It’s been a rough 4 days in more ways than weather

Friday through Monday  December 13, 14, 15 and 16, 2013
Sebastian Inlet State Park

 

IN GENERAL……

The weather went south on our beach days.  It has been too windy to bike or kayak or be in the water for the past 4 days.  So on Sunday, I decided now was the time to Wipe my Dell Laptop of Windows XP and install Windows 7.  The install went amazingly well but that's when the real trouble began and the last two days have been a nightmare

I’m finding that with Windows 7 I am not able to many many things I was able to do in the past and when I figure out how to do them, things that were one click operations are now 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5 clicks to get the same thing accomplished.   And nothing is less user friendly than moving from Live Writer 9 which was wonderful to Live Writer 2012 which was obviously not designed for the part tine blogger like but for someone with much more knowledge of publishing who wanted way more professional options.

Not to mention that IE7 won’t allow me to bring up blogger.com.  I get this message and have tried googling an answer for it but haven’t found one that works.  I read that this has been a problem between microsoft and google since 2009 so I thought, OK google wins I’ll use Chrome.  But with Chrome the same thing happened only instead of the message saying (IE8) it says (Safari).  I do not use the latter so who knows what argument google has with Safari even if you are using their browser.  When I try to bring up google to change my layout or anything on the dashboard it will not come up and instead up comes this message.  If any of you have ever had this problem, please let me know.

Possible Problem with your ‘*.gwt.xml module file. 
The compile time user agent value (gecko_8) does not match
the runtime user agent value (ie8).  Expect more errors.

Obviously this may never get posted if Live Writer and Blogger will no longer talk to each other now that I’m using Windows 7 and Live Writer 2012.  I actually tried uninstalling it and using Live Writer 11 but even when I uninstalled it and rebooted my machine, the 2011 installer said Oh no, you have a more recent version, uninstall it first.  WHAT?  I did uninstall it.

SO….. there may not be any more blogs from this pair of full timers if it gets any more difficult than this.  It just isn’t worth it.

 

 

There were two days before the Nightmare began.

 

On Friday it was still plenty windy when I went out on bike for Sunrise.

 

 

Friday and Saturday have had the same weather – cloudy and windy although the winds have not been rocking and rolling the rig.  But they have been too strong to do much but check out the sunrise and sunset. 

 

 

 

Taking a morning drive means a bakery stop.

 

Since it was so windy, on Friday we decided to take a drive over to St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park and check out the trails and kayaking.  Of course on the way we had to stop at a little bakery in Vero Beach for a chocolate croissant .I was shocked that they had a chocolate/bacon croissant and he chose a ham and cheese instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After we left the beach communities it was a nice drive through a rural area with traditional Florida cracker houses and interesting historic signs along the way.   This one about the town of  Fellesmere being the first in Florida to give women the right to vote nearly 6 years before the Nation follow suit was the most interesting.  Read the marker inscription here.

 

 

 

 

St Sebastian State park is large and has a lovely visitors center.

 

Unfortunately it was staffed by volunteers who had only been here since October and really couldn’t tell us much of anything about the park or the area or the kayaking.  Not sure what they’ve been assigned to do in those 2 months but learning how to answer visitors questions isn’t one of the things apparently.

We had read that park is 22000 acres preserving open grassy forests of longleaf pine that were once commonplace throughout Florida.  It is home to red-cockaded woodpeckers, the Florida scrub jay, Bachman’s sparrows, sand hill cranes and other birds.  They say West Indian Manatees gather in the C54 canal from November to March although there were none there today.

The park is divided into 4 sections NW, NE, SW and SE which have color coded long trails.  We determined that the park is used primarily by folks on horseback.  They have primitive horse camping with corrals.  Wide tire sand bikers also use it and if you were of a mind to want to walk between 9 and 14 miles you could do the trails in any of the sections.   Even the shortest of these would be an all day venture for us so rather than walk a couple of miles out and turn around and come back, we opted to look for the kayak put ins on the river.

 

 

All boat launching facilities are outside the preserve.

 

 

With the help of a map, we found them at two local parks off of County Rt 505.  Dale Wimbrow Park had what we thought was the nicest put in.  It is a small park with the boat launch, picnic tables and a playground.   We spent some of the nicest time today watching a little heron fishing right around the ramp.

 

 

 

A short distance down the road is Donald MacDonald Park (who would name their child Donald McDONALD or John Johnson or MAC McDonald??).   Donald’s park has 29 campsites some of which we could put Winnona in.  Boondocking for $16.  

 

 

 

 

 

The highpoint of today turned out to be that Mothball man was replaced by a couple of nice young fishermen in a tent and lo and behold our electric problems disappeared.   Since it is no longer in the 80’s we didn’t rejoice quite as much as we might have.  The camp hosts claim they cleaned up the mothballs but David went back over and nearly filled a bag with what they weren’t able to see or smell I guess.

 

And so ends the best day out of the four.

 

 

 

SATURDAY was another VERY Windy Day

 

 

 

More rough seas, no swimming today. But it was fun wading and running from the big ones.

 

 

 

The only other thing noteworthy today was David rearranging the basement to try to balance the weight on the slide which he feels might have been part of the sagging problem.  He has all his tools in these bins and they are heavy.

 

Today the fishermen moved to the site on the other side of us and a giant 5th wheel moved into mothball man’s place.  So far so good in terms of power but who needs AC when the winds are blowing and the temperatures are in the 70’s.  Time will tell, we have 5 more days in this site before moving to the back row.

 

 

 

The sunset was beautiful again.  The winds determine where the clouds will be but they also seem to bring the pelicans out in force.    After dark, the park had one of its “concerts”.  I was afraid of the bugs so David volunteered to go down and check out the quality of the entertainment and let me know if I should risk it.   Last time we were here there was an excellent husband and wife team.  This time he came back at intermission and advised “not so much”.

The sunset put on such a show.  We both think it was to keep our spirits up for what was to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The moon, nearly full, was also beautiful.   We saw none of this beauty for the next two days.  Not only because it wasn’t there, but because we barely had time to check.

 

 

 

Sunday was still windy so we were still inside. Today was the day.

 

The sunrise was more clouded than it has been since we arrived. Rain was predicted and it looked like a certainty in the morning.  So, today is the day to wipe out XP and install Windows 7.

 

 

Heads David installs windows 7.  
Tails, I wrap Yuletide gifts. 
All while listening to holiday music. 
We’re thinking things are going well here.

 

  

And the install did go well, we thought.  Until I found 3 inboxes in my mail, no way to access blogger and my pictures totally a mess.  Some weren’t even on the hard drive.  I didn’t even try Live Writer today.  Already too much stress.  It reminded me of working in IT for years at the University of Virginia.  What was an English Major like me doing there I always wondered……the money of course.

 

 

 

Monday is the first day in 3 years of fulltiming I have taken no pictures at all and neither did David.

 

Today things got much worse as I talked about that at the beginning of this much too long post.  No pictures today.  Still windy.  I did not go out for Sunrise or sunset.  Too furious with how much time and energy this was all taking and how much more difficult everything was to do in these new and improved versions of nice and easy programs.  Sorry to end on such a sour note, but that’s how I feel.  I guess you’ll see if this posts.  I do not have high hopes given what’s been going on.