Sunday 12 Mar 06 --3

The trip home.

i would have filed a few posts from the road if only i had bothered to memorize the email address! i did send one but 12 hours later was informed it was returned.

Mom & Dad took me to the bus stop, a truck stop and arby's in Ft. Pierce, and my sister, bro-in-law, and niece met us there to send me off. a bus pulled in bearing the destination "new york" but i thought i was looking for a bus labeled "detroit" and this one was 40 minutes early. the station manager checked and found there was 1 seat left on this bus, so i got it. another "new york" bus arrived before we left, but it also looked full. i don't know how well greyhound's computer manages seats, whether they knew there would be 1 to pick up in ft. pierce and saved it for me, or if it was just luck they didn't sell all the seats before getting there.

the bus was full until we left columbia, sc, then my seatmate, whom i refer to as silent silvia--i saw her name on her ticket, we never said one word to each other--was able to move to a seat of her own, but then i got another seatmate, a man who told me he takes the bus around the country but frequently has to fly to barbados.

we awaited a connecting bus in jacksonville, so we left 40 minutes behind schedule. (I think many times that people say too much, and this driver was one of them. he told us "we're 40 minutes behind schedule..." which was enough, but then he droned on "we were supposed to leave at 10pm and we're leaving at 1040.") unfortunately, we made up the lost time by getting shorter breaks. one young man i talked to in jax said he was coming from ft. meyers, fl, and, in his opinion, about 85% of the people he ran into there smoked crack! he was upset because all those crack smokers used up his lighter! he admitted to using drugs that morning, but he was not unpleasant.

M&D called while we were on a break in salisbury, nc, and the call continued after the bus got back underway. i had to put my father on hold while i got a return call from Dave to tell me my blog did not have an email entry from the road, too bad, that would have been cool!

the bus we boarded was supposed to go all the way to columbus, oh, so i would make no more transfers, but for some reason we did have to change, i think in charlotte, nc, it looked like they sprayed my side of the bus with diesel fuel, it was still dripping when we retrieved the stuff we had left to mark our seats.

in winston-salem, nc, i got a new seatmate. the bus was not full but he didn't want to sit in the back of the bus cuz he thought it too rough a ride. (the seat i got in ft. pierce was in the back, but i had moved up in orlando because the engine is so noisy.) he was retired army, retired teamster, twice-divorced but said the court gave him back the house and car and hardly gave his newly-ex-wife anything, and claimed he was going to put some property on the market for $1 million, but he packed sandwiches and snacks and didn't buy anything at the breaks. we had 2 meal breaks, a mcdonald's at columbia, sc, and another mcdonald's at wytheville, va, at noon, who staff panicked when 2 more greyhounds pulled in (wouldn't that be a daily thing?). my seatmate got his own seat at wytheville and i didn't get any more for the rest of the journey.

Sunday 12 Mar 06

This packing is for the birds! i should have only brought disposable clothes, at the end donating them all to my mother's thrift shop. instead i bought some shirts at the thrift shop, and my sister gave me a big bag of shirts her son won't wear! (she says he is very picky and thinks he wears the same 5 shirts all week!) so i have my suitcase full--my computer goes in the suitcase--and have 2 big boxes of stuff to mail home! plus the box of playing cards gets sent back home, with additions, as i found playing cards here to buy, some being duplicates sold over the counter of decks i bought by mail and brought down here! plus my brother purchased my xmas present while he was down here in december, made me wait to open it until i came down, and left to me the responsibility of getting it home! and it is a huge thing, a coffee frother the size of a small blender for making lattes. it is pretty neat, but that bum should have delivered it to me last xmas!

fans of obsessive compulsive behavior should note that i am leaving, happily, about 3/4 of the sticky notes i sent down here! (they were not one-of-a-kinds, they were in fact ones i have plenty of, so i can abandon them with equanimity. really!) and if you wonder where i got my OCD, let me just mention one little item. my mother collects clown dolls and miniature cars...and she has rearranged them several times while i've been here!

i'm also putting off getting a shower because the later i get it before the 28-hour bus ride, the better. i find, tho, that it is sleep that makes me feel grimy, but i will certainly fall asleep on the bus, especially since i only got 4 hours last night.

