Nobody Loves Me But My Mother..

And She Could Be Jiving Too...

I listened to BB King on LP vinyl before Pink Floyd cut their first Album. He's 88 years old now. Personally, my favorite blues guy is Jimmy Reed. I used to listen to Jimmy in the 1950s instead of the Beach Boys and drink grapefruit wine and think I was cooler than the other kids...but BB King is the most famous and influential of them all...and when you get to be that age and still remember some of the lyrics you should feel very lucky...I feel lucky to have been able to see him in concert at the Van Wezel in Sarasota last night...

BB King puts on a somewhat uneven concert. He has a tendency to lose track and spend 20 or 30 minutes rapping and trying to get the audience to sing "You are my sunshine"..it's sometimes hard to understand his raps because he seems to forget to talk into the mike all the time.... his musicians walk off stage when this happens and the audience eventually started to boo and walk out...they don't seem to understand that they are in the presence of legend and greatness.... Then he cuts into one of his classics...and sounds great...and they come back....
.

Nobody loves me but my mother,
And she could be jivin' too

Now you see why I act funny baby,
When you do the things you do

I read online that BB King has 15 children, all from different women. ...Maybe that's true? He named his guitar Lucille....I was doing my usual ten mile walk into downtown this morning when the two BB King super RV buses blew past on the way out of town...I waved but the windows were dark....BB spent about 45 minutes signing autographs after the concert....

On the Waterfront

The season is winding down.  People are leaving for the north country.

Al and Chris have a beautiful boat, Amberjack,  that is sitting on the dock of the bay at Sarasota Harbor.

As usual, there is lots of drinking, eating and solving the problems of the world.

Some even look to the sky for help.

Others are hoping to be saved.

And some think that a baptism is needed.  Oy Vay!

Mr. Phred says "why have a wooden statue when you can have this on the bowsprit!"

Girls just wanna have fun!

Bonne nuit!    À la prochaine

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...

Back in the U.S....

Sarasota, Florida

We've been back in the U.S. over a month. Many good and bad things have been happening (and I'm not talking about the visiting Republican candidates for President).

The kayaks at Fort Desoto park are $75 for an all day rental of a double, but you can also rent for one or two hours. I don't like to kayak when the wind is strong.

A lot of people were wind-surfing today. In the background is the new Sunshine Skyway. The old one collapsed when a freighter hit it in a thunderstorm. A busload of people and several cars and trucks took a header off the top.

We took a lot of pictures at Fort Desoto today. I've seen ratings that have it as one of the best beaches in the world, but you have to wonder....

I bought a more comfortable seat for my bike and an LED taillight that plugs into my laptop to recharge. We took a 12 mile ride on the Legacy Trail out of Venice earlier this week. It was lovely but I forgot my camera.

A lot of hungry birds hang out on the remnant of the old skyway.

I love Florida.

and all of it's strange birds and reptiles.

Sun and Fun just built a new 5 million dollar fitness center. It opened in January.

It has an indoor pool with lap lanes that allow you to swim in place.

There are mirrored rooms full of gleaming workout equipment.

My surgeries for head cancers also happened in January.

Ken and Karen took us sailing/

I pretended to be disabled so I didn't have to pull on the ropes. Ken Let me steer all day.

These strange sea birds had orange beaks.

This bird also has an orange beak.

Fort Desoto Park Beach on a warm, gray day in February.

Seaweed on the beach.

If you live in Florida, you may tend to forget how exotic a line of palms may appear.

I must have been saying something important to Mrs. Phred....

This bird is demanding another piece of our sandwiches.

Happy Campers

Sarasota, Florida

The weather here is lovely...high in the mid 80s and low humidity...It's still very quiet since most of the community doesn't arrive before November...We're playing "social" tennis in the morning and after the sun goes down.

I fixed a bunch of the RV problems yesterday. The rear video camera was manufactured in China. We took it out and hooked it up to a working video jack and verified that it was burned out. We blasted out the crud on the hot water heater, both air conditioners and the refrigerator and replaced the broken hose on the drivers side windshield washer. The turn signal problem turned out to be a simple fuse...

Today I saw one of my dentists and got another root canal...He gave me a Vicodan prescription so I'm flying high on pain killers and Sauvignon Blanc.

It could be that the frequent fuse blowing on the tow lights is caused by the way I've wired the tow jacks. The I have the male side of the jacks "hot" at 12 volts DC and exposed, so that if I happen to touch them to an exposed surface they would blow a fuse inside the RV. A simple preventative measure would be to reverse the jacks on the Toyota and RV so that the hot side would be the female plug, difficult to short to ground. Meanwhile, I did rewire the Toyota completely so it and the tow circuitry no longer share any wires or bulbs...I installed separate bulbs on the Toyota for the tow circuitry and quit using diodes to separate the two....

We hit Sam's Club to stock up on wine and the library for books. The pool is mostly empty this time of year. I went in during a heavy thunderstorm and had it all to myself.