Sun 30th & Mon 31st

Sunday we slept in late...around 10. We were burnt out from the garage sale. We ended up going down to
get our laundry caught up.

That took us till 2:30 and we went back upstairs, put away the clothes and took a nap. Around 5:30 we decided to run down to the beach for a piece of pizza at bobs. After dinner we walked the beach and stopped at two different places that had music playing. The first was a spanish guitar...mello and very beutiful sound. The second was a band much louder but very entertaining...It was a nice evening and a very laid back day.
Sunday.....to the zoo we go
We were scheduled to meet at the front gate of the Miami Zoo at 9:50AM so we left the condo at 8:30am.
Mapquest said it is a 1 hour drive so that should have been plenty of time. Should have been, If they took into account rush hour traffic. We got onto I-95 going south and as I was merging into traffic it was only going 30 MPH, I assumed it would pick up...mabye an accident up ahead or a police car on the side or some other distraction. 25 min and 5 miles later I was panic struck. 5 lanes southbound and stopped!
I asked Bonnie what she thought, and she responded we better make for the turnpike...I agreed. I got on the shoulder and made a few cool (almost TV cool) moves and I was off on a side road racing for the Zoo. I was pulling in at 9:52 when my phone rang. It was Bennie (used to work for me) asking where we were. I responded, Just pulling in, His sister works at the zoo and she had free tickets for us.  We got in the zoo and here are some pictures

Its Miami...Gotta have em

Lion

Everybody making fun of me

sheep

squirrel

Rare white squirrel

Break

camel

gorilla

spidermonkey

Bear

antalope

Sorry for all the pictures, But I loved the openness of this zoo and wanted to share it. Besides, I am just getting to the videos..I will only post a couple..



We didn't get done at the zoo till 5 in the afteroon. It was 7 miles around the park and by the time we got done evrybody was beat. We gave our profuse thanks and bolted for home, uknowingly into the evening rush hour traffic. We didn't get home till 7. watched the bachalor and bonnie passed out on the sofa.

So that was our past 2 days....untill tomorrow....PS....I was testing your knowledge on the animals.

Sat Jan 29th

Happy birthday Sarah! She is 26 today.  We had our garage sale today. We had to be up at 5:30 in the morning, well Bonnie had to be up at 5:30 in the morning, I had to be up because Bonnie was getting up at 5:30 in the morning.We got dressed and headed over at 6:30. We arrived around 6:50 with coffee in hand. We brought a thermos and some bananas. The sale opened to the public at 8 am and the people rushed in. The first 2 hours were crazy.

Bonnie refolding stuff

After zoning our table (sorry reference from our retail days) refreshing our table, We took turns taking our breaks. I video recorded mine....

We ended up with 140 bucks from our efforts and were happy with those results. That's a lot o money when you are retired. We went home at 1pm exhausted from our morning endeavors and napped for an hour.
We had seen there was an art festival going on down at the beach so we got into the car and headed down there. We got there and found our parking spot and wandered into the arts!

art fair on the beach

We walked about halfway down between these tents and found a stage with a band playing. So got coffee and listened a while. There was a lot of dancing in the streets going on. Not by me though.

We finished walking to the end and walked back up via the beach. I took this picture of the stage from the beach.

stage view from the water

The temp was plummeting from 71 to 60s so the beach was quiet.

long shadows means end of day

As you can see by the long shadows, it was getting late and we had a movie at home to watch, so we headed out for home. We watched "the kids are all right" which was good but strange at the same time.
then off to bed....We were bushed.

Friday Jan 28th

We got up at 8:30 ate some english muffins and juice, then got our coffee and prepared for the day. We have a friend coming through today, we just don't know what time. He used to work for me and his name is Bennie. He called yesterday around 10 and he was in Missouri. He has a sister that lives in Miami, and He and his wife, Valerie, and a Mike are going to run the Miami marathon Sunday. Mike is a kid that used to work for Select Comfort in Iowa city, and he worked for me at the state fair a couple of years ago. The phone rang around 11:30 and it was them. He said they were about 70 miles from Miami, so I told him which exit to take and we would meet them at a gas station right there. So we drove over there and they pulled up about 5 min later.

