4 things to remember when planning your Florida vacation

image from boktowergardens.org

So, you are traveling to Florida for the first time this summer? 

I have lived near Tampa most of my life and would like to pass on some tips the guide books and travel agents probably didn't mention to you.

1. The Weather and Our 2 Seasons.

• WINTER We have the best weather in the country from October until March.  There is low humidity and temperatures in the 60's and 70's during the day, with a usual cold snap in mid-January where it gets down to the 30's at night so we can wear our sweaters, and the 11:00pm tv crews invade the strawberry fields and orange groves to show cold farmers in heavy jackets out protecting their crops with heaters or spraying them with water so they get an insulating layer of ice overnight. 

• SUMMER However, in the summer (which begins in March and lasts until October) it is humid and hot. Like mid-80's to mid-90's every day and only down to 70 at night. It will feel like you walked into a sauna at 7am and will build throughout the day.  Save yourself some time and prevent blisters on your hands from the boiling hot steering wheel by purchasing a sun shade (here are some suggestions) for your car ASAP and use it all day, every day. You have no idea how fast you can burn in our tropical sun.  Forget the makeup and buy a big bottle of sunscreen with SPF of at least 30 and put it on every 2-3 hours. Don't forget the part in your hair, the tops of your feet, and your ears. Peak hours for sunburn are between 10am and 2pm.  Stay hydrated. Heat stroke is no fun. By the way, you will get delicious water out of your kitchen or bathroom tap, but it will not ever be really cold.  You have been warned. Hurricane season (June 1 - November 30) used to be a big deal, and those of us who have been through them do take warnings seriously, but we haven't had a hurricane since the infamous 4 that barreled through in 2004. However, it does storm every afternoon for about an hour or so, usually around rush hour, just to make that part of the day even more exciting.  Florida is the lightning capital of the U.S. so get out of the pool/beach, off the golf course, and away from tall trees at the first thunder you hear, even if it is sunny. Seriously.  

2.  The Scenery.

Yes, I know the postcards only show Disney and beaches. but Florida is more than either of those. Yes, we do have all kinds of palm trees, but we also have tons of pine, palmetto, cypress and awesome grandfather oaks that are hundreds of years old. No matter which major highway you travel throughout Florida (I-75, I-95, I-4, I-10) these are what you'll see, along with a lot of cow pastures lakes, rivers, and swamps. Of course, because more and more people are moving here, you will also see new house and business construction, too. Now, back to the beaches.  Most of them are wonderful, but be prepared.  They are not all the same.  On the east coast with the Atlantic Ocean, the beaches have coarser sand, much stronger waves and rip tides, and more shark attacks, but gorgeous views of the sunrise. The beaches are more calm on the west coast Gulf of Mexico side. Yes, there are rip tides, but not as often, and you do need to know about the stingray shuffle, and know that even though they are awesome, you need to leave manatees alone. I may be biased, but we have the best sunsets anywhere here on the west coast of Florida.

