Local Happenings!

Time for a short break from my long running July road trip narrative…  We’ve partially pulled back from too many outings.  Despite having had the vaccine, we are both of a certain age and with varying stages of health so we wear our masks in stores and generally avoid large crowds.  Eating out has less appeal as well, just from a risk avoidance point of view.  As the old saying goes, ‘different strokes for different folks’.  In our case moderate caution is our current mantra.

But, we do make exceptions in certain circumstances…

Next door neighbors Sherry and Mike invited us to their annual shrimp boil and, while we skipped it last year out of caution, this year with most of us older folks in our community vaccinated, we joined the party!

As we joined the party, I took this photo.  People were still arriving but one of the shrimp boil pots is visible and so is a big set of Jenga blocks.  The objective when playing Jenga is to remove blocks from the stack without the stack collapsing.  The game stresses me out!

As the crowd grew, it spread out.  The first photo shows part of the gathering in the garage and the second is of those who migrated to the back deck under Mike and Sherry’s louvered roof.  Other folks situated themselves at the island in the kitchen and on the screened porch.  There were people from around the USA in attendance…typical for our community.  We talked to people from New York, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and California.

When the food was ready, the potatoes, shrimp, sausage and corn were dumped into these big serving pans.  By the time I took this photo, this pan was greatly depleted… We usually aren’t big fans of seafood boils but, as they say, it’s all about timing and Mike timed it right!  Even the corn was perfect…as most corn on the cob that we’ve experienced at boils is mushy.  Not the case here! 

The stunner at this party was the dessert table and the over-the-top selection!  I took these 3 photos and I didn’t capture all of the options.  We brought some caramel cheese popcorn for an appetizer and our dessert contribution was that extra-large Costco Apple Pie.  It was almost completely gone when we headed home.  I had a slice of the pie and two…or perhaps three of the cookies.

When we headed home, most of the attendees were still going strong.  Two couples were playing Jenga and some of the guys were chipping golf balls at a target or playing corn hole.  Most of the ladies had retired to the screened porch or the deck.  It certainly was a beautiful day for a party!

I did take one other photo as we departed.  This is one of couple’s dog…her name is Maddie.  She’d trading in the toy she brought with her to the party and replaced it with a large rock from Mike and Sherry’s yard.  She wasn’t giving it up either!  Very cute!

Dawn Marie flew up from Miami to spend a few days with us.  We hadn’t seen her since last January.  Her job with an IT company usually has her on the road but during the pandemic she’s been mostly working from home.  As she’s as vulnerable as we are to infections, we stayed home for most of her 3 day visit… Watching her ‘relax’, I’m sure glad that I’m retired because in today’s work environment, you can’t get away from ‘the job’.  She has international responsibilities so she had conference calls at odd times and the emails/texts never slowed down.  Still, it was a comfortable change of venue for her and we got in quite a bit of football on TV.  

Fiona was our most recent houseguest… She lives next door with Mike and Sherry and they’d asked us if we could dog sit over this past weekend.  Mike was off playing golf in South Carolina and Sherry was headed to a mahjong tournament in Nashville.  She has 2 beds…one was near Laurie’s recliner and the other was in our bedroom.  She seems to favor lying on her back and she’s always asking for belly rubs.

Fiona’s visit went well too…except that she expects to go for a walk and to be fed later than 7 AM…and we usually don’t get up until 9 AM.  We adjusted to her schedule on the second night.  It was a nice visit except when she sprinted across the bedroom floor and leaped on our bed and did a couple of circles and leaped off the bed.  She apparently sprained a muscle in her left hind leg…nothing broken, thank goodness.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave