Merry Christmas from Pine Island

I hope everyone at home had a wonderful Christmas.  This is our third Christmas in Florida, so we're starting to get used to the "weirdness" of being in 80 degree weather and away from family - but I don't think I'll truly EVER get used to not being home for the holiday.  This year is a little different in that Brenda and her family are actually down here in Florida, so wouldn't have been part of my Christmas anyway.  And I got some nice messages from Alan and his family wishing me a Merry Christmas and thanking me for sending a couple gifts to them all.  I talked to my mom on Christmas Eve and she is with my sister Dolores and her family for a few days, so I'm sure she had a nice holiday also.  We actually had a nice Christmas today because we went to the Christmas dinner here at the KOA.  What a feast!  The resort provided the ham, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, along with beverages.  Then everyone brought their wonderful homemade dish to pass, which of coure always means wonderful food.  I ate way too much, but Dave really outdid himself and is teetering on the brink of being totally and completely miserable.  It's 7:21 as I type this and he just went in to lay down for the rest of the evening!  You just can't put Dave into a "buffet" situation and expect him to use any kind of self-restraint (as anyone who knows him will attest to).  The people down here are really very nice - the more we get to know them, the better we like them (...not unexpected, right?).  But in spite of everything, Christmas is always at its best when you're with family....

As I mentioned above, Brenda and her family are down here right now - they are in Jacksonville visiting Arnie's daughter and her family.  I spoke to Brenda this morning and they did their Christmas yesterday and she wasn't positive what they were going to do today.  But I pulled a bunch of pictures off Tessa and Chelsey's facebooks and obviously they had a wonderful day today.  I'm going to post a few of her pictures into this blog post - don't they look like they're having fun?  And I love the pictures of Arnie with Emma - precious, aren't they?  Emma's first exposure to the ocean, commemorated for all time.  What I'm REALLY excited about, though, is that on Thursday they are going down to St. Augustine for the rest of the week so I'm going to drive up there and spend Thursday, Friday and Saturday with them.  I CAN'T WAIT!  It's only about a 4-1/2 hour drive so I plan to be there by noon at the latest on Thursday.  This will definitely be my special Christmas treat!  I'll have a mega-post for when I get back, with tons of pictures I'm sure.

When I looked back at the blog, I see that it's been ten days since I've done an update - the last one was December 15.  That's kind of a long time, but it seems like the time has just kind of slipped away.  It's weird to think that, by the time I get back from St. Augustine, we'll only have two more days before we leave Pine Island and move up to Punta Gorda.  Crazy!  We've really enjoyed the past week and a half.  So what did we do?  Hmmmm.... I have to think.....



Well, for one thing, we went with Scott and Deb to Mary and Paul's condo in Cape Coral.  They were having a few friends over for the Christmas boat parade.  We had two boats that went down through the channels and down to where the parade was getting organized.  We rode around through the different boats, checking out the very elaborate decorations on some of the boats.  Wow - some people put a few bucks into this event!!!  I'm attaching a couple pictures, but it was hard to take good shots because we were moving, they were moving and it was dark.  So this is the best I could do.  After we rode around on the boats for a while, we all went back to some other friends of Mary and Paul's and had a very nice campfire on their dockside patio.  It was a really nice evening with some old and new friends.

We also put our kayaks into the water a couple times, including once at the little city park in Matlacha.  That was fun because we paddled through some of the channels, looking at some of the "funky" little residences in this wonderful little fishing community.  We really like Matlacha - it's the connection between the mainland, which is technically Cape Coral, on the north side of Fort Myers, and Pine Island itself.  You have to go over the bridge at Matlacha in order to get onto the Island. Matlacha is this great little fishing village, with lots of little brightly-colored shops and restaurants and some wonderful restaurants and, one of our favorites, Bert's Bar.  Bert's is an old OLD bar that sits right on the edge of the water and has lots of atmosphere.  They have really good seafood, frequent live music and what they advertise as a "million dollar view".  We went there for our Christmas Eve dinner and enjoyed just sitting out on the dock overlooking the water, the fishing boats and the birds.


