Pandemic Diaries Weeks #36 & #37

 23 November 2020

We visited Anastasia State Park, a really gorgeous park not even ten miles north of our little house.  The entire east coast of Anastasia Island seems to be beach, and Richard said that he remembered Anastasia Beach as being the prettiest beach in Florida.

Because it's a state park, there is an entrance fee.  There's also camping facilities, a pond or two for water activities, and a fishing pier.

As we waited in line to pay the entrance fee, a HUGE bird flew by, with a large fish in its talons!!!  I gasped and watched, camera in hand, so stunned I didn't even think to take a photo.  It was incredible, this majestic bird slowly flapping those giant wings, gripping a fish almost the length of the bird's body from beak to tail!

I turned to ask Richard if he saw it, and the man in the car next to us yelled, "That was an osprey!"  I had wondered if it was, and yes, that definitely was an osprey!  I saw a few more as I wandered around for the couple of hours we spent there, though I never did get a photo.

But it was such a special sight, I found a photo online and that's the first photo of this blog.  (Repeat, this is not my photo, it's from Fine Art America, by a professional photographer with a fancier camera than my little point-and-shoot.)

We drove in slowly, because there were signs to be careful of wildlife.  We saw several tortoises lumbering along the side of the road, and a couple of them seemed to have moss or lichen growing on their carapace.  Not sure if it was, but they definitely had greenery on the top of their shells!

The parking lots are near several raised boardwalks, roughly half to three-quarters of a mile long (about a kilometer or so), taking visitors over the wetlands full of birds, maybe some turtles, and hermit crabs.  I could see a few hermit crabs as I stopped to look into the wetlands.  

 

There were other park goers that day, and it was such a pretty day very few of us wore masks.  So I'd turn and look over the railing every time someone passed me walking the other way.

 

Along the way, I also saw the St. Augustine lighthouse in the distance, a very pretty zebra striped lighthouse.  It was about a mile away, but the island is pretty flat, so anything tall can easily be seen. This is a fairly old lighthouse built in 1871 to 1874 - this isn't the first lighthouse built here, but beach erosion caused damage to the first one so this second lighthouse was built further inland.

 

I saw a huge hole in the dunes, some animal's burrow.  The info sign said it's a gopher tortoise burrow, though other animals sometimes move in with the gopher tortoise.  Very cool!!! 

The boardwalk went up over the dunes - it's important to not walk on the dunes themselves, it displaces the sand and actually creates human-caused erosion of the dunes.  This not only damages the environment for the animals and plants that live on/in the dunes, but it diminishes the barrier that the dunes provide during storms, high tides, etc.  You can see how elevated this boardwalk is, allowing for waves that may wash over the dunes as well as sand accretion or erosion.

The beach was beautiful.  Truly gorgeous.  The sand in the dunes is white and powdery, and we were on the beach about a week or two after Tropical Storm Eta passed through and caused quite a bit of erosion.  So the actual beach isn't the white powdery sand right now, it's rougher beige sand, and sections are littered with gold and pinkish broken bits of seashells.  I'm not sure if this is the usual beach, or if this is the result of those large storm waves kicking up larger sediment onto the beach.

One section of the beach actually came to a bit of a cliff, where the waves may have undercut a small rise or something.  It was a bit odd, but again I suspect storm damage.

But it was a beautiful day, a trio of pelicans fly by as well as solo osprey, and I enjoyed an hour or so at the beach.

3 December 2020

The week just seems to have flown by, even though we didn't do much exciting.  The last exciting thing was the trip to Anastasia State Park.

But we had a nice romantic Thanksgiving Day for two.  Our menu was abbreviated so that it included only our favorite foods, and none of the items we are mediocre about.  Richard bought beautiful red and pink flowers, I lit candles, and we enjoyed our day and didn't worry about the fact that it was just the two of us, not a big family event.

That's my new policy for this crazy year of the pandemic - I'm embracing everything we DO have, rather than being sad or upset about what we don't have or can't do right now.  Sure, I'd love to be off travelling - but we're both over 60, so we're staying put in our cute little house.  Sure, we'd like to travel and celebrate holidays with family - but again, not the safest option for us or them, so we had a romantic dinner together rather than the big events we both had growing up in our families.

So in that vein of embracing the here and now, I decided to buy a few things that make life more comfortable and enjoyable, like 100% cotton jersey sheets for our bed.  Yes, our house is furnished with everything, including sheets and towels.  But I've always been the Princess and the Pea about sleeping - all conditions need to be perfect or I can't sleep.  I like all cotton sheets, and having discovered how wonderful jersey knit sheets are this summer, I decided to buy a set that we'll use during our six months here.  Well, down to five months, but still worth it.

