Florida, day 4: Butterfly world

We spent another day with my mom and Jack, who were also taking care of Jack's grandson, Mitch. We ran a few errands, but the highlight of the day was Butterfly World. It reminded me a lot of some exhibits that they have had at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. There was a large aviary filled with butterflies which was truly a paradise for both kids and photographers. There was another aviary with brightly colored birds, a museum with mounted butterflies from all over the world, an exhibit with live insects and spiders, and a giant cage full of lorikeets.

Like at the WAP, we could go in and buy cups of nectar to feed the birds. I told Lina that we shouldn't feed them because they bite, but she wanted to do it so badly that she spent her own money to buy nectar for both herself and Mitch. It was fun for a while, but soon she was so covered with birds that they were getting heavy, and as her arms shook, they dug in with their claws. That hurt, so she screamed, which scared the birds. A few flew off, but others dug in harder, and one bit.

They had a nice gift shop, and Lina spent some of her Christmas money, but I'd felt we'd spent plenty of money already for just a couple hours of entertainment. For the five of us, it cost $75, and that's with two buy-one-get-one-free coupons. There are lots of other attractions like this in the Miami area, but they're at least as expensive, so we'll have to choose carefully.

Mom and I made dinner at my step-sister's house. Lina spent the night there with her grandparents, and I went back to the hotel.

Florida, day 3: Grandma!

vMy mother and her husband came to Florida to visit with us. They're staying with my step-sister, so we went to see them. It took about 45 minutes for me to drive there. We spent a nice day visiting and shopping. My mom had promised to take my daughter shoe shopping, so we went to Target and a nice mall. My daughter got a nice pair of Sketchers, and my mom found great deals on two pairs of shoes. My feet are a very common size, so I was not surprised that they did not have anything I wanted in my size.

My daughter also got to go swimming with her cousin at the community pool. There were other people around, but nobody else was in the water. As we left, someone asked if we were from Norway since nobody else would be swimming at this time of year. They were shocked to learn that we really were from Sweden.

My step-sister and her husband are both vets, and she had to work that day. In the afternoon she got a dog with an intestinal blockage who needed surgery. Her husband went in to back her up, just in case of complications, but everything went well, and we all met for Chinese food for dinner.

Florida, day 2: South Beach

We awoke very early on Sunday, so we started the day with a trip to the hotel gym before visiting the breakfast buffet. The buffet was extensive, and my daughter wanted to try everything. I was most impressed by how excited she got over the fruit. She ate two plates full of watermelon, cantaloupe, and peaches.

Our first task of the day was to get some papers notarized. With the help of the concierge, we found a 24/7 notary who actually answered his phone on a Sunday. It turned out he wasn't very far away, so we went to him. The man was probably in his 80's, and I felt terrible for invading his home (and our daughter even asking to borrow his bathroom) while his wife lay dying from Parkinsons disease in the next room. He showed us pictures from when he was a musician and his wife a dancer with a variety of big band stars in the 50's. It got us thinking about the glamorous jazz scene that once thrived here.

Our next stop was FedEx, and only the main office in South Beach was open. From there, we decided to drive around South Beach and check out the famous art deco architecture. The main oceanfront street was closed due to a street fair, but I'd seen an announcement of an art museum that had a special exhibit on transportation design from 1908 to 1948, so we stopped there. After paying for 90 minutes of parking, we discovered that we were there 60 minutes before the museum opened, so we walked towards the beach. We looked around at the street fair briefly, then we walked along the beach. I was intrigued by the light color of the water but found the water quite cold--about like summer temperatures at the beach in California. My daughter was thrilled by the waves and got a bit wet. I was happy to try out my new camera, a Canon 50D.

With the parking meter running out, we returned to the Museum. By then, it was dumping rain. I found the museum interesting since it wasn't your typical automotive museum. I also learned that this exhibit was part of Art Deco Weekend, as was the street fair, and the theme for this year's festivities was "On the Road: Art Deco Celebrates the Motor Car." A few blocks further down the street fair was an exhibit of classic cars, so we went back there after the museum, and we were there for most of the afternoon.

On our way back to the hotel, we tried to find a grocery store. The GPS in the rental car was no help, but we eventually stumbled across a pharmacy. I'd say pharmacies like this (which sell a whole lot more than medicine) outnumber grocery stores and supermarkets at least 10 to 1. I found this really odd since I would estimate that in California, it's 5 to one in favor of supermarkets. I'd heard that there were areas in this country, especially poorer areas, where it was difficult to buy healthy, fresh food, but I'd found it hard to imagine. Now I saw that the pharmacies carried more food but much of it was junk or processed foods (none of it "fresh" or with short shelf lives). Healthy food was indeed hard to find.