We even had a special little outing for Brandi - if you go through Fort Meyers and down to Bonita Beach and then head north, you come to Lover's Key.  There is a very nice little state park at Lover's Key, which we visited last year.  It doesn't have a campground, unfortunately, or it would definitely be a place we would camp at.  But just a little ways from the state park is a special little beach that is dog-friendly.  It is one of the very few dog-friendly beaches that we're ever come across, so it's a really special place for us to visit.  We took Brandi and, OH MY GOSH!, she had a BLAST.  She ran and ran and ran and ran.... well, you get the idea.  She is such a good little girl, she went up and "met" all the other dogs (which of course involves LOTS of sniffing of body parts!) but she always plays nice and is never agressive even to the little dogs.  And BOY where there a lot of dogs there - over the couple hours we were there I would guess there were 50 dogs that came and went.  The only problem with the beach, as with many places on the ocean, is that the whole place disappears when the tide comes up!  Yep, according to some of the people that we chatted with, the whole beach is virtually underwater at high tide.  In fact, I was standing there talking to one nice "mom" of Raza, a very nice mellow old German Shepherd, when she nicely pointed out to me that my bag, my chair, and my towel were now sitting IN the water!  Yikes-I don't know if we'll ever get used to this "tide" thing!

I know I'm missing a couple little things, but that's probably a pretty good summary of the past ten days.  We do a lot of walking, some biking (Dave pretty much every day, me not so much although we did ride to the Publix together the other day), and I'm still plugging away at my running program.  We've been to the pool a number of times, gone out to eat a few times, and somewhere in there I continue to work a couple of hours a day (on average) for Kerkstra.  All in all, a REALLY good life, right?

So tomorrow I pack up my little suitcase and get ready for my little road-trip up to St. Augustine.  I can't WAIT!  In the meanwhile, I send out best Christmas wishes to everyone back home - I hope you all had a wonderful day today!

Halfway thru our Pine Island visit... already?

Hard to believe it's already the 15th of December, and our month here is half done.  It seems like we're being a little more "mellow" and laid back on this trip - are we getting OLDER???  I told Dave we'd better get off our behinds and DO stuff because I have nothing to blog about!  Obviously we have to do SOMETHING every day, but quite a few of those days are spenting doing things like sleeping in, taking the dog for a long walk, Dave going on a bike ride, us going to the pool and then spending an inordinate amount of time deciding what to do for dinner.  (I do have to admit-the pool is quite nice and as long as you aren't overly offended or grossed out by a bunch of old people with fairly bad bodies, floating around on their swim noodles, it actually isn't a bad place to spend a few hours in the afternoon!  And the people are all very nice, I have to add.)

We did, however, make some new FRIENDS!  And, frankly, we don't do that very often because we kind of like our own company and we like our privacy and we don't really want to "adopt" people as we travel - in other words, we're anti-social!!!  But we met this nice couple from Indiana this week - their names are Tina and Ed, and they are very nice.  A couple years younger than us, but retired - he from GM, and she was actually a bank teller for about 30 years.  They just bought their rig last year and used it a lot this summer, going to a lot of state parks.  We love that of course, because we too believe in USING your RV if you have one!  We met Tina and Ed at the pool, and made a "date" to go out for peel-and-eat shrimp on Tuesday.  Of course, there is a "special" at one of the seafood restaurants in town (oops-I forgot the name of the place - I think it's something like The Waterfront or something similar).  Anyway, they have shrimp, either hot or cold, for 45 cents apiece on Tuesday.  We got 4 pitchers of beer, close to 60 shrimp, and this decadent dessert ( a deep-fried, coconut-dipped piece of cheesecake-YUMMY!!!!) all for $48-for the four of us.  And for us retirees, there's nothing that makes us happier than a good food deal!

Wednesday was our anniversary - unreal...I've spent SEVEN years married to "the Lokes" - and he's spent seven years married to me.  I'm not sure which of us should be commended the most.  No-I'm just kidding-we actually still really LIKE each other a lot, at least most of the time!  So, since I did NOT end up flying back up to Michigan, we got to go out for our anniversary and we picked this excellent Italian restaurant on the island (actually, in Matlacha) called Micelli's.  Of course, neither one of us actually ordered Italian...Dave got the ribs (check the picture-doesn't he look happy?) and I got the stuffed flounder.  Excellent!

