This is the Weekend to Get Outside
Published: Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8:25 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8:25 a.m.
If you've been waiting for the weekend to get outside, today is the day.


There's only a 10 percent chance of showers and the temperatures may even hit the low 70s. Not what the average for this time of year is - 72 to 74 - but better than the 30s Polk County had earlier this week.

Sunday is good, too, according to Bay News 9 forecasters but all good things come to an end.

There's a 60 percent chance of rain on Monday and another cold front headed this way.

The birds read the newspaper Saturday.





This bird has the most delicate feathery veil that extends past the more sturdy tail feathers. As with all of these, you can click to enlarge.


The pelicans get bumps on their beaks during breeding season, apparently.


Sometimes we just like to stand around on one leg.


In the background, you can see the black swan nesting. In the foreground, you can see the mate shooing us away.






It's hard to see here (I didn't want to get closer and disturb them) but two of these storks are sitting on the ground with their knees bent and their feet stuck straight out in front. I have not seen this before.


Turtles were loving the sun.


This really doesn't look like an urban lake, does it? But it's right downtown.




Gratuitous swan pic, with cygnet in the background.




Another gratuitous swan pic


Then today (well, yesterday now) we went to Clearwater. It was a bit cooler than Saturday, but lots of people at the beach.


Here's a pirate ship.


You can't see here how pretty the colors of the sea and the sky were.






And we saw dolphins, for the first time. I first saw something big come out of the water and go back down, and told R and pointed. We watched until it happened again - there were two or three of them surfacing together. Subsequently we saw them a few times, mostly in the wake of a boat. It seems they like to follow boats around; the wake feels good to them or something. If you maximize this video and look real hard, at about 26 or 27 seconds you can see one.



Pretty good weekend. Now back to earth.

Y'all, it is such a hardship to live here.

After a stormy Friday, temperatures are expected to plummet during the weekend.

Bay News 9 is forecasting temperatures that will reach a high in the mid- to upper 60s today. The low will drop into the lower 50s .

On Sunday, the high will only reach the upper 50s. Lows will drop to the brisk low 40s.

Monday morning will be the coldest day, with lows in the upper 30s. Highs will be in the low 60s.

A chance for patchy frost is possible. Freeze warnings could be possible for areas to the north.

Weather System to Send Shivers Into Polk

Highs will plummet into the 60s and upper 50s! Oh noes!

It seemed to us that we had a very warm October, and I wondered if global warming was finally upon us. But it turns out that Florida appeared to be an exception.

Cooled down today, plus lots of wind (from Ida, somehow?) and we hung out a bit, ending up as usual at Lake Morton.

You can feed some of the birds by hand but I always draw back quickly because I'm afraid they'll bite me. Some of the birds are a bit jumpy too.



The pelicans are back.



Ibises like to hang out with them. They look like they must be related, but the pelicans look a lot calmer. The ibises are a bit frenetic. Maybe that goes with being smaller.



Sometimes when the pelicans are resting they turn their heads all the way around and nestle their beaks between their wings. It is the strangest looking thing.

14-Foot Python Pulled From Storm Drain

What we did today



I love Florida.

Sunday Afternoon at Clearwater Beach



What you can't see here is how incredibly white and cold and powdery and deep the sand is. And what a lovely day - I think the brightness overwhelmed the color of the sky and the sea.

R and I walked a good distance along the beach. We saw some really cool shells, including intact sanddollars - I think I've never seen those wild before. The water made pretty ripples and shadows against the sand.



Of course, cold as it was, I had to walk in it. I am constitutionally unable to refrain from walking barefoot in the ocean. At least I didn't wade off in it and get my clothes wet, as I usually do.



We went out onto the pier and looked at the crafts people had for sale. I bought a bit of artwork that caught my eye. The artist is local (actually a transplant from England I think) and his pictures are all very charming.



Driving back across Tampa Bay

We took F to the airport today, to travel back to her school and begin her last semester. We'll miss her. The cats will definitely miss her. We were still in Orlando when she arrived in Mississippi, because we decided to check out the Mall At Millennia there. I had a couple of gift cards burning a hole in my pocket.

