Bamboo planting

Yesterday we bought US$250 of bamboo. More details coming - and Shirley's posted a little about it. So far today:
8am - Enjoying coffee out on the lanai. Already 80F and a little humid. Gonna be a lot of sweat flowing today.
9am - Ben's home for the summer, so we had a family breakfast (out on the lanai, of course). That ceiling fan Ben and I installed out there a couple of months ago is working quite nicely!
10am - Ben's off to work and Shirley and I are off to Lowe's for compost and various other supplies for the day. Getting warmer outside. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.
...more to come...pics posted later...got some digging to do today - about 60 feet long by 2 feet wide by a foot or two deep and lots of compost to fork in and then plant the bamboo and make it happy.
(later)
12:30pm - Back from Lowe's. We've got 400 pounds of cow manure/compost in the back of the car, som epotting soil for some other plants, and a wheelbarrow. Stopped at one of the many road side fruit stands and bought a bunch of limes for the beer that will be consumed later ...and grabbed a couple of shrubs with awesome yellow flowers - looks sort of like hibicus, but it's not. So for now we're calling them "Seffner Wonders" (we live in Seffner, just east of Tampa). Now time to eat a banana, guzzle some water, and start the real work.
9:20pm - Quit working at about 6pm, took a quick shower and swim, and pretty much passed out on the bed for about an hour. My poor body may not be very happy with me in the morning :-)
Pics with more details posted on Flickr.

St Pete Beach

View northwest from Hurricane roof,
originally uploaded by Joe Litton.

One of our favorite places is Hurricane Restaurant in the town of St Pete Beach. The pic linked on the left is of the view from the rooftop bar. It'd been a while since we'd been to the beach, so on Saturday we popped down to St Pete Beach with our friends Karl and Chris Ann. Ahhh...after a few hours kicking back on the beach we went up to the rooftop bar. Man, you can't beat the view :-) ...More pics are posted on Flickr.

Life needs color

We
hate white walls. White walls are bland, blasse, lifeless, listless,
lazy, and lackluster. We prefer to think we are none of those.
Annnnnndddd...if you're gonna cut loose a little in a room, a bathroom
is just a wide open canvas, 'cause it's not like you're gonna be
looking at everything in there all the time (barring dysenteric
calamity, of course). So clicking on the thumbnail image at the left
will pop up a larger pic of our pool bath (meaning, of our 2 bathrooms,
it's the one with a door opening onto the lanai/pool area). My only contribution to the decor was participating in the choice of color and the selection of fish for the wall; the credit for the actual work all goes to Shirley. To us, this
is a color scheme that is happy and full of life...and very Florida :-)

How Republican are you?

My fellow Tampa liberal, Wayne, posted a link to this little questionnaire. I answered the questions honestly, and am quite happy with the score:

I am: 8% Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

Are You A Republican?

Now, some of my fellow liberals might think that one should hope for 0% Republican. But I like the philosophy of the Buddha (translated, paraphrased, and otherwise distorted over the years, and that's fine):

"All things in moderation ...including moderation."

So it's fine if I'm rated as a tiny bit Republican; there's some flex room. Some traditional Republican ideals are good - like fiscal conservatism. Of course, it's been a while since we've seen fiscal conservatism :-)

Kitty goes splash

The smaller of our two cats, Quidjibo (what was that name?), likes to drink from the swimming
pool. She also sometimes tries to get the floating thermometer out of
there, or remove a leaf or whatever. Well this evening she apparently
went a little too far. We were sitting in the family room - just inside
from the lanai and pool area. In came Quidjibo, soaked! Man, we
wish we'd seen what happened! She spent quite a while licking herself,
working on getting that nasty water out of the fur. Now we're anxious
to see if she takes a wide path around the pool in the future :-)