Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Visiting Florida

It has been a while since the last blog update which I guess is good because it means that not much has changed. My numbers are up slightly, but not enough to concern anyone (except me a little). I am currently sitting in a chair at Dana-Farber getting ready for a wonderful injection of Velcade. Horray. What better time to do a blog update.

We just got back from a trip to Sunny Florida. Our friend, Anita, rented a house for a couple of months and invited us down to enjoy it with her. We wanted to get away from the horrible New England winter. The weather thing did not work out exactly as planned.

At 3:00 AM the first night we were there, our cell phones started to howl with a horrible alarm sound and yelled out at us that there was a tornado approaching and that we should take cover immediately. Where exactly were we supposed to go? I put my head under the pillow. (Hey - it always worked when I was a kid.) We went back to sleep and were much relieved the next morning when we woke up and realized that we were both still alive. Give me New England blizzards over tornados any day.

And Florida was not particularly warm - barely got above 70, but we had a nice time anyway, seeing all (or at least many of the sites). The house we were in had a beautiful pool that we did not go in because it was too cold.

Halfway through the trip, Barbara started to miss our kitties, so we had to go to "The Big Cat Habitat" which rescues large African animals like lions and tigers and then lets tourists look at them for a small fee. This place was totally cool, but the problem is that after seeing these giant lions and tigers, I have become a bit unsatisfied with our own puny little kitties. I want bigger ones. Not as big as the ones at the Big Cat Habitat - I am thinking of maybe 500 pounds or so. We are still negotiating. Barbara and I are trying to agree on who is going to clean the litter box.

Our other animal adventure was that Anita had been talking all week about doing the "Alligator Ride" and that sounded very interesting to me, so we headed to Myakka State Park. I was totally disappointed because the "Alligator Ride" turned out to be a boat ride where you see lots of alligators. You don't actually get to ride on any alligators.

But the real highlight of the trip was dinner visits with several dear old friends that we had (mostly) not seen in years. We all really enjoyed these visits. We had the most wonderful time seeing all of them again and catching up.

So that's the report. We hope that all is well with everyone and that the winter is being kind to you.