So on Friday’s post I promised that every other post would be about my life so that the blog would have a better balance between the more diarist stuff and links, thoughts, ideas and ruminations about the rise of peep culture. Then I promptly broke that promise by posting about US domestic surveillance centers and a link to piece by a columnist who was briefly a cam-sex worker. In my defence, I had forgotten that I had set up a few posts to happen over the weekend automatically. Then yesterday I was too lazy to blog. Actually I was slightly hung over from drinking beer with my hockey team (we won and are going to the finals this weekend) and wanted to finish putting a bunch of research into my peep culture database so I could finally get back to writing etc. etc. basically I was putting it off.


But no longer. First off, an update about lost shoes. Faithful readers may recall that in the last blog post that had anything like personal commentary, I wrote about getting in trouble with W. for losing E.‘s shoes. Well, I never found them. I called the community centre where I left them (after changing her into her boots) and they said they’d look but they never called back. So high up on the agenda upon arrival in Florida was new shoe acquisition. Luckily we found an outlet mall pretty quickly (wow, what a shock) and amazingly we found a pair of lavender New Balance running shoes to fit E.‘s tiny feet. They were probably half the price of what we would pay in Toronto, and we bought them and the same shoes one size up for when she grew out of them. E., meanwhile, was having a great time tearing adult high heeled shoes off the racks and shoving her feet into them and then tottering around. Finally, we made it to cash. Happy times for Hal as W. was so pleased with our acquisition that she forgot that I was the one who lost the shoes in the first place and so pulled out her credit card and paid! My inner cheap skate grinned and we all piled back into our rented Chevy Malibu and headed back home.


“Home” was the tiny island of Goodland, a short drive from Marco Island and about 45 minutes from Naples in southwest Florida. We rented a place there that had a tiny swimming pool E. refused to go in. It overlooked a bay filled with jumping fish and pelicans. It wasn’t far from the beach, which pleased W. and E. but it was also pretty near the Everglades and other nature areas, which pleased me. Goodland features about 10 roads, 3 different bar/restaurants, a trailer park, a seafood outlet that sells great key lime pie and friendly residents who like to troll back and forth to the bars on golf carts.


Here’s a pic of E. touching a snake at the makeshift zoo off the highway on the way to Everglades City that I’m pretty fond of.

The zoo was called the Skunk Ape Headquarters, the Skunk Ape being the Sasquatch or Yeti of the Everglades.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m awfully fond of cryptozoology in general and the search for Sasquatch in particular. Anyway, we stopped at the zoo on the way for an airboat ride, which I thought would be a nice way to see the Everglades mangrove swamps but which turned out to be a super loud super fast hurtle down narrow channels crowded with weeds and roots. W. held on to E. for dear life.

When we stopped halfway through we took the ear muffling headphones off E., she shook herself out of a shocked stupor, looked around and said, “I all done.”


So am I, for now.