Flower Plaques

When I was five years old, I made these plaques, based on some I saw in my arts and crafts classes at summer camp. As I recall, I came home and hammered together my own versions using stuff I found in the garage and yard.

You gotta love how haphazard they are. The petals of the flowers are made from bits of pine cone, and the stems from sticks. I love the bent nails, the cracks and breaks, the sloppy paint job.

My mom was so impressed with them she took a picture of me:

(The red one in the photo is different from the one we have now. I must have made an extra one. Maybe I gave it away to my regular after-school babysitter, who was a surrogate grandmother to me.)

We hung them in my room, and when I got a few years older they were stored in a closet, and for the past few decades they've been hanging in a guest room. But the blooms are about to fade. My mom isn't keeping them when she moves, and neither am I. I just don't have the will or the space to schlep them back to England. The flowers are finally going back to nature!

Dog Stories

Chihuahua update: I seem to have been accepted into the pack. Pinky and Manny have stopped barking and snarling and tugging at my pants legs whenever I enter the room, or stand from a seated position. They've even taken to curling up on my lap and falling asleep.

And I admit it, they're kind of cute. I still wouldn't want a chihuahua -- they're way too nervous -- but I can appreciate what my dad and stepmother see in them.

They do, however, have terrible breath.

I also spent some time in Maybelline's fenced yard yesterday, playing with her Jolly Egg and horsing around with her. She's put on some weight since I saw her last, and she still runs at me full-tilt and body slams me like a linebacker. She's unaware of her size and impervious to pain. If I kneel down she climbs into my lap, which is interesting because she's filthy and not much smaller than I am.

Until now, after we've played with the egg toy, my dad has insisted that we put it away so she won't bury it in her yard. But I argued that if she buries it, she'll dig it up again. It will give her something to do. So he agreed to let her keep her egg, giving Maybelline access to a toy at all times. I'm hoping this will help her work out some energy and get a little more exercise.

Hopefully when I get back to England, Olga won't know that I've been cheating on her.

(Photo: A dying elephant ear leaf in my dad's back yard.)

Aliens, Cookies and Bagels

Yes! A day without rain! We actually saw the sunshine of the Sunshine State yesterday, enough so that I wished I'd had my hat with me when I walked outside. (And of course I didn't because I haven't needed it at all for the past week, and it's buried at the bottom of the suitcase.)

There are still lakes of rainwater all over the place, but they're subsiding. Who knows what today will bring, though!

I neglected to mention that on the way home from lunch with Cherie and Lynn on Monday, I stopped off for a brief visit with my college pal, known in blogland as E. It was a very short visit but it was great to see her. I happened to be driving past her house and thought, "Why not pop in?" I'm sure she was surprised to find me, of all internationally-dwelling people, on her doorstep! I stayed just long enough to damage her living room blinds, give her unhelpful advice about Facebook and fail to repair her camera.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful. We stayed close to home. I read in the morning and went with my stepbrother in the afternoon to a couple of local thrift stores. I found this $1.99 t-shirt at the Salvation Army:

It's navy blue, and that's the back. Berger Cookies do still exist, by the way. I've never heard of them before but I love the local charm of the shirt.

And just in case you're curious...

...this was my 99-cent shirt from the day before. It's black with yellow lettering. Its origin is a bit of a mystery -- apparently there are Sunshine Bagels shops near White Plains, NY and near Fort Lauderdale. I'm guessing it's from the latter, based solely on proximity, but who knows? I just like the name and the minimalist charm.

I mean, if Urban Outfitters came out with these t-shirts, people would pay $30 each for them. You know?

I love a good thrift store.

Finally, we all went to dinner last night, after fishing my 92-year-old step-grandmother out of her waterlogged mobile home park. (A feat that required circuitous driving to avoid oceanic puddles, where bacteria-laden children frolicked.) My stepbrother and I capped off the evening having a beer with my stepsister and her husband at their favorite haunt, a glassy TV-lined sports bar of indistinct character.

(Top photo: Florida is full of absurdity!)

Water, Water Everywhere

Once again, we had a crazy amount of rain yesterday -- six inches in the area where my dad lives. This (above) was the scene not too far from his house. A lake in someone's front yard! We've had so much rainfall that the water has nowhere to go. The ground is saturated.

I had lunch scheduled with some friends in South Tampa, including one who was driving all the way from Orlando. I contacted them in the morning as the rain poured outside, and said, "Are we sure we want to do this?" But we went ahead, even though parts of South Tampa are notorious for flooding, especially when high tides in the bay back up the storm drains.

I got some advice on which streets to take and got down there without too much trouble. There were a few occasions when I had to drive my trusty rental car very slowly through several inches of water. I did not try to pass the street above. See that disabled white car? Someone made a bad decision.

In fact, I got to my friend's neighborhood about a half hour early, so I popped into a Salvation Army thrift store and found a great t-shirt for 99 cents! Woo hoo!

My friends Cherie, Lynn and I -- and Cherie's two young daughters -- wound up having a fun lunch. I've known Cherie and Lynn for decades, from back in my earliest days of newspapering. They realized that they were wearing the same shade of nail polish on their toes, called "I'm Not Really a Waitress." Cherie readily provided the bottle so I could join the club for a group photo. (That's Cherie's daughter at the top, who was doing some kind of patriotic thing of her own.)

I only painted my big toe. And yes, I removed it before I went home. I only brought sandals on this trip and I wasn't ready to walk around for another nine days with one big red toe hanging out there.

