Lynn’s Largemouth Bass @ 2# & 17″

Today I caught my first bass.  It was a 2#  17” largemouth.  No fish for supper tonight though.  We set him free to live another day.  There is a big fish fry in camp on Tuesday.  We can get our fix of fresh bass and hang out with a bunch of the folks from camp.  It should be a fun evening.

We attended a night satellite launch from Canaveral.  We watched from a public viewing area in Titusville 12+ miles away as the crow flies.  We found a good vantage point in a city park along the Indian River.  As launch time approached the crowd grew as did the anticipation.  The TDRS-K(Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) went up on time and we were able to see it through separation with the Centaur rocket.  With such a great distance the roar of the launch was somewhat muffled and delayed over a minute which was a little eerie.  Not as flamboyant as The Shuttle but still, Pretty Cool.

Is it red on black is bad?  Red on yellow?   As this beautiful boldly striped snake wriggles to the side of the trail I try in vain to recall the rhyme the rangers told us to differentiate between a venomous Coral snake and a harmless Scarlet King snake.  I got nothing.  I watch but give the fellow all the space he needs and google it as soon as we got home.  Guess what, the rhyme is: “Red and Yellow kill a fellow, Red and Black friend of Jack.”   We have encountered our first Eastern Coral Snake.

Eastern Coral Snake

The Fairchild Oak at Bulow State park.

Noah’s Ark

Jumping Fish   Sand sculpture

Mother Hubbard’s shoe 

Barnyard

Eagle

Santa’s Sleigh

Thanks to the Charleston SC Parks Department for the lovely drive-thru display open for most of December.  We drove through twice and spent about 2 hours walking around admiring.  Really hard to capture the beauty and grandeur of the many acres of lights.

Hit-n-miss engines are powering all manner of device at a small show in StarkeFL.  We have been to similar shows around Indiana but there were some cool, unique machines here.  There was an early addition shopsmith, sort of.  It is a combination band saw, planer, joiner, and a shaper built in 1910.  It was all belt driven from an old hit-n-miss, single stroke Cushman engine. 

The same collector also had a snow fence making machine, circa 1920 that twisted the wire to capture the slats and automatically coiled the finished fence.  It was quite ingenious.  There were outboard motors back to 1910, a mechanically timed hay compactor/baler, a specialized saw for making shake shingles, and plenty of old tractors.  We got an invite to their big show that is a little further south in January.  Maybe we’ll try it?

We checked out the Charleston Festival of Lights.  Drive-through size wreathes, tree lighting synchronized with Trans Siberian Orchestra music, dinosaurs, animals, nursery rhymes and even an animated lighted snowball fight, a snow tubing Santa, and Santa golfing.  Weight Watcher’s sponsored a display: a reindeer with a yardstick measuring the chimney opening with a glum Santa looking on seeming to bemoan the likelihood of fitting through the chimney…ha ha.  My personal favorites…The Holiday Piggly Wiggly or maybe the hovering hummingbird.

Most unexpected, a huge sand sculpture…Santa checking his list, elves, tree decorating.   They didn’t have those inIndiana.  It was a good addition.