Flying What??

I said I wanted to get more involved with the Native Plant Society and that's exactly what's happening. First the plant sale (if I forgot to tell you, we had a very large native plant society plant sale at the USF Botanical Gardens and I volunteered for it). Here are some pictures from it:

And no, these are not native plants, but they were really beautiful and also being sold at the sale, so I took pictures.

And now, before I knew what was really happening, I ended up on the board! They invited me to a board meeting to see what it was like. It was held at Troy's house and wow is his garden breath-taking! Here's just some of what I saw in there:
And here's what else he had:
Yup, those are BABY FLYING SQUIRRELS! They are the southern flying squirrel (Glaucomys volans) to be exact. He owns a landscaping business and unfortunately while doing a job one day, his crew cut down a tree with a nest holding these two cuties. And of course, once the nest is down, it's unlikely the mother would return and be able to care for them in the same capacity. So Troy is fostering them until they're big enough to fly free! Of course, I couldn't keep my hands off them and I offered to feed them for him while he showed off his garden. They were the cutest things! I thought about stealing one (perhaps not the best idea I've had), but they seemed really happy in his care and I decided to just get some pictures to remember them by.

Do you see what I see?

I was recently doing some field work in Winter Haven, FL (woohoo! finally some time in the field for work...I live for this!). My field partner, KT, and I were taking groundwater samples when KT looked up and said "oh, my, do you see that snake?". Where? Where? I don't see it!! (can you see the snake hiding in this vegetation?Well, I didn't either. Until she pointed out a nice little snake climbing in the tree about 2 feet from my nose. And here he is! How cute! He was just hanging out and trying to blend in. You can see from above that he really did blend in very well, but once I put a flash on him, he really lit up. How beautiful!
This is a yellow rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta quadrivittata), distinguished by his color and the black racing stripes down his back. Hehe, and check this out - the yellow rat snake is also called a Chicken Snake! Is that because he eats chickens or because he's a scaredy cat?

Honeymoon Island...romantic solo trip

The other weekend I drove up to Lake Shore Camera Exchange in Palm Harbor to attempt to get my Panasonic Lumix camera fixed. It was a gift from two people who are important to me and somehow in my excitement to take pictures at the beach one weekend, I got sand in it...you know the kind, the really fine beautiful Florida sand. Well, long story short, the repair people up there told me that sand is pretty much the end of days for a camera and it'd be easier to replace the camera than to fix it. What a bummer.

Do you know what this is?

Well, luckily, I took along my DSLR Canon Rebel XT, so while I was in that part of town, I ventured over to Honeymoon Island for the first time. What an amazing park! Apparently it is the most visited Florida State park and was voted to have the best beaches in Florida. That is definitely obvious once you step into the visitor's center which is the most elaborate and expensive visitor's center I've ever seen at a state park, but somehow they also constructed it so that it really fits into that landscape, so it's a great asset. I didn't stay very long, but I took a little walk around the bay side of the park with my camera (see collage at top of post) and then ventured over to the beach side to find a couple surfers. And you'll be happy to hear that I didn't get sand in my nice camera and I still salvaged a beautiful day.

Ski Bunny Attack!

This year for Halloween, Simon and I took a road trip to Jacksonville for the annual culmination of the football rivalry between the Florida Gators and the Georgia Bulldogs at the "world's largest cocktail party". This year we stayed out of the rambunctious crowd and had a lovely somewhat relaxing weekend of sipping beers and hanging out with friends. Want to know what I dressed up as??

I was a 70s ski bunny and Simon was Reverend Run

Here's the relaxing part:

America's Wang Moving in the Right Direction

So this is my first election for which I voted as a resident of Florida. The first presidential election I voted in was in Pennsylvania in 2004 for the Kerry vs. Bush election. It's pretty exciting to be voting from a swing state. I feel like my vote actually counted more than if I had been living in a very Republican or Democrate biased state. So I marched my little butt out to the polls on Nov 4, 2008 at 6:45am...a time of the morning that normally finds me very grumpy...but yesterday I could barely sleep through the night I was so excited to get up and go mark my very own scantron in favor of my candidate of choice.
Then, yesterday evening, I picked a barstool from which to watch the results at one of my favorite stomping grounds - Yeoman's. Everyone in the bar was really amped up and anxious to know the potential of our next 4 years in this country. And boy were we excited to find out the winner...OBAMA!! Yay! My vote actually counted and it appears so did a lot of other people's in crazy ol' Florida!! What a victory!

