Apologies...

My apologies to those of you who have been checking my blog regularly only to find that, yet again, I have not updated it. In every way (answering e-mails, updating websites, sending newsletters, etc.), I have been a slacker with communication recently.

I hope (in theory) to get back to regular blogging soon. So...keep checking, and be on the lookout for a picture from a hiking trip in the Cascade Mountains near Seattle.

More Lizards

I'm sitting here in my dining room, looking at an indecisive gecko who is hanging out on the floor. I think I've blogged about these things before, but they are everywhere! I think the one running around right now is the one who lives in our mail slots (where we sort our mail in the living room). At the moment, he likes Nate's slot...I would, too, since he gets a lot more first-class mail than Jon or I. :-)

Orlando Observations, cont.

Here is another strange thing about Orlando that I've discovered: building materials are everywhere on the road.

Seriously, my roommate and I joke that we could build our own house with the random materials that are always lying in intersections, on shoulders or just in the middle of the road. Two-by-fours, nails, cement blocks, siding, etc. It looks like a hurricane ripped through Orlando and dumped stuff everywhere--but it's been almost a year since the last hurricane!

My theory is that it's the building boom happening here in East Orlando. Housing developments are springing up at an astonishing rate (most schools meet in portables, since they can't build schools fast enough to keep up with the pace of families buying new homes), and with that, comes more and more retail. And, in theory, this also brings a drastic increase in the amount of pieces of houses on the ground.

Pray for me as a I drive to and from work, attempting to swerve and miss this junk. (You know this must be a serious issue if I'm blogging about it...surely people don't blog about trivial, useless information.)

Only in Orlando (and maybe a few other places)

I recently had two "Only in Orlando" moments. Although I'm sure these things happen in other parts of the world, they seemed pretty special to our area.

Only in Orlando...

...could the most sophisticated machine of all time, the space shuttle, cause a major traffic jam stretching for over 50 miles. Hours before each of the scheduled shuttle launches from Cape Canaveral (normally about an hour away from Orlando), traffic on the three main east-bound roads have been packed solid, from Orlando all the way to the coast. Lots of people wind up watching the launch from their cars while stuck in traffic. If the launch today happens (scheduled to happen in about an hour), I'll watch it from the comfort of my own home...although I might go up on the roof to get a better view.

...would armadillos be the most frequently seen road kill. I don't know if it's migratory season for these things, but the in past week, I've probably seen two dozen 'dillos on the side of the road--most of them dead. The ones that are alive confirmed my suspicion as to why so many of them wind up as road kill: they're slow and not very bright.