Is This Hockey Or What?

On Thursday Sandy and I went down to Tampa for a night out on the town , or as much of a night as the two of us are capable of doing at our age. The first stop was going to the Hard Rock Seminole Casino. Not for gambling, but for buying souvenir t-shirts for our niece. Man that place is way out of Tampa near the Junction of I 4 and 275. We were so lucky as to be looking for it at rush hour and evening traffic. Now I've been in a lot of Hard Rocks across this country, from San Francisco to NYC to Key West, but this place is bizarre. It rises up out of former scrub brush and swampland and is gleaming white and maybe 4 or 5 stories high. We parked in a gravel parking lot, and had a quick wander through the lobby to the giftshop, bypassing the gambling casino. The place was filled with Yankee Lincolns and Cadillacs of the Behemoth style,i.e. monsterous chrome bedecked house- sized sedans with an acre of ugly vinyl for roofs. They all had northern license plates and sheriff stickers on the rear. I'm mystified at the typical Florida car that is always around me in traffic. Why do these people all have stuffed animals in the rear windows?? They have dogs , cats, monkeys , and things I can't identify. Another thing they do is blow their horn at me as I make unknown transgressions. Every time I look up to see who is impatiently beeping at me the culprit is usually an 80 plus year old man or woman, that I can only guess where they are in such a hurry to go.I guess it is because they are Northerners with stuffed animals in their windows. After the Hardrock Experience we went downtown Tampa to the waterfront to a first for us- a hockey game. Tampa has a professional hockey team, the Tampa Lightenings, which won the Stanley Cup last year, something I was told which is akin to winning the Super Bowl or The World Series. The concierge at Hard Rock told me they weren't very good this year, and they lived up to her prophecy by losing 3-2 to the New Jersey Devils in OT. It was most interesting, as we only knew the very basics of the game. It was very,very loud and chilly inside, as it should be. The sport is comprised of young athletes flying across ice doing everything possible to maime and disfigure each other. Two robust lads spent time in the glassed-in penalty boxes for fighting. Now I know what time out in elementary school was invented for-- it was to prepare future hockey players. The team booklet shows that the oldest player is in his mid twenties , and only three were from the United States. One star was from Finland.THe amazing show was the audience who screamed at the refs and players.They screamed at things that I didn't even know were screamable offenses. Maybe it was like Nascar in that these Thursday night fans were filling their fuel tanks with $6 beer and $8 sandwiches. I bought a Pepsi for $4 and it seemed to be the same recipe that I had paid $1 for previously in my Kentucky life. There were brief moments of cavorting ice cheerleaders, but it only lasted about a minute. In retrospect I guess that's about as long as scantily clad women can dance on ice. The arena ,as I said is about 10 or 12 years old and is beautifully situated on the river and bay of the waterfront. You can look out 70,000 sq ft of glass and see the beautiful skyline of Tampa's tall buildings and highrise condos along the river. The news says that real estate in Hillsborough County(Tampa) and Pasco County(New Port Richey) is down 40 percent. I couldn't swear to this by the Corvettes and Porsches zooming through the rush hour traffic. A very lasting impression of the hockey game is the sheer energy and volume of the music and crowd. It seems Nascar and Hockey share the same hard driving rock music, as is probably appropriate as both sports is full of violence and speed. After a Lightening score the stadium would erupt with a humongous ship's horn as loud as Dale Junior's race car.Then loud rock music as in Welcome to the Jungle. Overall I liked the scene a lot more than the old ones out at Hard Rock.I've got a week left in Paradise and it's been a lot of fun , but these old farts need to lay off blowing their big old chrome horns at me. I'm a stranger in a strange land and try to be a good visitor. But that only can go so far. I may buy me some stuffed animals and put them in the front window of Sandy's car. It can't hurt anything . If there are any mermaids on the net , I've stolen all of Sandy's hand lotion and can meet out back at the dock any time. This has to happen before next Saturday. Welcome to the jungle.

