Welcome to Simon, come back Julie, and the ER

     It soon became evident that Gracie and I alone are not a family. We need a cat. So I began to befriend the feral cats in downtown Cedar Key. After many days of feeding and petting the creatures and observing which ones tolerated Gracie, I introduced the cat carrier. When a male Bengal ducked in to grab the cat food, I zipped it up. Welcome home, Simon.
     Taming a feral is a challenge. Simon spends most of his time under the passenger seat. He comes out to eat and use the litter box, and prowls around at night. He hisses loudly and runs if I even try to approach him. We’re making a little progress; he will eat in my presence, take a nap on the dash with his back to me, make eye contact and relax his eyelids when observing me, and allow me to get between him and his safe spot. He hopped across me last night to get to food I left for him on the kitchen table. Time will tell.
     Thanksgiving was as wonderful as last year was awkward. Bruce and Roberta smoked one turkey, roasted another, and baked a ham. All the campers contributed side dishes, and we ate on the gathered picnic tables (yep, the ones I painted) outside the clubhouse. The weather was perfect, the food was so good, and the company was wonderful.
     I made a squash dish. I couldn’t figure out the stove (stop laughing), but discovered that my microwave is also a convection oven. It’s totally cool. Okay, so it’s been over a year since I actually cooked anything serious, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t know how to use the oven.
     My sister-in-law Julie came to visit from Ohio for five days, and we had a wonderful time. We packed a lot into five short days. I picked her up at the cute little Gainesville Regional Airport (short-term parking costs $1) and we started with a visit to the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens where we wandered around looking at all the beautiful Florida plants. I took notes, of course, for the park. We went to Homosassa Springs State Park to take a boat ride and stroll the park-like setting that is home to all the Florida wildlife, including the amazing manatees. We took a Cessna ride over the islands that make up the Cedar Keys, then a two-hour boat tour for a closer look. We ate at the beautiful Island Room to look over the Gulf at sunset. We had a drink at the Tiki Bar. We ate way too much good food. Our strangest adventure was the Spirit Walking Tour of Cedar Key by Miss Debbie who was flamboyantly dressed all in black, visiting all the places haunted by the ghosts of Cedar Key. (“There’s something wrong with that woman,” commented one of the local clammers who had seen us on the tour.) We had a wonderful time, and didn’t get to do half the things I wanted to do.
     Last Friday I thought I picked up a touch of food poisoning. I was able to control the effects with Immodium until Monday, when the Immodium no longer worked. By Tuesday afternoon I could not even sip water without starting an unpleasant chain of events. Tuesday evening my neighbors Cathy and Bill persuaded me to go to the emergency room in Crystal River, an hour drive. Six hours, one bag of fluid, two big injections of pain killer and anti-nausea drugs and I was feeling like I might live. I’m still weak, but recovering quickly. Tomorrow I get the results of all the tests they took on all my body fluids. I’m hoping it was just stomach flu. 
     Last week I tore out a large flower bed overgrown with succulents and weeds, dug out the depleted soil, wove a soaker hose through the lattice fence, painted the fence, layered 200 pounds of good soil and replanted it with a dozen new plants from the flea market designed to attract butterflies. I’m loving December in Florida.