At Last!

Okay, so I've been bending your ears about getting ready for the land of sunshine for the last month or so. We left the cold, gray skies of Ohio last Thursday at 8:00 in the morning and then drove for nineteen hours straight. Here we are a few days later and the sky looks the same as Ohio --- gray, leaden and rainy. And I am gray, leaden and rainy! I loll about on my bed like Cleopatra on her barge. Not young and lovely, but stricken with bronchitis and nasty of temperament. We have sustained ourselves on the bags of food that we brought from home, because I was not feeling like fighting the crowds at a grocery. Last night, we ventured out to the local Taco Bell and grabbed a quick couple of tacos, while trying very hard not to cough and give away the fact the a veritable Typhoid Mary was in their midst. The couple in the next booth placed a gray gunny sack on the table and kept feeling it in a very peculiar manner. The hubby said, "I think there is something alive in that bag". I eyeball the bag and look at the size of lumps therein --- too small for a kid, not noisy enough for a small animal ---- Hmmmm! Could it be a snake? A very big snake? In Taco Bell? And I am worried about taking my bronchitis out in public? You bet your life, it was a boa constrictor --- very big and very beautiful --- but not something you would find in your everyday Taco Bell in Toledo, Ohio! The folks in Florida do things differently from nice, middle class mid-westerners. I'm not talking about their tattoos or multiple piercings, but snakes on the dinner table? The young couple were very obliging and opened the bag to show us their lovely snake. I was impressed! I was also out of there!
This was the second snake we had seen since setting foot on Florida soil. Numero uno was a thin black snake about twenty inches long in our flower beds. This whole thing does not sound like the paradise I have been promising myself while I worked so hard to pack up and get here. Perhaps tomorrow, the sun will come out and I will feel differently about the gray and the snakes. On the positive side, the plants we stuck in the ground last summer have grown four or five times their original size and the living is easy.
We already have two or three sets of guests coming down for Spring Break, but Christmas is still up in the air. The picture at the top is my forty-six year old daughter at Ft. Myers Beach last spring. So, if you are reading this and are related to me --- come on down! The weather is bound to clear up any minute.