My Favorite Florida Things – Wilderness

Before I moved to Florida it meant only two things to me: beaches and theme parks. While we have both in abundance here they don’t make my list of things I will miss when I’m gone. To be fair, I have had some good times on beaches, but given a choice I’ll head to the mountains. I even have some pleasant memories from theme parks. [You haven't seen "It's a Small World" until you've seen it with a five-year-old.] By and large though they mean paying lots of money to be in big crowds — two things I detest.

After I moved to Florida I learned that there is a whole other world away from beaches and theme parks [and usually, but not always, away from crowds]. This other world includes natural springs, rivers, and hiking trails. For example, Wekiwa Springs State Park is just a few miles north of Orlando and has a gorgeous swimming area at the springs. There are miles of hiking trails and canoeing on the Wekiva River. Outside the park, the adjacent Rock Springs provides a wonderful canoeing experience too.

A little further north is Blue Spring State Park, best known as a Manatee refuge. The waterways are closed to swimmers and boaters from mid-November through March each year as the Manatees winter in the 73°F water.

There are something in the neighborhood of 150 state parks and historic sites that run the gamut from springs and rivers to beaches to coral reef. [John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park was the first undersea park in the U.S.] And we have a few national parks and preserves too. I’ve barely scratched the surface in exploring all these places and when I come back to visit these are what I’ll be looking for.

My Favorite Florida Things – Tai Chi

As I prepare to uproot myself I am acutely aware that there are some things about central Florida that I will miss a lot. One of them is my Tai Chi class. I’ve been studying with Master Chang for eight years and my classmates are wonderful people. There was much sadness when I told them I will be leaving in a few weeks. They want to have some kind of celebration before I go. [As a naturally shy person, I was a little tempted to just slip away without saying anything....]

Anyway, I figure I’ll be able to find another group to study with whenever I get resettled. One of the first things Master Chang said to me though after I told him I am leaving is that he wants me to teach Tai Chi in my new home. [He has talked to me before about how he wants his traditions to continue here in central Florida and that would mean that I and some of the other students would be taking over the teaching.]

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll try teaching it.”

“No,” he told me, “you will teach.”

“I will teach Tai Chi,” I agreed.

“And some day you will bring your students here to visit.”

Won’t that be a hell of a field trip?!?

Master Chang

Desperately Seeking Annette

Leap and a net will appear.

Today I leaped [leapt? -- nah...].

I have been in Florida long enough. I moved here for the job. The job has been getting increasingly frustrating and decreasingly fulfilling. It’s no longer enough to keep me here. And my family has wanted me to return to Kentucky ever since I left. So today I turned in my resignation.

Given the current economy you might well think I must be crazy to become voluntarily unemployed. [As if you needed another reason to think I'm crazy.] That’s right, not only have I quit, I don’t yet have another job lined up. And I’ll have to sell my house down here. And… and… and… there is just so much more that I am overwhelmed.

Still, scary as it is, it feels right.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. ~Robert Frost

P.S. For you sticklers [like YOU, you know] I know the quote I used at the top is usually stated, “Leap and the net will appear.” But that totally would have screwed the pun I wanted to use in the title. And my puns are often more important than total accuracy in quotations.

Limpkins

So there I was, right in the middle of one of our final exams. Another teacher gave me a chance to take a little break and when I returned I saw this family standing outside the door.

Limpkins at the door

I was SO glad I recently resumed carrying my camera around. For a moment they appeared to be looking in on my students, no doubt wondering what the heck they were up to. Or maybe they were just early to line up for lunch….

Limpkin kids

I had to look online to find out what they are. I have never seen limpkins on campus before — I’m not sure I’ve seen them anywhere before.

Color me grinning! Okay, chickies. Move along now. Nothing to see here….

RRR: My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable Ownership of a Pornographic Website

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
This is an update of a post originally published on 21 November 2006.

I garnered three new followers on Twitter this weekend. I have blocked two of them because they link directly to porn sites. [I am not philosophically opposed to porn. It's just not what I publish in this space nor will I promote it here.] I’m guessing I picked them up because I had the word “erotica” in my Friday Flash title and the tweets promoting it. And I’m guessing I’ll have to block a couple more when I publish this post. ~Tim 14 December 2009

Here’s the old post with updates:

Let me tell you about the time my website was labeled “pornography”. [And it was not last month when I got all crude and rude on a couple posts. In fact, it predates my blog by a few years.]

The school district where I work has only been hosting websites for teachers for about a year or two. Those of us that were ahead of that curve were on our own. So for a while I used some of the space provided for personal pages by my ISP to post information for my classes. I registered a domain name and had the URL forward to my pages.

That worked well… until one day the filtering software the district used blocked access to my site. It was classified as pornography. Hmm. Well, I was angered a little and amused a lot. But URL forwarding was a trick often used by pornographic sites so you could have a link for PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com that actually links to RaunchyDebauchery.com. And since it wasn’t really practical for them to, you know, actually have a person look at every website that passes through our servers, the filtering software just blocked every site that was forwarded. And labeled it pornography.

[I just made up those domain names and figured I better check whether there are websites attached to them. As of this writing PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com is registered but does not have a site up and RaunchyDebauchery.com is not yet registered. Wow! Same as three years ago! ~TVS So if you're looking for the Christmas gift for the person that seems to have everything....]

I copied the section of the agreement with my ISP that expressly prohibits posting obscene material and emailed our district network administrator. The reply shocked me more than having my students see the big stop sign when they tried to get to my site. It was district policy not to unblock sites owned by teachers. I think they adopted the policy because a lot of people were using services like Geocities [remember Geocities?] that were full of banner ads over which you had very little control. But I wasn’t using Geocities for my class pages and I had no ads (or pornography) anywhere on my site. And shouldn’t we expect a site owned by a teacher to be among the most relevant of the sites we want our students to access?