Saturday 11 Mar 06

All things must pass, and this vacation is coming to an end. :( I spent the morning organizing and packing. Unfortunately, I didn't get to go out to the ranch this visit. it is about an hour away, and my bro-in-law has been working out there all week and was too frazzled to take me out. (Originally the plan was to burn off some weeds there today, but the wind is too gusty to do that.)

I also didn't get to see my other niece this visit, because she is out in Arizona. Laura, i hope your trip goes well. i missed you.

In the afternoon, M&D and I met my sister for a movie, Eight Below, and dinner at Jensen Ale House. I thought the movie shamelessly manipulative, the dogs anthropomorphized too much. My sister thought that 2 happy minutes at the end don't make up for the 2 hours of sadness, and the dogs should never have been left behind in the first place. At the ale house i had fish 'n' chips, but they served a huge amount, and i brought about half of it home in a kitty bag, which i will leave to M&D to finish off, which is fine as they treated me to dinner. we had originally intended to go to the olive garden, but the wait for a table would have been about an hour!

The weather this vacation has been ok. rain only the first 2 days, strong wind gusts seemingly every other day chilling it down a bit. it's supposed to be 80° here when i board the bus home tomorrow...but i heard it was 60° back home today, which ain't too shabby.

back to packing in earnest now. i'm trying to put off packing my computer until the last minute, but i don't think i'll get in another blog entry before heading back home. no leaving shampoo behind this year!

Friday 10 Mar 06

I got out on the water today. My parents and i took a river cruise on board the River Lilly up the north fork of the St. Lucie River. We saw about 9 alligators, some pretty close, and a blonde osprey, and, in some places, a view of what prehistoric Florida must have looked like. It was my treat for my parents, but i couldn't leave without seeing an alligator. We took this same cruise last time i was in florida 2 years ago; then we saw fewer alligators but 1 really big one, this year we couldn't find the 12-footer.

I got all my laundry done today. somehow the rug of the laundry room got all wet, but it wasn't my fault, honest!

For dinner we invited over my sister's family, and all 3 showed up, Kris, my brother-in-law, and my beautiful niece. it was very pleasant and, according to Mom, a rare chance to cook a full meal.

Later my mother and I went to the clubhouse to work on the jigsaw puzzle, and we finally got the frame finished. i picked out a difficult puzzle that Mom will be working on for a while!

Thursday 9 Mar 06

The day started out at 0-dark-30 for the mens' prayer breakfast. i again enjoyed the company and snuck (sneaked?) out before the service. this time i walked about 5 blocks along Port St. Lucie Blvd. up to Bayshore Dr, and looked around in a Walgreens before heading back to the restaurant. i had intended to be back by 830a but they got out early and called my cell phone wondering where i was.

The only other event on today's schedule is dinner with my sister's family and her in-laws, but we got to see her much earlier than that: her chevy suburban conked out and we had to go pick her up and take her home. i got an invitation to hang at her house where i read and snoozed and sat in the sun while she did some home office work. M&D picked us up to go to the oceanfront condo where her in-laws live (her daughter and husband decided they couldn't make it to dinner) and we got there in time for a drinkypoo. dinner was terrific at a somewhat fancy place right next door with a great view of the ocean, even tho again the breezes off the water were quite strong and chilly. i had a slice of key lime pie for dessert. as usual i have an alcoholic beverage and then get very congested; could i be allergic to alcohol? someone once suggested that aged alcoholic beverages might exacerbate a dust allergy, but i have even got congested after drinking a zima, which is manufactured, not aged or organic.

Wensday 8 Mar 06

Our main plan today is to take my niece Natalie shopping to buy her some birthday presents as her 17th is coming up. 17 is that non-event birthday halfway between driver's licence and voting!

