Faith, Family, Food and Dogs

It is now April 8th and I am still going and doing before summer. This time I am at the Jacksonville Zoo alone. The zoo has this program going called "Nature Connects" and throughout the zoo there are supposed to be 13 Lego sculptures of different things. After spending 3 hours at the zoo and walking a lot, I confess I could only find 12 of the sculptures. They are all pretty impressive and I will let you know how many Lego bricks it took to make each one. When you first enter the zoo there is a Polar bear and her 3 cubs. This one used 133,263 Lego bricks to create. Next up is the large then life Chameleon. He came in at a mere 49,034 Legos. Then I found the Ruby Throated Hummingbird sipping nectar. He is made up of 61,107 Legos. Across from the Hummingbird is this Monarch Butterfly. 60,549 Lego bricks. Way back in the zoo, near the children's water play area I found 4 more sculptures. First up a Wildebeest and next to it, A Zebra. The Wildebeest and the Z...

It is now April and I am continuing my "summer's coming, summer's coming" outings. On this lovely morning it was only 70 degrees as I left home to venture out. Back many moons, weeks and years ago I used to love to come camping here. As I was driving through the park to get to the fort I realized that I miss camping a lot more than I thought. So much so that I may have to buy a tent and some gear and start camping again this fall. I will however have a cot and will not, I repeat, will not sleep on the hard ground like I used to in my much younger days. But I digress, all the roads near the river campground and the fort are canopied by the large Live Oak trees. Once you get through the gift shop and pay your extra fee, you follow a path out to the entrance to the fort. Construction on the fort began in 1847 and it was never finished. A civilian workforce under the direction of the US Army Corps or Engineers started it but when Florida seceded from the Union, Conf...

A few years ago, maybe more like a lifetime or two ago, when I lived in the mountains of western North Carolina we would spend our summers getting ready for the coming winter. We would work getting firewood cut, split and stacked, We made sure the family room and master bedroom had large stacks of firewood that would dry out as the summer progressed. We took down trees damaged by the winter storms and cut them into lengths to season for the next year. By Labor Day we were harvesting and canning the bounty from our garden, all the while knowing that by mid-September we would have a killing frost and by October the first snow fall would arrive. Now that I live in Florida and in an apartment there is no gardening, no preparing for the long and often snowy winter to come. Instead, I am trying to get as much outside stuff done as possible before the oppressive heat and humidity of the Florida summer sets in and I will loathe the thought of walking the girls. For the second and third tim...