This and That

 This past week has been a jumble of non-related activities, but I guess that is what retirement is all about. We get to do what we want, when we want.

I just finished reading Keep Sharp: Building a Better Brain at Any Age by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He talks about the fact that if we all start to lead a healthy, active lifestyle and fill our minds and bodies with good things, we actually can avoid or at least delay dementia as we age.  Thankfully, many of the key things he suggests are already a part of our lives.  

The number one best thing we all can do is to exercise, and Rick and I try to do that every day.  Other key ideas are getting at least 7-9 hours of restful sleep each night, handling stress in productive ways, learning new things and trying new activities each day, eating healthy foods, and remaining sociable.  All of those things help us build rather than destroy brain cells.  His book is very interesting and is worth taking the time to read.  I endorse both reading it and following the guidelines he suggests.  

Rick and I exercise daily, and we slowly are changing our diets to build in even more healthy fruits and vegetables. We both have to work on handling stress and getting more restful sleep.  I also need to spend more time seeking new experiences that will expand my knowledge and horizons. And as far as sociability is concerned, well, Covid-19 has really disrupted that idea right now.  Interestingly, Rick and I both realize that we know and interact with many more of our neighbors here in Florida than we do with neighbors and other people in Wisconsin.  That's one thing we will have to work on more, too.

A couple of days ago, I tackled a part of the yard that was more weeds than grass, pulling out half a 30-pound garbage bag full of weeds... and I have the blisters to prove it!  Now we need to get some grass seed into that area before the weeds try to creep back.

One of the ponds in Hammock Park

An anhinga dries its wings after diving for fish.

Three days ago the temperature was rising quickly, so we decided to walk in Hammock Park again.  Walking in the shade is at least 10 degrees cooler than strolling in the hot sun.  As we walked, I noted that the terrain is very reminiscent of what Florida must have looked like when the only people living here were the Seminole and other Native American tribes.  The landscape is wild and lush, and even though we are in the middle of a city, the only sounds one hears are small animals (mostly squirrels) scampering through the leaves and underbrush.  Several varieties of palms, ferns, bushes, and trees fill the landscape.  Drainage ditches and small creeks weave their way through the park, so the birds -- like my old friend the anhinga -- and other wildlife have a perfect habitat. 

I'll use what I can to make doing laundry
a happy experience.

Four wool balls will keep my laundry
fluffy without chemicals.

Yesterday, I received a wonderful "late" birthday gift from Stephanie.  She knows that I am into saving the environment in whatever small ways that I can. I wish all stores would ban the use of plastic bags.  We all need to train ourselves to use washable containers instead of Zip Lock bags, and we all should recycle as much as possible.  To that end, Stephanie sent me two products produced by Beekman 1801, a company that creates environmentally friendly cleaning and soap products made from goat's milk.  

The first product from Beekman's was their Happy Place Laundry Soap.  This natural soap cleans clothing without chemicals, and it does not leave a residue in the washing machine.  While the powder is expensive, it will save wear and tear on my clothes, and I will not have to buy any more Affresh tablets to clean the drum in the washing machine.  That's a win-win in my book.

She also sent me four wool dryer balls.  These naturally fluff and soften the laundry while replacing the need for any fabric softener,  with is another win-win for us and for the planet.

Rick replaces the condenser on the old
garage door opener.

Today Rick changed the condenser on our garage door opener.  It has not been working correctly ever since we got the new door installed.  He adjusted the tension on the door opener once, and that worked for a while, but yesterday it stopped working again.  We really believe that a lightening strike last summer in the neighborhood shortened the life of some of our electronics.  So today he took the new condenser that he had ordered a while ago for $20, climbed up on the ladder, and replaced the condenser.  Now the garage door opens fine, and he saved us over $100 in having a garage door service come to the house.  Way to go, Rick!

He also did his good deed for the week today.  He helped a widowed neighbor replace a towel bar in her bathroom.  She was not strong enough to get the old bar off, but he had the right tool and enough strength to wrestle the old one down.  Thankfully, the new one was easy to put in its place, so Rick finished that job in a half an hour.  As always, helping others also rewards the doer with a good feeling, so this was another win-win situation.