First, we took Mom to her Weight Watchers meeting where she made goal!!! whodathunkit! while she's at her meeting, Dad and i get coffee, then go to Staples where i bought some more post-its (super sticky ultra orange 3x3 being sold by the pad rather than in a bigger package, which is cool because i have several times had to buy a whole package just because i had all of the colors in it except 1!). my sister made a suggestion for my birthday present to Natalie: Harry Potter 4 as Natalie had checked 2 stores on Tuesday and hadn't been able to find it. Nat had told me Monday that her plan was to buy the dvd very early tue morning and watch it that very day before school! my sister and i had wondered whether it would be put on sale at 1201a tue morning at a store staying open that late, but i don't know whether it was or whether Nat went out that late. by coincidence Dad needed a new battery for a camera he's thinking of selling on eBay so we went to Best Buy and i found a whole display of the dvds there! and it was discounted $5 there but not at walmart where i also found it. it could be my best present to Natalie yet! before going to walmart, i bought us lunch at cracker barrel, tho i had been to one just 2 weeks before in Columbus.

my present out of the way, i still went with Mom, Kris, and Nat to TJMax, where we wiled away a pleasant 1-1/2 hours mostly looking at purses! ultimately Kris got more than Nat there! i did sneak out for a smoke, saw an office depot a few doors down, and found they had 3x3 super sticky pink "pink ribbon" post-its i had never seen before! the girls never noticed i was gone!

after that, kris took us all to a deli for dinner called toojay's. i had matzo ball soup and a hot salami sandwich, quite tasty.

Tuesday 7 Mar 06

[As if creative writing isn't hard enough, i forgot the cardinal rule of working on computers: save your work! I've been using computers for over 30 years, but forget every so often. when i pressed "publish" on tuesday's blog i had written this morning, i got a "Blogger Error. An engineer has been informed and will check it out." message and it was lost! i thought it was doing some sort of auto-save but no. oddly enough, when i finished monday, i copied the entire entry to the clipboard before publishing as a safeguard, so i must have had an inkling something was not quite right. bummer!]

We finally got to the ocean! M&D and i took a drive into Ft. Pierce, drove by the Indian River Lagoon, over the causeway to South Hutchinson Island, to South Beach Boardwalk. unfortunately, the Dreaded Wind Chill Factor was again a factor, and i didn't go swimming, just waded in a little. man the wind blowing on my wet skin was cold! my father just sat in the sun but my mother and i walked quite a ways down the beach, picking up occasional seashells. for the fifth or so time, i have gone to a tropical location on a day when it was too chilly for the bikini babes to be out!

we went for a drive along ocean blvd., into Martin Co. and Jensen Beach, and past the nuclear power plant. we saw lots of buildings still damaged from the two 2004 hurricanes, francis and jeanne, which had also killed large stands of forests still standing. we also saw scads of new buildings, mostly condos, litterally hundreds of new oceanfront (or nearby) units. if someone would boast to me that they have a condo on the beach on hutchinson island, i would say, "pfui! you and a million others!" somehow they keep building them, even after 2 devastating hurricanes, and people keep buying them, and i understand they don't go cheap, over a million dollars each. you can't look at roadfront property anywhere in ft. pierce or port st. lucie and expect it to not be developed within the next few years.

after getting back to the mainland, we drove through a county park that was a savannah. it was pretty interesting, but being mid-afternoon, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse! so far the best wildlife i've seen here was the red-tailed hawk flying over the baseball stadium in deland (not counting the strip club just across the street from the entrance to this development).

in the afternoon, M&D had another C.O.P. meeting. in the evening, i took them to their church for their weekly collection basket accounting while i took the car and drove down the road to a Sears Essentials, which looked just like a Kmart...and had the same post-it inventory as my Kmart at home...except they had a post-it pop-up note dispenser that i had been looking for for a while! one could tell it had been in the store for a long time: the top note was bleached by the fluorescent lights.

later my mother and i went to the clubhouse to discover that someone had finished the community jigsaw puzzle! i had last seen it about 80% done. we gave the proper respect for a "dead soldier," then we took it apart and started a new one. someone had suggested the next puzzle to start, but i thought it looked too easy so i picked a different one, and told mom if the person wonders why we didn't use her suggestion, just blame it on me!