Also as part of this quest, we explored the area around the hotel and discovered that the hotel was very near an area that was downright scary. I wouldn't consider walking there, and I'd be reluctant to drive through. We locked the doors and hoped we wouldn't have to stop for red lights.

For dinner, we walked to a pizza place about a half mile away. They had the football playoffs on TV, and I was thrilled to see the San Diego Chargers, my favorite team. I don't get to watch American football in Sweden, and even if it was shown on TV, it wouldn't be the same because it's a social experience for me. My joy was short-lived as I realized it was the fourth quarter, and the Chargers were losing. Bummer.

As we returned to the hotel, a young man ran up and asked me if we could spare any leftover pizza. He said he was on the streets, and I figured if he was hard up enough to ask for food, I would give it to him. Unlike so many other beggars I encountered over the years, he seemed clean, healthy, and polite, and he did not ask for money. He really made an impression and gave a new face to homelessness for me.

Florida, day 1: transit

Our much-anticipated trip to Miami began at 5:30 AM with the drive to CPH. We'd done the online check-in the night before, and we were pleasantly surprised that it allowed us to skip a very long line. The check-in guy asked why we were connecting in Newark since there were several considerably nicer places to change planes available. It's been years since either of us had been to Newark, and this seemed pretty menacing. However, everything went smoothly at Newark, and with the exception of the restrooms by the baggage claim, the place seemed quite nice. We waited only a couple minutes at immigration, and the guy was cheerful and pleasant. The security people were not equally nice, but they did their thing without being particularly offensive either. After all the hype about increased security, we were expecting worse.

With both flights, my ears failed to adjust properly, and I was in agony. I kept feeling my ears, because with the pain, I expected to find blood running down my neck. Oh the joys of flying when you have a cold.

It took about an hour to pick up our rental car--naturally they didn't have the car we'd reserved, and my husband wouldn't give up without a free upgrade. They eventually gave us a Mazda mini-SUV, which is pretty nice.

When we finally got to our hotel, it took us half an hour to park. The signs for Hotel Registration Parking lead us to valet parking, $28. Ouch. Getting back to normal parking wasn't obvious, but the worst thing was that the Hotel parking was on the 7th floor, and we couldn't get there. We drove several laps, but no go. We could get to levels 6 and 8. We could even see level 7. Since there were security guards on every level, we eventually asked one, who instructed to go all the way down to the bottom, then from there switch over the other half of the parking structure with the odd levels. Apparently it had been possible to cross between them at one time, but that had been undone in the name of security. Whatever. We were too tired to care.

(view from our hotel room)

Seeing Red

Eight and a half years after we started redoing the room which would become our bedroom, I finally started painting this week.

When we first moved into this house in 1998, this room was used as the guest/junk room. It was pepto-bismol pink and it smelled funny, especially in the closet. There was one large triple window, but it was in really bad condition. Only one of the three sections could be opened. On two of the three sections, one layer of glass was broken, so they were single pane. We tried storing cardboard boxes in the closet, but after just a couple of weeks, they got mildewy. After that, it was just wasted space.

When we started redoing the room, one of the first things we did was rip up the floor. There we discovered the source of odor: the sewage pipe from the bathroom went under the closet, and it was missing a piece. The horizontal pipe emptied directly into the vertical pipe--instead of a bend piece, it was open. Eeeew! Once that was fixed, the room smelled a bit better, but it was still a little funky. The floor also hid places where the subfloor wasn't poured all the way out to the rock foundation. Here it was just dirt. Filling these holes solved the mildew problems in those corners. In the meanwhile, we had just the cement sub-floor for a year or so.

We also ripped down the ceiling/attic floor and redid it so that we could store things in the attic and not risk stepping through the rotted boards (15 inch wide oak, but so rotted we could break them by hand). We replaced the 1950's vintage triple window with a smaller but more age appropriate double window. That in itself would have made the room darker, which we'd never do, so we also reinstalled two windows in the gavel end of the house. From the outside, we could see where these windows had been bricked up. The view out these windows is probably the best in the house, and we often see wildlife in that direction. When we put in these windows, we pulled down the drywall that had lined that wall. Behind the drywall was fiberglass insulation, but it looked more like a giant ant farm for mice. Once that was gone, the smell disappeared.

We did all this from sub-floor to ceiling ourselves. We did have an electrician do some work and inspect what we'd done, and we had someone else coat the brick and adobe walls with cement. Then we installed in-floor heating and click together wood-laminate flooring. This knotty pine flooring looks okay and age appropriate, but it turned out to be a bit soft and has scratched easily. Shortly before our daughter was born, we moved our bedroom into this room.

