Category Archives: Just stuff…

Hi Everyone!

I normally only post once a day, in the morning, Monday through Friday, but I felt compelled to add a post this evening to thank whoever it was who selected today’s post for the “Freshly Pressed” page today.  I am stunned, and grateful. 

To all of the people who had read my blog before today, as always, I appreciate your reading it.

To the new people who read my post today, to the people who made comments, and the people who posted ratings, thank you.  I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments, many of which are as funny or funnier than my post, and it is always nice when someone takes the time to give a rating to post as feedback. 

To the new subscribers, welcome!  I hope you will enjoy what you read in the future.

Finally, I am new to blogging.  I will do my best to follow blogging etiquette, but if there is something I do wrong, it is not intentional. 

Thank you to everyone again. 

Have a great evening!

Nancy

•  KAYAKING

After we reached the end of U.S. 1 on Monday, the hotel called to let us know our room was ready, so we went ahead and checked in, and got ready for the main activity we had planned for Monday, a sunset/evening 2 1/2 hour kayak tour with Blue Planet Kayak.  We have been kayaking before, but we were looking forward to having a chance to do it in the evening around the mangrove islands.  I had made a mistake on the reservations, accidentally signing us up for a tour a week later than I had intended, and the owner, Chad, kindly re-arranged things so we could still go on Monday. One nice feature of the tour was that the tour company would come pick you up from your hotel if you chose (and I think, although he was too kind to say so, that Chad figured it would be a good idea to come pick us up to keep me from getting any more lost than I already was!) so at 6:05, we were at the front of the registration building at Parrot Key Resort waiting in very comfortable rocking chairs.  

Promptly at 6:10, the truck from Blue Planet pulled up, and we went on to the meeting spot with the other kayakers (there is a maximum limit of 10 people per tour), and then they followed us over to Stock Island, which is where the tour begins.  Stock Island is the key immediately north of Key West; the two are separated by just a small channel.  Why Stock Island is an island instead of a Key is beyond me.

Once at the marina, Chad gave us a short introduction to kayaking, one of the best I have ever seen, and then helped each of us into our kayaks.  I have to admit that, for me, it is the getting in and out that is the most difficult part of the whole thing.  I am not overly gifted with either grace or coordination, and always have pictures of myself overturning the kayak and ending up standing in the bottom of the harbor.  However, I made it safely in the kayak, as did Mark, and once everyone was seated, we took off.  (We were in a tandem kayak, with me in the front and Mark in the back. )

Our destination was a group of mangrove islands in the middle of the bay, but on the way there we saw this black cormorant taking off.  The cormorant is streamlined for swimming and diving, but the same adaptations that make it an excellent swimmer and diver make it somewhat ungainly in flight.  We watched this cormorant for a while, and it never did get much over a foot above the water!

Here our group is in the bay right outside of the mangrove islands.  The man in blue, with his back facing me was our guide, Chad.  All of the green that you see on the left is made up of mangroves.

Here, we are getting ready to go through a channel in the mangroves.  Technically speaking, mangrove  islands are not islands at all, simply groups of mangroves that are thickly clustered together.  The Florida Keys is the farthest north point at which they grow.  The mangroves are well adapted for salt water living; their roots essentially drink the salt water.  The roots lifted above, and then curving into, the water are one of the ways in which you can tell a mangrove.  These are red mangroves, named for the color of their wood.  They can reach 8 to 10 feet in the Keys, but farther south they can reach up to 70 feet tall!  The black and white mangroves, named for the color of their bark, can grow to 100 feet tall in the same areas.  The channels in the mangroves are caused by currents, or places where the tree canopy closes over the top so much that the light cannot get down to the surface to allow new mangroves to grow. 

We went through several mangrove channels.  They are exceptionally narrow and twisty and have a spooky kind of beauty all their own.  This was especially true at night.  I was very grateful that our guide neglected to disclose the fact that there are two types of snakes that can live in mangroves until after we had finished traveling through the mangrove channels!  Making it through the mangrove channel in a tandem kayak does require some team work on the part of the two kayakers in the boat, but Mark and I managed it.