I also splurged on dryer balls.  Most adorable dryer balls ever, little woolly penguin balls!!!  They make me happy to look at, they take the place of dryer sheets by reducing drying time and softening with the natural lanolin in the wool, they reduce static cling in your clothes, and they also help reduce waste and thus help the world.  (Plus the organizations selling these plant trees for each bag of dryer balls purchased!)  AND they are fair-trade items made in Nepal, of 100% New Zealand wool - so you know the sheep are happy and safely shaved.

 

They're available at www.friendsheepwool.com (where they have different animals and designs), though I bought mine from www.freetheocean.com - so the purchase helps the work they doing cleaning up the garbage and pollution in our oceans.  (shop here: https://shop.freetheocean.com/products/penguin-dryer-balls) 

 

Just look at those happy penguins - they almost make doing laundry fun!!! 

Pandemic Diaries Weeks #34 - #35

 22 November 2020

 

Before I get into our travels and new location, I just wanted to share a find at one of those dollar stores.  I like being able to buy inexpensive dishes or cookware for specific cooking projects when we're staying in a furnished apartment or house.

I found, for $1 each, these very funny compressed washcloths.  Aren't they a treat?  Richard gets the two Superman washcloths, and Wonder Woman is for me.  They just need to be peeled out of the plastic wrap, paper removed, and then soaked in water.  They "grow" to full size washcloths.

I love silliness like this - my Wonder Woman washcloth makes me laugh.  My brother Howard received the "Hey Howdy" cloth, because we called him Howdy as a child.  (He said these are great for camping or backpacking trips.)

And while many people are baking their way through these long pandemic weeks, I decided to focus on healthier meals now that we have kitchens.  I like my baking, but I don't need all those yummy goodies.  So I thought sure, innovative ways to make low fat chicken and veg meals. The one featured here is my lovely sheet pan chicken with plums and red onions, a recipe from the New York Times summary I receive each day.  It really turned out to be pretty - and I probably tripled the amount of plums in the recipe, because I figured fruit is almost as healthy as vegs.

One more thing - I was interviewed (online and via phone) for a local New Jersey paper, or online paper, regarding the sign for Hartshorne Park.  Here's a link for the very nice article (with a couple of misprints), although the photo of me really is horrible.  But it's a great article:  pressofatlanticcity.com/community/currents_gazettes/mainland/article_50a2764a-591c-520c-aa4d-b63682763592.html

So, Richard and I left Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Halloween, October 31, heading to St. Augustine, Florida.  It took us three and a half days to drive roughly 950 miles, because we encountered heavy rains as well as slow traffic due to road construction.  Given that we're living in Covid times, we didn't really plan to drive slowly and explore, we wanted to drive as directly as we could.  We stuck with Interstate 95, and basically just drove south.  But we did end up spending three nights along the way, which helped the trip from being too arduous.

 

Normally we would have booked a hotel for a week or two, explored a bit, and then looked for a longer-term rental.  But as I said, these are the times of Covid, so we found a rental house online, available for the entire winter, November 1 through to early May.

 

It's always difficult to really get a feel for a location through the computer, and definitely more difficult to really see whether a residence will be suitable.  We need a place that is fully furnished, so that we just would move in with clothing and be ready to live there for six months or so.

 

We were SO lucky with this place!  First off, we're located on Anastasia Island, just a short bridge away from St. Augustine on the mainland.  The intercoastal waterway is visible from the turn around at the end of our street, and the Atlantic beaches are about half a mile away in the other direction.  

Then, our house is comfortably furnished, with enough dishes to host a party (but of course that isn't happening).  The kitchen is smallish but efficient, and we have plenty of pantry space.  Washer, dryer, dishwasher, microwave - all the mod cons!

The kitchen, dining area, and living room are all one huge room with semi-dividers - a counter with tall stools separates the kitchen, and the dining area is off to one side in an angled alcove.  The living room has a fireplace!  And then through a huge arched doorway and down a step is the sunroom, a fully enclosed room that feels more like a side porch overlooking the garden.  Off that is the game room, which Richard is using as his office.  Both the sunroom and the game room have doors leading out to the side and then back yards.

There is also a guest room with a nearby full bathroom.  Our bedroom is behind the living room, and we have an en suite bathroom.

That front kitchen-dining-living room is crazily colored, with two deep turquoise walls and several chartreuse walls.  Not colors I would normally put together, especially with the deep ultramarine blue trim around the archway.  But with a navy blue couch and a primary colors print chair, plus natural wood furniture, it works.  Bright, cheerful, and homey in an avant garde sort of way.

