Warmer here in the Gainsville area today, somewhere up around the mid 70's, so I am almost feeling guilty that many of my friends are in parts of the country that are either snowed in, frozen in, or both. I however; had a very pleasant day here. Mostly hung out at the trailer through the morning and caught up on email, banking, Facebook and other paperwork types of things. Still need to catch up on my comics and crossword puzzles, but there is still time for that later in the week.
   Mostly I worked on my photos today, sorting all of the ones I took over the past couple of weeks into manageable folders, and weeding through the ones that were out of focus or just plain badly shot. I also worked on a few more in depth, cropping, resetting the light values and other assorted things. I don't spend a lot of time on any of my pictures, but I usually want too at least crop them a little bit to make them look better.
    I left the trailer around two and headed into town for a movie. My original plan had been to do my laundry today in Ocala, but then I realized that it was the end of a 4 day weekend here, Presidents Day, and that a lot of people who weren't usually at home might well be. That might mean that there would be more people able to take their wash to the laundry also, and therefor the laundry mat might be busier than usual. So.... I just postponed the whole thing instead, and went off to watch a new movie out last Friday, 'Dead Pool'. Another one of the seemly endless movies based on Marvel Comics characters, this one was different in that it was "R" rated because of language, sex and violence. All of which it had in huge quantities, so it was of course, much better than most other movies. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed the movie much more than I thought I would, and will likely have to get a copy of it when it comes out on DVD sometime later in the year.
    Once the movie was over I went on over to 'La Tiende Latina', my favorite Mexican restaurant and had a very nice burrito.... this time a standard carna asada one. It was delicious!

    I'm going to post a few more pictures below, but they are from two weeks ago when Rima, my girl friend, and I drove over to the east side of Florida. We were due to fly out of the Orlando airport early on the 3rd of February so I went ahead and got us a room near there for the night before,, instead of trying to drive over there in the middle of the night from here. So we took off for that area early in the morning on the 2nd and spent the day wandering around some of that area over there. After a nice lunch at a little marina cafe on the St. Johns river, yummy fish Reuben and gator bites, we went to Blue Springs State Park and spent some time wandering around there. As the pictures will show, we found a few Manatee's still in the spring run and then all kinds of other wildlife hanging out around the water.
    We had a pleasant dinner that night at a sushi-Thai restaurant in the town of Deland. Really good food, but also very noisy, so not as pleasant as it could of been. From there it was off to the hotel room near the airport where we hit the sack early in order to be up first thing in the morning for our flight to St Croix.

Blue Springs State Park, Florida - Feb. 2, 2016

One of many natural artesian springs in Florida, Blue Spring is one of the biggest, spewing forth more than 1 billion gallons of fresh water per day. ( Yes... that isn't a typo). The water is always 72 degrees and flows as a river the 1/4 mile or so that is needed to get it down to the St. John River. The river is nearly clear and takes on the color of the sky or the surrounding foliage, usually either a nice dark blue or a gentle green. That day was a green day, as the sky had quite a bit of cloud cover.

Another view of the river.

Native manatees come into the springs in the winter when the outside river temperatures become too cold for them. I was surprised to actually see manatees, such as this mother cow, and her baby calf, in the spring as it was a nice warm day.

We actually saw around 20 manatees in the spring that day, though there can be as many as 400 evidently. The large adults can be 12' in length and weigh upwards of 4 tons. So about the size of a VW Beetle.

The only natural predator of manatees is man, and then mostly by accident. You can see the results of a close encounter with a motorboat prop on the side and tail of the juvenile one closest to the bottom of the photo. the number of manatees in Florida is holding steady or even increasing a little bit, but there are still way fewer than there use to be.

We took a 2 hour long boat excursion out on the St. Johns River while there in the park. The area was full of birds and other animals including several trees that held large flocks of White Ibis.

The trees in this picture are American Bald Cypress, a member of the Evergreen family that actually drops its needles in the winter time. There wood was, and is, highly prized for its rot resistance, so there is very little old growth forest left. It is said that in the old days you could find trees with diameters or 16'-20'. It makes these little 2'-3' diameter trees seem kind of puny in comparison.

One of my all time favorite animals... turtles... or 'cooters' as they are sometimes called in the south.

Another batch of manatees working their way down stream.

A Little Blue Heron out looking for something to eat.

I wish the lighting had been better, but in this picture you have the cormorant sitting on the tree limb and the alligator perched on the log to the left.

A pretty large alligator for this area.... maybe 10' over all. I like this photo for some reason. The light was decent and I like the reflections in the water.

A plethora of Cormorants sitting on a log.

*brk