Bob Seger's House on Upper Straits Lake

Sandy and I went to see my first boy crush from the 9th grade. He and Kimber, his girlfriend, took us out on Upper Straits Lake. Well, the sun was shining and all was well as we cruised around the lake and low and behold Steve points out Bob Segers home. I say, huh? Was this where he wrote Fire Lake?

All Summer Long

OK already! So it wasn't all summer long, but just a mere 10 days. But it was great!

And little did I realize the meaning of that the picture of my left foot in the soft, sweet smelling, yankee,Michigan grass would have so much meaning! Because if you look at the picture of the two feet, mine and my oldest, most sincerest, dearest friend since we were 11 years old, Sandy, and we'd gotten matching tattoos. Mine is on my left foot and hers is on her right foot and hers is all red and such where as mine healed just beautifully.

That reminds me. I've got to call her and see how her ankle is.

Anyways, the pictures will be coming. I flew in yesterday and then had jury duty today and I'm like -- swamped. But I'm starting on the stories and I've got the stories to tell.

Dang. Looking at that picture again of that sweet grass. How I wish I'd come across a yankee vine ripened tomato!

And that was my first tatoo. Not as bad as I thought it would be. But then even if it was I'd never tell!

I Can Only Imagine, Naomi Judd

This one is powerful!!!

I Am Yours, NSA

Click to watch this video. Awesome! Thank God he catches me. I fall all the time.

Tampa Bay Rays, my adopted team

Did I say the trip to Seahorse Key was the highlight of my trip? Well, I'd be hard pressed to make a choice of seeing the Tampa Bay Rays playing some good baseball as we headed towards home. This game was great! It was their 7th win in their streak.
















I had to adopt this team. Harold had them on while they were playing the Chicago Cubs and I was shocked to see that the Cubs fans in the Rays home field were much louder. How horrible! That was that. I always want to take in the under dog. But I was surprised when I got to the game. Yes, there were new fans there, and why wouldn't there be? They're #1 in the nation! But a lot of old fans came out of the woodwork also. How did I know? Lots of new Rays shirts were being worn, but lots of old shirts were there also. COOL!!!

Seahorse Key

So what to do the whole day of the 5th of July? The 4th's festivities were over and done with. Well, it was $350 for a half day of charter fishing or $700 for the whole day. Ay! And then there was the tour to Seahorse Key where there is a lighthouse that was built in the mid 1800's. The following year a hurricane whipped through there. Then the Civil War started and darned if the Union soldjiers didn't use it as a prison. Now the U.S Fish and Wildlife has it and it's a nature reserve and is only opened to the public twice a year. The 4th of July and during Cedar Key's clam festival in October. The boat ride was $21/person. OK. That's doable. And I was intrigued. It was the highlight of our weekend.








But that only took half a day. What were we to do with the other half? Did I mention that I'd had too much to drink the day before and slept through the fireworks??? Well, there was no way I was going to drink again (like so many others were doing). Ugh. So we went shopping. But when you're in a town that is old Florida and as cute as that may be, everything is expensive. So a lot of looking was done and then a meal at a horribly overpriced restaurant. Harold doesn't eat seafood so he had the only thing on the menu that wasn't seafood. A hamburger for $12. And it was tasteless. Horrible. Harold was whining for Red Robin. Me? I had an overpriced variety of seafood that was mediocre at best. Believe me, I know. There are better restaurants around Fort Myers. Pinchers Crab Shack is one. Shoot! Red Lobster is better. And the meal cost $30. Ha ha ha ... next time I'll pack a cooler and grill. Ha ha ha ... and byob! The price wouldn't have bothered me if the food was good. But ...

Harold's BIrthday Cake

I interupt talking about last weekend to put up Harold's birthday cake. This cake is so incredibly good. Let me tell you where I got the recipe from. A few weeks ago I went looking for a peanut butter brownie recipe online and came upon her blog and her recipe. That was it. I was hooked and I signed up to get regular emails from the Smitten Kitchen blogger, Deb. And she does an unbelieveable job of bringing us, her readers, her escapades in her small New York City kitchen that doesn't even have a dishwasher.

Fortunately for me I signed up just in time to experience her making a wedding cake for her friend. She wanted to give her a great tasting cake, not just some old humdrum dried out been sitting there for days wedding cake. I'd been following her creation for a couple of weeks and wanted very badly to try it out.