 

Not all the furniture is basic - there are a few hand-painted pieces that add a beachy scene to the rooms, reminding us that yes, the beach is just a short walk away.

The sunroom is actually my favorite room, full of light and sunshine.  I like to read or do my artwork in there during the day, enjoying that feeling of being almost outside.  The only color is that striped couch of primary colors - everything else is white to off white.  I'm not sure what the plants are right outside the windows - split leaf philodendron, diffenbachia, who knows.  Giant leaves and sometimes butterflies.

Richard's office may be the most colorful room - the walls are orange on the upper section, purple below, with flat wood trim painted red, and a line of multi-colored Mexican tile creating almost a chair rail effect.  I know, it sounds odd, but it absolutely works.  And for my art friends, we know this is an analogous color scheme, so yes, it makes perfect sense.  For non-art people, the colors are next to each other on the color wheel.  So it really does work better than you'd think.

The bedrooms are bathrooms are more restful, in soft blues or greens, with beige touches.  Even our bathroom has artwork!

 

And we both laugh, because not only are we now living in the Ponce de Leon Villas, our street is actually named Fountain of Youth Boulevard!!!  We're not yet feeling younger nor more agile, but we're hoping six months here will make a difference!

During our first two weeks, we had an opossum living under a broken flower pot in the front garden, just outside the front door.  I'd see grey fur sticking out the broken triangle it was using as the door.  Never saw the entire opossum, just a triangle full of fur.  Until Tropical Storm Eta came by.  Richard brought in the chairs from the backyard, and I secured items in the front, putting a few things in the garage so they wouldn't become projectiles.  I left the two-storey flower pots, thinking Opie the opossum would need a dry spot to wait out the storm.

Well, the storm was windy and wet, and a lot of dead branches blew down.  I checked on Opie, and saw the end of the tail and a little white nose.  I had an apple with lunch, and took the core outside, tossing it just inside Opie's flower pot.  That little white nose turned into a pointy white face, with a pink tongue tasting that apple core.  I guess Opie decided it was good, because he/she opened his/her mouth, picked up the apple core, and brought it further into the flower pot house.

I saved my apple and pear cores for a day or two, but Opie hasn't been back this week.  I feel kind of sad, I enjoyed having an opossum visitor.

It took me two days to pick up all the fallen branches and vines that came down in Eta.  And they filled two large outdoor garbage cans (picked up as part of the weekly yard waste collection).  

The vegetation here is a little odd - there are palm trees and flowering trees and I guess live oak trees, which have acorns but totally different leaves than oak trees up north.  There are also all kinds of vines that grow up the trees and seem to strangle branches, plus a variety of mosses and lichens that cling to the branches.  So everything is green, but half the branches are dead or dying.  And then, those dead branches blow down in storms.  If you imagine enough branches to fill two garbage cans, with the branches broken into smaller pieces to fit, you can see that this was a whole lot of fallen branches - not little twigs, but some good sized chunks!

Anyway, we're finding our way around.  We've done some shopping, found some cafés we like for outdoor eating or takeaway, and we have some walking routes.  We're had quite a few rainy days, so we haven't made it to the beach yet.  (Good thing we have a very cheerful tea kettle!)

But we're very comfortable in our little house - which turned out to be bigger than we expected.  

We're pretty much settled in - so after Thanksgiving, we likely will start exploring Anastasia Island, and St. Augustine itself.

Pandemic Diary Week #33 - A Pandemic Break at the Zoo

6 November 2020

I forgot to blog about going to the zoo as a break from the pandemic!  I guess I was so excited about finishing the sign and then having it installed, I totally missed our zoo visit!

(Richard and I are now in a rented house in St. Augustine, Florida.  Actually, we're on the barrier island of Anastasia.  But that will be another blog, and I want to focus on the zoo.)

 

Cape May itself is the southernmost point of New Jersey.  But Cape May is also a beach and town, just slightly northeast of the actual cape.  Just know that it's the southern tip of New Jersey.  The zoo is a bit north of the actual peninsula that is Cape May - but in the general vicinity, and a big inland so that it isn't impeding the wetlands.

 

Here is their website: www.capemaycountynj.gov/1008/Park-Zoo

 

Now, this was my sister-in-law (J) and my little break from the pandemic and all the self-isolation, social distancing, and sheltering in place.  However, we definitely planned on masking and distancing - and the zoo had a policy that masks are necessary for entrance.  So we went in, masks on, and trying to keep at least one zebra length away from other people.  There were reminder signs around the zoo, but not everyone kept their masks on their faces.  And while it wasn't packed, the zoo was busy enough that it would have been better had everyone complied with the mask rule.

