Mardi Gras Legacy
We had almost a full week of grim, grey skies and little sunshine, during which I saw the sad reminders of Mardi Gras valiantly trying to sparkle in the trees:
Record High
Today the high temperature in Pensacola, FL was 87°F. It was a record high temperature for this date, March 2. The temperature yesterday was also a record high, 82°F.
It is also raining. So it is hot, and it is humid. And it is only the beginning of March. At the beginning of February, I celebrated. We didn’t have to use the heat or the air conditioning for the entire month, and our electric bill was a mere $100. You need lights. You need to use the oven now and then, and the washer and dryer, computers and TV’s. If you could see our other electric bills (the heat and air run on electricity) you would know why I celebrate $100. for January.
Earlier this week, it was in the 60°’s (F) in the mornings, and I weeded! It was foggy and cloudy, and it felt a whole lot like Seattle, where the temperatures are around 40 something this week. Give me cold any day. You can always put on more clothes when it gets cold, but when it is hot and humid, even with the AC, it is still hot and humid.
It is still raining, and humid. There is a tornado watch on until midnight. I was near a tornado once, living further south in Florida, and the sky turned green and it sounded like the biggest loudest freight train in the world, and it didn’t even hit in my neighborhood. You could hear it anyway. It is a terrifying sound.
Our pomegranate tree is leafing out, our blueberries have blossoms and it really is time for a spring clean up, if only we can have a few more cool days in March before the serious heat sets in.
Snow Quilt in Steamboat, CO
People are SO creative!
Pensacola Advisories from Weather Underground
Active Advisory: Tornado Warning, Tornado Watch, Severe Thunderstorm Warning, Flash Flood Warning, Areal Flood Watch, Wind Advisory (US Severe Weather)
Rainy Saturday at 5 Sisters in Pensacola
It’s been rainy and dark the entire day, and I know what I need – I need to go to Five Sisters. We had planned to go to the huge Pensacola Mardi Gras Parade, but as the rain came down, my spirits were also dampened. There was a time – and I could see in AdventureMan’s eyes, he was hoping this wasn’t one of those times – when I would have said “We HAVE to go, even if it is raining!”
He has a little cold and I drift in and out of allergies, and standing a couple hours out in the rain and hollering and catching beads is probably not what mature people like us should be doing. (A part of me is greatly depressed at being so ‘mature’.)
But I know just the thing. Five Sisters. As we drive up, a parking space becomes available, always a good omen, and as we walk to the door, we are greeted with divine fragrances of smoke and grilling meat and we are starting to feel better already.
On the menu board, one of the specials of the day is BBQ Shrimp. Ummmm, ummmmmm, doesn’t that sound good on a rainy day. I order the BBQ Shrimp with cheese grits and a salad, AdventureMan orders the Seafood Platter. Bluesy music, some old hits from the 60’s and 70’s, and our food comes.
My BBQ Shrimp was AWESOME. Today it was tangy, vinegar-y and Tabasco sauce, the essence of Louisiana. It came sizzling hot, but the shrimp still had the shells on, which AdventureMan tells me is the way it comes when it is BBQ Shrimp in the South. Oh well, it is a good thing that the shells are on and I have to work to get them off before I can eat each one, if I didn’t have to get those tails and shells off I would probably gobble them down in no time at all! As it was, I was able to bring about half of the shrimp home to savor later. 🙂
AdventureMan said on the way home “Oysters sure are rich, aren’t they?” I just laughed, I like oysters cooked, but mostly I like them steamed, and even then, they are so rich I can’t eat many of them. If you deep fry them, you just add rich on rich. His dish was fish, shrimp and oysters, deep fried, and some of 5 Sisters fabulous fries, which he didn’t eat, and didn’t need because there was so much seafood on the Seafood Platter:
As we left, it was still raining, one of those days that went from dark to dark grey to not-quite-so-dark grey to a couple moments of light grey and then back to dark grey and now it is almost dark once again. We don’t often have a day with no sunshine in Pensacola, and it is very very sad when that one day is the day of the Pensacola Mardi Gras Parade and it pours down rain just as the parade is starting. Sometimes life just isn’t fair. But Five Sisters puts a smile back on our faces every time.
Winter Beach in Pensacola
We had great weather during the Doha reunion, great in that it was warm every day, and it only rained a little now and then. We had lots of sunshine, and they even got to experience a little bit of Pensacola sultriness.
