Shopping Spree and ’Spensive Shacks

It’s Tuesday of my second week in Florida. I can’t believe that one week has already passed.

I find myself facing what I expected to face with this blog. Not a lot has happened. I finished my previous entry on Sunday, and Monday and today were normal workdays. Who wants to read about that. When I’m 80 and senile, I know I won’t. So what to write about this week? What pictures to show? Time will tell, I suppose.

I went to a large bookshop yesterday. Haslem’s is a sprawling purveyor of new and used books just around the corner from my apartment. Located in what looks like a K-Mart plaza from the sixties, it lacks the charm of some of my favorite independents, but it does have a pretty good selection. I picked four books on this trip: a tour book on Bhutan (believe it or not, I don’t have one), Krakatoa, which recounts the 1883 explosive destruction of a volcanic island in the far eastern Indian Ocean, Endurance, an account of the Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous expedition to Antarctica and the amazing survival of his team, and Wreck of the Medusa, which tells of the grounding and sinking of the French ship, Medusa, and the horrors the crew faced over the next thirteen days as the number of survivors dwindled from 150 to just 15. I’m sensing a theme here.

I’m having dinner with Dan tonight, and I really need to give a shout to my friends, Peter and Mark, who also live in St. Petersburg.

…

So here’s something new. Dan turned me on to edX, an online learning destination created by Harvard and MIT. I’ve signed up to take a free class in Java. If I like how edX works and feel like I actually learned something, I’ll probably continue on and probably even pay to get a certification. I have wanted for some time to be able to code in something more useful than just VBA, but I haven’t been sure how to go about learning what I need to know. Perhaps I’ve found the way.

Today is overcast and rainy. It’s the first really overcast day since I arrived. That’s not bad, considering that I’ve been here for 11 straight sunny days. A ratio I can live with. I didn’t have any real work to do today (I’m waiting for a client approval), and with the weather being so dreary, I couldn’t really work on my photography, so I took a spin over to Banana’s, a venerable used CD store not too far away from my apartment. I looked through most of their inventory, but after 90 minutes, my neck was tired from craning to read the titles on stacks and stacks of 3-for-5-dollar CDs. I checked out with 13 new discs:

• Katy Perry, Teenage Dream (mostly for “Teenage Dream”)
• Dead or Alive, Sophisticated Boom Boom (What can I say? It was on my list, but I still don’t know why.)
• Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto (I like their other stuff up to and partly including Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends—which I think is generally overproduced—so I thought I’d try it.)
• Five for Fighting, Two Lights (Again, I like his other stuff.)
• A Flock of Seagulls, The Best of A Flock of Seagulls (and some other songss to round out the album)
• Lyle Lovett, The Road to Ensenada (C’mon. It’s Lyle Lovett. Nobody does Lyle like Lyle.)
• The Moody Blues, The Story of the Moody Blues… Legend of a Band (My sister once left me in her Maverick while she popped into a convenience store, and “Nights in White Satin” came on the radio. It creeped me out and scared the bejeezus out of me, but I can’t quite let it go.)
• Lisa Stansfield, Lisa Stansfield (One of the most under appreciated voices in R&B, in my opinion. Listen to her rendition of “Down in the Depths” from the AIDS charity album, Red Hot + Blue. It’s like drinking fine scotch.)
• Michael Jackson, The Essential Michael Jackson (mostly for “Ben”)
• Lisa Stansfield, Real Love (See above.)
• Dire Straits, Money for Nothing (I thought I was buying the original album with the song, “Money for Nothing.” That album is called Brothers in Arms. It’s okay, though; this one’s a compilation.)
• Toad the Wet Sprocket, Bread & Circus (I like their other stuff, and for less than $2, I can afford to hate it.)
• Collective Soul, Collective Soul (It was also really cheap, so if I end up only liking the hit, “The World I Know,” it’ll be worth it.)

I’ll go back another day to scan through the rest of their holdings. They had lots of things that tempted me, but I have a list to knock out, first.

—–

It’s Friday, and the sun has come out again. Wednesday was mostly icky, but Thursday’s weather was truly awful. It rained all day—literally all day! I stayed in except for a jaunt out at lunch to get a salad at Applebee’s. A nice young woman there asked me what I was reading, so I told her very briefly about Melville’s White Jacket. She had just read and loved Buck’s The Good Earth, which I’ve not read, but the style of which I can pretty confidently surmise. When I finished lunch, I gave her a few references including anything by Willa Cather (for the style) as well as Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Orwell’s Burmese Days, and Forster’s A Passage to India (all for the exoticism of the East; Burmese Days is probably not going to be to her liking the though.)

I completed the first week’s worth of lessons in my Java class today. I’ll take the exam tomorrow, but I wanted to reward myself with the sun, so I put the top down on my car and drove to St. Pete Beach with my camera. St. Pete Beach is on the gulf side of the peninsula and south of Treasure Island. It’s in the town called Pass-A-Grille. It’s kind of a swanky area, and although you can see a mix of modest and expansive houses, pretty much all of the real estate is well kept (and, I suspect, quite pricey). I said “Hello” to lots of passersby as I was walking, partly to allay their fears about a stranger walking through their neighborhood with a camera and partly because I’m making an effort to be more friendly and less intimidated by people. Everyone said, “Hi” back, and that made it an especially nice walk. Here are a few photos

These reminded me of the vertical Buddhist prayer flags we saw in Bhutan.

These are yuccas, if you can believe it. They were at least 20 feet tall!

This guy had just caught a lizard for lunch and was feeling pretty pleased with himself.

Here is one of the more modest homes in Pass-A-Grille.

And here’s part of one of the more palatial ones about two blocks down the road.

I expect I’ll eat in tonight, but maybe I’ll call Dan about getting coffee later. Tomorrow is laundry day. Bleh! Maybe I’ll take that Java test while I’m at the laundromat.

Mark comes down in less than a week now, though, so I need to try to get a haircut before Thursday.