So-regarding Michigan-since Chris decided to stay on, we ended up deciding that we should delay my trip up there until early January.  That way, we'll be through the first couple days of year-end processing, so maybe I can jump in and help out with that, plus our support person, Deb, can schedule a two-visit at that time also.  Hopefully we can spend some time strategizing about the ERP implementation and keep things moving even while I'm on the road.  I'm fine with waiting until January to go up, but am a LITTLE nervous about there being SNOW!  But I guess I'll just have to wait and see, and just deal with it if I HAVE to!

Yesterday Dave and I did an AVA walk - together!  This is my 57th AVA  walk, but up until now Dave just couldn't walk that far.  But now that he has TWO new knees, he's doing GREAT with walking.  We take Brandi for a nice long hour to hour-and-a-half walk every day or two, and he said he wanted to tackle doing one of the AVA walks with me-and those are 10K (or 6.2 miles!).  I picked the downtown Fort Myers one, which maybe wasn't the best choice.  It 's probably not one of the most scenic walks - I think he might have enjoyed Sanibel a little more.  But we did it, and he did really well!  It was really fun to have someone WITH ME-normally I do these walks alone (unless Cindi and Glennda are down for a trip, or I'm with Brenda) so that was a treat.  Little does he know that he set a precedent now and I'll be expecting many more of these in the future!

And last but not least, we went out fishing with Scott and Deb again today.  I absolutely LOVE being out on the water, on their pontoon boat, with the sun and the water and everything.  We had an extra special treat today, because we had a mother and baby dolphin swimming around by us for the longest time.  Apparently "mama" was teaching baby how to hang out by a boat and snap the smaller fish that the humans throw back into the water.  I snapped a bunch of pictures, but it's really hard to catch them because by the time they come up and I hit the button on my I-Phone and the picture actually "snaps" a second or two have gone by and they normally are already back under.  But I did catch them out of the water a couple times, so I cropped the pictures and am posting one.  If you didn't KNOW it's two dolphins you might not recognize them - but since you DO know, you can tell...right????  Anyway, believe me - it was SO beautiful to see them swimming together and coming up out of the water side-by-side.  And, we also saw a bald eagle sitting in the mangroves watching us fish - also a beautiful sight!  Dave and Deb both caught groupers - too small to keep but fun to look at - boy, they are really quite UGLY!  When we got back to Scott and Deb's house, we had a wonderful fish fry.  Deb was such a sweetheart and kept each separate type of fish apart, so we could taste the difference between each type.  We had kingfish, sheephead (which are wonderful tasting), pompano and sea trout.  They also had some halibut they had brought down with them from home.  So we had a wonderful dinner together, along with their friends Jim and Lanay (I have no idea if that's how she spells her name).  By the way, I have to add a comment regarding this last picture - when Scott and Deb come in from fishing, Scott cleans the boat and Deb cleans the fish.  Their fishcleaning station is right on the channel, so Deb attracts a lot of attention from the local birds.  She tosses the skin and guts to them and it's a hoot to watch them fight and scrabble to get their share.  Fishing, floating, eating:  it was a great day!










....But I can't end my post today without mentioning how heartsick we are over the senseless, horrible shooting of those precious little first graders in Newtown yesterday, as well as the teachers and others at the school.  We've watched hours of coverage of this tragedy and our hearts go out to all of the families of the victims.  How can such horror exist in the world????  We all need to tell our children and grandchildren how much we love them, don't we?

First Week on Pine Island

REALLY?  We're already one week through our month-long stay here?  We really do like it here on Pine Island.  If you're not familiar with it, it's an island right off the shoreline from Fort Myers, actually Cape Coral to be more specific.  The island is about 20 miles long, and our KOA is about 3 miles from the southern edge of the island.  It's a very nice park, maybe a little pricier than most of the places we stay, but it's such a great location that we don't mind paying up a little to be here-we figure we make it up by staying at less expensive places later on, right?  There's a very nice pool here, although, let's face it, any pool in Florida at this time of year is pretty much filled with the geriatric group, so maybe the scenary's not so attractive... but, HEY, we have a right to lay by the pool too!!!  It's about a three mile bike ride into St. James City, and there are some nice little bars and stuff in town that are fun to go to.  I think I posted pictures from here last year, because we were here for about 6 weeks then - the last half of December and all of January.  This year we're only staying for the month of December, then moving up to Punta Gorda for the month of January.

