I love this photo! We saw a documentary about this guy, the Bear Man of Kamchatka: Charlie Russell. Check out his site at http://cloudline.org/ He calls his work the Pacific Rim Grizzly Bear Co-Existence study. It is fascinating. His theory is that grizzly bears have gotten a bum rap and that they are not aggressive or a threat to humans. The photography in the documentary was awesome and his interaction with bears amazing.

We had a visit from Beth and Emily a few week-ends ago. Emily made pumpkin pie for us. Here she is making the crust from stratch under the watchful eye of her mom.

The pie turned out great! The crust was awesome and that is the hard part.

Happy eaters.




The girls had just rented an apartment and came for the week-end to load up with furniture from the store of mom and pop.

It couldn't get much higher.....

We loved seeing our girls.

It was sad to see them go.....

Though it is a good feeling to know that they have nice apartment for the winter and that now they have furniture for it.

....while we were in Florida we looked for an affordable (for us) house, real estate market was low, Florida had way over built, there were lots of foreclosures.

First, we bought this one, before we even got to Florida - 4 bedrooms, 2 fireplaces, one block from the Calosahatchee River......$24,000. We thought we could rent it, fix the garage into an apartment for us when we came down to see my parents.

Sweet, except when we got there we realized we didn't just want to just stay in Florida a few months to help my mom and dad, we wanted to spend more time in Florida and this house was not where we wanted to be......... not near the beach.

So, we went up to the Venice Beach area, about 50 miles north, an area we had liked before, targeted the little town of Englewood and looked at houses,

First one, near old town Englewood, nice palm, but too small of a lot.

This one was adorable, but the foundation was post and pier and being eaten (devored) by termites.....

This one was small and needed a lot of work. Also no privacy in the small yard.

This one had possibilities, nice palm.

We put an offer in on this one, only to find that 3 other offers were ahead of us. No shade anyway.

This was one of my favorites, the old Florida plantation. It was not for sale. It sits on 20 acres. Who ever bought it paid over a million dollars for it in 06. Now it's value is 1/4 of that.....

It too needed some work.

We spent many hours in our "office" discussing the possibilities.

We finally agreed on Catalan Street, near the edge of town, with-in walking distance to Myyaka State Forest, an 8,000 acre plus wild zone, with trails and camping.

The house is not glamorous from the front. Actually it is not really glamorous from any side. But it is a CBS - for concrete block construction - take that you termites.

There is a nice palm and a couple huge shade trees.

There is this interesting rock ("there are no rocks in Florida....") spa that we hope to get working.

Also an interesting rock water garden....I like the jungle feel of it.

There is a, you guessed it, a rock firepit, for my favorite chef!

One of the best parts is that it is a few miles to this beautiful swimable beach.

The other best part, that I am extremely grateful for, is that we put the first house up for sale on craigslist, and sold it the next week for $30,000. It would have been a rental for us at best and the house on Catalan might now become a home.

It has been a long and crazy ride. Now we have a project in Florida, while we are there helping my parents. It is awesome how it has all worked out so far :) We are spending the winter in Florida instead of Mexico - that is a big change right there. Though there is a lot of Spanish spoken in Florida and we found a great Mexican resturant! Not quite the same but it will do.