This Friday, we will travel three hours to the state competition for our state Federation of Music Clubs. Little Son will be competing in three events this year: Violin Solo (Elementary level 3); Violin Concerto (Level 1-B) and Piano Chamber Trio (Medium level). This is an event for which he has practiced and worked very hard. It will include a single night stay in a local hotel, so it is something of a big deal for us.

Two weeks later, the children will participate in the end of year graduation recital for our local music school. Baby Girl will be playing "Judas Maccabaeus Chorus" and Little Son will do Bach's "Concerto for Two Violins, 1st mvmt." with his teacher, Miss S. Baby Girl will be receiving the "Bach Award" for completing three Bach minuets, and the Suzuki Book 1 trophy for completing that challenging book of 17 pieces. Little Son will be receiving the Suzuki Book 4 trophy. I truly cannot believe we have completed six (6) years of violin!! I never dreamed we could be committed to an activity for such a long time. (I only have 12 years to go - ha ha ha!)

This past Friday evening, they performed for a benefit dinner for a local charity. They did fine, and were happy to eat all the refreshments that were provided for them. After all, isn't that what it is all about?

Tomorrow, our homeschool group will arrive at our homestead en masse for a morning of science experiments. Hopefully there will be no explosions.

As for Calvert, Baby Girl is up to First Grade lesson 73, and Little Son is up to Fourth Grade lesson 53. That will go on all through the summer. We actually get much more school done during the summer than we do when all the activities are in full force during the "traditional" school year. After all, it is too hot in the summer to do anything else, except swim.

That's what's new with us. Hopefully the dust will settle soon! We will have earned it.

I have had this post sitting somewhere in my brain for months now, and this article in the New York Times about frugality reminded me about it again. So perhaps this is the day to set it down in ink (or rather, black and white dots on my terminal).

Despite my outward appearance, I am as old-fashioned as they come. Yes, that is a photo of my mom and me taken 20 years ago, at Ocean City, Maryland. It was the last vacation we took while my mom was alive. My mom passed away in 1991, and my dad passed away in 2005.

The family in which I grew up was different than most in that my parents were much older than most when they finally had children. They were around 40+ when they became parents; it is because they adopted three children domestically at a time when wait times to do so were already dragging on into years. They were, in fact, married 12 years before the first baby arrived, and didn't complete their family until after 18 years of marriage.

Now Self-Reliant Man and I kind of did the same thing, although this isn't exactly something you do by choice. We didn't meet each other until I was in my early 30s; then after marriage didn't come to the point of becoming adoptive parents until I (at least) was the same age that my mother was when she became a mom. Yes, the same age... to the month. Then I was the same age again as my mother, to the month, when Baby Girl came along. What are the chances?

All this to say that in my family, the generations are spread out much more than in most families. Which wouldn't seem to be such a big deal, except for the fact that it occurred during the 20th century, a time of swift cultural change in America. In so many ways, I have always felt my own family to be out of step with the mainstream, a situation that pained me greatly as a kid. Now as an adult, the same situation gives me a feeling of privilege as well as loss.

My husband's family, not so. Everyone in his side of the family had their babies in their mid-20s, and he is 4 years younger than me, too. So some of the differences between his family and mine highlight those things that make my own family different from most. My parents were approximately the same age as my husband's grandparents.

Despite only being in my 40s, I am a direct child of the World War 2 generation. I feel privileged because of this. I also feel that it has had a dramatic effect on my view of the world. My parents grew up with a popular culture that bears little resemblance to that of today. No kidding!

In addition, my parents knew hardships that are foreign to my experience, and that of just about anybody I know. My mom grew up in a broken household on the eve of the Great Depression. Her father divorced her mother when she was 4 years old, and her little sister was 2. Somehow he set up my grandmother to create the appearance of her having been unfaithful to him, when in fact it was the other way around. My mother's mother then went to work as a seamstress in a sweatshop where emotions ran high at times, and ladies were known to stab each other with scissors. My mother was poor before and during the Depression. She stood on relief lines for food staples. She had very few items of clothing to wear to school, yet she knew how to make herself look good and was voted "best dressed" by her classmates (see if that could happen today!) She always had a broad smile and was very popular. She was also a talented singer, and had things been different, she had enough talent to launch a lucrative singing career.