Bennie and family

Val getting some pictures

Bennie making a move on my wife

We chatted a while and found out Mike and Bennie's kids had never seen the ocean, so off we went to see the beach. It was upper 60's today, so the beach wasn't real crowded.

Mile's first time

They loved the Ocean, Who would't?

We love being with people for their first time seeing the ocean. It was a lot of fun and we hung out until Bennie's sister called worried about why they were not there yet. So we parted ways until Sunday when we are going to Miami to watch them run. Bennie's sister works at the Miami zoo so we are going to the zoo Monday. That should be a lot of fun as we heard the zoo is fantastic.  It was around 3:30 and we were hungry so Bonnie suggested we go to this place called the duck for late lunch. We had a South Florida Dines

coupon for 30 bucks. The only reason we ordered that on was it only cost 10 bucks. We found it and it was a hole in the wall beer joint that served food. I was hoping the food was good.

Bonnie getting sauced

My danish beer

They had beer from all over the world in there so we ordered a couple of carlsbad, made in Denmark. I ordered the fish and chips and Bonnie ordered shrimp scampi. The salad sucked. At least the salad dressing sucked. The food was considerably better. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give it a 7. We ended up drinking more beer to make our tab good. By the time we left I was half in the bag. Yikes!

We got home and wore our buzzes off. we had to be over the the school by 7 to set up our table. We got over there and had to carry everything about 100 yards from the car to our table. There were quite a few people in there and we were anxious to get set up and out of there.

Sale setup

Our table is toward the back. We have to be there by 7AM tomorrow so I gotta get to bed, Bonnie has been sleeping for 2 hours. She is going to feel great tomorrow and I am gonna be suffering. Later....

Thur Jan 27th

We got up at 8, I am not sure why, but we got up at 8. I didn't really want to get up at 8, but I did. We sat on the patio drinking coffee and chatting till around 10. Bonnie said we had to do laundry, at least the whites. So on with the swim wear and out to the pool we went.

View from the laundry room

After that was completed it was 12:30 and we were hungry, so we ran down to subway, which is right off the beach. We ordered a $5 footlong and went to the beach to eat.

Mouth full of Subway

While we were eating we were also watching some sand volleyball games going on. Here is a glimpse of one of them.

We were supposed to head back home after lunch but I got adventuritis and we headed up the road to check out a park we discovered a while back to look for some manatee. We didn't find any manatee, but we did find this hidden area of the park. We had to hop over a fence and walk through some heavy woods to get to the water. While standing there we saw something shiny in the water and I tried to retrieve it but the water was to deep.

Its tooo deep

Bonnie then went in with a stick to try to retrieve it.

Bonnie can do it!

It was a foil wrapper from some candy...Oh well...you never know. We then took off and went about 25 miles north to a beach in Boynton beach. It was actually a park on the Intercoastel that you can walk across the street to the ocean. We hung out there for quite a while checking it out. Just as we were getting ready to leave I see this guy standing on his head on the rocks so I took this picture.

I have no idea! It was 6 so we headed for home to watch American Idol! That was it for Thurs

Free Hugs Campaign - Official Page (music by Sick Puppies.net )

Wen Jan 26th

Well we didn't have much of a plan for today, other than finding a battery for my a watch that was going to the sale.I just wanted to make sure it worked before I sell it.  We got up and drank a glass of juice sat around trying to decide where a good place to find one would be. We decided on Walgreen's. We showered and off we went. We got to Walgreen's, found the watch batteries and were shocked to see they were 5 and 6 bucks apiece. Nope. Off we went to Walmart, they had to be cheaper there. Didn't they? We got a parking place, which is no easy task at this Walmart. It seems to be an extremely busy store. I will take a picture next time we go out there. We went in and found the watch batteries, and found them to be cheaper, but not cheap enough. They were $4.88 to $5.88. I only paid a couple of bucks for the watch at a garage sale. Some lady at walmart told us to get one at the Festival flea market. Ok...off we went.

