When It Rains, It Pours

It’s pouring rain outside right now. It started a few ours ago and hasn’t let up yet. I’ve heard this about Florida and I guess the stories are true.

A few nights ago, I was driving towards the beach and a thunderstorm kicked into high gear. It was neat because as I was watching it rain, I could see areas of clear sky out over the water. The lightening got going and then the thunder. Not bad for one of my first nights here. I drove up the coast, talking to a friend on the phone, watching a pretty awesome lightening storm. The below picture shows things right before they began.

There’ve been some things I’ve needed to upgrade in this house. While my every intention is to keep things the way they are and to not go overboard and fall into the trap of fixing things up, I have had to purchase a few items to make living more intelligent.

First, I needed to filter the drinking water. Palm Coast gives city water and if you’ve ever tasted city water, no matter how many claims the city makes, it’s not that good. At the very least, you need to get the chlorine taste out of the drinking water in the kitchen. Eventually, I plan to get “everything” out of it with a whole house filter, but for now, the chlorine needs to go. With that in mind, I ran out to Lowe’s today and picked up a “Filtrete” under-sink water filter. They claim that this water filter filters down to .5 microns, clears out parasitic cysts, sand, sentiment and soil, chlorine taste and odor. And I’d say it does that. At least the chlorine smell anyway. When I run the hot water, it smells slightly, but when I run the filtered cold water, no smell. Beautiful.

The next thing I had to do was to purchase a small window air conditioner. It’s not that hot right now, but it’s warm and humid enough to make us northerners feel uncomfortable. Since I don’t want to run the central air all day long, I figured that I could remedy things by running a small unit to, at the very least, take the dampness out of the air.

The unit I picked up is the smallest they make. It’s a “Frigidaire 5000-BTU Window Room Air Conditioner.” It’s tiny and it’s cute. Fits right into the dining room window and it’s hardly noticed.

Ron Voleman has been having a lot of fun. He’s decided that he owns the joint and runs all over the place. I think he likes looking out the window the best though. He watches the birds that come by our feeder and gets all bent out of shape when he realizes he can’t chase them like he used to. Good cat, but still and kitten and he likes to run. He’s pretty much met one of our other ones, but the one that’s left isn’t too happy about his joining the crew. Mike, the old cat, hisses and screams every time he sees Ron, so we have to keep them separated still.

Ever since we put up our bird feeder, we’ve had so many birds come by. First it was the Cardinals, today it was the Common Ground Dove and another unidentified bird. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

And by the way, it seems as though the squirrels have followed us down here. We saw a few of them try to slide down the bird feeder cable to get to the bird food this afternoon. They didn’t make it because they fell off the roof, but if I know anything about squirrels, they’ll find a way to get what they want. We’ll see.