The has been a crazy week but a productive one.  Each day we meet new ideas and challenges and take the next step forward.  And that's life.

Eagle Lake Park Adventure

 Yesterday we decided to revisit a park that we have not walked in for a couple of years.  We took about a 20 minute drive to Eagle Lake Park in Largo.  The park is a 360 acre park that has lakes, paved and gravel trails, lots of natural woodlands, and great parking, pavilions, and restrooms.  Admission and parking is free.

According to their Web site, if one were to walk all of the trails, a person could log about 3 miles.  We took a shorter walk, but we had a great time.  The paved walkways are very wide, so we had no problem staying 6 feet away from everyone else on the trail.  Since we chose to go on a Monday, the park was not very busy at all.

I will let the pictures and the captions tell the rest of the story.

An anhinga spreads its wings to dry as it sits 
on an anhinga nest.

The sign tells the story about the anhinga, one
of Florida's most fascinating birds.

Trails encircle Shore Lake in the middle of the park.

The lake is a haven for a multitude of birds
and turtles.  And, no, we did not see any alligators!

One of the gravel trails we walked led
us through a very peaceful terrain.

Part of the trail also includes boardwalks
over parts of the lake's shores.

Tranquility is the key at Eagle Lake Park.

One of the many turtles swims near the boardwalk,
heading for the shade underneath the walkway.

We certainly will visit the park again as it is beautiful and a nice break from our usual walks in the neighborhood.

Power Washing Florida

 The little known fact about living the "glamorous life" in Florida is that many times, it is not all THAT glamorous.  For example, in addition to keeping doors shut so that lizards and fruit rats do not creep into our house, we also contend with numerous techniques to keep the termites and cockroaches at bay.

And the most glamorous thing of all is that black mold grows on every concrete surface -- be that patio blocks, sidewalks, paver edging, or driveways.  Any where that does not get a high volume of traffic (such as in the middle of the road) eventually will grow mold.

The old pavers needed lots of washing to look new again.

Yesterday Rick replaced the carburetor in our power washer so that he could power wash the pavers we put behind two of the storage sheds in the back yard.  We want to paint the pavers the same color as the new concrete that we installed, but paint does not stick well to mold growing on pavers.  So his first job was to power wash the mold off the pavers in preparation for painting tomorrow.  We checked the pavers today, but they were still damp, so we will give them another day to dry before Rick adds paint.  The paint will protect the surfaces from future mold.

In the meantime, another glamorous job of the spring is raking leaves from the live oak tree.  The leaves of a live oak are small, oval-shaped, and have a waxy consistency.  They are hard to get out of the grass, and we seem to have an overabundance of them this year.  

I call this time of the year "Sprall" since it is both spring and fall.  The new spring buds on the trees force the old leaves of last year to fall off.  What a mess!  We bagged five 30-lb. bags of leaves last weekend, and we added another two 30-lb. bags of leaves today.  We only raked about a third of the yard, so if we wanted to add more, we certainly could do so.

Rick hits the dirt at the edge of the driveway
as he power washes off the mold. (That line
of darker pavement in front of him is not a shadow.
The black color is mold.)

After lunch today, Rick went back outside to power wash the mold off the driveway.  The picture shows him hard at work at that task, and the splattered mud shows he got a little to close to the grass along the edge of the driveway.  I will say, though, that power washing is a great way to blast out any weeds that are trying to grow in the joints between sections of the drive.

Temperatures are climbing toward today's high of 82, so I do not expect that he will be in the sun working too much longer.  Whatever he does not finish today certainly will wait for our attention tomorrow.

Finishing Touches

 Yesterday we spent quite a few hours adding landscape fabric to the new backyard garden.  Since the garden is over 50 feet long, we could not run the fabric down the garden in one strip.  Instead, we had to cut one yard pieces and piece them into the garden as we fit them around each plant.  The fabric is heavy, so it hopefully will cut down on the weeds.

Heavy landscape fabric covers the new garden.