Monday 6 Mar 06

We are vaguely planning to get to the ocean today, the parents think we can manage it even tho we won't be ready to leave until about 11a and they have to be back in time to go to a C.O.P. dedication of a new law enforcement facility at Indian River Community College at 5p and then do their actual C.O.P. shift from 10p-1a, so my sister came up with a better idea: she'll entertain me until she has to go to her meeting at 8p. we met for lunch at a florida seafood restaurant only a few blocks from M&D's house called R.J. Gator's. i did not order the alligator on the menu, or any other of the freaky fish that cool people eat and act like they enjoy, i stuck with the chicken fingers. my sister and mother both had conch soup, and my father had a burger. then i changed drivers and went with my sister; my mother took her car and went to the drug store and Father walked home. My sister is a speed shopper, she filled her cart in about 15 minutes, because she needed to get home to put dinner in the crock pot. Her daughter, my niece Natalie, came home from school and made ramen noodles for a snack, something she's been doing for years. She reminded us she has a bowling lesson so i got to see her bowl, and she is a terrific bowler. I think her high game is 267, and Nat told me her record is 9 strikes in a row! After bowling, we stopped by to see Nat's quarterhorse, Jessa.

When we got to her home, my brother-in-law was sorting and packaging seeds of native florida plants to restore them at "the ranch", bluefield ranch mitigation bank that he owns and operates. here's how it works, as i understand it: say a developer wants to develop a parcel with an acre of wetlands on it. he is not allowed to destroy the wetlands unless he promises to replace them at a 2 to 1 ratio for the acre he wants to pave over. then he contacts my bro-in-law and leases the requisite amount of property. my bro-in-law, meanwhile, is restoring the ranch to it's native condition so it can fulfill it's role as replacement environment.

He told me about the ranch, but then i asked him about the struggle that he spearheaded to defeat a coal-fired power plant that had already won preliminary approval from the county commissioners. he told me about the meticulous planning it took to orchestrate the defeat, culminating in a unamimous vote 5-0 to reject florida power and light's application after an 11-1/2 hour meeting that started at 6p and had 81 people address the board. it didn't hurt that fpl was basically unscrupulous and unprincipalled.

Sunday 5 Mar 06

On the schedule today is a college baseball game. We are driving up to De Land, FL, home of the Stetson Hatters, where my sister's son Charley has a baseball scholarship. it's a 3-hour drive so i amuse us all by taking my computer and GPS-ing the route, you know, using navigation software for your pc like the kinds that are built-in to new cars. M&D were entertained by the voice telling when to make turns.

Unfortunately the Hatters lost, only getting 4 runs on 14 hits; the game ended on a fly out with the bases loaded. Charley doesn't yet get much playing time as he is only a sophomore and the current 2nd-base man is a senior; he expects to start more often next season. today tho he did pretty good:

Stetson 9th - PRUITT, Bri. popped up to ss. CRUZ pinch hit for PRUITT, Bra.. CRUZ walked. [Charley] OLSON pinch hit for TINDLE. OLSON singled to right field; CRUZ advanced to second. GOLLINER doubled to left field, RBI; OLSON advanced to third; CRUZ scored. JORDAN popped up to 3b. PARITZ reached on a fielding error by 2b; GOLLINER advanced to third; OLSON scored, unearned.

in the stands we joined my sister and her husband and her girlfriend and her husband; they all had to leave to get the girlfriend and hubby to the airport to go back to their home in michigan. i expect to spend more time with my sister this week. after the game we took my nephew out for dinner at sonic, a place i always wanted to check out, and went home. my laptop's batteries lasted till about 5 minutes after we got home, with liberal and judicious use of hibernate on the 120 miles we were on I-95.