I Could Get Used To This

well, We're in our 3rd week in Paradise and I've found that being in Florida on the water for a month is not nearly as difficult as I thought it was going to be. First of all I'm not missing work like I used to do because I'm not working anymore, sort of like George Bush. Secondly when Kentucky's weather is so horrible, blue skies and 70 degree temps look pretty good. We went to Daytona on Sunday and watched a good race until the end when Matt Kenseth lucked into a victory. There were nearly 160,000 people watching the race and drinking huge quantities of $4 beer, although everyone was well behaved. Young Satan Kyle Busch got taken out on the straight stretch with about 9 others and the excitement faded away. Its amazing how quickly things go downhill at nearly 200 MPH! The pace car , a new model Camaro was driven around the track by Mr. Cole Trickle himself, Tom Cruise. You'd have to have seen Days Of Thunder to understand. Keith Urban performed and the rest is history.I personally liked Tom better in Top Gun. I liked when the Carrier chief called up "Call the Ball, Maverick", and Maverick would say," Mavericks got the ball". I sometimes call the ball when I'm pulling into our garage , and I've even tried a few illegal fly-bys , but generally can't pull it off with the aplomb of Maverick and Goose.We did rent a pontoon and went out in the Gulf and out to the famous sandbar. We saw lots of birds ,a dolphin, and had to stay between the red and green channel markers to keep from running aground in the shallow water. It was amazingly beautiful with the blue skies and white sails all against the horizon. No mermaids, but we had seen several at the Weeki Wachie Springs up the coast from us. This is a corny story but they have nubile young maidens with mermaid outfits on and they cavort under water attached to breathing hoses in the clear natural spring water. The audience sits in a theatre with glass windows to view the show.There was one mermaid that made me wish I was 40 years younger, but I guess I have to stay old and go back north to Kentucky.Timmy and I had driven up north to Williston where The Blue Grotto spring is located. We unloaded our diving gear and had a great dive . We hadn't been down for a while so we cruised around at 55 feet for 34 minutes with no apparent ill effects. How can I be so precise in my numbers? Because my Prodigy Dive computer told me this ,and showed that I was in no danger of getting "bent",or acquiring decompression sickness. The only disappointment was trying to get in my 2 mm wet suit. Man that thing had really shrunk. I think I'm going to get a vet back home to zip the thing on a large hog for a week and maybe stretch the belly to where I can get in it. I did get it on but potentially I could have injured bystanders if the zipper had popped.It will take at least a 300 pound hog to achieve my goal. We have been to Tarpon Springs just down from us and eaten Greek food and desserts. All the sponge divers were Greeks and the little town is very picturesque with neat shops and great old boats in the harbor. Did I mention  there were tons of old,old people sightseeing there? There can't be any elderly people up north because they're all down here. I haven't watched tv or listened to news for three weeks and haven't missed either. I guess that I have to re-enter adulthood sooner or later, but I'm holding off as long as possible. Peter Pan and Neverland make more sense everyday. If I enter and find that creepy assed Michael Jackson ther then I'll just go back to Weeki Wachie and the Mermaids.

It's Cold

Here it is the 4th of February and we are in New Port Richey for the whole month, and tonight might be a record cold. The weather forecasters are predicting temps in the teens. Nevermind that the sky was beautiful blue and the temps were in the 50's today. It was snowing in Kentucky and the temperature tonight is supposed to be zero!We're waiting until this weekend when it's supposed to be normal Florida weather, the mid 70's. Our rental house is on a canal with a boatdock and water that flows into the deep blue of the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday we cruised down the coast in the Yukon across the Skyline Bridge to Sanibel and Captiva.Captiva is as nice as I remembered but Sanibel is infested with old farts riding bicycles.I think the median age on Sanibel is 89 years old, but they're all mobile and running from the grim reaper. It seems that every corner has a Publix grocery and we've certainly done our share of support in the few days we've been here.Florida residents are certainly a diverse bunch of people, mainly sharing old age and strange dress. The Publix store looks like they dumped a rest home upside down and all the residents escaped and fell into the grocery. The old ladies wear too much rouge on their emaciated cheeks while their husbands wear garb reminiscent of cowboys.Maybe Roy and Dale are alive and well in Tampa!!I chose this week to resign from a job of 30 years.Nothing in sight for the future but there was nothing in sight working. Maybe I'll just get a job in Publix and push in the stray grocery carts lurking in the parking lot. I'll have to learn to talk like a yankee as it seems all the elderly workers are Northerners. A week from Sunday and we're going over to Daytona to watch the boys in the big dance, and that will certainly liven things up. I have to talk to the new neighbors about whether its okay to fish in the canal, as I believe I can become another Papa Hemingway. I'll have to buy equipment and a license before I can acquire the new skills. They say I need to rent a pontoon and go out to the sandbar in the Gulf because there is supposed to be a lot of aquatic things happening out there. I guess I'll wait until Timmy gets down and we'll go out and fight the rays and sharks. Maybe we'll get lucky and find us a couple of mermaids. I don't know why but I always think of Mermaids as young beautiful women. I bet they have rough, dry skin from all that time in the salt water. Pictures always portray them as beautiful girls basking on the rocks, combing their hair and trying to lure sailors to them. That's as far as the story always goes, and I wonder if any of the participants ever get lucky. Or even if you can get lucky with a mermaid. I don't know much about mermaid anatomy. I wonder if the mermaids would need lotion like Sandy uses on their dry skins?Maybe I'll stop at Publix and get some beauty stuff to trade out at the sandbar. A little wine might help. The truth of the matter is that any mermaid I would meet would probably look like some of those chubby, welfare spending ,lottery buying wenches from the Trading Post back home. Of course I'm not so great myself and I don't even have a vocation.Maybe those chubby mermaids aren't so bad after all. I hope they survive the next couple of cold nights, but they're probably down around South Beach tonight basking offshore dodging Cigarette boats and the Art Deco neon.If there are any mermaids out there with a laptop and wifi I'll be around for the rest of this month.See you at the sandbar. If I'm not there you can find me at the Publix on Highway 19 North,just beyond Flora Mer ,looking at painted old ladies.