Alive An' Kickin'

 Yes, we are all still here and with the living!  We just got back from a week long vacation down in St. Andrew's State Park, in the sunny state of Florida, where we had a fabulous time!  As you can see, I finally got to try paddle boarding, which I had wanted to do for some time now, and it was great!  I enjoyed the hell out of that.

 It is a little harder to stay upright that some might think; I was just mildly surprised.  But it's not terribly hard.  It is a great workout on your legs and stomach though. I did fall off one time, in shallow water, and my big butt went straight to the bottom and hit pretty hard!  That didn't do a whole lot of good for my hips and tailbone but it didn't seem to bother me too much later.

 The waters are beautiful and so clear at St. Andrew's so I could see all sorts of sealife below me.  Fortunately, no sharks but I did have 2 dolphins swim right under me!!  and several large schools of fish and a stingray.  The dolphins were feeding on the fish so we all went back and forth and round in circles.  It was great!

 Since we were camping in the park we had time to do all sorts of other things, like hiking.  Their trails are very short but it was interesting and we saw lots of stuff.  I was trying to photograph a squirrel here and just almost got an unintended shot of said squirrel being snatched up by a hawk.  Me and the squirrel were both very surprised!

 Tons of dragonflies but I was not able to get a good shot of any really.

 The beaches here are some of the prettiest I've seen anywhere in the U.S. and I've been to both seas and all around the Gulf.  I also did a fair amount of snorkeling and swimming and had a little group of my own fishes that followed me around anytime I did.  They apparently liked for me to stir up the sand for them because there was something there they liked to eat I guess.  At any rate, they stayed with me every step of the way.

There are tons of various wildlife at SA, as you can see in the following photos.  Most of the creatures are fairly used to humans too, so you can get some good pics.

Did I mention we had a great time? lol!

Our mattresses stayed blown up, we had a nice, shady, quiet camping spot, the amenities here are great; nice showers etc.  The weather was outstanding.  Warm in the day and just cool enough at night to sleep good.  I cooked a nice breakfast each morning but we had dinner out each night so I got lots of great seafood!

And to top it all off, we saw this bald eagle on our last day there!  Almost everyone else on the beach was too busy checking their phones or taking selfies to notice it,

One thing I really enjoyed about being there was actually....no internet, no electronics of any kind.  I'll tell you I did not miss it one bit.

I'll be back soon with another post I think with what little has been going on around here..  Honestly, I have not had a lot of interest in posting this past month, for various reasons I guess, but I think I have a couple of updates for ya'll.  Just lots of busy work getting out of clay and cleaning up, checking out new work leads etc. and the regular yard, garden and chicken work.

Blur

I know ya'll are probably getting tired of my hummer photos but I just haven't been able to get anything decent of much else.  This has been a very wet summer so seems like it's been cloudy forever.  I went out yesterday after the sun came out some and really tried to get some new pics but it just didn't work out.  I only got a few and then it clouded back up again and I just gave up.
Things are going fine though.  Just been real busy trying to get ready for this last show and that doesn't leave me with much to tell ya'll about. 

And of course, it seemed like I had more that I wanted to write about but now that I finally have time to sit down at the 'puter I can't think of what I wanted to say.  I've been doing better as far as the fatigue goes; not quite as tired through the day, but seems like around 8:30 at night I just poop out and my mind goes on auto-pilot.  I will really be glad to get this show over with and a few other little orders done so I can just get away from clay for  6 months or so and see if that won't help things.  I suspect I will feel much better.  I also suspect that the wet summer we have had is contributing to things because there are tons of mushrooms all around the house and you can just smell the dank, mustiness everywhere.  When I go outside it's like I can't breath good. 

It's been so wet all my cantaloupe rotted and several of the watermelons busted.  The girls get to enjoy the melons, such as they are.  Most of them did not turn out to be very ripe so I don't know how much the chickens really like them but they eat them anyway.  I hope we get 2 or 3 ripe melons at least.  Some of them are pretty big so you'd think they would do something.
 I did prune back some of the herbs and clear out a couple of things there that have rotted due to the wet.  Half of my big sage bush died and I think my beautiful lemon thyme is gone.  Also, that new variegated mint croaked and I thought they usually liked a little damp.  This has just been an awful year for the garden.  Maybe the fall will be better and we can actually harvest a few things.