Living on the Wild Side

You might think that living the retired life in Florida would be a tame thing, something that could not compare well with seeing lion attacking a wildebeest in Africa, or counting the bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge on the walls of Angkor Wat, the ancient temple in Cambodia. Yes, it is slightly more tame.

But there are moments when the wildlife comes back into focus. This morning was one.

I drove into our RV park after dropping off Jo at her silk painting class. A flick of movement, off to my right, caught my eye. And there was a four and a half foot long iguana hanging upside down on the trunk of a Spanish-moss-covered oak tree. He barely moved. His mane of bristling spikes caught the sun. His bulbous neck throbbed ever so slightly. I drove back to the RV and grabbed my camera before returning to the tree. But he has disappeared when I got back. I stood in the sand-spur-filled grass, looking around. And there he was down on the ground.

I knelt down beside him and he looked at me with his ball-bearing eyes. He allowed me to photograph him at will and only showed a little nervousness when I would stand up to move my position.

The Rat Came Back

This is a story about a rat that has been living in our Honda Accord for at least two years. Maybe I've got this wrong. He started living in our Honda Accord in 2006. Sometime between then and today he died.

I discovered this when I had the car serviced and told the mechanic there was an overflow of water from the air conditioner's evaporator box. It poured into the passenger compartment and onto Jo's feet.

This morning, the mechanic took the evaporator box off the car and pried it apart. Oops. There's the rat... or what was left of him. Mostly tufts of furry stuff and large quantities of leaves and other nest-building material. Presumably he used the cold fresh water from the evaporator for thirst quenching. Nice.

The mechanic called everyone over to view his handiwork. I was called from the waiting room to view the remains. Nasty smell!

$238.23 later, we have a fresh-smelling car that seems to pump much greater quantities of cold air into the interior space.

Jo and I remember seeing rat turds in the back seat of the car in 2006. We set a large trap with cheese but the smart little bugger stole the cheese without springing the trap. So we moved over to the tried and true peanut butter. We dumped a dollop on the spring of the trap. But this rat had gone to trap school and he avoided the peanut butter. We left it in the back seat until it had hardened on the trap. The rat continued to leave his calling card of turds as we hauled him around New England, Provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and then back to the U.S. via Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

Somewhere along the journey the rat gave up the ghost. We no longer saw the turds and assumed he had left the premises. Wrong. He'd simply crawled into his evaporator and evaporated from our sight.

Ah...Florida!

We stepped out of the motor home this morning and there it was: the humidity of Florida...and the wall of heat. Ah! We're home.

We arrived at our resort this morning after getting three free nights in two campgrounds on the way south from Georgia. We did experience some scary bits for two or three days when we had to search for gasoline in North Carolina, South Carolina and most of Georgia. Happily, we stumbled off the expressway in Macon, Georgia, and found a station that was able to let us fill up. Before that, we had to call friends in the tiny settlement of Big Canoe, Georgia, to come and pick us up as our car was on empty.

Florida seems to have gas. But the price is steep.

We spent our first day here getting set up for eye exams, getting the car an appointment for service. On our two free nights and three days at the world's largest RV facility in the center of Florida, we took advantage of end-of-the-month specials to have maintenance done on our motor home. We also attended a free seminar on generators and listened to the speaker tell tales of woe about how his colleagues at the RV Center have been laid off because of the plummeting sales.

We visited Manatee County's Art Center to sign up for classes. Jo will return to her silk painting. I have signed up to work on metal and hope to make some bracelets, earrings, pendants as a change of pace. It was heartening to check in the Art Center's store and find that all but one of my raku pieces (shown at the top of this blog) have sold. Jo still has a couple of silk scarves on display. So there is a market for this.