2010 Jan. 8, Friday.
We went to the book store at Gulf Coast Mall for coffee and donut at 10:00, and I worked on downloading the pictures we took at Lakes Park yesterday to send to my list of people. It took me three tries and 2 hours to get it done. For some reason, the site I usually use, Kodak Gallery, wouldn’t work right. First, it accepted 7 pictures out of 30, and then the computer froze up. After shutting down completely and starting from scratch, it appeared as though it was downloading. But when it finished after several minutes, it displayed “No pictures downloaded”. Frustrated, I went to Snapfish and finally got the job done.

For lunch we went to Miller’s Ale House just a block away. They have very good hamburgers, so we went off the seafood diet for a day! After lunch, we went to Target to buy a small TV. The one we have in the 5th wheel now needs a box to convert the analog signal to digital which costs $62 at Radio Shack. Since we are selling the RV, we decided to just get a small 19” TV that we can take home when we leave. The grandkids play-room TV will be upgraded - they will love that! We went back to the RV to set it up and had a short visit from the Sands from Dwight. They rent a place near the Ahearns, and they invited us to a party next Friday. If we can’t come to this area in the future, we will miss seeing friends like the Ahearns, Sands, and Haltermans.

At dusk, it started to rain lightly. A couple stopped by and bought our dish antenna, two folding chairs, and our patio table. We have a sign out that we have things for sale. Now if someone would just stop and buy the RV!

WEATHER: Low last night of 38, high today of 71! It felt great! However, high tomorrow is predicated to be 49 with rain. Lows Sat. & Sun. night of 33, but in the 20’s inland. But the future looks good - next Tuesday, high predicted of 70, and increasing from there. Finally!

FL NEWS: 1) The front-page headline today was about the weather - “How cold will it get?”. Some forecast indicate this weekend will be in the upper 20’s inland, which would cost the fruit and vegetable farmers a six-figure amount. 2) Collier County (which includes Naples) has voted to financially back efforts to bring the Chicago Cubs to the area for spring training. The money would come from a tourist bed tax and would not raise property taxes or sales taxes. 3) A major Everglades restoration project has begun in Collier County east of Naples. A failed housing development of 55,000 acres will be restored to Mother Nature’s river of grass as closely as possible. Canals will be filled, roads will be taken out, and pump stations will be added at a total cost of $435 million. The area is surrounded by public land, and its restoration will fill the 55,000 acre ‘hole in the doughnut’. It will become a healthy piece of a watershed flow-way to the gulf, adding life and promise to that estuary system.