Saturday 4 Mar 06

Today we have Visit the Mall on our schedule, the Treasure Coast Mall owned by Simon, who also owns the Springfield, Ohio, Mall, and many others. Now i've always maintained, for all the good it's done me, that i am not like other men because i shop, i talk, and i genuinely like women! A friend of mine once said, women love sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made! So i go with my parents shopping with no idea in mind of what i might buy or even look for. i end up finding 2 new volumes of Spider-man comic book reprints--they take full-size color comics and reprint them bound together 3/4 size in black-and-white, and i'll buy them!--and i also need some protector for my cigarettes now that i'm wearing shorts so i manage to find a metal cigarette case on sale. i probably should not have bought it because

1. yes, it has a small picture from the wizard of oz of dorothy and the wicked witch which is cool, but it also has a caption under the pic "don't make me get the flying monkeys!" which is neither a line from the movie or the book and hardly makes any sense. one wonders whether the person, probably a plant manager in some foreign country, has ever seen the movie; and

2. since fewer people smoke these days but cigarette case makers still gotta eat, they have rearranged the straps to go long ways on the small chance that someone will actually use these cases to hold library cards and drivers licences. unfortunately that pretty much ruins them for holding cigarettes. yes, the case has the room inside to hold almost a whole pack of smokes, 9 on each side, but as there is nothing to hold the cigarettes on their side, when you open it, they all fall out.

still it has a nice pic from the wizard of oz so i went ahead and bought it.

now a major part of the enjoyment of going to the mall is people-watching, and i favor watching members of the female persuation. there are certainly pretty women here in sunny florida, but there are pretty women everywhere, in a delightful variety of colors, and my observation is that here there are fewer blondes and more darker women, more from the latin and asian gene pools than back home. there was, however, a blonde who came out of the book store just as i was leaving, who had about 85% of her body uncovered, just wearing sneakers, tiny shorts, and a tiny top (in terms of coverage, not size)! maybe she was on her way to a gym...did you know the word gymnasium comes from the greek word meaning "to train naked"? *sigh*

last time i was here i got a fantastic buy on blank dvd+rw from office max, and a phenomenal bargain on some close-out post-its from office depot...or was it the other way around? this year i had to check them out because they are both a block from the mall, but no bargains.

my parents are healthy and doing all right but their day seems to go from meal to meal. perhaps they've always been that way, and perhaps my unstructured bachelor lifestyle has lead me in the other direction, but they had breakfast, then a big lunch at the food court, and then at 530p we had dinner! i said that if dinner hadn't been served until 9p i wouldn't have minded! i will get home so overfed i won't need to eat for a week!

Friday 3 Mar 06

Today we just lazed around. I'm still recuperating from having to get up yesterday before breakfast! In the afternoon, i went to this subdivision's clubhouse to work with my mother on her jigsaw puzzle. otherwise i just managed email, read, and watched tv. in the evening high-school-and-college buddy Linda called from home to my cell phone because it was an emergency and she missed me! i had only that morning learned that someone was actually reading this drivel, which was quite amusing, Linda and another college buddy Ted, and my brother also mentioned that he has checked it out, so this blog continues in answer to a steadily diminishing number of requests! I may have to extend my vacation just to keep my fans happy! That's just the kind of guy I am! We also vaguely wondered whatever happened to 2 other high-school buddies, Barry and Carol, he said alphabetically, who seem to be having a much quieter vacation than even i am! I welcome comments on my deathless prose; i think all one has to do to leave some is click on the number of comments at the end of each entry.

I may start another blog after i get home so i have some place to rant about irritating tv commercials. some of them really irk me by not being logical, scientific, or coherant. (some actually are.) For example, the latest commercial for a new kind of yogert that combats women's bloating caused by stress is none of the three.

Thursday 2 Mar 06 --2

a few more words about the St. Lucie County Fair...

I ran into this scrawny old guy who was talking to himself before i accidently got into earshot. I figured he was ancient, about 80. he told me all about his life, about going to Viet Nam (brought up by the fact that a vendor was offering helicopter rides around the fairgrounds for $10 until well after dark--helicoptors, it seems, bring up memories pleasant and otherwise in 'Nam vets), and later getting run over by a car, anyway eventually he told me he was born in 1945 and i realised that he was only 7 years older than me...and all of us! I'm sure we have all worn a little better, tho. he did give me a beer, so i didn't have to buy one. i was looking for where they were sold, i'd never seen beer and wine at a county fair before.

My underserved reputation for cheapness precedes me, so my parents were warning me that it would cost $8 to get in to the fair, tho they had free passes because they were working. well la-de-dah! they just by amazing coincidence worked at the fair on Dollar Night!