Fortuitously, I also emailed the publisher of the software the district was using and they unblocked my site. The argument with district policy was moot for me then and it was a battle I was not inclined to fight just on principle. Eventually web hosting prices dropped low enough that I was willing to have a site devoted just to my classes so I don’t have to forward the URL any more. And thus ended My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable [dammit] Ownership of a Pornographic Website.

Saturday in the Park

Most Saturday mornings for about the last seven years I have started my day with a Tai Chi class in the local Central Park. One of my favorite things is to watch the light change as the sun rises. [Class is from 7:30 - 9:30] I often think that I need to take my camera with me to share some of the glory.

So here is the view across the park just before class started this weekend.

And here it is about 45 minutes later.

And then about an hour after that.

If you look closely you might see there are two fountains in the park. This one.

Here’s a closer look.

The other fountain isn’t as interesting.

At the other end of the park is a rose garden where I saw this

and this

and this

and this

All things considered, not a bad way to start the day.

When It Rains

It was back to work today for teachers here. Students return to classes next Monday. Sigh… no more watching cheesy marathons on SyFy or Chiller for me. Not that I really did that. Well, not every day. Some days USA had something better. Hah! Now I’m getting up at around the time I was getting to sleep. What a shock to the system! Hoo else is a night owl? Raise your wing.

Hurricane season is officially from the first of June till the end of November. Of course, they can really develop any time of the year, just more likely during these months. Anyway, it has been a very calm tropical storm season so far this year and then in just the last couple days we’ve had three [THREEE!] tropical depressions develop. Already one of them, Bill, has strengthened to hurricane status. But it’s way out in the Atlantic and might not make it to the US. Another one, Claudette, wound up to tropical storm status and has made landfall across the panhandle into Alabama. Poor Ana, the first named storm of the season, is still a tropical depression and may fall apart before it gets here. Or not. You never can tell for sure with these things.

But seriously, all this activity developed in just the last couple of days! It really hasn’t affected my weather here yet but I feel like we’re looking down the barrel of a gun again. A HUGE swirling, blowing, raining, storming, thundering, lightninginging… STORM gun. On the plus side, hurricanes can be good blog fodder!

The Moon as We Knew It

Someone at the school where I teach [SWIT] had the brilliant idea to require all students to read the same book this summer. From a letter to the parents our fearless leader explains:

In an effort to support academic performance, cross-curricular and community connections, and a lifelong love of reading, [SWIT] proudly announces our 2009 “One Book, One [SWIT]” required summer reading title Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The book is a heart-pounding account of one family’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar time.
Every student in the school will be required to read Life as We Knew It. This is in addition to any summer reading assignment for specific programs or classes. A school-wide test will be given to every student during the first week of school; some ideas and questions to think about as you read are listed on the back of this letter. In addition, all content areas will use the book as a foundation for many activities, writings, and projects during the first few weeks of school.

While I appreciate the concept, imagine the difficulty in choosing one book for all our students in grades 9-12 (which easily spans ages 14-19) of widely varying abilities and interests. Frankly it is a task I would not want. And while they chose a highly rated, award-winning title it is one that I think is really terrible. Bad science. Bad fiction.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book is just awful. Honestly, I don’t understand why it is so highly regarded and has won so many awards. I don’t believe the premise on which it is based and I don’t believe the way the characters act. It doesn’t even get the phases of the moon correct. Ugh!


View all my reviews.

Little Big Hike

Saturday we had an unseasonably warm 80+ degrees. Yesterday morning a cold front blew through bringing some rain and unseasonably cool high temperatures in the low 60s. This is winter in central Florida and I am not missing the snow that is blanketing the northern climes one little bit.

We took advantage of the pleasant weather by hiking one of the trails by the Little Econ.

Little Econ

We saw this little critter on the trail.

When I was in college I had a professor at Eastern Kentucky that told us he worked his way through school by coming down south and getting armadillos. Then he would take them back home and sell them as ‘possums on the half shell.

A Debate Evolves

I recently read a discussion here that was spurred by a New York Times article there. I read only a fraction of the hundreds of comments on the NYT article and, as expected, they were not all as polite or well-stated.

I am tolerant of other people’s beliefs, but I bristle when they believe that non-scientists should be able to decide what is taught in science classes. For me it is no problem if a science class and a religion class [or one's school and one's church or home] teach information which is contradictory and incompatible. They are different approaches to our attempts to understand the world and our place in it. I would even go so far as to say it is important to learn about things you do not agree with — you’ll have to deal with people that disagree with you all your life, you might as well try to understand their point of view. [I hesitate to use the "agree to disagree" phrase because I've worked with too many people for whom that is code for "I disagree with you and therefore don't have to listen to your point of view" -- NOT the same thing at all.]

Anyway, I was surprised by a comment that stated:

Noah may have brought some dinosaurs with him on the Ark.

That was a new one on me. The commenter went on to explain, “I believe everything incapable of surviving a worldwide flood was preserved aboard the Ark.” Okay, I see how believing that statement could lead to the previous one. [I do not, however, consider either statement to be scientific.] But I wonder then, what happened to the dinosaurs after the flood? Does he believe they were hunted to extinction?

Regrettably, I didn’t see the discussion until a couple weeks after it was posted. I asked the question anyway, but I’m not hopeful I’ll get an answer there. How about here? Anyone have similar beliefs?