Check it out!

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Just after the race for the cure, Karen and I stepped onto a beautiful 38 foot long Catalina sailboat with Captain Bill Sharpe at the helm! We were fortunate enough to be invited to join him on this amazing adventure leaving from The Vinoy Marina. We sailed from St. Petersburg, FL to Treasure Island, FL on Saturday and returned the same way on Sunday. This was my first time on a sailboat of such size and with such large sails. On Saturday we had a full boat with three guys on crew hoisting the sails with Captain Bill keeping us on course. One of our crew members was Chris Ross, a seasoned sailor who really knew what he was doing.
He even got us on keel (is that the right terminology?) going about 8 knots with the main sail almost parallel with the water (this means our boat was tipped over at about a 30 degree angle)! This was amazing! Did you know that ovens in the cabin of true sailboats have a thing called a gimbal that keeps the oven level with the horizon even if the boat is tipped over? This has got to be one of the coolest things ever invented!!
We sailed for about 10 hours on day 1 and on the way back we sailed again for 9 hours just barely beating a very heavy thunderstorm. Along the way we lost a few crew members when we docked at John's Pass Marina and gained a few at the same time. Coming into John's Pass, we gained access by calling the bridge keeper at the John's Pass drawbridge. Have you ever gone under a bridge that stops traffic and opens just for you? It kind of makes you feel like a king! Here is the crew:

click on this image to see the pictures better

Also, we had a pod of about 10 dolphins sidle up to the boat and swim along with us for a few minutes! They were jumping and playing in our tiny wake.On the way back to St. Petersburg (when I was manning the jib!), we also spotted a school of thousands of stingrays (maybe the Atlantic Stingray) swimming on both sides of our boat out to the Gulf of Mexico. They were so graceful, gliding along and occassionally flapping a wing out of the water to wave us along. So peaceful! Thanks again Bill for a fantastic trip and to the entire crew for guiding us through safely!

Running for boobs!

This is after the race, so please forgive the sweaty exhausted look!

The weekend of October 4 was a busy busy busy one! Somehow, my roomate, Karen, convinced me to run a 5k race. When she told me it was for breast cancer research I immediately said yes without really thinking about the fact that I'm not a good runner nor do I really enjoy the act of running. But by then it was too late. I was registered and on a team (with the Jolly Roger Hash) and the date was approaching. I decided that if it was too hard I would just walk it instead. So that morning, Karen and I awoke at the crack of dawn, drove to St. Petersburg, parked semi-illegally (the town was packed with hundreds of participants and not so much parking space!), grabbed our pirate hats and power walked to the start in Vinoy Park. Vinoy Park is an amazing place in and of itself, but I don't have much appreciation for such things at 6am, sorry! We got our team t-shirts, took some pictures (I have to get these from the team yet, so hopefully you'll see them soon), and before we knew it the race was beginning. Karen started first because she decided to bravely run the 10k. I was sticking with the 5k race and I knew even that would be difficult for me. 30 minutes later, the 5k race began. We all lined up at the start. They label the starting line with big signs that say something like "6 minute mile" all the way down to "20 minute mile". You are supposed to stand next to the sign that corresponds to the pace you think you will be running. Well, I started walking back to 10 minute mile, when my teammates pulled me all the way back up to the beginning of the starting line...apparently no one pays attention to those signs, so if you go that far back, you'll be stuck behind lots of people walking. Glad that I was there with people who had done this before. Well, to make this story a bit shorter, I ended up running the race in 29:12 minutes! Can you believe it? I ran 5km in under a 10 minute mile! That's a big deal for me! Granted, I almost passed out afterwards and I couldn't really focus my eyes for a good 10 minutes, but I felt really accomplished. Throughout the race, I definitely thought about giving up and walking...my lungs burned and my feet hurt...but as I was running I realized that this run really had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with those people battling breast cancer and going through extremely grueling treatments. So who was I to minimize their struggles by quitting a race that really wasn't that long because my feet hurt a little bit? That just didn't seem respectful. So in honor of the fight against cancer that both my aunt and my mother endured for the past year and their bodies are continuing to fight into the future, I pushed myself to keep running. Thanks to the women in my family for never giving up and going through with the brutal and taxing treatments that will hopefully keep them in our lives for many years to come!Aunt Monika was the person I honored for others to see on my back while I ran. Mom, you'll get a sign on my back too when that race comes to town!