The big thrill, for me, was the winter beach. I love good wave action, and a little drama in the sky. The Pensacola beach, with its gorgeous white sands, gave it to us in full:
Slow Moving Severe Weather
The last of my Doha friends left yesterday, not without moments of hilarity. We had a great time together, and all my concerns about visiting Pensacola in the coldest month of the year were for naught. The weather, every single day, was in the 70’s, and one of the days it almost hit 80. One friend was flying straight into severe weather, and I wonder how it affected her day – if she even got home.
We had one lovely evening when our son and his wife and little happy toddler came over, laughing and talking, and our sweet daughter in law introduced all my friends to a Pensacola specialty, Sin in a Tin. Our last stop on their last day was the market where they could stock up on it to take back with them!
I am keeping my own eye on this ‘slow moving weather front’ because it is headed our way. If you’ve seen the devastation in Dallas, you’ll know – hurricane level destruction, 90 mph winds – high winds and lots of rain, and flooding.
When I checked Weather Underground this morning, this is what it looks like heading towards Pensacola:
Scary looking, hmmm?
Qatari Cat’s Happy Place
Winter in Pensacola is mercurial, one minute the temperatures are in the seventies, and the next minute we are covering our more fragile plantings and hoping they make it through the freeze. This year we had hibiscus blooming that has suffered from the winter two winters ago, a very cold winter, and we weren’t sure they would survive – for two years!
When the temperatures go down, the Qatari Cat begs to go out into the garage (he remembers it is a very warm place) but two minutes later he is saying “I made a big mistake! Let me in!”
Last year we bought an electric bed for him. It doesn’t get really warm, not as warm as a heating pad, but it gets warm enough that he thinks it is heaven. He could stay in the bed just about all day, rolling around so that every part of him gets some of the warmth some of the time. He doesn’t leave it much except to eat.
I keep it in my office, at my feet. He dreams, snorts, shudders, moans and growls, and nothing I do bothers him in the least. He has found his happy place. 🙂
Christmas Time in Pensacola
Christmas in Pensacola starts just after Thanksgiving, for most people. I saw a very few decorations go up around Veteran’s Day (11 November) but very few. Most started going up around Thanksgiving. Because we are having some work continuing on our house, I couldn’t do the same decorations I did last year, so I did something new; my goal in the week before I left was to get SOME Christmas up, inside and out.
This year, AdventureMan is here, too, and it makes all the difference. Last year, he left for Kuwait just before Christmas, and I was so sad that it was hard to put a lot of effort into decorating. I did it, mostly because I am too proud not to. (No. I will not let adversity get me down!) But mostly, it takes a lot of energy to fight depression, so this year, I am appreciating just how good it is to have a ‘normal’ Christmas, i.e. my husband is on the same continent as me, in the same country, even the same state, same city, and same residence. It’s all good. 🙂
Our tree this year is smaller – and higher – that other years, and all the ornaments on it are unbreakable. Yes. Happy Baby, now Happy Toddler, will be coming by and I want to protect him – and the tree. Over the years we have collected so many wonderful ornaments that I have a lot to work with, and still manage to have a nice tree; the angel on the top is a traditional angel from Nurnberg, and we bought it the first year we were married. It’s nice to have her high on the top of the tree once more.
Under the tree, covering the table, is a special wool sefsari we bought when we lived in Tunisia, bright red with bands of gold trim. These were everywhere when we lived there, especially in the cold winters, but when we visited, I no longer saw them in any stores. Covering the tree stand, I have one of my smaller Damascus tablecloths; I treasure these coverings, and beads, Pensacola parade beads.
“Beads!” we shouted to Happy Toddler as we put them over his head.
“Beads!” the crowd shouted as the floats went by at the Pensacola Christmas Parade last night.
Last year, even as a Happy Baby, the parade was an enthralling event. What baby wouldn’t love a parade that starts with flashing lights, and motorcycles, and a loudly wailing, lights fashing FIRE TRUCK?? What Happy Toddler wouldn’t love the bands with the throbbing drums, and trumpets, and tubas, and trombones? And the dancing girls, and oh yes – the BEADS! Life is sweet at the Pensacola Christmas Parade.
The parade starts at 5:15 and we get there about 5:14. Here is what I love about Pensacola; you can get there at 5:14 and get a place to park only about 1/2 a block from the parade and be there when the spectacle begins. It is a laid back kind of parade, still a community parade, you see your friends there. It is sort of a Christmas parade, you see some Santas, and some reindeer, and snowmen, and there is usually at least one float with angels, but it is also sort of Mardi Gras, with all the Krewes (local social groups focused on Mardi Gras) on floats with their buds throwing beads, coins, toys and candy out into the waiting, dancing crowd.