For us, of course, the best part of the island is the fact that our friends Scott and Deb live here about 8 months of the year.  They are great friends, great hosts and GREAT party people.  Honestly, I don't know HOW they keep up the pace they do.  But they love people and they love to be with people.  And everybody here on the island knows and loves Scott and Deb!  Now that we've been here three times, we're beginning to know some of their friends too - especially Mary and Paul, who are super folks too.  In fact on Wednesday we spent pretty much the whole day "clubbing" with the four of them.  By clubbing, I do NOT mean like night clubs and dancing until 3:00 AM or anything like that - nope, I mean the "O" (for Oriole) club, the Vets Club, the Moose club, the American Legion club, etc.  Scott and Deb picked us up at 11:00 in the morning and we spent the next six hours "clubbing".  I'll say one thing for these people - they can sure drink a lot of beer!  I am a rank AMATEUR compared to them - in fact, neither Dave nor I even tried to keep up.  But it was a fun day and we bumped into different people that they knew along the way.  But honestly, I think we were in bed by 9:00 that night!  And I don't think we'll repeat the day in the near future.

Yesterday, however, was a totally different story.  We went out fishing with Scott and Deb on their pontoon boat.  We had a BALL!  It was a gorgeous day - some big puffy clouds, a little smidge of rain, mostly off in the distance, and a beautiful rainbow!  I snapped a picture of it and am posting it in the blog, but I'm not positive it'll show up very well - we'll see!  I didn't fish because I don't have a license and Scott and Deb are very religious about sticking to the laws down here - it's just not worth the risk of them losing the ability to fish by having guests and doing something stupid.  I brought along a book and had a great afternoon watching the three of them catch fish, soaking up the sun, and just relaxing!  It was a wonderful afternoon.

Dave loves fishing down here because the fish are so different from up home.  I'm posting a few pictures, although they aren't great.  The most fun one is the puffer fish - he's an ugly, lumpy little gray thing that puffs up like a balloon when he gets caught - and you would absolutely SWEAR he's going to explode any second!  Scott caught a pompano, they all caught sheephead (which Deb tells us are great eating), and then they all caught a bunch of sea trout, which are supposed to be wonderful to eat.  The majority of the fish were under-size and had to be thrown back, but Dave caught a lovely 17 inch sea trout, which was probably the biggest fish of the day.  Deb, however, is the QUEEN - she LOVES to fish and is very good at it.  Scott says she catches WAY more fish then he does - in fact, lots of times he mostly nets for her and repairs snapped lines and stuff like that.  It's great that they both enjoy going out on the boat so much, and we were very grateful for the chance to go with them.  TERRIFIC fun!

Tonight we went up to the Legion for the Friday night dinner - Dave had broasted chicken and I had the fish-and-shrimp combo.  Both were excellent, but we agreed that we can NOT eat like this very often - we need to get back to making our healthy home-made dinners.  We both feel like we should lose a few pounds.  So - going forward! - a little less eating out, a little more cooking in!

And I have to put in a word about work.  For those of you who know me, you are aware that I have been doing some "temp" work for K****** over the past five years, primarily in the summer but I'm also set up to be able to go online and work from the road.  It's been a "win-win" situation over the past couple winters, as they've needed a little extra help and it gives me a little extra pocket money.  Over the summer we converted to a new ERP system and are still in "early days" of going live with lots and lots of new procedures, so I'm definitely going to help with a little of the extra burden over the winter, which I'm very happy to do.  But this week we were also faced with the possibility of losing our controller and I spent quite a bit of time on conference calls, helping with some brainstorming and contingency planning.  Everything has turned out great - Chris is staying "on board" and there are some very positive things looming on the horizon, so all is good....  But it's been a little time-consuming; in fact, I've put in about 40 hours of work this week and will be flying up to Michigan for a couple days next week.  I actually love staying involved and helping Katie and Robin with some of the month-end duties - it's good for my "old brain" to keep exercising!  (Now if I can just get my "old body" to do a better job of exercising!)  Dave has been very patient and supportive this week because he realizes this is a pretty critical time for the company, and for people who I've come to care very deeply about, and he's also being great about my flying home for a couple days.  But I told him today - tomorrow is SATURDAY and I'm GOING TO THE POOL!  PERIOD!  So - the next pictures I post may have some of the afore-mentioned geriatrics laying by the pool - be forewarned!  But it's 80, it's sunny, and life is good!!!!