3. The Critters.

You really cannot imagine how much wildlife there is here. We have forests, swamps, beaches, plains, scrub, and caves. Many of the animals you already know about. Yes, we do have tons of alligators.  Do not approach them and do not feed or provoke them.  They will leave you alone. We have lots of snakes.  Some are poisonous, most are not. Be safe, and leave all of them alone, too. We have lots of creepy and just plain pesky bugs, too.  We have fire ants.  They are horrible, attack in a group and yes, their bites hurt like fire for a long time. So stay away from large piles of sand in the grass. Those are their mounds. We have lots of varieties of roaches, all gross.  Some fly. Because of our climate, mosquito repellent is a must. We have lots of good spiders, and some pretty venomous ones, too, along with scorpions.  Again, leave them all alone.  Do you see a pattern here? One insect you may not have heard of are love bugs.  They look kind of like lightning bugs and, although harmless, are the scourge of Florida for several weeks in May and September, when mating pairs, who are attracted to car emissions, fly awkwardly around and get creamed by cars.  It is not uncommon to have to stop several times a day and clean them off your windshield so you can see the road. If you let the remains bake on your car, they will eat through your paint. So, May and September are good fundraiser car wash months, but bad times to drive for hours on the interstate. You probably won't see a live armadillo or possum while here, but, unfortunately, you'll see plenty of them as roadkill, too. A couple more things about beach critters. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go to the beach right near the water's edge and scoop up big handfuls of sand.  Most of the time I'd feel weird things moving in the wet sand. These are coquinas.  You'll find tons of coquina shells on the beach, many of them still hinged together, so they look like a butterfly. When alive and on top of the sand, they dig down and try to bury themselves. Their shells come in a variety of colors and I would try to find as many different ones as I could. Try it, it's fun! But here's a tip from someone who's been there, done that.  Do not collect a bucketful of live coquinas, sand, and ocean water, put them in the trunk of the car without telling your dad, and then have him find them the next day. They do not survive.  And they really stink when cooked in your 100 degree trunk.  So does your trunk. After you've played with them for a while, leave them where you found them. There will be plenty of empty shells for you to take as souvenirs. 

4. Most of us Floridians were not born here.

I have lived here most of my life, but like most people I know and also grew up with, I was not born here. I was born in Ohio and moved to Florida when I was 6.  I did time lived in Michigan for 10 cold years, but have been here the rest of my life (33 years as opposed to 16 elsewhere). Yes, there are some folks who were born here, but there are many more of us who have lived here longer than anywhere else, so that we, too, are Floridians.  We love Florida and are proud to be here.  We are glad you are coming to visit and we hope you find things to love too, maybe even some of it's quirks. 

Victory, or how I defended my feathered friends from my furry nemesis.

Standing there dripping, I decided that this had gone far enough. I had tried to be kind.  I had been persistent in using my garden hose and great aim, but not nearly as persistent as she had been. I kept telling myself she was no different than the fiery red cardinal and his family, the sweet little tufted titmice, or the noisy blue jay that all visited regularly.  But did any of birds hog all the birdseed, and then scatter the remains all over my flowerbed to come up as grass and weeds?  No.  Even when there was a steady stream of birds all day long, my feeder would slowly empty throughout the week, instead of swinging empty and forlorn an hour after I filled it up. I have given up filling the small feeder  that I can see outside my office window.  The pole attaches to the fence, and therefore is very handy. I greased the pole. I greased the top of the feeder.   It just isn't feasible to put Vaseline on the entire fence, but I have thought about doing so. So, now I just have the one feeder right outside our porch, where we can see it from the kitchen, so we can relax and feel at peace watching the lovely birds. Or so we thought.

So, today I went to the hardware store, and I found it.  Guaranteed to stop her. Cue maniacal laughter, ala Bill Murray in Caddyshack. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of this tale, I was done. Every morning at around 8am, I see her out there stuffing her little fat face.  I let the dog out, who is so excited because she knows this is something awesomely fun that she and mom do every day, and she tears out the sliding glass door, and to the porch door.  But our arch nemesis is already sitting on top of the screened enclosure above the pool, mocking us.  So, I let the dog out, who just runs around the backyard and barks because that's about all she can do 16 feet below the culprit, and I get the hose, take aim, and squirt the intruder right on the belly.  The next stage of the game involves her flying off the screen and rocketing down the slope, through the fence, and back into the woods, with my clueless dog convinced that the intruder is still on the enclosure.

Usually that's the end of the game.  I bring the dog in, finish getting ready for work, and look at the feeder a half hour later as I am about to leave, only to see our adversary munching happily away. All I have to do is open the sliding glass door quickly this time, and she is gone.  My mission complete, I leave for work, but with a sneaking suspicion she comes back the minute she hears the garage door creak shut.

