Philip Livingston's Florida Life

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Cornucopia

Fall is the best time of year in Florida. Except for our little brush with Tropical Storm Ida on Wednesday, we have enjoyed a long streak of near perfect days, warm and blue in the sunshine, cool and crispy clear at night. Best of all - no humidity!

Unlike the north, where cold temperatures drive people indoors, it is the stifling heat and humidity that keeps people inside in Florida. Once the heat relents, people begin to stir again. There are yard sales galore, church and school festivals at every corner, and it seems like everyone is doing yard work. With this coming week the last full week before Thanksgiving, people are already preparing for the holidays.

I finally got around a few weeks ago to getting something I have wanted for twenty years - a real leather chair. Ev and I were browsing through Encore, which is a giant furniture store in Orange Park that sells very high end furniture on consignment. We spotted a deep red chair and ottoman. Turns out it was brand new, purchased from a Norwalk store here in Jax. The leather is Butter Soft, the highest quality you can get, I believe.

The chair and ottoman were originally priced at $3700 at the first store. By the time it went through a series of markdowns at Encore, we wound up paying just a few hundred dollars. It was a major bargain for a chair and ottoman that should last for decades.

Our Next Big Thing is to de-carpet the house and install Bamboo flooring. Neither Ev nor I care for carpeting, and with my allergy problems, the carpet in the house only makes them worse. This time last year we were painting and remodeling the den area, so maybe we can make a start soon on taking care of the floors.

It has been a good year, and we have a lot to be thankful for. Good health is at the top of that list, both for us and for our loved ones. It has been one year this week since Ev's brother Alan passed away in Los Angeles. We remember him fondly.

There is Thanksgiving for new life, Rachael and Justin's healthy baby Reagan. Ev and I have gratitude for the means to have our surgeries this summer, and for steady jobs, not only for us but for our children. I have Thanksgiving that my son Pat, who has faced so many challenges this year, continues to overcome them one by one, day by day. I am so very happy for him. He has turned out to be a fine man, and he has discovered, to my delight, the enormous power of positive ideas and of positive people in a person's life.

It is important to count successes, not failures: to remember kindnesses, not slights: to recall good times, not bad: to look ahead, not behind.

Looking back, I can see the glass as half empty or half full. That is my choice. The warm and inviting Thanksgiving holiday urges me to look upon it as half full, and to consider all of the good things that have come my way. I have been freely given a cornucopia of blessings, and I am reminded to count them, not just at this time, but every day. Like the ancient Horn of Plenty, the goodness of life spills out like fruit and bounty upon the table, zig zagging a bouncy path that is neither neat nor predictable.

I don't know what tomorrow brings, but I do know that I have been given 56 years of life, and that is a lot more than some other of my peers have gotten. Regardless of what has happened, I have made it thus far.

Just having made it. That is, in and of itself, something to be thankful for.




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Bama's Back!

I have noticed over the last day or two that the landscape has finally began to look like fall. Some trees have color, while others are already barren. The remnants of Hurricane Ida will cross Jax on Tuesday, so that will blow more leaves down.

It is beginning to feel like Thanksgiving. In this area, a sure sign of the season's approach is the big Jacksonville Sea and Air Spectacular, held in early November every year. It is one of the largest air and marine shows in the nation, with thousands of people making a weekend of it on the beaches. Even as I write this, at 9:00 on Sunday morning, I can hear the big jets roaring by overhead.

The show starts at 9am Saturday and Sunday, and since we live near the beach, where it takes place, we get a little extra view as the planes circle around. The beach setting is absolutely ideal, allowing everyone to get an equally good view as the planes and ships go by a couple of hundred yards off shore.

The Christmas decorations are up at the Publix shopping center near our home, and yesterday's Alabama game was full of Christmas ads. The holiday season is here.

Speaking of Alabama - what a great win! There have been a couple of times over the past twenty years when the media announced Bama's Back, only to have the team sputter again. But this time Bama is back for real, having not lost a regular season game since 2007, and headed for a rematch with Florida in a few weeks. It has been a long, hard dry spell for the Tide, but it is over. I think Alabama is a strong threat to beat the Gators this time around.

