Existing In BFE

Brendan and I were invited aboard an unnamed 19-foot fishing boat the other week.  She is captained by Michael Johnson of Wesley Chapel and is the son of Ed Johnson of Peoria who you will remember is a high school classmate of mine.  When Ed was down from Illinois last year he and Michael stopped at the Three Birds Tavern and met Brendan and I.  What was supposed to be a couple hour get-together turned into a 6 hour beer-fest.  Along the way it came up that Michael had a boat and would be inviting us on her at some point to go fishing.   Not everyone follows through with buzzed social chit-chat, but darned if Michael didn't call a few weeks later and firm up a date.      This is the wonderful boat that Michael owns.   With a couple coolers, fishing tackle, a beautiful sunny day full of high hopes and dreams of a great haul, we set off from Fort DeSoto marina. Brendan and Michael on the lookout for a good spot to dip some artificial worms.  Michael is a teac

Here we are again, dutifully posing for Marj, before school on some unknown morning.  Picture taking wasn't necessarily a frivolous spontaneous event like it is now.  There had to be some sort of reason why she would have taken it, and I am guessing by the summer-type apparel, that it is one of the first, if not the first day of school for this year.  My guess:  first day of High School.  If it was Junior High we would have taken the bus. There are some interesting things to glean from this picture. No one looks particularly happy to be posing. Mark (R) seems to be unencumbered by books.   He also is showing no pretense of even trying to acknowledge the event with a smile, or any kind of facial action. I see Phil has three books, probably part of his con job on the folks.  By looking studious he was able to get them to buy him a nice 64 Chevy and 68 Camaro convertibles.  What a suck up. Marj was no longer able to dress us alike, after Mark and I staged a rebellion agai

1.  Have you noticed how obituaries are getting smaller?  They used to be long, extremely well written things and even threw in adjectives for the deceased that they probably never enjoyed in life.  Nowadays they are a paragraph and contain a sentence that attempts to encapsulate who the person was.  That sentence I despise.  Invariably they throw in "life long (insert favorite sports team) fan" and I even saw one that had the person was a member of AARP.  You cannot tell who someone was with two activities they peripherally participated in.  Better not to say anything at all that diminish them with nothing more than trivial banalities. Jane, here, did something I totally agree with and hope we can learn from.  She wrote her own, and did it with grace, humor, thanks to many and a sprinkling of the facts.  Jane Catherine Lotter One of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen, is that y

Just down the road is I-275 that takes you across the Bay into the Bradenton-Sarasota area.  The Skyway Bridge is fairly new, having been constructed in 1987.  The former bridge was destroyed by a ship that rammed one of the pylons causing 35 people to plunge to their deaths.  Remnants of the old bridge remain as fishing piers for local anglers.  For $4.00 you can get a pass onto these northbound and southbound ramps and spend the day drowning worms, although, from what I saw,  you'd likely be hooted off if you used worms here.  More appropriate are fish heads, and larger live bait.    This old vacated ramp still stands and is one of two which were used for Northbound traffic.   The only ones to use it now are the myriad birds that keep vigil over the humans in case a snack would come their way. Crumbling away from disuse this is a road to nowhere. I can't get enough pictures of he weirdest ugliest thing with wings, my old flying buddies, the Pelic