room. All of that finished off the last of the dirt pile and used one pile of wood chips. My neighbor’s usage is more ambitious so he’s taking one of my three piles off my hands leaving me with enough to last a couple of years. I know that all the areas I filled and covered will sag a bit over time so eventually it’ll get used.

More good news – Olivia was accepted to USF (South Florida) a couple of weeks ago and by UCF, the preferred target school, today. I never had any doubts at all that she would be accepted but now that it’s bagged, she feels much better. Already picking a dorm and all that goes with that.

Can you overdose on vitamin D? What happens to your camera when you have it in your pocket and then fill the pocket with sand fleas? I hit the beach early on Thursday to fish the outgoing tide. It was high about 5AM so I was halfway to low tide when my bait hit the water. I caught a few small whiting and one keeper in the first hour then it slacked off to zero. The camera still works although it sounds kind of funny when the lens pops out. The whiting is now fillets in the freezer.

The upstairs neighbors invited us up for a fish dinner last night. They’re from Wilmington NC and I had contributed several fish to their larder over the week but hadn’t expected to be eating it. This is the first time we’ve ever had another fisherman here at the same time so that’s been nice.

Lunch today at a favorite spot. We hit this beach shack once each trip and say the same thing every time – best burgers in the galaxy. We split a burger and an order of onion rings and have to stretch to finish it. Add an Octoberfest brew and it’s as close to culinary perfection as it gets. It’s right on the beach, truly a shack, but an incredible menu and quality of food. First timers would drive right by, thinking no way they would ever stop at a place that looked this bad. We did until we kept wondering why there were so many cars there at lunch and dinner. We walked in and the first thing that strikes you is that it really is marginal in terms of the structure. But you also notice right away that the selection of drafts at the bar is excellent. Then when you get the menu you think these are wildly high burger prices – lots of other things too- but the burger prices jump out at you. The first time we each ordered one – big mistake. These are thick, juicy 3/4 lb burgers cooked exactly right as are the onion rings. We watch other people ordering other things and everything they put out looks incredible. Fantastic service and it’s the kind of place where people just talk to each other as if they’ve known them for years.

All in all, this week has been the best fishing, worst catching week I’ve had at the beach. I closed it out with an evening mixed catch of small sharks and small catfish.

Monday – I would be updating if I were catching any fish. The weather is great – a tad windy- but certainly fishable. The water is clean – a tad choppy- but certainly fishable. Lots of sand fleas and frozen shiners so bait is not a problem. No fish. I did manage to snag one small pompano which I promptly converted into fillets. I’m so desperate that I actually took a picture of it.

Wed – finally some fish. They started biting late yesterday. Not a big bite but compared to the rest of the week, a welcome relief. I got another pompano and a few whiting. It came late in the afternoon, high tide, and with a rain threatening sky. Personally, I enjoy just fishing in the surf so much that actually catching something is a bonus. The folks staying upstairs wanted the fish for an end of week fish fry so I made the contribution. For the next two days I’m expecting good things with the high tides happening closer to sundown. That’s my favorite combination.

Nancy is enjoying the trip as well. She was set up to play bridge Tuesday and Thursday in Palm Coast. The game there is an afternoon game so it fits well – I hit the beach early then we take a break late morning for breakfast. I come back to the beach while she heads off to the game and returns late afternoon. We hit happy hour at the pier or whatever hits the spot and home before dark. On Tuesday she was asked to play in a Swiss Doubles game (not sure exactly what that is) Wednesday so she’s an extra happy camper. Tonight is fish and chips night at the Golden Lion so the pier will have to wait a day.

Wood chip update – I’m 3/4 through one load and it looks like I’ll have all the places I’d intended to cover done with that one load; and just loafing along, I should have it done before Thanksgiving. I could have it finished in one day but I’m waiting for a bottom layer of cut palmetto fronds to get fully dry before covering with wood chips. If I don’t do that, the area will sag later and require more fill and since there are no planned social events at the lake, why rush it. This morning I heard some banging up by the road and when I checked there was another new pile of chips; so I now have two full loads and 1/4 of the first load available. We told them they could dump as much as they wanted but perhaps that was a mistake. I had in mind one big load or perhaps two.