view from the car of the flea market

Looking around

We walked in and one of the first Boothe's you come to is a jewelry place. I asked the guy how much for a watch battery, he responded 2 bucks. Ok, give me one....Done. While we were here we decided to grab some pizza in the food court. They have great new york pizza. We ate the pizza and wandered over to the fruit stand and loaded up on fruit. Bananas, grapes, mango, nectarine, oranges and pears. We hauled our fruit to the car and headed home. On the way home we stopped at a thrift store, went in, looked around. When we came out we saw this van parked next to us. It had 2 metal house door hinges holding the door on.

Click on this picture for a better view. LOL

We then got home around 4 in the afternoon. I put the new battery in the watch and it worked like a charm. It is a nice watch. Adolfo and it is water resistant to 100 ft. Around 6pm Bonnie had dinner ready and it was good. Pork chops, fried potatoes and bread. Yum. We then watched American Idol and Storage wars (really good show) and went to bed. ZZZZZZ!

Tues Jan 25th

Slow day in paradise....We are taking today as a house day. We didn't want to go anywhere, just hang out at home and get our stuff ready for the big sale. Bonnie spent the day pricing everything while I took pictures of stuff I needed to get posted on ebay. It was very warm outside, but overcast. We worked at a leisurely pace through most of the morning and into the afternoon. Bonnie had finished her pricing so we started hauling it all out to the van. The van is kinda our holding area for things we don't want cluttering up the condo.

all this on a six foot table?

Looking up at our condo

After we got the van all packed up, we just hung out around the condo. I posted a few more things on e-bay.
Oh...Sarah had the baby! I found out this morning and she is doing well. That is about it for this day...American Idol tomorrow! see ya then...

Mon the 23rd

I was jarred out of a deep sleep by a loud crash! It sounded like glass breaking! I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen where Bonnie was standing over what used to be the coffee pot. She had a shocked look on her face and I asked her if she was ok. She said she was fine, she had accidentally elbowed the pot off of the counter. She ended up using a big bowl and a fork to get the coffee made... She made us a breakfast of eggs toast and sausage. After eating breakfast we started to get stuff ready for the sale this Saturday. In case I forgot to mention it, we got a table at the high school annual sale. It is this Sat from 8 till 1. We were preparing some stuff when we realized we needed some price tags. It was around noon and 75 out today so we jumped in the car to run to walmart to get some price tags and look for a coffee pot. Our coffee maker is a Cuisinart and it has to have the right pot to work. We got to walmart and found the tags, but no coffee pot. We left and headed over to kohl's because I had checked online and they were a retailer of those coffee pots. Well they had our coffee pot but no carafe only. Off we went up the road. I saw a Bed Bath and beyond on the horizon, another authorized dealer! We went in and victory was ours! There it was, but at a substantial cost...25 bucks. I could buy another coffee maker with a un-busted carafe for less than 25 bucks. Bonnie was not going for this as she loves her coffee maker. Nuts, another genius idea ruined! 25 bucks later we were off again and Bonnie wanted to go to a few Goodwill's. So we spent the rest of the day shopping. at the last one there was this little game room just up the strip mall. I couldn't spend another second looking around, so I wandered up there. It was a small gambling room. I walked up to the counter and asked, "so how does this work?" The lady asked me if I had been in there before. I said nope. She said they had a 5 for 10 deal. I give her 5 bucks and they give me 10 dollars on my card. So i gave her 5 bucks and sat down at one of the machines. She put 10 bucks on my card and told me they had a snack room and to help myself to anything in there. She then told me they serve a free dinner at 6:30. It was 5:30. I went over to the snack room and it was filled with cookies, chips, candy, coffee and a fridge filled with pop. I grabbed some cookies and a can of coke and sat back down at my machine. I played till 6, got up and went outside to have a smoke. I looked up and saw Bonnie walking my way. I explained the deal going on in there and told her I wanted the free dinner. She agreed as that way she wouldn't have to cook. We went back in and She gave her 5 bucks and started playing. she grabbed some coffee and a bag of chips. it wasn't to long and the lady said dinners ready! I watched some of the old ladies start shuffling up there so we waited till they started sitting down then we got up and walked in to see our dinner. It was a plate of rice and meatballs with some gravy and rolls. I told the lady to load me up, and she did...she gave me twice as much as she gave everybody else. LOL.
In retrospect, I think it was because I was the only man in there. We ate, I grabbed another coke and we took off for home. I still had 5 bucks on my card so I got 2 dinners, and a bunch of snacks and 3 cokes for 5 bucks. It was 7:15 when we got in the car so I had to hustle to get us home so Bonnie could get there in time to watch the bachelor on TV. That was the day and I didn't have my camera with me so I have no pictures today. I will put twice as many on tomorrow, if you can stand them. LOL See ya then!