Thursday 2 Mar 06

You might have noticed that my mother likes to drag me around wherever she goes, and i usually don't mind. During the 12 years she lived in Muncie, if i happened to be visiting while she had her prayer breakfast, she would drag me along, i would join the ladies for the breakfast part at 9am but then discretely leave when it came time for the praying part. (My attitude towards prayer echoes the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair when she said "a billion teenage-hours of prayer every year and he still hasn't cured acne!") Mother understood as we had discussed religion occasionally over the years.

My father and i, however, had not particularly talked about religion, so when he invited me to his prayer breakfast this morning, i was somewhat nervous. how would he react to my walking out? how will the preacher react, since he already knows? then it gets even worse: it is at 7am after a 35-minute drive! dad says he'll wake me at 530am! hey! i'm on vacation! i don't even get up that early on workdays!

well it went okay. his fellow pray-ers are a great bunch of guys, i enjoyed meeting them. oddly enough, all but one member and the preacher were retired so there is no reason why they should get up so early. when the breakfast part was over, i had to leave to find the smoking area...which was outside. so i walked around. Port St. Lucie's Community Center was next door and City Hall was right across the street, and both had ponds with signs saying "beware of alligators" but i didn't find any.

I get a little nap in the afternoon and then they are dragging me to the St. Lucie County Fair, where they volunteered to man a booth for the Sheriff's Dept. for 5 hours. They are members of the sheriff's neighborhood crime watch called Civilian Observation Patrol or C.O.P. and actually get to ride a patrol car around their neighborhood for 3 hours on monday nights, plus my father takes a solo shift late-night friday/early saturday 1-4a (and if years ago anyone had predicted that he would voluntarily be up at 4a under any circumstances, i'd have said they were crazy!) unfortunately fairs aren't as fun by myself, i walked all around the fair in an hour. thinking i would get my book and find somewhere to read, i go to m&d's booth, but dad needs to take a break, so we walk around together, then mom needs one so we walk around together and get candy apples and a funnel cake--the sheriff had provided subs for dinner--and listen to the country band for a while. so the remaining hours of their shift go pretty fast. a credit union booth in the same building had sticky-notes so i helped myself!

Wensday 1 Mar 06

Shorts weather is finally here!

My mother has her weekly Weight Watchers meeting this morning so she drags me along, my father too as she doesn't drive much any more. While she's weighing in, Dad and i get a cup of coffee, then walk down to Staples office supply store. They have a new post-it pad! It is a super-sticky 3-color cube die-cut in the shape of a 4-leaf clover! i didn't get any...no, i'm just kidding! i got 3.

Afterwards their routine is that they stop for lunch somewhere--weight watchers leaves my mother hungry!--and then they go shopping at Wal-Mart. No new post-it there, but i did get a micro-fiber cloth to clean my glasses with. unfortunately they came in a package of 2 of the same color but i wanted 2 different colors, so when no one was looking, i opened 2 packages and swapped 1 from each package.

We get home and Mom asks if i want to go shopping but i'm content to read my book (a large-print mystery i checked out of the St. Lucie Co. bookmobile) for a while. Over the years i've realised that when Mom asks a question and doesn't get the answer she wants, she'll forget she already asked it or not understand the answer or act like no decision has been made, so when she asked again if i wanted to go shopping, i said "sure." Dad does not do shopping, so i get to drive his car! We went to Big Lots, which i had already been to while mother was working at the thrift shop, and she buys some of those solar garden lights, and i buy a deck of cards i had talked myself out of monday, a long and narrow deck (about 5"x2") by umbra that may be perfect for playing handheld solitaire games on the bus! hard to shuffle tho.

we also go to an outlet for one of the major discount clothing store around here called beall's and she gets me 2 loud and flowery ultra-tropical shorts so that every one will know for a fact that i am a tourist! they'll definitely cause comment around the office on casual fridays!

we get home from shopping around 530p and mother suggests that we have leftovers rather than the stuffed peppers she had originally planned, but dad is irritated because making meals and serving them on time is about all he actually asks of her in the way of homemaker duties, and he says he knew as soon as we left that we wouldn't get home in time to make dinner.