This time of the year my work hours change. In mid summer I’m out doing the garden or the jungle by 8 AM and quit by 11AM; now I’m 9 till noon; by Dec that will be 10 till 2. No change in wardrobe because I wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt even at the peak of the summer but now it feels comfortable. If I dress down in the summer to shorts and no sleeve T’s, the jungle bugs and sharp brush tear me up. In mid winter I switch to lined jeans and add an outer vest.

This week is beach week. I’m blasting out this post and then will start packing the car. If everything is on schedule by 2 PM my bait will be in the surf. It’s less than an hour from the house but the beach is a totally different environment. We’ve rented the same place, twice a year, for the past 5 years and it fits our needs and likes perfectly. I’ve been loading up with large shiners for bluefish bait so I’m ready. It’s looking like the weather will be nearly perfect, low 80’s and sunny during the day, low 60’s at night. Nancy is set up for two or three rounds of bridge at the Palm Coast club and will have enough quilting backlogged to relax at that. We have several favorite restaurants and no firm schedules – depends on the tides and what’s biting in the surf. Get ready for some nice fish pics.

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So now that the Obuma administration has turned off all our Middle East allies, it’s going to work to do the same in Europe. Off to a great start, I’d say.

Not too much going on in the garden. The green beans are pickable and loaded with beans and blossoms. We’ll be picking these for at least a month, longer if we keep picking continuously. The late season cucumbers are done and all we got was half a dozen and those were not nearly as good as the spring grown ones. A couple of the tomato plants have blossoms and should have fruit before Thanksgiving. There are four acorn squash plants with plenty of squash attached. No telling how they’ll work out – depends on whether critters get them. We’re being promised a cold snap by the end of the week and that sometimes marks the end of the bug issues. I’ve transplanted starts of kale, cabbage, broccoli, collards, and cauliflower into the garden and planted new seeds for lettuce, chard, and Chinese cabbage. That’s the fourth cabbage variety planned for this year. The seeds stay in the house until they germinate, then get transferred to a flat and eventually to the garden. I also put in a 20’ row of green pea seeds. This is the second time on the peas. The first planting a month ago didn’t germinate at all, I’m thinking because it was just too hot. I have high hopes for all the new transplants and the peas because we had an inch of rain last night and could repeat that for the next two nights. The rain is the leading edge of the cold snap.

I’ve been mentioning the view area I cut through the jungle so we can see the lake from the living room. We can sit at the computer and check out the lake. That is until about 5 minutes ago. I was sitting at the computer and a giant branch from one of the dead bay trees broke off and landed perfectly to kill the view. It’s not windy and I didn’t see any crows landing or squirrels climbing out on the limb but it sure came down. If I had been standing there, I’d be dead meat. I’m just not going to mess with it today but it’ll take a couple hours with the chain saw tomorrow to restore the view. The dead tree is on our property for sure but it was overhanging the neighbor’s yard and that’s where it landed. This neighbor is a young guy renting the place and I know that branch could sit there for 100 years and he’d never clear it. I also know he couldn’t care less if I trespass and clear it myself. I also know the Home Owner’s Association (that would be me and George) doesn’t care one way or the other and would be perfectly happy letting it rot away over the next decade.

I mentioned that I was landscaping our park by moving jungle flora from place to place. Most of the plants are bromiliads. If you don’t know what a bromiliad is, they’re the tropical looking plants with cactus like foliage and plastic looking exotic blooms you see in big box stores. They’re air plants which means they don’t develop underground root structures but rather get their nourishment from above – leaves, water etc. Similar to orchids, you can set them in the crooks of trees, hollowed out tree trunks or in between exposed tree roots. They do quite well in the jungle because so many nutrients fall onto them and the sunlight is well filtered. Over the years I’ve bought some and traded some with friends so I have a fairly good variety. The way they propagate is to send out shoots along the bottom of the plant which turn into new plants so if you just leave them be, they’ll form a clump of individual but connected plants. You can break off the new plants and relocate or trade off as you want. So when I was doing the jungle landscaping, it was breaking off plants from large clumps and moving them to newly cleared areas. Now here’s the interesting part – each of the new plants is putting out a bloom. Usually you get one or maybe two blooms a year but apparently when you break off a new plant from the main clump, the new plant very quickly puts out a bloom – within a week of separation. I counted a dozen today walking down towards the lake. Here’s a few pic’s.