They say they are upscale. And they're right. Valet parking tipped us off to begin with. And then the stores. I suppose I've never actually been to a Bloomingdale's before. Well, Bloomie's is one thing, but we went into one store and were kind of drawn to a little two-button jacket - not a jacket for cold weather, but the kind of thing you might want to take into a movie theater, for instance, in case it's over-airconditioned. Very cute. Sucker was over $1,000. The very nice saleswoman said it was 40% off. Okay, it's over $600. Well, at least R and I thought it looked very cute before we realized how expensive it was. It's always kind of unsettling to discover something is very expensive after you've concluded it's one of the ugliest things you've ever seen.

I didn't even go in the Jimmy Choo store.

My Talbot's gift cards were definitely spent, though, and a little bit more. They were having a nice sale too, and 40% or 50% off at Talbot's doesn't move "out-of-reach" to "out-of-reach" (more like "ouch" to "ok").

We went downtown today to look at the birds on Lake Morton and get some pix.

Here's an egret. These birds make us think of Edward Gorey sometimes.


I like this shot of a seagull in flight.


Woodstorks


Don't know what this is - it's backlit so you can't see the interesting patterns on its back. It's some kind of fisher.


Pelicans


There were lots of seagulls.


As always, swans.


Turtles sunning


Some kind of blossoming tree - the leaves look mimosa-like but the blossoms don't.


This is definitely some kind of mimosa but it's different from the ones back home - the leaves are bigger and the blossoms are deep fuschia.


Roses - they look more like wild roses than cultivated but they smell really wonderful.

Well, ha ha, ten days later.

Fay turned out to be, for us, the storm that wasn't. We were right in the path for a while but we ended up getting the usual amount of rain that we get every day in the rainy season, maybe just a bit more wind than usual. It's pretty breezy right now, in fact. One of the many things I like about living here is that after the sun goes down the temperature drops, there's a breeze, and you might want sleeves even in August. I keep a sweater handy for my evening stroll. I do feel for the people east of us who are being flooded out of their homes. A spectacular amount of rainfall will do that. When F and I came here last year to find a place to live we were very conscious of wanting whatever high ground there was, and we have it.

And she cracked me up on Tuesday afternoon, calling to check up on us. She gets jittery not being here to look after us, because we probably won't have any better sense than to run out to look at the hurricane - "I've never seen a hurricane before!" she imagined me saying in a ditzy voice - and have a tree fall on us, or something. But I have, I've seen what there was of Camille when it swept through north Mississippi when I was a girl, and I think we got some stormy weather when the remnants of Katrina blew through. And Hurricane Elvis, of course, which was bad news. No fun at all.

Eventually I will stop talking about myself, but here's some more stuff. I stopped Ultram on the weekend. I was on it for 3 months and that's possibly long enough to get a little used to it. Major insomnia. So I added another herb last night (Valerian) and it made all the difference in the world. Will do the same tonight. Before long I should be re-adjusted. I feel not having Ultram in that my shoulder is griping at me more, and more often, but it's nothing like it was three months ago. I'm very hopeful of getting past this, maybe completely by the end of the year.

Work has been pretty busy. We're trying some things to get the plant back up and running and back to the usual 30 or so employees. I've called back another tech to help with that. Kind of miss being by myself in the lab, but I knew it couldn't last.

Look what we saw today.



At last.

F and her roommate are here for spring break. We went to the Bok Sanctuary yesterday and they've seen the pretty lake downtown with all the birds but apart from that we haven't done much yet. I don't know if they are all that interested in going to the beach but I will feel bad if we don't go.

We had an appointment for F this morning, with a neurologist, to continue to work with her migraines. We're increasing Nadolol, which I wanted to do, and he talked to her about timing with taking Zomig. And somehow we had a lengthy conversation about ... atoms. Atomic weight v. atomic number. Weight v. mass. Avogadro's number. He is reading a book about Rutherford and had forgotten his freshman chemistry so he was happy to have his questions answered. Really, I am such a nerd. I feel sorry for F, to have a nerd mother.