But today was different.  Oh, she was there as usual at 8am. And there I was with my hose, and the dog was doing laps in the yard, frantically looking for the little twerp. But, instead of her dashing off to the woods, she sat on the far corner of the screen enclosure mocking me.  So, I squeezed the trigger of the hose nozzle even harder to make the water go farther, and it jammed.  So, as I tried to unjam it, the pressure knocked the nozzle out of my hand and it went flying around like a demented cobra, and I got sprayed.  A lot. After I turned off the hose, rounded up the dog, and wiped the water off my glasses, I knew I had to step up my game.

Hence the trip to the hardware store and the successful purchase of my secret weapon.  Designed to only allow lightweight birds to sit on the perches to eat. The guaranteed squirrel-proof bird feeder. She's tenacious, but I hope I have stymied her once and for all.  Only time will tell.  Excuse me, I have to go get my clothes out of the dryer now and wind up the garden hose, but I must admit I will keep it handy, just in case. 

No one will play Trivial Pursuit with me - the downside of being a librarian.

Trivial Pursuit was created in 1979 and celebrated its 35th birthday on December 15, 2014.  I received my Masters degree in Library and Information Science in 1993, but worked in the library field for 11 years before that, mainly shelving lots of books.  In library school I had a class on library technology and the instructor briefly mentioned this thing called "the Internet," but not to worry about it because we had no need for it in the library field.  There was a great post floating around for a while that read "Librarians are the original search engines."  After all, Google did not launch until January 1996.  So, we librarians had to rely on books, magazines, and newspapers to find all that information people were requesting.

So, when you have memorized all of the Dewey Decimal section numbers (500's - Natural Science), physically walk to the correct section (Children's non-fiction, Aisle 8A) and glance through the indexes of a couple of likely-looking books (call # 594.56), you can tell that desperate kid that, weirdly enough, octopuses have 3 hearts and show them other interesting facts they can use in their research paper...due tomorrow.  Its not my fault that people ask me to find the answers to the same kind of questions as Trivial Pursuit. Maybe Trivial Pursuit's questions were created by a bunch of librarians.  However, once I have looked up the answer and told the patron, then it is stuck in my head forever, whether I want it to be or not.  You are going to remember that octopuses have 3 hearts now, aren't you? See...

Yes, there are plenty of times when I wished I had a pensieve like Professor Dumbledore, who could siphon off his excess thoughts to make more room in his brain, but unfortunately, I seem to have an enormous capacity in my noggin for hanging on to useless facts, as do most other librarians.  We thrive on learning new things.  That's the real reason most of us became librarians in the first place. And, on a side note, we are extremely organized, too.  What? Your spice rack isn't in alphabetical order? (It really does make it easier to find the spices quicker if they are.) Thanks, Melville Dewey and Library of Congress. The problem is that now I seem to have so much information in my head, that it is getting a little crowded in there and sometimes there just isn't room to store facts that I really do need, like where I just set my car keys, and whether or not I was supposed to pick up the kids after practice today.  But, I can always recall song lyrics from the 80s and what Alfred Nobel invented (dynamite, ironically), and that the Mariana Trench is 35,994 feet (almost 7 miles) deep, deeper than Mt. Everest at 29,029 feet is tall.

So, no, Trivial Pursuit opponent, I did not guess.  I did not memorize all of the cards.  I did not cheat and have my iPhone on my lap, cued up to Google.  I read it for fun, or researched it, or helped someone with that information.  Remember, we librarians really are the original search engines.  So, come on, play another round with me.  You just might learn something new.

Being the peanut butter in the sandwich generation...

 

 

Below is an article I wrote over a year ago.  Things haven't gotten any easier, as my mother-in-law continues to decline from dementia and we attempt to meet her needs to the best of our ability. She is now on Hospice care, which has been terrific for us.  Twenty-six years ago, when my mom had cancer and was at the end of her life, she was on Hospice care for 3 weeks, so I was therefore frightened when we were approached by Janette's doctor about placing her on Hospice care.  I thought she was dying and they hadn't told us!    Today, Hospice recognizes the need for long-term care for dementia patients and the extended length of time services will be needed for them.  We are very thankful for all of the help and support Hospice has provided for us and the compassionate care they give to Janette.