Tuesday 28 Feb 06

Mother volunteers to work at the Clubhouse of this senior manufctured-home park every Tuesday so she dragged me along, and afterward we worked some more on her jigsaw puzzle. She assumed i would be joining her on the tennis court for her weekly tennis lesson, too, but i resisted--i am a tennis fan but i don't play the game, tennis or any other, and i wouldn't be bullied into it! i did walk over with her and i read a book while she gamely (no pun intended) attempted to hit the ball every so often, but she's not played any physical sport for decades either.

We walked home and got here just in time to get my computer and other packages from UPS, so this is the first blog entry written on my own computer. M&D's DSL internet is my first experience with it and it is plenty fast compared to my dial-up back home. Catching up with my email and updating programs--not done on this computer since last Thursday lunch--i clocked DSL at downloading 40megs in about 1/2 an hour! (at home i get about 6 megs in 1/2 an hour.) so i might have to really consider at&t yahoo dsl when i get home. i've downloaded perhaps 400 megs worth of the rude email i subscribe to that has piled up in the past 5 days!

My parents are financial secretaries of their Lutheran church, so they dragged me along so they could count the collection plate and credit all the envelope donations to the proper accounts. i forgot my book so i just wandered around, meanwhile they get confused and bicker about what money goes where. The preacher stopped by and my mother introduced me, told him i was coming with my father to prayer breakfast thursday morning, but that i am an atheist. later i told Mother that i wouldn't have told the preacher that up front, he's probably at home right now writing a sermon for me! she said she was making sure i wouldn't feel like i had to stay for the sermon to keep them happy, i could walk out if i wanted (which i always did do when i went with her to her prayer group when they lived in Muncie).

Monday 27 Feb 06

Florida weather is finally warming up. My mother works 4 hours today volunteering at a thrift shop for a hospice, so she drags me along and i go shopping at the stores in the area. At Big Lots i find, incredibly, another bottle of a nice shampoo that i bought here on my last trip 2 years ago. i left it behind when i went back home but mom & dad don't remember finishing it off and were getting weary of my constant worrying over where the bottle might be. Hey, call me Monk! Welcome to my world of obsessive-compulsive behavior! A poor abandoned bottle of shampoo bugs me! I mailed my computer down here, it should be in tomorrow...but i also mailed down here a 15 lb box of post-its and a 10 lb box of playing cards just so i could have some of the things i obsess over without having to carry them on the bus! (both boxes had a few other things in there, like my complete beatles cd collection, fun to play while reading their biography, and the box set of a tv show, Nowhere Man, and my digital camera).

I was looking for a 50th-birthday present for my sister, my mother was suggesting a bottle of wine, but i found a nice fired-clay pot with a half dozen little cacti in it at Kmart. i wanted to pay for it with travellers checks--remember travellers checks?--but the cashier was too new to know how to process them. she got a supervisor who told her to get my drivers licence and write it on the check...but unfortunately i had left my licence back at the house! the trainee cashier eventually used my mother's licence number and accepted the checks. i'm pretty sure her supervisor would have sent me away, even tho the checks were already made out to Kmart and countersigned, which i think would have ruined them even if i came back later with my i.d. i thanked the cashier for trusting me and she said, "i could tell you're honest, you're with your mother!" incidently, one of my travellers checks jammed the check-stamping machine, and the cashier had to reboot her cash register!

i finally got to visit with my sister for a family birthday party, with her parents, in-laws, only daughter still at home, and me. She had a celebration the previous weekend with her daughter, a "Girls Only Weekend," and then through this coming weekend she will be with some girlfriends as part of her husband's birthday present: he bought the girlfriends' plane tickets down here. so i really won't get to see much of Kris until next week. her birthday cake was the chocolatiest cake i ever had. i could not find any cake in it, it was all fudge and frosting! nobody could finish a piece! i like chocolate but it was too much even for me. Kris got Mother and Mother-in-law to take some home but we don't think anyone will eat any of it!