Anyway, by the time I got back in the car for the journey home, the rain had stopped and driving wasn't quite so perilous. Today I think we may actually be rain-free!

Devouring the Air Potato

Florida has long been cursed by the presence of the air potato vine, which was imported to the United States more than 100 years ago and has since overrun a lot of native vegetation.

I'm used to seeing these vines, particularly around my dad's house, where they grow in profusion. As kids we used to pick up the inedible "potatoes" -- the round tubers that grow on the vine and drop to form new plants -- and I even grew one in a pot in my bedroom when I was a teenager. But on this visit I've been seeing something new -- the vines' leaves have been devoured, turned into a lacy remnant of their former selves.

I was mystified by this, because I was unaware that anything ate the air potato. I've never seen leaves looking like this before. I looked on the vine above but could not find the culprit.

Finally, yesterday, my brother and I were taking a walk when I saw another gnawed plant -- one not so far along in its destruction. I turned over a leaf and found this:

At first I thought it was a scarlet lily beetle, which you may remember was snacking on our fritillaria back in London. But as it turns out, this is a different species from the same genus -- notice it has a black head, while the lily beetle's is red. And this one only eats air potato. (Supposedly.)

For the past few years, the state has been experimenting with releasing these beetles in the hopes that they'll keep the vines from taking over. They certainly seem to be effective from what I can tell, at least in terms of thinning the foliage. Whether they'll ultimately kill the vines, I don't know.

Mystery solved!

I'm staying at my dad's house now -- actually in his guest house, which I wrote about a few years ago. I've never stayed in it before, but it's very comfortable. It's pouring rain (again!) outside, so I'm enjoying the sound of distant thunder and the heavy subtropical downpour.

I'm dying for a cup of coffee, but I tried the coffee maker and the coffee comes out tasting very lemony and chemically and strange. I have a feeling the machine was cleaned and descaled and not rinsed well. I'm going to run through a few more cups of water and see if I can rinse it out because I MUST HAVE MY MORNING COFFEE.

Shipping the Ancestors Elsewhere

I have a doozy of a cold, probably thanks to that airplane. I was sneezing all day yesterday and it looks like today will be more of the same. Great.

I've been sharing my germs with my brother and his family, who are visiting from Jacksonville this weekend. We've been celebrating my older niece's 9th birthday, which of course involved two celebrations -- one with the household of each grandparent. More cake!

My niece has once again been obsessed with my photo-editing software. She sits at my computer for ages, manipulating my photos into psychedelic creations. I think it's great that she enjoys it and can concentrate for such long periods. (She's also a big book reader.) I just let her go to town with it.

And it has been raining like crazy. I mean, it's Florida in the summer, so there's going to be rain. But this has been heavy, consistent rain -- yesterday it poured from late morning until well into the evening. We went for a walk early yesterday and my niece and I found wriggling tadpoles in a tiny remnant of water soaking into the bottom of a oadside ditch. We scooped them up and carried them to a deeper part of the ditch with an outflow to the lake -- thinking we were saving them.

Then, of course, it rained all afternoon. I told my niece, "Well, I guess we didn't need to move those tadpoles after all!"

I should have known that nature would figure something out. Nature does not need our help -- at least not in this case.



In the continuing effort to help my mom clear things out, my brother and I went to the UPS store with some large, framed portraits of two Civil War-era ancestors and a battered, non-functioning mantel clock from the same time period. Mom doesn't really want them in her new place, and I can't very well take them to England. My uncle said he wanted them, so we sent them to him in Virginia. They'll eventually be passed along to my cousins, presumably.

Of course, just as we pulled up at the UPS store, it began to rain harder. We didn't want our precious heirlooms to get wet, so we sat in the car for at least 15 minutes waiting for it to die down. We listened to Duran Duran on Q105 like it was 1983 all over again. (Several radio stations in Tampa seem trapped in a time warp -- I haven't heard Air Supply in years, but here I've heard three of their songs already!) Finally, we decided to make a dash for it, with no ill effects.

In a similar vein, I've arranged to take some old washstand pottery to my aunt up in Ocala. You know those basin-and-pitcher sets that used to grace bedrooms before the days of indoor plumbing? Well, we've got one of those, along with some smaller accompanying pieces (like a soap dish). Again, none of us have room for them. It's nice to know we've been able to keep these items in the family.

(Photos: Hawks near my mom's house.)

Museum of Mid-Century Graphics

My mom's house is a vast repository of mid-century graphic design. Everywhere I turn I'm faced with old, whimsical packages like this 1970 envelope from Eckerd Drugs.

And remember TG&Y? They were a chain of dime stores -- I used to love going there as a kid. We still have this paper bag, which contains a package of paper doilies. That's just the kind of useless stuff that TG&Y used to sell.

Before TG&Y we had Neisner's and Grant's -- both long gone.

This is an old shoebox that used to contain family photos and now contains office supplies. I guess shoes for $20 back then weren't exactly cheap. And these were the "Tigress" style of Paradise Kittens. I would love to know what they looked like. Knowing my mom, they weren't all that exotic.

Isn't it funny that the box has long outlasted the shoes?

My brother and I always tease my mom about her spice cabinet. She still has spices that she bought probably 50 years ago. There's a cardboard container of whole cloves stamped "20¢" in that purple ink that grocers used to use. Can you imagine? Twenty cents for a box of cloves?

I don't know how old this curry powder is, but it's priced at 49¢.

It's like a museum around here!