Many adults today are finding themselves as part of the "sandwich" generation.  They are parents who work full time that still have children living at home with them as well as having aging parents who need caring for, too.  It can be exhausting and unrelenting for years and years.  According to the US Bureau of the Census, the number of parents living with their adult children increased from 2.2 million in 2000 to 3.6 million in 2007 – a 63% increase. According to the Pew Research Center study on Social and Demographic Trends (January 2013) adults who are part of the sandwich generation—that is, those who have a living parent age 65 or older and are either raising a child under age 18 or supporting a grown child—are pulled in many directions. Not only do many provide care and financial support to their parents and their children, but nearly four-in-ten (38%) say both their grown children and their parents rely on them for emotional support.

I am one of those statistics.  I have 3 children - one in elementary school, one in junior high, and one in high school.  My mother-in-law is 81 and in the mid-stages of dementia.  After a nasty fall in her independent-living apartment resulting in  2 broken neck vertebrae, surgery and a stint in rehabilitation, we knew she could no longer live safely on her own.  The first thing we did was research as much as we could about what to expect in dealing with dementia.  We discovered that it was important to help her get her finances and healthcare wishes in places before she was no longer mentally able to make those kinds of decisions.  My husband is now her legal power of attorney for both finances and health issues. For about a year she lived with us.  Our house had 3 bedrooms so my children graciously (for the most part) shared a bedroom while Grandma had another.  We all helped her with her activities of daily living.  My son helped her with her physical therapy by playing catch with her.  My daughters helped pick out her clothes for each day and chose audiobooks for her at the library. We had a caregiver be with her while I worked part-time and my husband worked full time.  I felt guilty about never seeming able to keep up the housework and having the caregivers see us rushing around like mad in the mornings because there is no privacy for the rest of the family if there is a caregiver there. The other 16 hours each day we were her caregivers and it was exhausting to do so as well as try to give the children much needed attention. She is a fall risk, so she could not be left alone, therefore we always had someone in the room with her.  At night we used our old baby monitor in her room so we could hear her call if she needed us.  My kids were very understanding, but it felt as if we were being pulled in a million directions between homework, baseball practice, after school activities, orthodontist appointments, grandma's appointments, and getting a household of 6 up and off  to school and work each day or to bed at night.  It takes an incredible amount of organization and coordination to pull all that off. 

Eventually, when my mother in law deteriorated, we could no longer safely care for her in our home and neither she nor we could afford around the clock in-home caregivers. We were fortunate enough to find an assisted living facility that houses 6 residents. They even have a physician, a podiatrist, and a beautician (for nail care and haircuts) who come each month to attend to the residents.  She seems happy and well cared for.  But just because she no longer lives with us does not mean that all our worries are over.  We now have to travel to another neighborhood to visit her and we still take care of all of her finances and manage refills of her prescriptions. We still need to carve out time each week in our busy schedules to go and visit her. 

Many people are fortunate enough to have their parents living with them be in reasonably good physical and mental health, but it is still a challenge for everyone.  It can be difficult for the elderly to accept giving up the freedom of living independently and no matter how well grandparents, parents, and children get along, it can be very difficult to all be under one roof.  As for us, my mother in law has always been there for us and like countless other families in the sandwich generation, we will certainly do our best to be there for her as long as we can.

 

Image courtesy of worradmu at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Container Gardening

 

 

 

 

 

Gardening can be so relaxing.  Planting seeds and seedlings, nurturing them, and reaping the harvest of gorgeous blooms and fresh veggies.  You may think that you need acres of land, or at least a huge backyard, to grow plants, but you can have a full, lush garden in a surprisingly small amount of space. 

