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!!!!