 

It isn't a huge zoo, but it now is home to some 550 animals, and the zoo has several conservation programs working to house and maintain several endangered species animals.  My favorite are the snow leopards, and there are two enclosures of these gorgeous fuzzy-furred cats.  The female, Himani, has given birth to seven cubs over the years.  Two other snow leopards joined the zoo and had twin cubs in 2017 as part of their breeding program.  (They strictly follow all the protocols established by the AZA's Species Survival Program.)  

Animals seemed to be grouped not only by species but sometimes by species in the same family.  For example, camels, alpacas, and llamas were in the same enclosure.  They wouldn't be found together in nature, since camels are from the Middle East and North Africa, while alpacas and llamas are indigenous to South America.  But they're all camelids, so they're housed together here.  I don't know if they've become friends, but they definitely tolerated each other.

 

The white deer, or leucistic deer, always look vaguely magical.  They have a shady wooded area, and wander around or laze under the trees.  These deer aren't albinos in the true sense - they have a recessive gene that produces the white fur, but they have the dark eyes and noses of non-leucistic deer.  (Doesn't this deer look like it was conjured with a patronus charm?)

The bison were interesting to watch - there seemed to be one huge alpha bison, maybe the patriarch of this herd.  He lumbered around, munching on grass and checking on the other bison, who all seemed to move out of his way and concede the shady or comfortable areas to lie around.  Really, he was definitely the king bison here!

The flamingos were flamboyant as always, preening and looking at their reflection in the pond.  They were very funny to see napping though, curling those long necks around their bodies like a snake.  There were a few pale young flamingos, trying to grow up into that beautiful coral pink color.

The Amur leopard was restless, pacing back and forth in her enclosure.  I'm not sure if she was unhappy with the many people watching her, or because it was a fairly warm day, nothing like her native northern China/southern Russia region.  Or maybe she was just walking to keep her kittenish figure.  She definitely had a route planned out, and kept walking in circles and figure eights.  (Her name is Judda.)

The giraffes and zebras shared an enclosure, just as they share the savannahs of southern Africa.  There was an ostrich in there as well.  The giraffes were nibbling on the leaves of trees on the other side of their enclosure fence, though the youngest giraffe wasn't quite tall enough to reach those yummy leaves.  The zebras were munching on the grass, keeping it well mown.

There was a kookaburra, the Australian bird with the crazed laugh - we could periodically hear it across the zoo, and eventually saw him/her in the enclosure.  Really, they have the most distinctive bird cry, almost like Vincent Price laughing his most demonic and maniacal laugh.  Since we were coming up to Halloween, this seemed quite appropriate.

 

We even saw a few jack'o'lanterns, possibly to be the next meal for some of the vegan animals here.

 

Several pea fowl roamed the zoo property, though the peacocks' tails seemed shorter than usual.  The pea hens aren't as colorful, and the hens aren't as gregarious as the males.  But that iridescent blue is just an incredible color!

The capybaras were having lunch and being hand fed, I presume because the one on the right was eating twice as fast as the capybara on the left.  If you haven't met capybaras, these are the largest rodents in the world, native to parts of Central and South America.  They're large, about the size of a medium to large dog (though not as huge as a Great Dane).  Herbivores, and they spend half their time in water, just hanging out like hairy rodent hippos.  They really are unique animals!

 

I should mention that this zoo is free to the public, although they do accept donations.  They also have private tours (for a fee), and special "animal encounters" such as maybe feeding the giraffes.  It really was wonderful to have a sunny afternoon visiting with all these animals, and taking a break from the pandemic, the election, the murder hornets, all the craziness that has been 2020, the year we never saw coming.

 

There were other animals, but they weren't close enough for decent photos.

 

An hour before closing, we were ready to go - but I needed a ride on the carousel.  I do like a good carousel, and this one has wild animals to ride, rather than the mundane horses.  All the animals gallop along to the music, except the giraffe - he's so tall, he'd hit his head if he galloped.  So he just poses and looks regal as he goes around and around.

 

I rode the lion.  Last time I was here, I rode the zebra.  I'm an equal opportunity animal rider.  I was the sole rider on the carousel, although a family came along after my ride and they were able to enjoy this very festive and colorful carousel.

And that was it.  It's all happening at the zoo.  Definitely worth a visit, to have some fun and to get out.  (But wear that mask!)