Containers are the key.  If you have a tiny yard, a patio only big enough for a bistro table and 2 chairs, or even a sunny windowsill or two, you have room for a garden!  Many kinds of fruits, veggies, and flowering plants thrive happily in containers.  You can find containers of any shape, size, and color with or without drainage holes, using potting soil, dirt from your yard, or sand and you can find a plant happy to grow in it.  Take a trip to your local home improvement store, flea market, or scout out local garage sales to find terrific containers.  An old paint can?  Soup cans? Old goldfish bowl?  Heck, an old rusty wheelbarrow or chair missing its seat? All good, whimsical containers. Good old standby terracotta pots are very inexpensive and can be stacked inside each other to grow multiple levels of plants in a small amount of floor space.  Put the plants that vine and droop in the bottom, such as strawberries, sweet potato vine, ivy, or good old pothos and the tallest in the top pot.  If you are including veggies, add a frame at the top for easy picking of beans, cucumbers, or squash.

You can grow an entire salad in your containers.  Many varieties of lettuce do very well in containers, as do radishes, peppers, and any herb you can imagine. Herbs are the home gardener's best friend.  Get 1 wide pot and some good potting soil and you can plant several different herbs in it all together.  Basil, chives, parsley, cilantro, mint, oregano, thyme, sage, dill - even catnip for your furry friends - are all happy growing together in 1 container.  And the best thing about herbs is they thrive and grow even better as you use the leaves.  As you cut them off, they grow even more, so you really only need 1 of each type of herb to have plenty of fresh goodness for your meals, and probably enough to share as well. It's actually best to always grow some herbs in a container, like mint, spearmint, and catnip, otherwise they will take over the rest or your garden, your yard, your neighborhood…  Well, you get the picture. 

 

Even if you have been a plant killer with a not so green thumb in the past, growing a succulent container garden is easy.  Make sure you have good drainage in your pot and basically ignore the plants.  You say that didn't work very well with your spider plant?  Well, succulents do best when left to their own devices.  They don't need much water, like being in a sunny spot, and don't grow very fast, so they don't need much maintenance.  Cactuses come in all shapes and sizes, as do aloes and other succulents.  Add some pretty pebbles around the plants, and check the soil once every few weeks.  If it is bone dry, water until the soil is nice and moist, not a muddy swamp, and  you are good to go.  You are a successful gardener!

 

Don't let your small space deter you from enjoying plants.  They clean the air in your home, they provide you with yummy things to eat and beautiful leaves and flowers to look at and are a lot easier than you think to live with and take care of.  Why not give it a try - you may find you have a green thumb after all!

 

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/badalley/8784783928/">Bad Alley</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

Save the Egyptian Antiquities!



Will there be any antiquities left for our children and grandchildren to view and enjoy?  Just looking at today's headlines about the turmoil in the Middle East makes one wonder.  Stories are rampant about trading artifacts for cash and weapons to support this side or that in the violence erupting on daily basis, especially Egypt.  Museums and private collections are being stripped and sold to fund militants and armies alike, and collectors world-wide are seeming to turn a deaf ear on the protests that these items will be removed from public view forever.  According to an article published on April 15, 2013 on the website Albawaba, the Egyptian Council for Culture and Arts stated in its report last year that "the amount of stolen Egyptian antiquities after the January revolution reached about 3,000 artifacts, probably now residing outside Egypt in the hands of private collectors." 

Some say, "Can you blame them?"  When a small artifact sells for hundreds of US dollars on sites like eBay, it can help feed and house a whole displaced family and help them escape the violence in which they find themselves living. So what if it goes into someone's private collection never to be shown in public again.  There are plenty of others out there for the viewing.  Not only does this mentality hurt everyone in general, but it also loses critical background information on the item - its location, its age, the relationship to other items found near it - its whole backstory gone, and documentation darned near impossible to corroborate. 

