Debby and us

Sunday June 24, 2012
Lithia Spring Park Site 25
Lithia, Florida

 

 

I wake up to the rain on the roof.  Sounds soooo nice.   Not much encouragement to get up and go out to run.  So I don’t.  I read instead.

 

 

 

 

 

But then my guilty conscience gets the better of me.  I stick my head out the door.  The rain isn’t nearly as strong as it sounds on the roof inside the coach.  Somehow I can never remember that even though I lived for years in a farmhouse with a tin roof. 

 

 

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t like to run but running in the rain actually is my favorite if I could be said to have one.  Let me qualify, that’s if the rain isn’t too cold or too strong.  I get on my gear including, out of habit, my walkman so I can listen to a book on tape which usually makes the time go faster for me.  But I don’t listen to it, I don’t need it at all today.  I don’t need a hat either.  Just let the rain wash over me.

 

 

 

 

Out I go and I have a GREAT time.  The rain and the temperature are just right.  I’m not in favor of Tropical Storms and certainly not if they decide to turn into Hurricanes and come my way but Debby has so far only sent me this nice rain and I’m thankful. 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t get hot, I don’t sweat, I don’t have trouble with the air soup because there isn’t any soup just rain drops and there isn’t any heat.  It is the easiest run I’ve done in a LONG time.   If I can arrange for the rains in Florida to come overnight and last until say 10am, I’ll run in them all the time.

 

 

 

 

After I finish with my 5 miles I come back but I’m not ready to come in.  It is just too nice outside.  Besides I’ve seen a hawk right down on the post next to the outdoor shower at the spring and David has seen him too when he was on his walk. (He took an umbrella)  So I think there is a chance I can take the camera out and maybe get a picture of the hawk.  Or not.  I don’t care.  I’m just not finished being outside yet.  And besides I want to walk the path from the boat dock to site 40 and see what all this rain has done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I get some pictures of the park in the rain and the rising waters.  The hawk is on the fence  this time but flies up into a tree before I can get a good focus on him. None of the shots I take of him from below are good enough to print.  Oh well I saw a drenched hawk close up and he looked seriously wet, just like me.   The ducks I’d seen earlier are also gone.  DARN!   I like being wet with these guys.

 

 

 

My last stop is the natural spring where I find the water is really up and the grasses are getting submerged.  It looks much more flooded than the public spring.

Eventually the rain picks up and I am totally soaked to the skin so I begin to get chilly.  Chilly, in late June in Mid Morning In Florida. AMAZING!  I walked over but I run back to the coach. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David takes a picture of the happy drowned rat.  No need to shower.  :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a delicious scrambled breakfast and hash browns.  We talk to Carrie and my father on the phone….free Verizon minutes on week-ends.
Then we do the final touches on the financial aid applications for housing during the stem cell transplant.  I thought I was finished with all of that when Carrie finally got out of the education game.  L

 

 

 

 

In the afternoon I drive up to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for omeprazole.  David is having some stomach troubles due to the chemo drugs and taking these before he eats helps.

 

 

We have the weather radio on but don’t hear anything alarming.  Mostly just coastal rip tide warnings.  The tornados seem to be to the north of us unfortunately they are around the spot we will be moving to next week which is concerning.  So far Debby has been very nice to us.  Hope she doesn’t change her mind.  And hope she travels away by the time we have to move.

 

 

 

 

We have beans and rice and beautiful red chard for dinner.  Local weather is much more specific and shows every county touching the gulf has 4-9” of rain. 

 

They show tornado damage, flooded streets, giant waves.  They say another 2 days of rough weather.   Thank goodness we are on the far end of Hillsborough County and away from the Bay and Gulf.  Boy are we lucky this didn’t happen while we were at the beach.

 

 

After dinner the rain is still heavy.  Someone comes down the drive in a car, honks, comes up to the door and says a tornado is coming and they are leaving.  We haven’t seen that at all.  Not on the weather radio or the TV.  No winds or anything here.  We think he is foolish to be driving in this weather.  We go out into the rain and move the boats, the bikes, the car away from the coach.   We keep watching and listening.  If it it looks as though it is coming here, we are possibly the only RV in the park, the other two were a pop up camper and a truck camper, and possibly the only people in the park other than the one house for the on site Ranger up near the station.  We will go to the bathroom which is the only building with no windows. 