Before the night had finished, our guide, and some of our fellow kayakers, had managed to find a horseshoe crab, a spiny sea urchin (the guide lifted him up onto his kayak with a net and it was fun to see the urchin squiggle off back into the water), a sea cucumber and a sea hare, two of God’s uglier creatures, I think, a sea star (starfish to us laypeople) and a Florida lobster.  Because of the “supermoon”, it wasn’t possible to see any of the bioluminescent creatures in the tidal flats, but what we did see was very interesting.  Florida lobsters, for example, do not have front claws like Maine lobsters do, although they do have very spiny legs.   Our guide, as you can tell from this entry, knew a lot about the ecology of the mangroves and tidal flats, and did a wonderful job in communicating his knowledge.

Finally, Mark took this picture of the sunset as we were traveling around the mangrove islands.  As beautiful as this picture is, he and I both agree that it doesn’t do justice to the real thing! 

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

Hi everyone!  It looks like we might be in for a wild weather day today; I could hear the wind rushing through the trees and playing with the garage door this morning, and it sounded pretty fierce.  Batten down the hatches and stay safe!

I have a better picture of Darwin now that I am putting into the “About Me and the Purpose of This Site” page.  Here it is:

The center of the door knob he is standing under is 34 1/2 ” from the floor, and he is about 4″ shorter than it, so from the floor to the top of his head is about 30 1/2″.  In our family, that is a big dog!  

• Lie v. Lay

Many, many thanks to my friend Toni from Lousiana, who provided a great explanation of the difference between lie v. lay.  Here is her post:

Lie vs. lay
Lie means that the actor (subject) is doing something to himself or herself. It’s what grammarians call a complete verb. When accompanied by subjects, complete verbs tell the whole story.
• Lay, on the other hand, means that the subject is acting on something or someone else; therefore, it requires a complement to make sense. Thus lay always takes a direct object. Lie never does.

Lay has a direct object……”to set something down”
Lie has no direct object…..”to place oneself down or to stay in a horizontal position”

Example:
Lay down the beach blanket so that we can all lie on it.

So, to further cement the difference in all of our minds, I offer the following:

I laid the dog beds down on the floor.  Here are pictures of my three dogs lying down, one on the floor and two on dog beds:

Mandy lying on the floor:

Darwin lying (well really for him I would say curled up) in the dog bed that it is too small for him but is his favorite:

Tyra lying on one of the several dog beds that she chooses to use:

So, to end this grammatical lesson and to refer back to the sentence that gave rise to the question, Mandy, in her alter-ego of Bad Dog, stole the handkerchief from the bedroom, laid it on the floor and then proceeded to lie down on it in order to pretend that she hadn’t done anything.  (See the post of Friday, March 4).

• The Marshmallow House

Kayla came home on Monday with a house she had made from toothpicks and marshmallows.  I thought it was really cute, but a defect in the construction materials had her pretty disgusted with it.  The following is a photographic portrait of why she didn’t like her house:  

I think it’s really fun to watch it collapse over and over, but she wasn’t as amused.  I still told her she had done a good job, but she is not sure.  Mark didn’t think watching the house collapse was nearly as funny as I did.

• Cam Newton

We decided to get Kayla established with a doctor here in our home town (really, after four years, it probably was time!), and so she had her first appointment yesterday with him – we were discussing her seasonal allergies and what she could take.  He was trying to make conversation with her, so he asked her what she watched on TV.  She told him that she liked to watch I, Carly and football.  He kind of smiled and said that if she liked football, then she is in high cotton down here.  I asked her to tell him who her favorite quarterback was, thinking pro football and expecting that she would say “Peyton Manning” because she always asks in a pro game if Peyton Manning is the quarterback.  She answered, without hesitation, “Cam Newton.”  I started to laugh, and said, “No, sweetheart, I mean your favorite pro quarterback.”  Again, without missing a blink, she answered, “Cam Newton.”  It’s not the first time I have been outsmarted by my own daughter! 

Have a good day everyone!

Nancy