After that, remodeling was no longer a priority. We decided the cement walls were too rough, so we spackled all but the chimney. We also installed a wood burning stove. Before we could paint, I wanted to fix all the cracks and scratches in the spackle. Unfortunately I'm far too much of a perfectionist for this job, and I would work for hours on just a couple of square feet. By this fall, I'd finally managed to spackle over 3/4 of the room, but the remaining walls came into room (around the pantry) and were especially exposed. I just couldn't get them right. We brought in the pros, and these two guys did the job in about half an hour. Spackle complete, we now had no excuses not to paint. I no longer liked the original blue color scheme we had selected for the room 7 years ago, so we started over with a mountain of brochures and paint chips. Having worked at a paint factory, I was inspired to challenge my inclination to paint everything a variation on white, so we chose deep red for the interior walls. I wanted tan for the exterior walls, but my husband feared it would look like we tried and failed to match the light yellow of the kitchen, so we chose a warm white.

We started with the chimney, which really couldn't be anything other than white. Really, there was no reason we couldn't have done this years ago. It certainly would have made sense to paint it before installing the fireplace. This was phase one, and I did the first coat on Wednesday (a holiday because of the 13th day of Christmas). The paint really got sucked into the cement, so there wasn't enough for two coats. We apparently bought the last one liter can of this stuff in Skåne, but we did manage to find more paint (a larger can and a different brand) so I could do the second coat on Saturday. I also did the prep work for the red walls and brush painted the edges and corners on Saturday then continued on Sunday. When I first opened the can, I was shocked--it was bright red and a little pinkish. As I painted, I was reminded of all the things that were this color: lipstick, firetrucks, etc. The second coat looked more like our old Volvo 740. Miraculously, the third coat dried darker and pretty much how we expected. The white chimney is pretty contrasty, so I think I'll get my way with the darker exterior walls, but that will have to wait a few weeks.

The biggest question remains: Why didn't we do this years ago?

New Blog

Today I created a new blog for the purpose of showing photos and marketing my photography. It's not pretty, but at least I got it to link to my regular website and display large photographs. (The size of the photographs is one of the things that have frustrated me with this blog.) Hopefully I will eventually figure out how to make it more attractive. I've been told that a blog is a great asset and supplement to a regular website. If it's done right, it's easily found by search engines and thus an excellent marketing tool.

I will keep using this blog, as I have, to share my personal thoughts and activities.

On my mind these days is our upcoming trip to Florida. We leave next Saturday, all three of us. For the first week my husband will be at a meeting in Miami, so my daughter and I will have time to explore. My mom and her husband will come to Miami to meet us there. It will be nice to see them since we didn't see them for Christmas. The second week the three of will have our first family vacation together that isn't all about visiting relatives. We're looking forward to seeing the Everglades and the Keys.

So from here in our snowy winter wonderland, I've been surfing up hotels and activities in sunny and warm south Florida. If anyone's been to this area, tips would be greatly appreciated.

Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve started out as another Christmas. We ate scones and cookies at my mother-in-law's house and opened presents from her and my brother-in-law's family.

We were invited to a New Year's Eve party this year, with the same people who had the Halloween party. It was nice. The highlight of the evening was fireworks at midnight. It's the one time per year where the usually safety-obsessive Swedes abandon all common sense. Kids light fire-crackers and mini-rockets in their hands then throw them at each other. This year's ads for fireworks featured things like safety glasses and hearing protection for kids, which is definitely a step in the right direction, but a lot of the rockets seem just plain dangerous. Even if you do manage to pound the things into the frozen ground sufficiently, misfires seem to be fairly common, and a rocket going any direction other than up is bad news. To me, the fountain style fireworks seem a lot safer than the type that shoot high into the air.

So anyway, we were outside at midnight where it was -8 C (18 F). We toasted each other with champagne and sparkling cider. I chose the cider, but I didn't drink it fast enough, and it froze in the glass. The alcohol in the champagne functioned as antifreeze to keep it liquid. There was still a little snow left from before Christmas, and it had been supplemented with a powered sugar dusting the night before. This evening there was a rim frost which covered not only the grass and cars but the trees as well. Add the full moon, and the fireworks, and it was a very bright and beautiful night.

I realize now that it's been 10 years since we were last invited to a New Year's Eve party. It was the big 2000 party, and I remember it fondly. It's also weird to think how much has changed since then. Our friends who hosted the party have divorced, moved away, and remarried. Other friends who seem to have had kids forever did not have kids yet, and neither did we.

I'm not much for new year's resolutions, but I'm setting a goal for a happier and healthier year. I'm going to focus on the positive and not dwell on the negative. I'm also going to try to exercise more and eat better. Sound familiar? At least I'm not resolving to lose weight.