Sunday 26 Feb 06

Saturday and Sunday here in Florida it has rained. Yesterday it got to 61° but with 25mph wind gusts the Dreaded Wind Chill Factor made it feel a lot chillier. So far I've been wearing the jacket i brought with me. I understand it will start warming up now, to the 80's by the weekend.

Saturday 25 Feb 06

My parents and i get home from the Ft. Pierce bus station around 345am, and i am weary and feeling grimy. i forgot to put a toothbrush in my carry-on. i get sleep in the bus, i even remembered to bring a pillow, but somehow it doesn't seem the restful kind of sleep, so i sleep the sleep of the dead once i get in bed.

my father always need some help on his computers so he always looks forward to my visits. one computer problem i solved instantly (the best kind of problem!), the same problem on another computer took a few minutes but was uncomplicated.

Mother and i go the community club house to return video tapes to the lending library and work on her jigsaw puzzle she leaves there spread out for anyone to help with. we walk back home and she decides it is not raining any more so we should go ahead and go the greek festival being held in a tent this weekend by a greek orthodox church.

i later get to tease her about her having no future as a weather forcaster as it rains buckets while we're driving there. we have authentic gyros for dinner, i have a Mythos greek beer, we watch some of the children of the church do greek dances while the rain outside is coming down in droves and the runoff is leaving big puddles inside the tent. at one point i'm watching 2 fantastic-looking greek young ladies walk by--one of them really named "Helen" according to her nametag--then i look around and there is an hispanic young man watching them too and he comes over to me and asks, "do you speak hispanic?" and i say no and he says, "in hispanic we would say, 'Mamacita!'"

so this vacation is already taking on an international flair!

Friday 24 Feb 06

As i said, the trip was uneventful...until we got to Columbia, South Carolina. just a few miles short of that bus station, my fellow travellers in the back of the bus alerted the driver that it was filling with smoke! we pull off to the side of I-77 and all get out. a S.C. Dept. of Transportation employee pulls up within minutes. the driver gets a fire extinguisher and sprays it on something in the engine, and also between the rear set of tires. more pickup trucks trucks show up. a fire engine comes out. taxis come out and take a few passengers off to their final destination, but one guy i'm talking to lives in Columbia but can't afford a 7-mile taxi trip: he just the day before got out of Virginia jail. we wait by the side of the road for 2 hours!

finally a loaner bus arrives just to take us into Columbia, but there we have to wait for another greyhound bus to come from Charlotte, N.C., to replace ours. it finally gets there and we leave Columbia 4 hours late. about 15 of us have missed all our connecting buses. my schedule is in ruins. i was supposed to change buses in Jacksonville, Florida, at 530pm, but that bus was long gone by the time we got there at 845pm. not too long a wait, however, the next bus leaves at 915pm.

unfortunately, greyhound no longer runs a west coast route and an east coast route; all Florida buses now go thru Jacksonville to Orlando to all points south. so now the nice straight 4-hour trip from Jacksonville to Ft. Pierce on I-95 "Alligator Alley" is a thing of the past, Orlando is 'way out of the way. where once my schedule had hour-long layovers in Walterboro, Jacksonville, and Orlando, now all 3 are reduced to 1/2-hours. i spent the layover at the Walterboro McDonald's to get something to eat, so i didn't get a smoke, and i hardly had enough time for a bathroom break and a smoke at either Jacksonville or Orlando. we get on the 1215am bus out of Orlando instead of the original 1030pm bus, and i get in to Ft. Pierce just a little before 3am, 2-1/2 hours late! my father not being a night person, asking him to stay up that late to come get me is a big thing! (my mother is better at staying up late.)

Thursday 23 Feb 06

Today is the day i leave Ohio for sunny Florida. i was trying to finish up a project at work and didnt even take a lunch break, but i'm not sure it is finished to the boss' satisfaction, yet it is 3pm and i have to leave for the last few hours of packing and closing the house...and also get a bath before boarding a greyhound bus for the 28 hour trip.

dave and barb take me to Chillicothe to catch the bus. it arrives and departs on time, and i am off! the trip so far is uneventful (the crying baby on the bus notwithstanding!)