BRRRRR!!!

Well, Dave and I are hanging in - we miss Foster terribly and have spent a lot of the last two days crying together. But we are trying to keep active, because we can't just sit here feeling SO sad and heartbroken. We keep exchanging little stories and memories... "remember how Foster used to....?" - and that seems to help. Last night we went onto my laptop and found every picture of him that we could and I did a little cropping and trimming and we printed off some of the pictures and have them hanging up in the RV - that also helps. Right now we're waiting for a phone call from the vet, to let us know if we can pick up Foster's ashes tomorrow. We know it seems silly, but we really just want him back here with us in the RV. I'm attaching a few pictures for those of you who didn't know him - beautiful, isn't he? And his personality was as beautiful as his external appearance. Isn't that why we have pets - they give us unconditional love and just give us so much joy.

Yesterday we took a trip down to Homosassa Springs State Park, about an hour south of us. We knew we needed to get out of here. It was pretty cool - probably just barely hit the low 40's - but we just bundled up and went. It is a really neat place - it's a state park but is more like a little zoo, with a special emphasis on manatees. The center point of the park is the hot spring and of course the manatees come in from the Gulf to stay warm in the 72 degree waters. They built a really neat underground observation room where you can see the manatee swimming around and eating their delicious meal of romaine lettuce. The park also has a lot of other Florida birds and animals, plus one hippopotamus named LU. The story is that the park used to privately owned and had a lot of "exotic" animals, like tigers and stuff. When the state of Florida bought the park they got rid of all the non-Floridian animals, but they couldn't sell or give away poor Lu. They were going to put him down but the people in the area all love Lu so they had a huge petition drive to save him. As a result, the governor of Florida at the time made him an honorary citizen of Florida, thereby allowing him to remain! This January they are celebrating Lu's 50th birthday. Isn't that a cute story?

So the other issue for us is the WEATHER. I'm sure everyone knows that there is just a tremendous cold front moving through virtually the whole country. Last night it was supposed to get down to 28 degrees - that's pretty cold when you're in an RV and have relatively exposed water pipes! Thankfully we always carry two electric space heaters with us, so we use them for the majority of our heating, and just use our furnace to "boost" the temp a little every now and then. We feel really sorry for people who are using their furnaces - they are probably going through a tank of propane every day!!! The Weather Channel (...we have cable at this park, which is nice!) is saying that this cold front is expected to hang out for at least the rest of this week and probably into next week as well. We're about to head out for a short bike ride along the Suwanee River, even though it's not quite 50 degrees, but we know we need to keep active. That's what Foster would want us to do.