Technically, I know this isn’t a great photo because you can’t even really tell what it is, but it is the beginning of the parade, and I love the motion of it all:
As it turned out, we were in a pretty good spot for catching beads, and we loaded down the Happy Toddler, put a few on each of us, and shared the bounty with some of the babies standing behind us. There were some people in front of us who caught a LOT of beads, and as soon as they caught them, they stashed them in a bag; they caught LOTS. Maybe they sell them back or something.
Last week, we took Happy Toddler to Boats on the Bayou, where boats decorated with Christmas lights gather near the bridge and then come parading to the park, and people gathered there sing Christmas Carols. Happy Toddler loves going to the park; the boats were interesting for about five seconds, and then he got to swing and play on the playground, which mattered a whole lot more to him:
It was just a really fun, community thing, and it was pretty, too.
Lunch at the Fish House, always a treat, and their tree is BLUE!
The Pensacola Christmas Parade attracts around 50,000 people every year. Imagine! It is so much fun. What I love about it is that there are so many floats, so many bands, so many civic heroes – you know how I feel about giving back to your community. These people are doing it. On one of the coldest nights of the year, they are on the Krewe floats throwing beads, they are patrolling behind the dog clubs, cleaning up, they are making sure the floats make the turn at Wright and Palafox, they are marching with bare legs in the cold, windy night – and it is so much fun.
Who would think that 50,000 people gathered in one place, competing for beads, would keep it all so civil? There is no place for ‘special people;’ we are all Pensacola citizens, there to enjoy a family evening, and it is just that, it is a great Pensacola evening, one of my favorite of the year.
Best of all was watching the Happy Toddler take it all in. The lights! The sirens! The beads, and the scrambling to catch them! The loud music, the pounding drums! It was all so much fun, and that fun was doubled watching him try to figure it all out. I can hardly wait ’till next year. 🙂
In the Garden
The temperatures have fallen, and even ten degrees make all the difference. You feel like going outside again. The heat doesn’t slap you in the face.
Sure, with temperatures still up in the 80’s most days you still work up a sweat if you are digging, planting and weeding, but being outside on the cooler days – and there have been a couple – is sheer joy.
We’ve done some work in the garden, and had some work done with Garden Gate, who are such a delight to work with. They have a landscaper, Carole Simpson, who when we first moved here advised us to do nothing big for a year, but to live with our gardens and see what was working and what we wanted to change.
As it turned out, we have one garden that is nearly perfect – save for the weeding, but even the weeding in that bed is not that hard. We knew we wanted a native plant and grass area, and we had an area where we were concerned about erosion, so we asked for some help with that. I wanted to try some hydrangeas near our back fence. Carole had a couple other ideas, and we liked them, and added them in.
This is our new herb garden, designed to help the area not to erode – and for the sheer joy of the herbs and flowers. 🙂 Two kinds of rosemary! Sage, thyme and oregano!
These are the new hydrangeas; the center back one is an oakleaf hydrangea and the three surrounding it are more compact. I am hoping they will grow into big sprawling shrubs like I had in Seattle.
This is the grassy area, which will take a while to establish and fill out. Years! But we have the time . . . 🙂
This is a vine in its second year in out backyard; it is so happy. The flowers are white. We like it so much we have planted a second one to keep it company on the fence.
AdventureMan has his own project – a butterfly garden. He found all the right plants at Garden Gate and planted them in an old wheelbarrow we found at a yard sale. The very next day, we watched a butterfly come and lay eggs in the milkweed. Since then, AdventureMan has checked the results daily (sometimes hourly, depending on the stage.) We have watched the eggs develop into hungry, hungry caterpillars, and are now watching the caterpillers attach to the underside of the wheelbarrow to become chrysalis, and we hope to be able to see one (or more) become full Monarch butterflies.
When we planted the pomegranate tree in the Spring, we never dreamed it would put forth a fruit the first year, but we are watching our pomegranates (we have two on our small tree) with the same joy we are watching for the butterflies.
Today we awoke to clouds and drizzle – perfect weather for helping our new additions settle in comfortably, establish their roots, get comfortable. We need a good spell of moderate weather before the colder weather sets in.
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