MORE PICTURES FROM CELEBRATION



 Looking across the lake from the beginning of the walk.

The building at the left is the very nice Celebration Hotel.

Town center is to the left of the hotel.



From a bridge over one of the canals that feed the lake.

In the far background is the Celebration Hotel on the lake.

To the left is a very nice park.  To the right, homes & condos.

A nice live oak with Spanish moss in the middle of the town center.

To the left is the lake, to the right are two restaurants, ahead is a covered area with benches for sitting.  Behind that is our favorite Starbucks.



2011 Mon. Jan 17


Rainy day, so we went to the Florida Mall. We had lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s again. Then Linda went to get her hair cut, and I walked and then read my book. The mall was packed, as we thought it would be, since kids have the day off school but can’t be outside doing things. The Florida hotel is part of the mall, and there is one area leading to it that has a Starbucks with tables with very few people walking through. So that’s where I go to have coffee, a cookie, and read my book. Linda’s hair looks good. Home for supper.


FL WEATHER: High 70, low 48. Cloudy when I got up but raining by 10:00. Kept raining until we left the mall, then just sprinkled for awhile. It’s dry here, so they are glad to get the rain.


FL NEWS: Central Florida Hispanic growth key to state’s two new congressional districts:
Florida’s population growth has earned it two more seats in Congress. Because Hispanics in Central Florida have been key to that growth, Latino leaders are gearing up to try to claim one of those seats. Their numbers have grown by 70 percent and now they top 900,000 in the I-4 corridor. John García, redistricting manager for the Latino Justice Program, headquartered in New York, said, “The I-4 corridor represents the largest growth of Latinos in the entire state. We want to see a much more equitable representation of their voice in the Florida Legislature and look at the data to see if there could be a congressional district as well.” In Florida, Hispanics may account for more than half of the state’s population growth through this decade - at least 51 percent. In the Central Florida counties of Orange, Osceola, Lake, Polk, Seminole and Volusia, the Hispanic population grew by 70 percent, from 347,000 in the 2000 census to almost 590,000 in 2009. Legislators have to follow the rules approved by voters last year in the “Fair Districts” amendments, which require congressional and legislative boundaries that are geographically compact and contiguous, follow city or county lines when possible and are not manipulated to favor any political party. Until now, legislators were required only to draw districts that were contiguous. The state also has to abide by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, among other things, says that minority votes should not be diluted through redistricting.