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!