Florida Weekend - Panama City Parakeets

This weekend I visited with my friends Leonard and Betty in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. I had not seen their house in quite a while. Leonard has the yard and his barn looking good. Lots of nice, large shade trees. I felt I was staying in a house straight out of Southern Living, Betty should be a consultant to those that want their homes to depict the decor and ambiance of the south. I should have taken some pictures. I don't know how she kept it so immaculate. It was good hanging out with them.

I stopped in Panama City and visited with my friend Becky. We ate seafood at Hunt's Oyster Bar. It is located near the city marina, away from the tourist crowd. If you are in the area you should try it, the food was great as usual. I recommend the blackened Mahi Mahi. Oysters were good too. We later went to the city pier to check out the shrimp boats.

There was a lady there with three parakeets that rode on the back of her MG Midget. She said the wings were not clipped. They were trained to hang on to the convertible top frame as she zipped around town. When she left they just rode back there like it was the thing to do. They were pretty tame as you can tell when they roosted on my arm. They liked me, they waited until they were back in the car to do what birds tend to do. She had a bag of peanuts still in the shell on the hood of her car (see the bottom picture). The parakeets would hop over to the bag, get a nut, crack the hull, and eat the peanut. I guess I better plug the business the lady was advertising for - "Legend or Legends" -could not remember which. It is a charter fishing boat based there at the city marina. When we walked by it had just come in from a charter and it was loaded with fish.

On the way home I stopped to check out Sadie's Flea Market south of Dothan. I bought a couple of tomato plants. Lots of stuff there and mostly just that, "stuff." I did pick up a few woodworking ideas to add to my "to build" list.

Well I better get back to my day job. I wish smooth sailing for all.
Comments are always welcome.

Amy's 4/15/08 Visit

My daughter Amy visited from Chattanooga to try out dad's new toy. She enjoyed the throaty sound of the 3 cylinder diesel and the ease of the hydrastatic transmission - basically a 2 pedal (one for forward and one for reverse with a hi/lo option) system. It works well if constantly backing up and pulling forward when digging a stump or loading dirt.
If you double click on the photo you'll notice the blooming dogwoods and also little flags stuck in the ground. The flags are there so I will not run over the little volunteer walnut seedlings from nuts buried by the squirrels. I've read somewhere that squirrels forget where they bury nuts within 30 minutes after burying them.

Well friends it is time for the annual Apalachicola FL Boat Show trip this weekend to look at the wooden boats and eat seafood. Every year I go I say I am going to build a boat for the next year's show, but hey we all know how that goes - something always comes up! Wellll thats it for today. Comments are always welcome!

Before and Later!

These are some logs a local farmer cut off his place near Greenville GA. My tractor could not lift any of the logs. But I was able to drag them to the mill and roll them on the lifting arms with the tractor. The pine logs (18"x17' & 15"x16') were sawed into 1 inch boards and the 2 oak logs (34" x12' & 28"x10') were sawn into 5 quarter lumber. The farmer pulled the trailer with a full size pickup, which was strained coming up my drive. It took me about 3 hours to saw the logs.

All's well that ends well - no nails or other foreign objects.

This is about 700 board feet of lumber sawed from the 4 logs, 2 which were water oaks (of the red oak family) and the two long ones were local loblolly pines.

Sooooooooo bring your logs and I'll saw them to your dimensions.

All comments are welcome!