My dad grew up in a more economically comfortable setting than my mother. His life was more sheltered as a kid, but all that changed after he was drafted and served in General Patton's army in World War 2. He eventually became a sergeant and worked in criminal investigation in the European [military] theater. He ended up being drafted again during the Korean War, after being married to my mom for just a few years. In total, he served 11 years in the army before entering a business career after the wars.

Growing up, nobody in my peer group had parents the same age as mine. Their parents were usually more than 12 years younger than mine, and that made all the difference in the world. There was a huge difference, I found, between adults born in the early 1920s, and those born in the late 30s, 40s, or later. Our world had changed so much. America had changed so much. The culture of people had changed so much. And the fact that my brothers and I were growing up in the 1960s and 70s......... well, that presented certain challenges to my folks that they couldn't have foreseen in their wildest imagination. They were blindsided by the changes and challenges of our generation.

I have heard it said that the World War 2 generation was the "greatest generation" that ever lived. While that is most certainly hyperbole, I do truly appreciate what is meant by that label. There was something special about that generation that is unmatched by any later generation, in my eyes.

Now how can I say this tactfully, without seeming to look down on younger people (I'm including myself, of course)?

Why was that generation so special? What were the qualities that set those people apart in my mind? I know some of it was just the way my parents were, but there was a certain goodness in the people of that time, a certain lack of self-centered interest, a simplicity of life, a contentedness, a wisdom, a lack of obsession with wealth and possessions, that characterized such people. It was evident in my parents, and also in my husband's grandparents. I don't generally see the same ingredients in the older folks I know today (those in their 60s and 70s), whose lives have turned out so differently than their predecessors. Of course, there are exceptions.

Since I was a child, I have always sought out elderly people to befriend. It began with my being best friends with my great Aunt Anna, a woman who was eighty years my senior! But there was always a special ingredient, a certain warmth, and willingness to share smiles and kind words that exuded from elderly people that I talked to. I do remember this.

But now something has changed. I don't get the same reception when I look over and smile at older folks. I don't get the same reaction to my friendly comments. The same comments that used to end up in quality conversation between older folks and myself.... well, they are received more coolly today. These people are more interested in their own agendas now. These are the same elderly folks who are healthier, living longer, and are more well off than those of the past. They are busier, often having to look after their grandchildren more. They are taking more extravagant vacations; they have bigger motor homes. They own condos at the beach and in the mountains. But something isn't the same, and I don't know how else to express it. Maybe some of my readers can help me out.

Anyway, I miss the World War 2 generation very much. I miss their special qualities. I feel that we and our modern culture are much poorer without these people around.

I will close this post with photos of my parents in their heyday.





Here is my mother in her early 20s, some time in the mid1940s.



















This is my mom when she was 18 years old, a typical teenage girl. Looks like a typical 18 year old of today, does she not?

















This is my mom with my Great Aunt Anna, who was born in 1883. She was even older then. By the time she and I were friends, she was in her 80s and 90s. We had so much fun together, once a week. She'd let me comb her hair, paint her nails, and she would participate in any craft or art activity that I had planned for that evening. She was a gentle soul.





This is my dad in his football uniform.














Dad during his tour of France. Too bad there was combat going on at the time. It would have been a splendid vacation.


















Another cherished photo of him in uniform.














My mom is sitting there in front on the right. They played the music, and she sang for the audience. She wasn't even 20 yet. She did sing professionally for awhile. This was the "pop music" of her day. How greatly things have changed!







I suppose I am just a hopeless traditionalist, or at least decades behind my time.

Little Son is in the middle of his fourth grade course with Calvert School. As such, he learned to write cursive using Calvert Script beginning with the mid point of first grade. He learned it with no resistance or problems at the time. This form of script is strictly efficient and practical, with no real finesse. There are no loops or flourishes to speak of. Everything is vertical, highly legible, and using the minimum quantity of strokes or lifts of the pencil to accomplish the job. Block letters are used for capitals. It isn't the prettiest, but it does accomplish the job. In this image at right, the traditional Zaner-Bloser, that I learned as a child is at the top, and Calvert script is on the bottom. See the huge difference?





So imagine my surprise when Little Son announced that he wanted to learn a more traditional style of cursive. He noticed some of his friends who learned to write with Zaner-Bloser and decided that he liked the way it looks.