How did I get to be such a nerd? you ask. Well, when I was a girl my dad and I both enjoyed science fiction. (Still do.) The two of us had that in common, and since there was no bookstore in the town where I grew up he often took me to the bookstore in Tupelo and gave me some money so I could get the latest Bradbury or Asimov or Heinlein or whatever there was.

One day there wasn't anything on the science fiction rack that I didn't already have or that looked halfway decent. There was a rack of nonfiction next to it and I moved over to look at that. I found a book, a collection of articles by one of my fav writers - Asimov - about actual science and math. Possibly it was Science, Numbers, and I. In desperation I bought it and took it home.

And this opened up a whole new world for me. This stuff was real. Asimov produced several of these books and I bought them all, and read them until they were broken-spined. When I got into high school I enjoyed my chemistry and physics classes. Had a great teacher. But I already knew a lot of that stuff because of those books.

When F started high school chemistry, she sighed, "I don't get orbitals."

"What's not to get?" I said.

I pulled the book over and started reading. The first chapter was written very dryly and raced through important information way too quickly. But I remembered that I already knew about orbitals when I took chemistry in high school, so I don't know how her book would have compared to mine. I had to take a short trip down memory lane to remember how Asimov explained them, and when I did, I flipped the book around and found the periodic table and explained them to her using that. First, of course, we talked about what the atomic number is (it's the number of protons) and where you find that on the periodic table; and then we talked about charge, and started building the 1S orbital; and we talked about spin, and why hydrogen wants to lose an electron, thus forming a positive ion, while H₂ is a very stable molecule; why helium doesn't need or want to bond with anything (it is a rock, it is an island) and so on from there. Orbitals make a lot more sense when you can correlate them to how they make the atoms act. So we marched through the first three or four rows of the periodic table and talked about where the electrons went and how those atoms interacted. I hope she understood it. She probably did, because she's pretty deft with her Lewis structures.

I have to say that it's a theme I've seen throughout F's schooling, in her math and science classes: they did not spend enough time on basic things. They rushed ahead to get all the stuff in. You don't have to memorize things like whether barium chloride is BaCl or BaCl₂ if you can glance at a periodic table and see that barium is going to be an ion with a charge of +2. To be able to do that you have to stop, and explain, and think, and draw pictures for yourself, make guesses and check yourself, and all that takes time. I don't understand the rush-ahead thing when the kids get through with class and whole swaths of them don't retain anything. Plus, it's no fun and they don't get why anybody could think this stuff is cool.

I've mentioned the weird birds around here. We've seen some enormous vultures, lots and lots of them. Today R saw some that descended on some roadkill - a possum, probably - and picked it up out of the street and put it on the sidewalk so they could eat it safely and at their leisure. Now isn't that a bit much?

And Bonnie caught an 8-inch lizard. I saw its head, big as a turtle head.

Still looking for alligators. The lakes we drive past have little signs about "no swimming" and so forth. I am assured that we will see them eventually.

Where we moved from

Where we are now

I happened to look at Madison, WI today ... you know I turned down that job last November ... at 10:30 AM our time it was -5°F.

We saw pelicans yesterday at one of the pretty lakes downtown.

What we did today



Don't laugh. It's hard to take a picture of your own feet.

When F was a little kindergartner I was driving her to school one day, she was looking out the window, and she asked:

"What are those strings for?"

"What strings, honey?"

"The strings between those, those - those bird-standers."

She was talking about the power lines. Wondering what they were doing, stuck to the poles that kind people put up so that tired birds could rest on their way from point A to point B.

Naturally, 15 years later we are still spotting bird-standers. Florida has quite a few.



I'm told these are ibises, and they are everywhere. You see them marching through the neighborhood in groups of 15 or more, searching for bugs I guess.

And then there are your garden-variety ducks.



Here's a closer look:



Water cold? Scared of alligators? Just like bunching up? Don't know.

We spotted this bird-stander when we went to Clearwater last weekend. Yes, the sunset really was that gorgeous, and more.



And finally, some birds just stand on the ground. Do not ask me what this is. I do not know.