Rick had ordered red cedar rock for the garden to match the rock in our other gardens. The company who supplied and delivered the rock also offered the rental of a hopper which would be filled with the rock, so that all we would have to do was position a wheelbarrow under the hopper chute, push down the lever, and the rock would pour into the wheelbarrow.  That sounded like a much easier way to load a wheelbarrow than by shoveling rock into the wheelbarrow from a heap of stones in the driveway.  We were supposed to get the hopper and stone delivered "around noon" today.

Our hopper was the second to be delivered
today by the landscape company.

This morning at 8:00, we received a phone call from a driver who said that he would be dropping off the hopper and the stone "in about a half an hour."  Oka-a-a-y.  We quickly changed into our work clothes, and Rick moved our car out of the driveway.  The driver was timely as he dropped off the hopper and the stone.

The hopper made quick, easy work
of loading the wheelbarrow with stone.

That's when the work really started.  We filled the wheelbarrow and walked it back to the backyard.  Rick dumped it into the garden and started to spread it around while I went back to the driveway to get another load of stone.  We worked until noon, and then took a break for lunch.

After lunch we finished unloading all of the stone, adding stone to one of the back corner gardens and some the last of the stone into the garden in front of our kitchen windows.  We finished that work by 1:30.  

The garden is complete!

While Rick washed down the stone, washed out the hopper, and cleaned up the driveway and pavers from the wheelbarrow tracks, I grabbed a rake and filled a bag full of leaves that we had blown out of the corner gardens.  

Earlier in the week, we had purchased paint to tint the concrete that we had laid in front of the fence to protect it from getting cut by weed-whackers welded by our landscape folks.  While I came in to shower, Rick painted the concrete in front of the north fence.

We decided on a creamy light brown
color to match the pavers that lead to the back yard.

We now have a completed garden, fresh stone in various places, a somewhat raked lawn, and half of the painting completed in the back yard.  We are pleased with the results.

Next week Monday we get the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19.  We were warned that some people experience side effects from the second vaccine, so we wanted to complete this outdoor work before the weekend.  That way we can lay low on Monday afternoon and Tuesday in case either of us do not feel well after the vaccine.  We can just sit back and enjoy our new garden in the back yard.

Garden Glory

 Last week we were looking at a lot of work to protect our bare vinyl fence from getting cut to pieces by weed-wackers.  This week, we are looking forward to finishing the job.

The bare fence did its job by giving us privacy from the neighbors.  It enclosed our property, kept the neighbor's dog from seeing us (and thus barking at us) when we were trying to relax in the back yard, and it was easy to access and to clean.  However, the landscape people did take a toll on it, and frankly, it was boring to view.

The boring white fence started to look
better just with the edgers installed and
the grass and weeds removed.

So last week we bought the edgers and Rick killed his back laying them into place.  At the end of the week, we both worked hard to remove the grass and weeds within the garden.  Thankfully, our city services are great at hauling the debris away each week.

On Friday we traveled around to see where we could get the best flowers.  Surprisingly, the Lowe's right here in town had the healthiest looking shrubs and flowers.  I will not buy any annual flowers.  Most bloom the best through the spring and summer, and we just are not around long enough to take care of them all.  So bushes and perennials are our choice.

Early on Saturday morning, before the crowds were awake, we made our first of four trips to Lowe's to buy all of the plants we wanted to put into the garden.  We anchored the ends of the garden with one Podocarpus on each side.  They are taller than the rest of the plants and will give us an evergreen bushy tree on each end.

The taller Podocarpus is followed across the yard
by the same pattern of plants for symmetry.

Since the house itself is surrounded by various Crotons, Arboricola, Ti plants, and Ixora, we purposely avoided buying any more of those shrubs.  Instead, as we moved across the garden, we added a small, rounded yellow-leafed bush called a Duranta Gold Mound.  That was followed by a red President Hibiscus.  Then we planted another Duranta Gold Mound and a purple, spiky Cordyline Dracena at each fence post.  We followed that pattern all across the garden, ending with the Podocarpus at the end. 

The garden as I look north to our other corner garden.

The garden as I look south toward the large oak tree.

We now have green, red, gold, and purple in the garden offering a variety of textures, heights, and shapes as the eye travels down the line.  