 

But we never see anything that shows our area on the map for a tornado.   There are a lot of them touching down with damage and continued flooding in areas closer to the gulf.  We continue watching the radar until all the cells have passed to the north of Tampa.  This reminds us of last year when we were running from tornados in Oklahoma and sitting in shelters.  Ruby was damaged by hail, we crossed the Mississippi in Nashville the day before they closed the bridge due to its flooding.  Very scary.

Now the rain gets very heavy.  It almost sounds like hail.  Things have changed, we watch a very red area on the radar moving right through Lithia.  But luckily we have no winds.  Just nearly deafening rains.  We can hardly hear the weather. 

The rain stops just after 10:00.  We are very lucky.  Our day ends not with a hurricane but with tornados passing us by.  Even the rain has stopped…….for now. 

Tomorrow is David’s last pre-stem cell transplant visit with his Moffitt hematologist Dr. Ken Shain.  We are hoping the flooding and damage we are seeing on TV in Tampa doesn’t prohibit us from keeping that appointment.  But I guess we won’t know until morning.

Surprise Package

Friday June 22, 2012
Lithia Springs Park Site 25
Lithia, Florida

 

Another humid morning after another rainy night.

I get up this morning and slog through 4.5 miles at a snail’s pace.  Temperature 75, humidity 93%.  The most interesting thing about it is the two wild hogs that went running across the road in front of me nearly scaring me to death.  I had no idea there were wild boar here.  I’ll have to ask the rangers.  We’ve been here a LOT of days over the past 4 months and I’d never seen them before.  When I finally get back,  my clothes are sopping.  I can ring them out.   I begin my stretching exercises outside but it is so hot I come inside.  I never do this.   Oh my, it’s only June.  What will August be like??

 

 

David goes off to Brandon to get our Check Engine light turned off by replacing the faulty Oxygen Sensor heating element part of the Emissions control apparatus.  He has arranged all this with several phone calls and we think we are all set.  The part is in, he gets to the shop early.

I finish my exercise routine, shower and get some breakfast for myself. One of my goals today is to clean all the floors and carpets in the motor home. 

By the time I am nearly finished with the cleaning, he calls to say they couldn’t get the old part off without potentially breaking it and having to go to greater lengths to extract the broken piece embedded in the exhaust manifold.  This might mean the manifold too would have to be replaced.   The mechanic suggests we skip it as this part really isn’t necessary anyway.  Well then……….    Guess we need a second opinion on this operation from our back home mechanic via telephone.   Took the whole morning, the problem is not solved and more things are added to the list.  Drat!  

BUT, the silver lining is that they didn’t charge him anything for all their time and trouble.  Great guys at Precision Auto in Brandon.  This is the second time we’ve had work done there and been very satisfied. 

The only golden part of all this is that David was feeling well enough to do it!!

 

Oh dear, what can the park Ranger want??

Am I the only one who wonders what I did wrong when I see an official of some kind headed my way?  Or is it left over guilt from all those things I did do when I was younger and could.  :-)

 

 

Just after I hang up with David one of the park’s little gas powered carts comes down the drive and a guy hops out with a package in his hand.  They had told us early on that they didn’t accept packages for campers so I have never had anything sent here.  I have no idea what it is he was bringing to the door.  When I go out, he explains that someone called yesterday and asked that if she sent a package to Sherry and David in Site 25 would it get to them.  He’d promised it would and here it was.   What in the world could it be and from whom I wonder.

 

 

I thank him, take the box inside and open it up to find a brand new copy of The Most Scenic Drives in America.   I have no idea who sent it but the fact that whoever it was did not know that our last name was Boyd makes me think it must have been one of this blog’s wonderful followers.   I hope whoever was so generous will fess up so that we can thank them for such a nice book to dream with.   It really was a WONDERFUL surprise.   Like a Christmas present you didn’t know was coming.  Definitely makes my morning.

 

In the afternoon, the sun lures me outside.

 

 

The sun is shining.  I want to be outside.  I take the camera to see what’s new in our front yard.  I stay out as long as the “88 feels like 98” degree temperature and the mosquitoes will allow which unfortunately isn’t very long.  It’s amazing how full of water the air is.  I do see quite a few mushrooms shooting up all over with all this rain.  I notice the moss seems to be creeping over everything it can.  I wonder if over the next 10 days of rain it will cover Winnona as well.

