This morning’s stroll, according to the radar, should have been safe. It had been raining off and on all night, but the radar images clearly showed that the rain bands that had been coming on shore all morning were petering out, and the last ones had already moved through our area.
Heh. So much for technology. If you want to know whether it’s going to rain: look outside! Unfortunately, I neglected to do that, so our morning stroll was quite a bit wetter than I’d expected. We spent most of the walk huddled under a palm tree at the new park up the street from us; our umbrella was able to cover Eric and about half of one of us…
Nevertheless, it was a warm rain, and like many of the rains in Florida, it was off and on, off and on. We came back wet, but happy.
A few of the sights we saw along the way:
The gumbo-limbo tree (Bursura simaruba) has very small flowers, but when a whole large tree is in bloom, it can be quite impressive. This one is on the corner of the church near us, and I always try to go by it whenever I’m out, because it’s such a beautiul tree.
They also have the most intricate twisting limbs; while they’re not a Dr. Seuss tree like the screw pine (Pandanus utilis), they are fascinating in their own right. This is a detail of that one on the corner that I’ve long envied. I hope that our tree grows up as sinuously as this one did:
Since it’s been raining for the last 10 days or so (almost 8 inches have accumulated on our rain gauge since the rainy season began), we’re seeing fungi everywhere:
After we got back from the morning’s drench–er, stroll, Eric got to spend some more time at one of his favorite activities: driving his car!
There were very few birds out this morning, but we do have our bird quilt, courtesy of Grammie Jan and Grandpop:
Thanks for the quilt, nice people!
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