Half Gone?

Half a year gone already? Where does the time go? I can remember as a kid when summers seemed to last thirteen months. I guess all those people who say that time goes faster as you get older know what they’re talking about.

It being the end of June, we are already ten days into summer and thirty days into hurricane season here on the central Florida coast. We had three hurricanes hit our area during our first two years here, and none since then. That’s just fine with me. They can stay as far away as they want to. I won’t feel the least bit slighted.

We are also getting into our rainy season, which we definitely need. Every afternoon the clouds start building up and the thunder starts rumbling, and even here in our little area that seldom gets rain compared to places just up and down the road a mile or two, we have been getting our fair share. Our grass and citrus trees sure appreciate that.

I don’t know if we’re beginning to get a bit acclimated to the climate here, or it just hasn’t gotten quite as hot yet, but I have noticed that while we’ve had some hot days, it doesn’t seem quite as harsh as in previous years. But I’m sure that won’t last much longer. In a blog post a couple of weeks ago titled They’re Back I told you that after my son and daughter-in-law dug up the banana palms at the end of our driveway, the darn things came back and were already knee-high within just a couple of weeks. Taking advantage of the somewhat tolerable temperature, last week I went out with a shovel and dug up the area where the banana palms were, taking out their root balls and throwing them in the trash. Some of them were as big as a grapefruit and seemed to weigh a couple of pounds. I hope that does the trick and we’ve seen the last of those messy plants. Terry has something else she wants to plant in there, but we don’t want to do it until we know the banana palms are completely gone.

So what have I been doing, besides digging up tree roots? Working on my new Big Lake book. I ran into a snag in the plot but realized it in time so that I was able to do some research and then go back and make some changes to what I’ve written already to correct the problem. I’ll be back at it again today.

I didn’t get any writing done yesterday because we had to go to the airport in Sanford, about 45 minutes west of us, to pick up our neighbor Jennifer. She had been in New Hampshire on business and was scheduled to fly home on Sunday, but her flight got canceled and the next one she could get out on was yesterday. Her regular ride couldn’t pick her up because of a scheduling conflict, so Terry and I volunteered. We had not been to the Sanford airport before because people visiting us from Arizona always fly into Daytona Beach, but it seems like it good facility with a lot of flights going to the eastern and Midwestern states.

Speaking of Sanford, they have an Amtrak station there and we have always wanted to take a train trip somewhere. Amtrak has an auto train on which you can load your car and go to Washington DC. That sounds interesting, but first we thought about just taking the train without our car up to Savannah, Georgia or Charleston, South Carolina. But for some reason, even though there are Amtrak stations in both cities, I can’t find a way on Amtrak’s website to book a trip to either of those two places. It’s not exactly user-friendly, and the three times I’ve tried to call their customer service number, all I get is voicemail and nobody ever calls me back. So I guess we won’t be doing that.

In other news, my friend Arthur Herbert recently launched his debut novel, The Cuts That Cure. A small town Texas boy, “Herb” spent time working on offshore oil rigs, as a bartender, a landscaper at a trailer park, and as a social worker before going to medical school. For the last seventeen years he’s worked as a trauma and burn surgeon, operating on all ages of injured patients.

I get many, many requests to read books-in-progress from new authors, and I almost always decline simply because I don’t have the time, given my own work schedule. But I had already read his eerie short story Sisters and loved it, so I agreed to take a look at The Cuts That Cure and offered Herb some advice I thought would help the story. Believe me, you need to read this book. It takes some twists and turns you won’t soon forget.

Thought For The Day – Bigfoot saw me yesterday, but no one believes him.