This caused me to recall the penmanship of my mother (born 1922), my grandmother (born 1897), my great aunt Anna, who was my best friend as a young child (born 1883!!) and especially my other aunt, Helen, who I suppose was born around 1912. Aunt Helen had the most impressive penmanship of all, even into her very elderly years. She always chose a very fine tipped ball point pen for all her correspondence. We always admired her writing.


I did some research and discovered that my mother undoubtedly was taught the Palmer method of penmanship (sample at right -- not my mother's actual handwriting, though). She later went on to develop fine skills in Gregg and Pittman shorthand.


My aunt Helen, however, may have been taught Spencerian script, or a variation of it. She had the most perfectly formed letters of any adult I knew, and the capitals had such beautiful flourishes that dipped below the line or leaped above the line. Unfortunately, she has passed away now, and I don't think I saved a single sample of her writing. An I shortsighted or what?


So Little Son and I decided, after looking at online samples, to study Spencerian penmanship for fun. I would very much like to improve my handwriting, and this is certainly an inexpensive hobby. So we are investing in this set of books: Theory of Spencerian Penmanship with five copybooks.


We figured, this is the penmanship that Laura and Mary [Ingalls] would have learned. Wouldn't it be neat to be able to write that way today?

A lot of things have been going on at Mighty Oak Country School lately, therefore partially explaining my relative quietness on this blog.

First of all, I put up a new header photo of our mighty oak. It looks better than the old one did, doesn't it?

Saturday, Little Son participated in a Bible Quiz team from our local AWANA club. We had to travel to the Big City for this event, and there were eight teams in all. Little Son's team came in sixth place, but I have to say that they had a good time. A bonus was the special Ch*ck Fil-A lunch afterward! My favorite memorable moment was when a question was asked such as: "Which scripture verse teaches that God is true?" followed by three possible references. A, B, or C. (multiple choice question). Well, our precious Bible Quiz team held up their agreed-upon answer and it read "false". We moms had a lot of smiles over that one.

One of my frustrations this winter/spring season has been the length of time it has been taking for Self-Reliant Man to rebuild our tractor's engine. Yes, I am sure you are shaking your head, saying "is she still complaining about that?" It is not so much that Self-Reliant Man is incapable; quite the opposite is true... he is, in fact, very resourceful and self-reliant (grin) but the truth is that we are not exactly the kind of folks that have a lot of time on our hands for working on such a large project. Anyway, Sunday evening seemed rather glum around here as we reflected on our failed attempt to press cylinder sleeves into the engine block by cool shrinking them with 14 pounds of dry ice. A lot of money was spent on this ice, and all for naught.

Or, maybe not?

We sure did get a lot of entertainment from a cooler full of dry ice! That is some pretty amazing stuff.


The wonder of carbon dioxide in solid form.













Self-Reliant Man stirring up the cauldron.












So much fun. This stuff just doesn't melt!














Little Son received Mouse Trap for his ninth birthday, and we had a good time playing it together. It is a game I had as a child.











Little Son loves God's creation, and one evening as we were practicing violin indoors, he remarked on the unearthly orange glow outside the windows from a striking sunset. We hurried outside to appreciate it better. It really was beautiful. Little Son and Baby Girl called it "the glory of God".





















We are always trying to capture photos of nature to send in to R*nger Rick magazine. Here is a close up of a lily outside our house.










One more thing. The children are really into writing notes... to their friends, to each other, to us parents. Here is a note I found in our school room just the other day, from Baby Girl to her big brother.

Little Son wrote notes on heart shaped paper for us, too. We found them on our bed, on each side, as we were going to sleep last night. One read: "Dear Mommy, I love you. Good mothers can get rare now! Love, Little Son". The other one said: "To Daddy. I love you. The Dad I love is you."


Definitely gives you a reason to smile as you drift off for the night. This is what being a parent is all about, right?

... you just need some renewal of spirit.

This morning's prayer from Baby Girl went something like this:

Dear God, please help my teacher, mommy, not drop school, and keep teaching me. Please help her like what she has to do. Amen.

Not that I have ever talked about "dropping school", but she is aware that it is a big commitment for me.

Certainly, a prayer like that one can do much to renew my spirit!

We wish a blessed Resurrection Sunday to one and all!

Христос Воскресе! Поистине, Он воскрес!

which is Russian for "Christ is Risen! Truly, He is risen!"