I was down working on the dock and heard some clanging and banging up towards the top of the property. By the time I got up there to see what was going on, the tree trimmers had dumped another load of wood chips. I now have enough for two lifetimes. The picture shows just the new pile so double that to get an idea of the total. To add some perspective, the pile is 22’ long x 10’ wide by 4’ high – about 30 cubic yards. The pile at George’s is now three loads so between us we have over 150 yards of chipped trees and brush. It will decompose over time but I’ll be able to redo the paths annually for the next 10 years at least.

I mentioned that I’ve been using the chips to clean up some of the jungle area, particularly areas along the path that look snaky. I never really see any snakes there but visitors walking by just know they could be attacked at any time. Today I saw three snakes – that’s three more than I’ve seen in the past six months. They were the harmless varieties, two black snakes and a corn snake, which is good news since they mostly feed on rodents. I have to guess that all the changes I’m making are putting them on the move.

We had a big night on Friday. It was senior night at Lake Mary High – that’s senior as in high school senior, not a senior citizen event. It’s a big night with a football game and a ceremony that recognizes individual seniors associated with the football program. Olivia is a 4 year cheerleader so was among those recognized. Each of the honorees is escorted across the field by their parents so we got to see Tom, Tina and Simon walk with Olivia. Then the game and a chance to watch Olivia do her cheering. It must have worked because they did win the game. One thing I found interesting is that the lake Mary High cheerleaders outnumbered the football players – that would be the football players on both teams combined.

I’ve been lots of speculation and opinions about who ultimate won and lost in the budget and debt limit wrangling and gov’t shut down. I haven’t heard anyone hit it right. The big, big winner is Christy. He’s a shoe in for Pres in 2016. He’s basically non-partisan and has forever worked in politcally divided gov’t and gotten good results.

Starting another repair project – replacing a couple of rotting planks on the dock. I broke out the tools I thought I’d need and noted that my drill and rotary saw were both purchased from Montgomery Ward for my first remodeling job in 1970. Wonder what I do for a warranty if needed?
Replacing planks sounds easy enough but the problem is that the screws holding down the planks have not lived up to their lifetime warranty so when you go to unscrew them, more often than not they break off. I attacked the first plank and managed to get it removed without too much trouble. The second one was a bit more challenging; not one screw backed out properly. As soon as I put the screw driver on them, the heads spun off. There are no really bad planks left but I’ll still pick up a couple more replacement since it’s looking like I can do the job myself as needed and not have to bother Mark. He replaced a couple a few months back so I think I understand what needs to be done and have all the (old) tools I need.

Today was a major bulk delivery date – I got another 20 yds of wood chips dumped up near the road and George got 20 yds of fill dirt. He asked if he could have it dumped on my property and I was more than happy to oblige. We usually both work from the same piles and don’t get too engaged about ownership. For me, this puts dirt and chips much closer to where I’ll use them, which is a big deal. This pile of chips is about 500’ closer to the spread points than the other load which makes a large difference at the end of the day. My plan is to dump 5 wheel barrow loads, a couple of yards, each day filling in low spots in the jungle alongside the path. Gradually the foreboding jungle look just off the path is starting to take on a “park” look. I want it to look totally natural but not threatening to city folk.

I was drafted by Nancy to thread the needles for one of her sewing machines. This is a monster machine called a serger (maybe it’s surger) with 4 large spools of threads going at one time. The thread paths are almost impossible to follow and requires going thru tiny holes, wrapping around posts, through tiny tubes and finally through the tiniest hole in a needle. Each thread has it’s own pathway but it’s very easy to cross paths such that the thread can be misrouted with disastrous results. We used flashlights, magnifying glasses, special tweezers, and scissors and had to give up in frustration a couple of times. Finally it looked like we had it threaded correctly and it broke a needle. It was an important sewing project so we persisted and eventually got it – on the second day. Personally I would have thrown the machine in the trash or taken one more tool to it – a hammer. It’s 30+ years old but the service guy said it was much, much better than newer machines and not to think about going to a newer model with automatic threading.