At the end of yesterday's game, the CBS announcers played a moment of the radio coverage from the Alabama Football Network. I had forgotten how it was to listen to the games on the radio. On up until the mid 80's, there were few Alabama games on television. Sometimes even big, important games weren't televised, because there were only three networks, and Bama had to compete for coverage with the likes of Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and such. There were many Saturdays when radio was the only option.

I was selling radio advertising in Huntsville in the early 80's, and my station's biggest money makers were the ads we sold in the Alabama football games. Even the big FM rock station in Huntsville carried the games for awhile.

Of course, an FM rocker carrying a football game would be silly nowadays. Cable television wiped out the popularity of radio coverage, as more cable channels came around with more time available to carry a variety of games. Now, even here in Jax, almost all of the Alabama games are on television.

Cable television revolutionized media in the 1980's, just as the Internet has done in the 2000's. The Internet's influence has been much more dramatic, though, since it touches almost every aspect of life now. Cable television was never portable, but the Internet can be accessed anywhere now through wireless technology, making it almost essential in daily life only fifteen years or so since it came onto the scene. The time is near when it will overtake cable and broadcast technology and make them a thing of the past. I can imagine a time about five years from now when most people will watch their television, listen to their radio and visit with their friends over the internet. Many people already do.

Bill Gates said recently that the next big thing in internet and digital technology will be interactive voice capability, which will diminish the use of the keyboard. It won't be long, according to Gates, before we will talk to our computers and they will talk to us. I guess we can teach them to drive after that, and send them to the grocery store to pick up a few things!

Best of all, nobody owns the Internet, and no one person or group of people has found a way yet to dominate it. The Media and it's handful of owners and stars, once so powerful, are not so powerful anymore.

And that is a good thing.




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Halloween 2009

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Spilled Salt

It is bright and hot in Jax...not a cloud in the sky. This is Georgia - Florida Day, with the game set for 3:30 here in Jacksonville. Black and red Georgia colors seem to be everywhere this morning.

Of course, it's Halloween, too. That makes it particularly busy. The block party started last night on the street behind us, and I imagine it will be full blast tonight.

The Halloween holiday makes a mockery of superstition, so I guess that's a good thing. When I was a little boy, my Mama had some superstitious beliefs that still linger with me today. Once I was running inside the Clarks department store in Abilene, Texas, and knocked over a rack with mirrors on it. Several broke, and I remember believing for years that each of the broken mirrors brought seven years of bad luck. I figured I was pretty much sunk for the rest of my life! I calculated that five or six probably cracked, meaning a maximum of 42 years of bad luck going forward. Since I was about seven at the time, my bad luck would have ended only seven years ago, at age 49.

Of course that was silly. I have been lucky throughout my life. Probably the luckiest person I know.

Mama would never wash or hang clothes out to dry on New Years Day. That brought a year's worth of bad luck. I still observe the practice, as well as not walking under a ladder or stepping on cracks in the sidewalk (Step on a crack, break your Mother's Back!), the old saying goes. If a bird flies into the house, it means someone there is going to die. If a black cat crosses my path, I try to go a different way.

Thirteens of anything still give me the creeps. I remember fighting the feeling of apprehension when Ev's surgery was scheduled for August 13th. I would have had mine rescheduled, and I told her so. She went ahead anyway.

A braver person than me, that Ev!

In DaVinci's famous painting The Last Supper, Judas Iscariot is portrayed with a vessel of salt in front of him, some of which has spilled onto the table. This is an evil image, since salt is viewed as a symbol of life. Thus the tradition of tossing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder if you spill some, to keep evil spirits off of your back. It doesn't hurt to place salt around the house sometimes, either.

There are good luck charms, too. Daddy would always encourage me to look for a four leaf clover for good luck as I played in our clover filled backyard. Mama gave me a billfold for my lunch money with a real Rabbit's Foot attached for good luck. Black eyed peas consumed on New Year's Day bring good fortune in the coming year. A pulled tooth was always put under my pillow for the tooth fairy, who would replace the tooth overnight with money, usually a dime, sometimes a quarter.