I had a close friend from my college days, Diane, my roommate of two years, who has since passed away under very tragic circumstances. I remember well how she cherished the rituals of Easter within her Russian Orthodox tradition. For many days after Easter, the Orthodox greet one another with the above greeting.

The Vietnamese would say: Kitô là tăng! Thật sự, ông là tăng!

Those in South Korea would say: 그리스도 상승이다! 진정으로, 그가 상승이다!

And in French: Christ est ressuscité! Vraiment, il est ressuscité!

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ brings joy in any language.

Here are some highlight photos of our family's Easter this weekend.


We began on Saturday by decorating hard-cooked eggs.













Easter service was very early this morning and we had to leave home by 7:15. But it was not so early that the baskets weren't already discovered and taken apart.
















Five acres make for the best, and the most challenging, Easter Egg hunts. Little Son carries along a butterfly net.... just in case he sees one along the way.











Baby Girl scarcely needs my help anymore to find eggs.













Checking out the loot afterward. The Golden Egg had a dollar tucked within!












Baby Girl found two Golden Eggs in the yard, but she passed one on to her brother so he would have one, too.









We finished up by enjoying matzos, hot cross buns, coffee, and Resurrection Eggs and scripture reading, while seated as a family at the breezeway table. It was a very beautiful, breezy Resurrection Sunday morning!

....... that we would have had frost




..........................in April




...........................in Florida!



But last week, with that incredible cold snap, we did. So the children's small vegetable garden has been failing. I guess they will have to replant.


The carrots are doing okay, though.

Yesterday we celebrated another birthday in our family. Little Son turned nine years old. All I could think of is that another nine years will make him 18, and headed off to college.

He had a pleasant day, and he was very happy with his gifts. He received plenty of clothing, a swimsuit and rash guard, super big water gun, a kite, another butterfly net (his third -- he really works them hard!), a wristwatch, Mouse Trap game, an R/C hovercraft, fisherman's sandals (he specifically wanted fisherman sandals!), and many sweet notes and messages from his little sister. We also ordered him a new Bible, but it hasn't arrived yet.

Baby Girl, you will remember, emphatically adores her big brother. On Friday, she told me that she was so excited for his birthday to arrive. Just imagine: his birthday! She has taken on the tradition of wrapping up various belongings of her own in her own specialty homemade wrapping paper and presenting them to him as gifts. Hey - who need to go shopping to give birthday presents? She must have wrapped up 6 packages in this fashion, and included three different happy birthday letters. It was so cute.

I cannot believe he is nine. That age seems so big to me. He is an absolutely delightful boy. In God's grace, may the second nine years be as wonderful as the first.

...it was from a dear friend. She had passed on an email received from another lady (a stranger to me) that read:

I spent over 31 years of my life as an active Roman Catholic. Although I have since come a separate way on my spiritual journey, with a different understanding of Scripture and theology, there are certain things I miss about being a practicing Catholic. One way I would contrast my "reformed protestant" spiritual life from my old Catholic spiritual life would be... My Protestant present is a college science course. My Catholic past was an art and music course. Of course I have aged as an adult, and I cannot possibly replicate many of the affections, passions, and facets of my earlier spiritual life. We get older and our hearts change.

Holy Week used to really stand out when I was Catholic. I remember so well, how special and holy (as in "set apart") this week always was for me. I loved the rituals associated with that time. I loved the palm branches of Palm Sunday; the Holy Thursday Mass and the washing of feet; the special and solemn Good Friday service, which is the only day of the year when Holy Eucharist is not celebrated; I remember my favorite Mass of the year was the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening after Good Friday. The blessing of the fire, the candlelight service, the multiple scripture readings, the catechumens joining the church. This was so special to me. I never forgot to abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent in those years. I remember all those Ash Wednesdays, signifying the holy season of Lent. There was something distinctive and wonderful about it (nowadays I scarcely even remember that it is the lenten season sometimes).

My life has this huge dichotomy... Chapter One meant New Jersey, Catholic, unmarried, both parents alive, and electrical engineering. This was roughly three decades. Chapter Two began... my mother in heaven, Florida, protestant, married, a mother of two, staying at home (eventually) and now homeschooling. All this to say that missing the old Catholic days is closely linked with missing my mom, and that whole other life. My mom taught me about being a good christian who was a good Catholic. From my present point of view, I don't know to this day exactly how my mom understood the gospel message, but I do know that she sincerely loved Christ. She birthed my childhood passion to joyfully "practice my religion", and later on this morphed into a different spirituality for me.