Sunday Jan 23rd

Sunday was a cooler day, it only got up to 72 degrees. We got up and went to a few garage sales, Sunday's are much fewer sales so they are farther apart. We were out till about noon and had only gotten to 5 sales so we decided to go to the Galleria Mall. We had never been there before and Bonnie wanted to get her hair cut. It is right on the intercostal and was surprisingly fancy. I do not know what I was expecting but it was quite high end. In their food court they don't have any national fast food places, which is weird for a mall. The food court was really fancy and I think one company runs them all. We grabbed a bite to eat and walked the mall looking for a haircutting place. We wandered past a Sleep Number store so we went in. We ended up in there for 45 minutes as the store manager was there and we talked for quite a while. We left and found a hair salon and Bonnie put her name on the list. She had to wait so I left and walked around for an hour, came back and she was in the chair, almost done. After the haircut we went up A1A and stopped at the fishing fleet dock and sat watching all the pelicans. I took a few pictures here.

After that we went home for diner and watched TV and I re listed a few things on ebay. I have some new stuff to list, so I may do that Monday evening. That was the extent of our day...

Sat Jan 22

Its Saturday! The list had already been made and mapped out. As soon as we woke and showered we were out the door. We were out from 8 am till around 1 and hit approx 20 sales. Tough day for finding treasures, easy day to find junk. It was one of those days...didn't really find anything to write home about, so I won't!
Bonnie wasn't feeling well toward the end of garaging so once we got home she laid on the sofa and took a nap. I had a couple of movies to return to the store so I quietly slipped out of the condo. I dropped of the movies and decided to run down to the beach to see what was going on don there. It was overcast and around 70 degrees. (It had been in the 80's prior to this morning) I grabbed my regular parking spot and took these pics.

Maybe it was only in the 60's? I know it was 72 around noon but a cold front was dropping into our area and I could feel the air getting chilly. Where is everybody? Well, I got tired of being at the beach by myself so I walked back to my car and I was looking at our secret parking lot and how empty it seemed so I took a picture.

Then I turned and looked back towards the ocean and down the street and found it strange looking for the lack of cars. It is always bustling, well not always, at least not today. Look and see for yourself...

I got in the car and headed for the bridge....Darn...Its up for a boat to pass under. So i figured I would drive down under to see if the Iguana's were down there. This is a picture of the bridge up...The next ones are under the bridge.

My little Friends were out...at least 2 of them.

Then I headed for home. Bonnie was still sleeping. She woke up shortly after my return, I told her about my exploits and showed here some pictures. She asked if I was hungry, to which I replied "yes". She made a great meal of pork chops, corn, potatoes and a salad. Just like the homeland! (Iowa) We then watched TV
till bedtime. That was our day!