 

 

 

I send out an Update on David to his family via email.  Not sure how many do or do not read the blog.  There is only one who comments fairly frequently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spend the rest of the afternoon lazily doing a lot of nothing.  I read a Margaret Truman Mystery.  He reads the Myeloma Listserve.  The rains start again pretty seriously after dinner around  6:00 and are still coming on strong at bedtime.   We’ve finished Stem Cell Transplants from the Patient’s Perspective and return to reading aloud the last couple hundred pages of Shadow Country.

 

It is a slow, wet, humid day and a rainy evening. 

Great for mushrooms and moss.  We didn’t do much and David is disappointed he didn’t get that light checked off his list.   But he’s feeling pretty good, not too tired and we had a wonderful surprise.
All in all, I’ll take it! 

Many thanks again to our secret benefactor.  
Now who could it be????

Morning walk, afternoon appointments

Thursday June 21, 2012
Lithia Springs Park Site 25
Lithia, Florida

 

I love Rain on the roof.

It begins raining about 7:00 on Wednesday night and is still raining when we go to bed.  Should be good sleeping but we are both restless and don’t sleep soundly.

 

 

When I go out in the morning everything looks fresh and clean  though the air is heavy from the rain.  Site 25 is not on the river, but there is a path to the river so I take off with my camera to have a look.

 

Along the way, each time I stop to take a picture the mosquitoes attack.  This isn’t going to be a long walk I realize.

 

 

 

I reach the river and decide to take my chances and go part of the way down the riverside path. 

 

 

 

 

 

As I walk along at the foot of one of the trees by the river, I come upon a trash stash and wonder why if they can collect it they can’t cart it.  I don’t have my backpack which always has a bag for picking up trash so I’ll have to come back and get this pile.  I just don’t understand such thoughtless inconsiderate behavior amid such beauty. 

 

 

 

I stop in at Site 40, my favorite.  Amazingly, it’s still empty.  I later find we are the only folks camped in the park this morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I head up the driveway to return home, I hear a rustling just above my head.  I’m not particularly a squirrel lover since they tend to get into things and make a mess but this guy was so cute with the mushroom treasure he’d found.

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s appointments are not at the hospital.   David has to have his teeth cleaned before the transplant since he will not be able to take any chances with any bleeding afterwards.  So he has made an appointment for 10:30 for that.   This time Ruby gets to wait.

 

 

 

 

 

Then at 11:00 Ruby goes in for two new front shoes.  We are trying to get ahead on things that might go wrong in the near future when neither of us can attend to them.  We prefer small shops to the dealers.   We’ve always found they do a better job.  The service here is good and so are the new tires.  Another concern crossed off the list.

 

 

 

David seems to be feeling well today.  I ask about his hip and he reports no soreness from the bone biopsy yesterday.  That is just amazing to me.  He tells me he slept on that side and it was fine.  Now there is a another thing to be glad about.

 

We’re very happy to mark two pre-transplant errands off the list but there are still several others to go.  It will be very hard to get anything done while he is in the hospital and once he gets out and needs care 24/7.  So we are trying to think of everything and take care of it now.

 

As you know, I have been feeling somewhat sorry for us having to be in Florida during the summer and especially during hurricane season.  This was definitely NOT in the plans.  But today a friend in Vermont writes to tell me that the high today in Woodstock is going to be in the upper 90’s.  I check my former home town, Charlottesville, and its high is predicted to be 98.  My daughter Carrie, in Pikesville Maryland will be having 97 degrees.  Well the 88 degrees predicted for here is looking pretty good!  Although with 93% humidity that 88 feels like 98 and it’s hard to be outside.  The air is thick.  I practically wilt.  But still, as misery loves company, it makes me feel a little better knowing that everyone else is suffering too.  Isn’t that terrible!  Even folks in Sacramento and New England where we had intended to be.  Guess before I get too smug, I’d better check on Nova Scotia since that was to be our destination.

 

It has rained off and on all day and begins in earnest again this evening.  I check the 10 day forecast and see that it is 50-100% chance of rain every day.  This is just like the weeks before our last “vacation” and then for that one vacation week, it didn’t rain.  That allowed me to spend beautiful days at the beach.   Makes me feel very lucky as the rain pounds on the roof.