Our "mistake" turned into a delightful
addition to our front garden.

We are hoping for bright flowers
on our new little hibiscus plant.

We made one mistake: as I was taking one of the hibiscus out of its pot, I noticed that the tag on it was different.  Although the blossom on the hibiscus was the same color as all of the other plants, the tag read "Hibiscus Trio -- three different colored plants in one pot."  Oops!  We wanted symmetry in the back garden, so back to Lowe's we went to get the correct variety of hibiscus.  We actually kept the trio, though, and planted it in the corner of the front garden since the Firecracker plant that we had planted there died from too much sun.  We hope the sun-loving hibiscus will survive and add a little color to the corner.

Today we found landscape stone that we will have delivered later this week after we get the landscape fabric fitted around each of the 21 plants in the back garden.  With the one hibiscus in the front, that means we planted 22 plants all together.  Our muscles will attest to the truth of that statement.

We hope that we do not have too much planted too closely together.  If we do see crowding as they grow, we can always move some plants elsewhere.  We just hope they all survive this first year in the ground! 

Rick smiled this morning as he opened the Florida room blinds and saw not a blank white fence, but rather  a wonderful splash of textures and colors bordering that fence.

Necessity Garden

 Sometimes the actions of one person force others to make accommodations with surprisingly happy results.  Such is the case with the landscaping around Gladys.

When we bought this property 10 years ago, Gladys had a paltry four-flower rose garden next to the front, heaved-up, uneven sidewalk and a wild jungle of invasive pepper trees, towering cactus, dying palm trees, a leaning "ear" tree, and other overgrown or dead shrubs filling half of the back yard.  In cutting down the trees, digging out the shrubs, and pruning back what remained, we gained an additional area about six feet deep spanning the entire width of the back yard.  

Since we were not here in the summer and had no place to store lawn care equipment, we hired a lawn service.  We fired the initial man after he charged us for summer lawn care that he did not do, and we hired a much more reputable firm that we use to this day.  Sadly, no one is perfect.

A hired man for the second lawn service trimmed too near to the house, chipping off all the paint.  To remedy that situation, we planted flower gardens all around the house.  Now the house is safe, the paint remains intact, and we have flowers to make Gladys look pretty.  Wherever we do not have flowers, concrete touches the house.  So the careless landscaper was the reason we now have beautiful shrubs and flowers surrounding the house.

Now we face the same situation in the back yard.  Trimming next to the vinyl fence is causing cuts into the posts of the fence.  To keep the string trimmers away from the north and south fences, we added a strip of concrete; however, I did not want that along the back fence.  Instead, we are adding yet another flower garden. 

A few days ago we bought edgers.  Rick dug a trench into which he built a wall for our new garden.

Rick started the garden against the
corner garden on the northeast corner 
of our back yard.

The most important thing was to make sure
that the edgers were level.

The garden will come out three feet from the back fence.

 We took the garden from one corner garden to right below the large live oak tree.  We had to stop short of the oak tree due to all of the large, underground roots of the tree.  Adding edgers any closer would not have done any good since the roots would just push them up each year anyway.

The garden edge curves to a close just shy of the tree.

Lots of digging eventually will leave us
with a level garden into which we can add beautiful plants.

I started to dig out the weeds and grass on the inside of the garden and got about half-way before we had to quit for the day.  Of course, the following day we had rain, followed by cold and lots of wind.  We have not been outside since that time to finish the garden, even though we do have landscape fabric waiting to go down.

We can wait, though, since we probably should wait another week or so before we plant anything.  We want to get the shrubs and flowers in early enough so they take root before we go north for the summer, but we don't want to plant too early and have the flowers freeze.  

We have more finishing work to do, and we will soon get that done.  Then once again, necessity to protect the fence will result in a beautiful addition to our landscape. 

Peaceful Retreat

 We have all had enough of staying home or of walking through the same neighborhood streets as we approach the one year mark on isolation due to the Covid pandemic. Sometimes, a person just needs some new scenery to keep from climbing the walls.

