Close To Home

A foot injury and a partial-knee replacement kept me closer to the Folly than in winters past.  We really do need to landscape the front yard.  The ibis investigating our jungle from the sidewalk probably would agree.

Other than the artificial orchid arrangement Thom created for the Florida room, we did absolutely nothing in the way of home improvement.  He's gotten a lot of use out of that vase.

I also stayed longer into the spring to recover from my surgery, a smart move.  I turned the pool into a physical therapy center, moving from one side to the other to avoid the morning and afternoon sun which seemed to shine nearly every day for months.  Florida experienced severe drought and wildfires during our stay.

Morning Sun

Afternoon Sun

I spent hours looking up into the sky while doing PT as birds, butterflies, planes and drones drifted past.  Very Zen.

The South Florida National Cemetery lowered the flag to honor President Jimmy Carter.  His death at 100 offered a poignant and timely reminder of how selflessness can serve the American people.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I threw my vote away on John B. Anderson when the peanut farmer from Georgia ran for re-election in 1980.

We fled to Sarasota for two nights in late January while exterminators fumigated the house for termites. Here's Thom with chatty Heidi, the German proprietor of a kitschy schnitzel house she named for herself after moving to south Florida from Berlin 19 years ago.  "I found my people here," she explained.

An enormous scale model of an early 20th-century circus was the highlight of our visit to the Ringling Museum.

The ants returned to the Folly less than a week after the termites disappeared.  It's either one or the other in Florida.  Reservations for our cutting board were overbooked.

Foot pain forced me to substitute swimming for walking after our chilly Sarasota sojourn.  A lifeguard gave me a hard time for going too far out, not for the first time.  I like to get beyond the surf break.

You don't have to look far in Palm Beach County for evidence of beach erosion.  Sand replenishment closed sections of Phipps Park.

If I owned a multi-million dollar home in Manalapan, I'd follow Billy Joel's lead given the proximity of the ocean at LOW tide in the exclusive beachfront neighborhood.  The Piano Man sold his for nearly $50 million, $15 million less than his asking price, last October. Don't feel too bad for him, though.  He bought the place for $22 million in 2015.  The rich just keep getting richer . . . 

South Florida offers great socializing opportunities in the winter.  We hit the Norton Museum of Art with Paul and Linn for a terrific boxing exhibit.

"Prize Fight (Jake LaMotta and "Blackjack" Billy Fox)" by Rosalyn Drexler (1997)

Andrew and Steven spent a month enjoying the Miami energy in Brickell with awesome views from their pool deck.

I picked them up at the Brightline station in West Palm Beach to take them to the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival.  They'd never been before.

Even the unicorns celebrated gay pride at this year's parade.  Too bad the D-Girls weren't here to see them.

I loved the snake-themed exhibit at the Bunker Art Space.

"The Sargasso Sea" by Barrow Parke (2022)

Thom cooked a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner as colorful as it was delicious while Chris was in Moldova, thanks to the European Union which picked up funding for his judicial program after the US issued a "stop work" order.

Fortunately, my Achilles tendonitis didn't interfere with biking, either.  I loaded mine--not this one, parked in front of a recent condo development--into the Folly for a Lake Okeechobee ride during my first week of "me-time" since purchasing the house in 2018.

The plumbing fixtures chime, although those at the lake are much bigger and so antique that they're now on permanent display in a park.

Cocktail glasses and small bowls of chopped liver cast long shadows in the Florida room at the Folly during solo appetizers.

Less than a week after surgery, I began taking short walks in our neighborhood that eventually extended as far as Bryant Park, which fronts the intracoastal, and the Gulfstream Hotel, currently under extraordinarily slow renovation.  It almost was if I was seeing South Palm Park for the first time.  No wonder we decided to buy here!

To mix things up a bit, I also drove to Lake Osborne for a sunset walk.

I never knew the windows in the Methodist Church there were stained glass.

Not long after Chris departed for the season, Thom reminded me we never had visited the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden.

We also drove to Fort Lauderdale to see Surrounded Islands at the NSU Museum. I enjoyed looking at the Joel Meyerowitz exhibit even more.  He turned color photography into an art form.

"White House Diving Board Palm Tree, 1978"

We celebrated my departure at Oceano where the steak tartare was even better than when Christine treated us in March.

Lucky Thom--he gets an entire month of sunny me-time with nobody nagging at him to keep shut the refrigerator door shut!