Spoonbills and Sushi Socks

I spotted this manatee on my early-morning walk yesterday. I love how someone has managed to give it lipstick and mascara.

BUT...I actually also spotted real manatees on my walk, along with a bunch of other interesting wildlife. Spoonbills! I've only seen roseate spoonbills in the wild a handful of times, and yet there they were, in a ditch behind some trailers, with an egret and some ibis.

And of course I decided not to bring my big camera on this trip, so all I had was my phone to record these momentous events. But it's better than nothing.

Here's a special FloriVideo™ Wildlife Edition to show you the morning's critters:
-- We start with a flock of Nanday Parakeets, flying away. I mainly wanted to record how noisy they are.
-- Then we see three Nanday Parakeets on a bird feeder, with a stork hanging out beneath them. The stork ambles away as I approach, but the parakeets stay put and squawk loudly.
-- There's an osprey, sitting in the top of a tree and piping loudly.
-- That's followed by the spoonbills and the other birds as seen in the photo above, with a noisy fly-by from the parakeets.
-- And then, manatees! They's just dark blobs in the water, but you can see their noses emerge as they breathe. We could hear them exhaling and inhaling as we stood on the shore.
-- There's another view of the spoonbills, egret and ibis from the other side of the ditch.
-- And finally, a cormorant surfaces with a big flopping fish in its beak. We didn't think it would be able to swallow it, but it did, to the disappointment of a waiting osprey. (You'll hear a woman's voice, along with me and Dave -- just another curious onlooker!)

Dave and I had lunch yesterday with my friends Jay and Charlie, who I used to work with at the Sarasota newspaper back in the day, and their partners. It was great to see them again. We ate on the patio of a restaurant at University Town Center, a glam new shopping area east of town -- it seemed like a good idea at first, but by the end of the meal I was wilting like a hothouse flower. The sun was brutal! That area was all farmland when I lived here back in the '90s. Progress, I suppose.

And yesterday evening we had our lasagna Christmas dinner. We gave Dave's dad his jar of pennies, as well as some other gifts. I got this great set of socks from Dave's sister Dawn:

Don't you love those?! I hate to even try to wear them, they're rolled so precisely. I may just enjoy them in the box for a while!