Today I needed some peace and quiet, so I took a walk in nature, and I did not have to travel too far from home to do so.  I visited the serene trails of Hammock Park.  No, there are no colorful hammocks hanging between trees in this park.  In this part of the country, a "hammock" is a fertile, higher area of land that is characterized  by hardwoods and deep, humus-rich soil.  Such an area exists just a half mile from our house, yet we have not explored the trails in the nine years that we have lived here.  That changed today.

While we have a "side entrance" to the park off of a neighborhood street, I traveled to the main entrance of the park.  The primary parking lot is still closed because the city is building 1.5 miles of boardwalk on trails that traverse lowlands, but a secondary parking lot was open, and the trails in that part of the park were high and dry.

The main trail and some smaller trails are wide and paved, but they also tend to be populated by dog-walkers and people with strollers or walkers.  I chose the gravel side trails instead.

Sugarberry Trail offered plenty of shade
and tranquil walkways through several
varieties of trees.

The first trail I chose was the Sugarberry Trail, named for a native species of tree that apparently produces very  sweet fruit.  The trail was absolutely deserted except for me, lots of squirrels (or something else scurrying in the underbrush), and birds.  The temperature was perfect for a walk, and that trail actually follows along a stream.  I was totally alone with nature.  The only thing I kept an eye out for was snakes, but I saw none sunning themselves on this slightly chilly morning.

I did not linger in sunny spots, but several
were available, including many with benches
on which to rest.

The second trail I chose was Cline trail.  While I did not specifically look for any particular species of trees, I am sure that there 're several different ones along the way.  That trail followed the opposite bank of the creek from the first trail, and again offered sweet air, lots of shade, and abundant nature.

This tree, growing at about a 45 degree angle,
attests to the storms that have ripped through the park.

I took a branch off Cline Trail by following Oak Trail back to the main Skinner Trail.  In each case, I either had the trail totally to myself or only passed one or two people as I neared the main trail.  That trail was busier with afore-mentioned dog walkers or parents with children.  

Several creeks and drainage canals
wind their way through the park, but most
have sturdy bridges on which to cross.

Most of the park is left wild.  Trees lay where storms took them down, and one sign even explained that a "dead" tree really was not dead at all since it housed birds and insects, provided a surface for moss and other plants to grow, and provided food for a variety of animals and insects.  

Hammock park is a beautiful, easily-accessible park that offers tranquility and a chance to walk with nature.  I certainly will visit it again.

Christmas Creations

Yesterday I took some time off from yard construction to bake some Christmas cookies.  I wanted to make cut-out cookies, but my dilemma was that I only have three cutters here in Florida:  a palm tree and two different versions of a pineapple.  This year is NOT the year to go shopping all over for non-necessities that may never be used again, so I decided to improvise and to think like a child. 

After a couple of hours, I had a pile of cookies waiting for decorating.  The time was too late to start that on Saturday, so I waited until this morning to tackle that task.

The cookies await their transformation.

I did not have many options with the palm tree other than to turn it into a Florida Christmas palm.  The magic of frosting and sprinkles has to go a long way this year to get into the Christmas spirit!

The plain palm tree is not very festive, until...

it becomes a Florida Christmas Palm.

The smaller pineapple reminded me of something entirely different, so I ran with that idea.  

The pineapple as it should be iced.

But with a little frosting and imagination,
it becomes a reindeer.

Lindsay says this is the male version.

The larger pineapple was more of a challenge.  I realized too late that I should have just used a glass to cut out circles that I could have decorated into wreathes or ornaments; instead, I made do with what I had before me.

The larger pineapple as it should be iced.

And, with LOTS of imagination, the ornament
with the hanger cap on top that it became.

The candy canes are just scraps of dough rolled and shaped before baking.  Nothing went to waste, and since I do not have to take these to any fancy parties, they will do quite well for this year.

So this Christmas we have a family of reindeer,

some assorted canes and ornaments,

and a forest of Florida Christmas Palms.

I will make pecan fingers tomorrow.  The good thing about those is that they still say "Christmas tradition" to me even if all I have to do is roll them in confectioner's sugar.  

Happy baking, everyone!