As a little boy in Texas, I loved to sing, and would often sing myself to sleep with Elvis or church songs. Mama believed that to be bad luck and would stop me, quoting the saying Go to bed singing, wake up crying!. My guess is that the saying probably was an admonition to not drink excessively at night, not something aimed at little boys, but I toned down my singing none the less.

I don't know if it was superstition or not, but Mama believed that eating dairy products with fish could kill you. I never had milk to drink or ice cream for dessert if fish was on the table. Looking back, it was a little ironic, since we would occasionally eat wild, hand picked Poke Salad with boiled eggs. Poke salad, if not carefully prepared, really can kill you, from what I have heard.

There was a fire at a trucking company one night. Although the company was located a couple of miles away, the clouds were low, and the flames lit up the sky and turned it red. The next morning at school, kids were talking about how their parents had stood in the yard in awe, not knowing of the fire, thinking the orange sky was ushering in the end of the world, and the Second Coming.

In the late 60's, ambulance companies were switching over from the old fashioned wailing sirens to the more modern pulsating traffic horns, with the rapidly rising and lowering pitch. We heard our first one when I was a boy in Sylacauga, Alabama, as an out of town Cadillac ambulance sped past our house. The next day some of my friends told me their parents were quite alarmed, thinking that the sound was from a flying saucer that was landing somewhere in town! One boy said his dad had ridden around trying to find the UFO!

It was also in the late 60's that Alabama switched to Daylight Saving Time for the first time. There were two brothers at my school, Paul and Silas. I was talking with them one morning and they told me how concerned their Mama and Daddy were with the changeover. Their entire family apparently believed that somehow the earth was going to be slowed on it's rotation in order to lose an hour of time!

People shouldn't be messing with nature like that!, one of them said, quite earnestly.

Speaking of Daylight Saving Time, it's over tonight. I am glad. There will be no more going to work in near darkness. It will be near dark when I get home, but that is OK. It is supposed to be dark at night.

Maybe Paul and Silas were on the right track after all!

I've always looked upon the end of DST as the first step toward the new year. The mornings will be brighter now, and that will make the days brighter, too.


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Fifty Down

I am at a landmark of sorts. As of Friday, I have lost fifty pounds since the start of my Lap Band journey 90 days ago. I have made a mental note to find something that weighs fifty pounds today, just to get a feel of how much weight my body is no longer carrying around.

The weight loss is slow, but steady. I am not really on any diet at all. In that sense, it is almost effortless. I find that a regular McDonalds hamburger with no fries satisfies me. I don't care much for carbohydrates anymore, much preferring protein nowadays. My tastes have changed from quantity to quality. I enjoy smaller meals, but I want them to be good. Greasy, rich or fried foods don't sit well with me.

I stopped drinking Cokes years ago, and found that, after awhile, I lost the taste for sweetened sodas of all types. I can't stand the taste of them now. I think the same is happening to me now with other foods. I don't have any desire for popcorn, chips, fries or cookies. Prior to July, stuff like that would disappear pretty quickly if I was around. Now it sits around for days or weeks, in most cases.

Not that I don't eat sweets anymore. It is just that a small sliver of cake or a few teaspoonfuls of pudding does me just fine.

As long as I make intelligent choices, I will be fine. The only thing I really have to fight is the thoughtless decision to eat something I know I should not have or that I really don't want. I have to remind myself that it is OK not to eat everything put before me, and that just because there is food available doesn't mean I have to eat it.

I had an upset stomach yesterday morning from eating fried Tempura and Conch Fritters that Ev and I got from a local fish place. Although the taste was fine, I paid the price later on. I doubt if I will pull a stunt like that again. Live and learn. Avoid mindless eating. That is my credo now.

Three months ago, I was wondering what it would be like. You can read all kinds of things on the Internet, and I wasn't at all sure what to believe. But as I settle into my new lifestyle, I can begin to see how things work, and will work going forward.

