So much I’ve been able to do, with so little.

Just spent the last 5 days in a  piece of Paradise just off of Bay Shore Blvd in Tampa, Florida.   Without full time employment, there is time to do things for the people in my life, my family.   Roland, Omar, Lucy and I had a grand time while “mom and dad” were away for a few days.   

There is beauty in everything, you just have to look for it…that sentiment I learned from the movie, Local Color, one of the 12 or so movies I was able to watch these past few days.   Made me think of what might be beautiful in losing contact with a beloved child, the dog I came to think of as mine, and so many other painful losses…that I could choose to find something beautiful in the losses, that’s what the movie gave to me.  While sadness exists, the opportunity to find joy also exists. 

Time is fleeting and what we have today, job, income, health, status, security, stability, sanity…you wake up one day and find something entirely different.  And, even in the darkness, there is still a glimmer of hope, more than a glimmer even.

To think that I would be spending time in a beautiful home, with so many precious things, and especially with precious animal family members, a rescued kitten named Roland, a marvelous rescued cat named Omar and a beloved family Boston Terrior named Lucy…when I am facing important, yet not IMPORTANT, challenges…

Lucy is walked a couple of times a day on a thoroughfare where people, seemingly without any cares at all, with high priced fancy vehicles they park on the side roads, jog and walk along Tampa Bay…we pass homes and estates with windows drawn, or open, the splendor of the lives of the occupants so obvious…and so hidden.

Be careful what you wish for…they say that when the struggles are gathered together in a pile and we are allowed to choose…we pick our own.  

Beautiful things demand care, security, attention or they are subject to the loss of the beauty as time takes it’s toll.  Cities which are abandoned are eventually reclaimed by nature…Katrina came and went.  In some areas, as shown in the movie “Trouble the waters”, vegetation climbs the walls, weeds grow up through the decaying boards which were once the foundation of a home inhabited by people with dreams and hopes, or maybe no dreams and no hope.  

There is beauty in every situation, you just have to seek it out, notice it, acknowledge it.

Happy 56th Birthday to me.

Just checked the Power Ball numbers for last night.   Not one number.

YIPPEE!!!

I didn’t buy a ticket!!!

I received a call from someone answering my ad for a long time rental in The Villages.  This person shared with me that she wishes to keep her home on the north west side of the vastness that is The Villages, but that she wants to rent the property for the next 5 years.  She asked me if I’d be alive that long.

It’s been 2 or 3 days since I’ve seen the 4 Moorhen chicks…and I think there is just one of the parents and 2 of the older siblings out there now…

A couple of days ago the maintenance people were out…there is a ring of dying vegetation around the big pond…which is right at the entrance to where the Moorhen family would go every evening, I think their home/nest is inside the big lake and the surrounding vegetation…

There is always the possibility that the gators have been hungry…

I’m choosing to believe the bulk of the family is on a grand adventure to the far shores of the big lake…and that they’ll return one of these days and once again frolic (these birds don’t do a lot of playing…it’s a lot of foraging for food, preening their feathers and foraging for more food) in the retention ponds out back.

10/1  There are only 5 birds left now…2 babies, nearly the size of the older siblings, one older sibling and the 2 parents.   Not sure what happened to the others…