What better excuse to make this cake than for Harold's birthday? When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted he told me a yellow cake. When questioning a chocolate cake, after all, I'm female and adore chocolate, he told me that if I wanted to make a chocolate cake for me to go ahead. But if I was making one for him, well, he wanted a yellow cake.

I was able to take Deb's vanilla butter cake recipe along with her Swiss buttercream icing recipe and came up with the above pictured creation which is a three layer vanilla cake with Swiss buttercream icing. Now I'd read in Deb's many comments from more than one person that the icing recipe would/could collapse after beating it for 15 minutes and that you just had to keep beating and it would pull together. Mine didn't collapse when it started pulling together although I beat that bugger with my kitchen aid hand mixer for at least 20 minutes. But ooo la la, the taste of it all. It was totally worth the effort. I just added some fresh strawberries for appearance.

I'm not going to try to copy and paste and credit and whatever all Deb did with her cake that turned out beautifully. But I did give you the link in an above paragraph. Just click on the words wedding cake. I'm betting you're going to enjoy her blog as much as I did if you like going in your kitchen. Her story telling and her husband's photography are superb!

Cedar Key, FL on the 4th of July

Harold and I needed a laid back place to get away. We both have high stress jobs and we didn't want a hectic pace while off. Enough of that at work. A coworker suggested Cedar Key stating if we didn't want to do anything but relax that would be the place.

Well, darned if we didn't happen up there on a wild weekend (for Cedar Key). Pixie, the gal that ran the motel told us right from the start, If you don't drink, fish, or like seafood, then don't come to Cedar Key. Boy was she right. Even landing there on the 4th of July festival weekend didn't make things crazy. And Harold and I wondered what we'd have done if it wasn't the 4th. Ha ha ha ... As it was, it was perfect. Walk around the festival, eat, go buy some absolut vodka along with orange and cranberry juice, get drunk (me, not Harold), and crash for the fireworks, waking up at mindnight with a headache.

And what good is the 4th of July without a watermelon???














Cedar Key is toted to be the largest farm raised clams in Florida, the country, the world? I don't know which it is or even if it's true, but they were good.

A Good Old Fashioned Mullet Toss

Yep. It all started at 4:30pm. Those gals were out there tossing and dropping those mullet. Hint: roll it in the sand first so it's not as slippery.

Rocking and Rolling

This two person band played some awesome music. Great songs and it was just the two of them. And Lord when he pulled out his harmonica. I just LOVE it when a harmonica comes into a song. The song at the time was by War, Low Rider. Oh, and their name is Flashpoint.

Rock-n-roll!

The old beast, my pc, died -- again. I was in the middle of working 75 hours in a 7 day stretch. I was tired. I looked at it, and after messing with it, getting the rescue disc and trying to get windows to open up, I said, ugh, and started looking at the Best Buy (I would NEVER shop there!) and Circuit City's cinculars to get an idea of what is out there.

All I can say is WOW! There are some cool machines out there right now. I called my daughter and guided her online to further my search and I must say, Thank you Katie! I know I drove her nuts. Ha ha ha ... but I digress.

I have a feud with two retailers that hinder my electronic shopping experience. I refuse to buy anything from Best Buy and HP. Both have burned me badly. I informed both of those companies that they would lose much more than what they were screwing me for and believe me, just from me, myself, and I, they have. And hopefully my mouth yipping away to all who would listen has taken a few more dollars away the tricksters.

Consumers UNITE!

But again I digress. What can I say? I am sipping on my first cup of coffee.

The machine I finally settled on was a Gateway. Let me tell you it leaves most pcs in the dust! The processor? An AMD Phenom 9550 Quad-core and boost it with 6 gigs of DDR2 dual channel RAM And we're rocking. Oops. No we're not. What totally rocks is the 8-channel (7.1) high definition audio and now we're rocking. Unbelievable what this computer sounds like with my Bose speakers. I'm in heaven. Add a 640 gig DVD-RW optical drive, 15-1 memory card reader with Smart Copy (this is a cool feature), HD 3450 Video along with some other software and it doesn't get any better than this.

Well, yes it does. I am waiting for the rest of the electronic world to catch up with me and my 64 bit computer. Lots of software products still working on getting things up to par with 64 bit. But then again, I have enough working so that it's not a real difficult hardship.

Ahhhhh ...

And don't worry. I'm going to try to retrieve some items off my old computer and recycle it to my son. No garbage dump for ol' Betsy. I'm all good.