I am happy with my decision. It is proving to be a good thing.




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My Trip to The Kremlin

I made the connection a long time ago between stomach distress and wild dreams. I have been sick for a couple of days with a stomach virus, combined with allergy problems.

Last night I had the wildest dream. It was like an epic movie played out before my sleeping eyes!

Ev and I were in Moscow. Why, I don't know. We were unhappy there, and trying to get to the airport to go home.

For some reason, I equated the ancient Russian compound The Kremlin with an airport.

In an attempt to get home, I remember running down a flight of extremely narrow spiral stairs, which suddenly cut off in mid air and forced me to crawl back up to the top. I ran down the basement hall of a decrepit puke green Soviet hospital only to discover that it it ended at a blank wall. It was a maze. I had to retreat.

We next were in a tiny, old fashioned elevator, which stalled and left us stranded between floors. (is there an element of confinement running though this dream?)

In the old clunky elevator, there was an emergency button, which lifted us up to a street I was not familiar with. As we walked along the street, we noticed a Russian festival was going on. We stood and watched, but eventually I grew tired and asked directions to The Kremlin, where we could catch a flight out. The streets were crowded, and as we made our way through the sidewalks toward the fortress, I spotted a tourist tram bus. It was empty, so I commandeered it and drove toward The Kremlin. As I passed tourists anxious to get on board, it occurred to that I would be spotted soon for hijacking a bus, and jailed. I parked the bus at a stop and ran away.

Here is where it gets interesting. My traveling companion became not Ev, but Bob Hope. We were both penniless. Bob said not to worry, that he would get some new clothes and we would talk our way out of things. My memory is of Bob buying a nice Khaki outfit like the type you see British soldiers wear. But when I next saw him, he was in common garb again. When I asked him what had happened, he said that the store wouldn't take his check!

That's when I woke up.


My best guess is that dreams of confinement in tight circumstances have to do with difficulty breathing. Because I was so congested Thursday night, my mind translated the congestion into several tell-able stories.

I never did make it to The Kremlin. That's annoying. I always wanted to see it!


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King of WHAT???

My memory of Mrs. Smith's misunderstanding of a sexual slang term brought to mind another comical episode from just this past June.

This one was as funny, if not even funnier.

The term "cornholing" is an old expression in the south that describes sex between men. Our local NBC affiliate here is Channel 12. It is the most popular of the local television stations. During the Channel 12 5:00 News some weeks ago, the anchorman was switching back and forth to a live broadcast downtown. There was a street fair going on to raise money for some worthy cause. The reporter on the scene was an old friend of mine, whom I used to work with in my early days in radio.

One of the games at the fair was the bizarrely named Cornhole, in which people would toss corncobs into a circle for prizes. The anchorman, who is a yankee, had heard that my friend Steve was going to demonstrate the game on camera. The newsman, clueless to the slang meaning of the term, went live to Steve by saying that Steve was going to demonstrate cornholing for the viewers! To make matters much, much worse, the anchor also said that he had heard Steve was quite good at it, indeed, a Cornholing King!

I could not believe what I was hearing.

The other two anchors on the news were women. You could hear them snickering off camera as the anchorman continued to talk about cornholing. It sounded as if others in the studio were taking note also.

When the camera went to a flustered Steve, he immediately said that, although he was happy to be at the fair, he wasn't sure about the cornholing thing. He then proceeded to interview the also clueless fair organizer, who demonstrated the cob tossing cornhole game.

By the time Steve sent the show back to the anchor, reaction had already started. The women on the set were teary eyed from laughter, and the anchor, looking sheepish, joked that he was going to have to find a dictionary to look up all of the meanings of a certain word.

It was riotously funny, probably the funniest thing I have ever seen on television. While an on air demonstration of cornholing would have been a ratings builder for sure, I am glad it was the corn tossing game instead of the other version.

I laugh about it til this day.

I think Steve reads my blog sometimes. No offense, Steve. You handled it as well as anyone could!



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