But being Catholic was very mystical, very spiritual, meditative, devotional, and it involved all my senses. It defined the way I felt and thought when I was young. It was Search weekends, folk Masses, and college retreats. It was my serving my church as their youngest ever Eucharistic Minister, at the age of 18. It was reading from the Lectern before the congregation. It was attending daily Mass with another engineer friend every weekday morning before reporting to work.

Now I understand things differently. It is more cerebral now, more mature. Definitely Older. It is commitment to Christ in a completely different form. It is a comprehension of the simple gospel that I never had when I was 18. But Holy Week....... well, it isn't quite the same as it was when I was Catholic.

One Holy Week devotion that is practiced among Catholics is the Stations of the Cross. One station features a woman named Veronica, who upon seeing Jesus struggle along the via dolorosa, tenderly wiped his face with her veil. As a special blessing to her, Christ was said to leave the image of His divine face upon her veil. As far as I am aware, there is no anecdote in scripture of this event. It is merely tradition that holds this account. Nevertheless, it was still worthy of consideration: what kind of human emotion, passion, and devotion drove Veronica to do this gesture for Christ?

I leave you with an old poem, a devotion for Good Friday, author unknown. A poem that shares what the writer may have understood as Veronica's emotion.

A Second Chance

Your creased eyes, brown as the wood above your head
Aimed painfully at the thirsty sand below
Are still beautiful -- human -- glossed over with love and silent tears.
Your once crisp beard, now snarled and matted
Is grained like the post from which you hang.
One leather leg crossed over the other displays every bone
While cupped, moist palms pull their weary arms willingly apart,
And a torrid, wavering sun mirrors itself
Upon helmet and sword, spike and hammer.

I wish I could have been there
To touch your cheek
Which they struck;
To remove wet strands of hair from your eyes
Where they crowned you;
To rest my hand on your shoulder
Where they thrashed you;
To speak gently to your parched face
To which they, gritting their teeth, swore and spat.

Perhaps I still can.

Well yes, I guess it is true. I feel like I haven't been a very good blogger lately. I certainly have read many blogs, and have been impressed and inspired by oh so many profundities contained therein. So many talented and prolific writers. So many well thought out conclusions. But I haven't felt at all equipped to contribute anything meaningful to the electronic warehouse of homeschooling parental wisdom.

But today, that won't stop me from rambling about things that have mattered to me lately; and who knows? By the time I stop, I might even have something worthy of a post.

Recently I have written about our extreme weather event of the week, our camping trip, and about Baby Girl's birthday. And some of the posts of other blogger have gotten me thinking up potential posts (PPs). But it seems that many PPs end up becoming UPPs (un-published posts).

One thing I have always looked forward to, being a mommy of a daughter, was getting her interested in various handcrafts, like crocheting, knitting, needlepoint, cross stitch and the like. I only learned needlepoint and embroidery myself, and some strange little pastime with yarn that I remember being called "horse rein", but I never did learn to knit, crotchet, or even to make a latch-hook rug. While shopping for Baby Girl's birthday, I happened upon a latch hook kit of a 8" by 8" butterfly rug. Yesterday, I got a little time to teach Baby Girl how to do it (while I learned myself -- so easy!) and she really took to it. She has been happily working on her rug since yesterday, even getting up early this morning before church to try to seize a few minutes to work on it. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to see her working on a project of this size and complexity at her age. Hopefully it whets her appetite to learn more things down the road.We had family visit us last weekend, and stay at our home for three nights. That whole experience could be a post by itself. For now, though, I will just share that our children's lives were enriched by their visit, and one activity that was particularly exciting was the water rockets. I do have pictures of this. It took place in our pasture, and involved homemade rockets from 2 liter soda bottles, and a homemade rocket launcher. You filled 1/4 of the bottle with water, and pumped air into the remainder of the bottle up to about 60 p.s.i., then fired it off. The rockets probably flew at least 200 feet, but maybe I am a bad judge of that sort of thing. Might have been higher. Anyhow, Little Son got a kick out of it. Baby Girl ended up being the rocket retriever. She is such a good sport.



