Cyndee's surgery went as planned.  She went in on Wednesday morning this week and I brought her home by the afternoon on Thursday.  Doctor's instructions were clear - no lifting, nothing strenuous, no driving, no traveling for two weeks.  She has a follow-up visit scheduled in ten days and we hope the doctor will give us the go-ahead to get on over to Texas.

But Cyndee has not wasted any time in trying to push the limits of doctor's instructions.  She is already stir-crazy and I have had to give her the stink-eye a couple times to keep her from trying to do things she should not.

I have been trying to make good use of the time.  The night before Cyndee's surgery I went over to a friends house and used his stuff to polish the headlights on Putt-Putt (the PT Cruiser).  They had almost become opaque but now, thanks to Chuck, they look great.  I will be taking Putt-Putt to a detailing shop early next week to get it all cleaned and shined up for a trip over to CarMax and a quick sale.  Of all the things we have disposed of, letting the second car go is proving to be the hardest.  Our transportation will soon be totally dependent on a single, large, fuel-hungry truck.

I have also been spending some time out in the "yard" around our camper.  I started noticing blooms laying all over the ground, spread out over a wide area.  Odd, we don't have any flowering shrubs or ornamental trees anywhere near us.  It was a mystery, every morning there would be whole new crop of blooms all over the ground.  Were varmints carrying them in during the night?

But one afternoon I took my mid-afternoon apple break in a lawn chair under the awning and out of the corner of my eye I saw something falling in the general area of where all the blooms gather.  So I got to watching and shortly, from very high above something else fell.  I walked out to where it landed and saw that it was one of the blooms.  It appeared to be coming from a very tall, slender tree but I could not see any blooms in the high branches.  I got out a pair of binoculars and then it was clear that the tree was the source of the blooms.  With the magnification I could see the blooms sprinkled throughout the large crown of the tree.


The tree, I learned, was a Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera ).  And it produces large, thick-leaf green-orange-yellow blooms that fall like rain.  In the photo above the scale is hard to tell but the bottom most branch is at least thirty feet above ground.  The top of the tree is at least another thirty feet above that.  According to the literature, this tree can get as tall as 165 feet with the bottom branches not starting until 60-80 feet off the ground.  So I guess ours is a youngster and has some growing to do.  Tulip Trees are native to this area but in all the years I have lived here I have not recognized one when I saw it.  And this is the first time I have ever seen a bloom.

Reading has also worked its way back into my life.  I used to read voraciously but work and other demands on my life had squeezed out my reading time.  I used to try to get a couple pages of something in at bed time but it never failed that sleep swept over me and I never remembered a word I read.  But since moving into the RV and ultimately retiring, I have again been reading.  I have caught up on stacks of magazines and journals that we subscribe to and I have polished off a 1500 page Clancey novel, three murder mysteries, and a fiction about a 7-year drought in Texas set in the 1950's called "The Time it Never Rained".  I am going to have to find a comedy to read after that last one.  It affected me, I found myself worrying about the characters and what was happening to them when I was not reading about them.  More tragedy than I usually care to read about and without a satisfying (to me) end.  Definitely going to find something light to read next.

We have been having fun organizing our music library too.  I now have the iPhones, PC and iPod synched up, a Motorola Bluetooth device for FM transmitting through the truck radio and an iPod dock with speakers (Bose SoundDock) for setting up outside while we are getting some awning time.  We recently saw a special on PBS that featured a musician by the name of Joe Bonamassa.  His sound intrigued both of us and we bought an album today, "An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House".  He is classified as Blues but there is more to it than that.

T -4 days until departing Georgia (clock stopped and holding)