But the blame does not land solely on the Egyptians.  If there was no demand for such trading, especially in the West, where it's common to find greedy collectors or even museums that are willing to accept these items with iffy or no certification at all, then there would be no looting of these historic treasures.  There has been a lot of talk in the media and on the Internet recently about how some Egyptians wanting to protect their cultural heritage have created Facebook pages and other social media that show pictures and descriptions of missing items.  One of the best known is the Facebook page "Stop the Heritage Drain." On the page it states in part, "Help us save our shared heritage.  Over the last two years, Egypt has fallen into a state of increasing chaos. Theft and looting of the country’s heritage have been rampant. Adding insult to injury, the ministries of culture and antiquities, in a (miserable) attempt to pretend that “everything is fine” do not publicize the thefts in order not to scare off prospective tourists.. They don’t want the bad PR you see…   As Egyptians, we think it’s a bit too late for that.."

It contains many, many photos of missing and smuggled antiquities and simply asks that we in the West share this information so that these items of Egyptian heritage can be returned.  We can only hope that this kind of grassroots movement will help in the return of so many antiquities back to Egypt so the world can once again enjoy them, along with their invaluable historic and scientific documentation restored.   

 

Drinking dino water

 

 

 

I love science. So now that fall is here and school has started again, I want to share one of my favorite cool science facts. I was floored in elementary school the first time I learned that we drink the same water as the dinosaurs did.  What?!? How can that be?  Well, let me give you a short lesson in "The Water Cycle."  Cue cool music...  

 

Water has been on the earth for millions of years and water is a pretty durable thing.  It travels through cycles of changing states and constant movement. Most water molecules are pretty durable, too, during all of this change, and continue on, basically recycling themselves over and over.  Water molecules depend on energy from the sun to change states.  When the temperature of the water is moderate it stays in its liquid state.  Liquid water covers about 70% of the earth's surface in the form of oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds.  When the temperature changes, so does the state of the water.  When the temperature cools to 32 degrees water turns to a solid - ice.  As the temperature heats to over 212 degrees it turns to a gas - vapor.   I bet you didn't know water was so talented, did you? 

 

Of course, water is also a big traveler.  It is always on the move.  Let's use a puddle as an example of water's journey.  The water molecules in the puddle are in their liquid state.  As the sun beats down on the puddle, the temperature of the water rises and the molecules begin to change into vapor, which is lighter than air and  begins to rise.  As more and more vapor rises and the puddle slowly shrinks, it is known as evaporation.  So now the water vapor has risen very high in the sky.  The temperature is much cooler at this altitude and so the vapor begins to cool, too.  As it changes back into its liquid state, the vapor joins with other vapors, creating larger drops or condensation.  You can see this on a window as well when the air inside the room is colder than the air outside and condensation forms on the outside of the window.  As the vapors condense together and create larger and heavier drops, they will fall back down to earth.  Condensation is constantly being blown around by winds. So where the rain drop eventually falls may be many hundreds or thousands of miles from where that water molecule started out in its puddle.  Depending on the temperature of the air around the drops, they will either fall as liquid rain or in cooler temperatures as snow, hail, or sleet.  Once it is back down to the earth's surface, the cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation will start all over again, as will water's change from liquid to gas to solid. 

 

It is so interesting to think that water covers 70% of the earth and humans are also made up of about 70% water.  Even though there is so much water on the surface of the earth, underground, and in the air, only 1% of the earth's water is potable (safe to drink).  The rest is either too dirty or too salty for us to drink.  That is an amazing figure, and water flows through a constant amazing cycle.   Which brings us back to the dinosaurs.  Think of the possibilities. The glass of water you just drank might have also been drunk by a thirsty stegosaurus or even Albert Einstein or it might have sat on top of Mt. Everest as snow or was part of the iceberg that rammed the Titanic.  Pretty mind boggling, huh?