One thing I have been struggling with personally is a very acute sense of not having time to accomplish what I want to. Free time comes so infrequently, is so short-lived, and often arrives during such unexpected moments such that I never know what to do to best fill it. I am one who has a keen sense of my responsibilities, and a strong desire to always make the best use of my time. This is a blessing that can also be an annoyance. The frustration I feel over having "no time" is bringing out all my spiritual shortcomings. I get moody, critical, and resentful of ~~~ I don't know what. I get angry that I don't have the time to do everything I want to do. At the same time, ironically, I get impatient when thing don't happen fast enough. For example, I often feel impatient over the fact that Self-Reliant Man seems to be plodding along in his rebuild of our tractor engine. Yes, this is a big job. Yes, we really aren't the kind of folks that have time for this sort of thing. Yes, we really rely on this tractor. And yes, we have lost far too many precious Saturdays to other demands, and there are many similar Saturdays to come in the next month. Although I want to do the other activities that are "stealing" Saturdays away from this project, I resent them at the same time: simply because there is too much I want to get done on our Saturdays.

In a strange way, I have even resented our family camping trips, because even as we plan and prepare to carve out a few days of margin in our family life through camping, when we return, the old resentment returns as I realize how much I have to do to "catch up" again at home. It spoils my peace.

One thing we did for Baby Girl's sixth birthday in March was order her a complete set of bedroom furniture. This means a bed, bookcase headboard, desk, dresser, and nightstand. Four pieces showed up, and now I found out that the bed is on backorder until April 27, well past a month past her birthday. She doesn't seem to mind, but it really bummed me out for a time. I see it as another loose end in my life. So the boxes sit unopened while we wait. Like we even have time to assemble it anyway. Can you see my lack of peace and impatience?

Here's a trick of technology in my life. Ever since Self-Reliant Man and I both lost over 30 pounds each in 2007, we decided we could keep the weight off by weighing ourselves every single morning and writing the amount on a chart. That way, we knew if we were creeping up and could make small corrections. It worked well for over a year. Then about a month ago, we discovered that we were both losing weight without really expecting to. Our digital scale had been showing us to be steady for weeks, then both of us declining in weight. No way!

What we discovered was that we needed to change the battery in the darn thing. After getting a fresh new battery I discovered that I had gained about 8 pounds! I wasn't surprised, but I learned not to trust a battery operated scale anymore. Now I need to get my mind into weight loss mode. For some reason, that was easy to do two years ago; not so easy to do now.

And how has the NP (new plan to drastically reduce my computer screen time) been coming along you might ask? I have to say that despite my desire to limit the screen time in my life, I have not been successful since that first glorious week. It seems that there is always a need to go online for something, and then instead of walking away when I am finished, I decide to check this news website, then that weather website, then this homeschool website, then a little online shopping, and before you know it, a half hour has passed. And I am cranky that I have no time? I need to re-evaluate, rethink, and replan. I need self discipline. It is a spiritual issue.

One more thing is that our school time at home has been taking more time lately, too. I fully expected that it would with Little Son in 4th grade, and Baby Girl in 1st grade. Now that we are in the midst of our academic year, it is true, and it has been a big adjustment for me. I had dreams of doing other activities and find that I never get to any of them. I barely even have time to read a book some weeks.

There's that resentment rearing its ugly head again. I know it's a spiritual problem. As I reread this post, I think to myself "ah, the rants of a person who really has nothing serious to worry about". But that's real honest life in my little world. I said I was going to ramble, and I certainly did. Bless you for wading through it with me.

Today I discovered that our new weather warning radio does work. The siren does go off when there is a watch or warning in our county.

First there was a Severe Thunderstorm Watch.

Later it became a Severe Thunderstorm Warning.

Then it became a Tornado Warning.

In the meantime, we had a significant hailstorm over our house. It began as golf ball sized hail, then after a minute reduced in size to quarter sized. Then nickel sized. But as it went on, there was more and more and more hail. The hail persisted between 5 and 10 minutes. Please click on the photo to see all the hailstones on the ground.


The passing storm left behind a lake around our house.

Afterwards, the sun came out and left an unusually low rainbow. Look closely; better yet, click on the photo and notice how it hovers just above our swimming pool, in front of the trees. It turns out that a tornado was actually sighted in the area of our small village.

Ahhh, Florida in the springtime.