My Mind Blows Gently

Ken lets me steer the boat for a couple of hours. I manage to keep to a heading (give or take 30 degrees).

Cousin Katie comes to visit for a couple of days. We take her to a Tiki bar on the beach and to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

According to Wiki, "The Gardens feature the most diverse living and preserved collections of epiphytes in the world, and feature more than 20,000 living plants including 5,500 orchids, 3,500 bromeliads and 1,600 other plants".

In case you were wondering, an epiphyte is "a plant that grows on another plant but is not parasitic, such as the numerous ferns, bromeliads, air plants, and orchids growing on tree trunks in tropical rain forests".

The orchids are very pretty, but my favorite plants are the ones that have evolved in poor soil and have become meat eaters. Some of those are coming up later...

Let us arrange 

these lovely flowers in the bowl

since there's no rice

― Matsuo Basho

White plum blossoms―

though the hour is late,

a glimpse of dawn

― Yosa Buson

 Observe:

see how the wild violets bloom

within the forbidden fences!

― Shida Yaba

smells like rotting flesh

luring the hungry insects

plants dining on death

bending down for the top leaves 

on the bonsai tree —

baby giraffe

The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
-Emily Dickenson

Mai-Tai in a Tiki Bar on the Beach.

I am observing
mighty Mother Earth spinning

my mind blows gently...
Tim Ryerson

Marie Selby Botanical Garden

Sarasota, Florida

So... Joe the Plumber is running for Congress in Ohio. My cousin is Danny the Electrician. Here's what Danny had to say about Greece, "They can't print their own money? What were they thinking?" I'd like to see him in charge of the Federal Reserve...

Carolyn (AKA sunshinecruiser) came to visit us this week. She was fun. We went to lunch on the beach at O'Leary's and then to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. We know her from social networking, specifically the "Women's RV Forum" of which Mrs. Phred is a member.

Somehow the botanical gardens brought back old memories of Japan, 20 years after the war. I'm reading "The Last Great Victory" which deals with Japan in July/August of 1945. There were a lot of "ultras" who wanted to fight to the death and derail the surrender and attempted very disorganized  multiple uncoordinated coup d' e'tauhs at the very end after the bombs were dropped...I visited Japan about 30 times from 1965 to 1968 in support of moving stuff from here to there. It was before they exploded into consumer goods and way before they crashed and burned with a huge real estate bubble.

In 1965 we stayed overnight in a hotel near the Tachikawa air force base. The Red Guards would fly red balloons at the end of the runway to complicate the landing. There were a couple of crashed and burned transports at the end of the runway. I gave my flight suits to the hotel maids to wash. They washed them with fibreglass curtains which created a very itchy situation. I have always wondered if that was deliberate.

The military exchange rate back then was 360 yen to a dollar, while the free market rate was 180 yen. Now a dollar will buy about 70 yen. I bought a 150CC Honda motorcycle, brand new, for $150. We flew it back in an empty C-124. I was very impressed with it's quality which included a little tool kit under the seat.Another time I bought something called a Hibaci Pot which was like a very heavy ceramic barbeque smoker. 

Once we took off from Tachikawa and passed by beautiful Mount Fuji. As we got out to sea, all the engines started to misfire. We aborted and returned to Japan. It turned out that each engine had 32 spark plugs and 16 cylinders. All of the spark plugs were only in finger tight and they had all begun to fall out of the engines.

The C-124 had the largest piston driven engines ever placed on any aircraft. The same engine was also used on the postwar B-36 bomber.

I went in for my 12th of my 20 radiation treatments today. The doctor says that I might be feeling fatigued but I'm not feeling it. It's 83 degrees again today. The sky is blue with pretty puffy white clouds. The air smells really fine...

Someone left a bunch of  strawberries on our doorsteps today. I chopped up half of them, added some sugar and put them in the freezer.Strawberry shortcake in the future...

Marie Selby Sarasota Botanical Gardens (and more)

I get a red dot on the map of the world on the right side of this page whenever someone accesses this blog. If you click it, it gets a little bigger. One dot has me really curious. It's the one up on Hudson Bay in Manitoba...maybe the town of Churchill?


Who can this person be, I wonder. Young? Old? Man? Woman? Whoever it is, the dot is growing so they are coming back. Drop me a response, person from Hudson Bay...tell me a little about your life...(that also applies to anyone else, even Iceland).


I can remember when going to a botanical garden or eating broccoli would not have been high on the list.


The Marie Selby botanical gardens had a nice collection of psychedelic flowers. Many of them had adapted strategies for eating insects. One actually traps rats and small birds.


I've rented the cowboy movie "3:10 to Yuma" which was just released on DVD.


Mrs. Phred is leaving for Venice on Thursday. I shall miss her.


The stitches came out today. My right eyebrow is still drooping over my eye. The doctor says he cut some nerves. He's hoping they will grow back in the next six weeks. If not, he will make a few new slices and pull it back up.


I quote Oscar Wilde to the doctor. "A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's is her work of fiction".


Oscar Wilde's tomb in Paris has an angel on it. The angel once had a penis and testicles, but these were broken off and kept on the cemetery curator's desk for a number of years and ultimately disappeared.


We've been to that cemetery often enough. We feel no need to return.


My grasp of words is slipping. I've been trying ....Oh...that's it...an ORCHID...to remember what these special types of flowers are called all day....