Native Plant Society Plant Sale

So this weekend I volunteered to help the Suncoast Native Plant Society with their big fall sale at the USF Botanical Gardens. I arrived, bleary eyed and barely on-time (without coffee), at the gardens at 7:30am on Saturday morning...yes, that's crazy early for me on a weekend, but I didn't want to let them down. We immediately started unpacking a box truck filled to the max with all kinds of great native plants. Our area, which was right smack dab in the front of the event, had hundreds of really beautiful native plants which we labeled with growing information.

Once the customers started streaming in, we were pretty busy helping fill their wagons. Apparently, well seasoned customers know that the best way to carry all the plants they want in their garden is with a wagon, push cart, or luggage carrier (some people were very creative!). So I was able to help customers pick out the plants that would do best in their yards, would look the best with their gardening vision and see their smiles as they carted off healthy native plants. I also got a chance to check out some of the other booths at the event (though many of them did not have the native plants that are so important for this area) and got some great pictures:

Here are some of the booths at the sale. There was an amazing variety of things to look at and purchase at this sale, including exotic fruit from the Rare Fruit Council of Tampa!


Are there any plant sales or other fun fall events going on in your area?

The Black Widow Blues

So I recently had the opportunity to get back in the field for work. Yippeee!! I was so happy to be out and about and not staring at the gray walls of my cubicle that it really didn't matter to me what I was actually doing in the field. I was happy with whatever was thrown my way. And boy was this an "interesting" site. It's a contaminated site up in Panama City on which we were sampling groundwater for a list of parameters including VOCs, SVOCs, lead, TRPHs, and PCBs. We had twenty wells to sample for groundwater level. Below is a picture of what a well casing looks like. The well is the white PVC pipe with a cap on the top to keep things from falling into it. And the rusty metal thing around it is a box to keep the well protected and locked if you so choose. Since this site is only sampled once or twice a year, some of the local creatures have taken up residence in the wells. I was excited when I opened this well and found some really cool egg sacs...

I was excited when I opened this well and found some really cool egg sacs...
Here's a blow up of some of the ones inside the casing lid. There were probably about 15 of these spacey looking sacs, so I called over my coworker and asked her to come take a look at them. Good thing I did! She identified them as Black Widow spider eggs...YIKES! So then we started looking for Mama...we found her in the corner, somewhat scared, but still very dangerous looking all decked out with her red hour-glass marking on her underside. I didn't get a picture of her, but she looked like one of those sweet old ladies with a dark past! And of course I didn't want to kill her, so my coworker kept an eye on her while I reached my hand down into the well to take the cap off...no bites!Here is a picture of what the actual Black Widow spider looks like. Here are a couple more. And according to this site, even the egg sacs contain poison! Wow, glad I didn't take a specimen!

Oh, and we also found a dead scorpion in another well and a very large bee's nest in another. I'm not sure what kind of bees they were, but they looked much larger to me than a normal honey bee. I'm hoping they weren't the Africanized Honey Bees (aka African killer bees which established in Florida around 2005)! Can you tell the difference? Either way, we didn't get stung, but we did have to kill them to get to the well...sorry bees!

Kayaking (#6)

For the past week my Swiss cousin, Gian Marco, came to visit me in the USA! Yay!!! I love having family in town! Gian Marco is an amazing, multitalented guy from Switzerland who is not only my super smart cousin, but also a famous Swiss rapper and techno DJ...yes, I said Swiss rapper. Check out some of his music collaborations here and here.


So I wanted to show him all the cool things that I like to see and do in the Tampa/St. Pete area. It was a crazy whorlwind of a tour for him. I didn't realize that the stuff I did was so physically active, but in his words "this has been a very sporty vacation". One of the things I did with him was to take him kayaking at Weedon Island Preserve. We rented kayaks from a pretty cool local kayaking center called Sweetwater Kayaks. There's a really great, very well marked kayak trail at Weedon Island that took us through some cool mangrove tunnels and got us a little more sunburned too.



Yes, it was "sporty" but I think Gian Marco had a good time. When's the last time you saw a kayaking rapper?