Kids vs Animals

Friends !

zZZZZ don't disturb them !

Mummyyy!!! That naughty cat...!!!

They are looking great !

Baby ... Her cute baby !

Euuuuwwwwwww Naughty !

Tiger!

Cute Doggy !

That kid has got a pillow !

Eeeee cute !

What did you do ?????

Busy cat !

Both lost their teeth ! Cheese!

You goollly doggy doll !

Sweet friends!

Horse !

Friends are sleeping together!

Kid and dog : getting ready for the bull fight? :p

Haaaaaaaaaaaaa !

NB: Images are collected using google image

Funny Model

Thats why we see girls most of the time to promote products !

Yankee vs. Dixie Food

Guest blogger  Berkley Clayton is at it again. His post below is not approved or sanctioned  by this Yankee, but I did have editorial rights on the photo's posted below, It's my blog  :-)

When I was growing up the 1960’s and early 1970’s we almost always ate Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s house.  Sometimes there were a lot of us and sometimes it was just our nuclear family and my grandmother. 

I know that our “northern friends” tend to have different kinds of food for Thanksgiving and Christmas than people in the South do.  My half Yankee wife, seems to think that all you should have on the table for Thanksgiving is a turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce made from real cranberries, (none of that canned jelly stuff) some type of sweet potato or yams, stuffing made from white bread dried in the oven, then cut into cubes, and pumpkin pie for dessert..........

When I first started dating her..........

I spent holidays with her folks in South Florida and had the items mentioned above for Thanksgiving.  Christmas was more flexible, (ham) but basically the same.  All very traditional you know.  She would say, “none of the “country food” you eat in Tallahassee!!”  My father in law always had pickles and olives out on the table especially around Christmas time.  I never had that when I was a kid.  The only pickles that I knew anything about came out of.........

..... a jar and you bought them at Winn Dixie.  Mostly I remember “hamburger chips pickles” and that was it.  What were black olives and the nasty tasting green Spanish olives with the pimentos stuffed in them?  I never ate one until I was grown. 

The first time she was at my folk’s house for a large holiday celebration such as Christmas, she was aghast......

that we had macaroni and cheese, potato salad, squash casserole and other non-traditional “holiday” food items.  I remember one year Mama made............

...... banana pudding instead of pecan or pumpkin pie.  My wife said this is picnic food and you eat this all year long.  To which I replied “yes, but it is good.”  The year we had collard greens on the table really set her back. I tried to get across to her that no matter what one eats for the meal itself, it is still Thanksgiving.  She did not want to hear it. 

Two of my friends from work are Cubans and one of the best Thanksgiving dinners I ever had was when all of us and our kids got together and had southern and Cuban Thanksgiving together.  The Cubans, being Americanized ate the same stuff everyone else eats on Thanksgiving, but they brought along Cuban food that was usually eaten at Christmas.  We had fried turkey, croquetas, platanos maduros (fried plantains) and black beans and rice.  It was great!  Even my kids ate it.  We did have dressing, but no pumpkin or sweet potatoes.  And most especially, we did not have potato salad!!  All in all it was still Thanksgiving and I like Cuban food.   My wife was o.k. with that being that it was not that “redneck food”............

..... I eat!! 

Fish is another thing I have noticed about people from up north being picky about.   My wife is from Ft. Lauderdale and she will not eat fish unless it passes the “smell test”.  My son and I have gone out in the Gulf via the landing at the state park on the Econfina River and caught redfish, speckled trout and mullet.  We bring it home and clean it, even skinning it, leaving just the filet, and my wife won’t eat it.  After a big sniff she says ‘that smells fishy” and won’t touch it.  She never had problem eating the fish her brothers used to catch when we were down there.  I have yet to figure out the difference between fish caught in Ft. Lauderdale and the fish caught here.  As for mullet,

that is trash fish.  “You people up here don’t know what good fish is.”  “Anybody that will eat mullet will eat trash.”  She won’t eat mullet cooked any way, shape, form or fashion.   Any seafood place in this area worth its salt serves mullet, fried, broiled or blackened as a staple on a seafood platter.  Not my wife, bless her heart, she gets a hamburger.  I call her a fish snob.  She just laughs and doesn’t eat fish.     

As for Yankee food, I do like a nice corned beef sandwich from a deli.  There is not a good one here where I live and I wish there was. To get a good deli you probably have to go to South Florida.  There are lots of great Jewish delis down there.  (Especially Wolfies and Wolfies Rascal House on Miami Beach. 

 I think both are closed now though.)  The corned beef is/was the best!!!!

- Berkley Clayton

Yankee Goes Gruntin' For Worms

You have not lived until you have experienced the worm gruntin' festival held annually in Sopchoppy Florida (I love to say Sopchoppy to my Northern family and friends) . 

S O P C H O P P Y

Worm fans

It's a worm folks!

When I first heard about this festival I had mental images of locals on stage with a microphone grunting like a worm, (does a worm grunt?) not unlike the pig calling contests I have seen on the news. Far from it! First off, My wife had to tell me it's worm gruntin' honey, NOT worm grunting! Worm gruntin' is the art of earth worming - using tools with names such as ropping iron, wooden stob, gallon can and croaker sack.....

.... you use these tools to create a vibration by moving back and forth the rooping iron across the wooden stob - the vibration moves the little fellas from under the soil to topside for easy pickings to be used for bait.

At the festival, I found the worm gruntin' master-Gary Revell. His family has been doing this for many, many years. Gary owns a bait shop in Sopchoppy and was very excited to show me his "catch" from his recent gruntin' activities.



Gary is a very happy man and loves what he does with a passion: 



I appreciated that more than anything else at the festival, how passionate Gary was to his trade and how he enjoyed telling us what he does and how he enjoys doing it. It's a family tradition. The closest thing I ever came to doing something like this up east was to dig for hours in my backyard when I was a kid and could only find those darn......

 ......Rolly Polly bugs that curled up into a ball when you touched them. 


Or how about the time I told little Graham and Nathan that we were going in the backyard and dig to china....They were all in at the time. We never made it to China. 


The bottom line of the festival was just as much about the people than the worms,good people celebrating an old tradition....

The festival is not without royalty, each year a king and queen of the festival are chosen...errr coronated.

And of course there is always festival food..

This is big in the land of FSU

Everybody is getting into the hot sauce biz

Who said the South likes fried food?

Did you know this about worms?

• An earthworm can grow only so long. A well-fed adult will depend on what kind of worm it is, how many segments it has, how old it is and how well fed it is. An Lumbricus terrestris will be from 90-300 millimeters long.
• A worm has no arms, legs or eyes.
• There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms.
• Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
• In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms.
• The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.
• Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called aggregates.
• Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying earthworms more than 100 years ago.
• Worms are cold-blooded animals.
• Earthworms have the ability to replace or replicate lost segments. This ability varies greatly depending on the species of worm you have, the amount of damage to the worm and where it is cut. It may be easy for a worm to replace a lost tail, but may be very difficult or impossible to replace a lost head if things are not just right.
• Baby worms are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
• The Australian Gippsland Earthworm grows to 12 feet long and can weigh 1-1/2 pounds.
• Even though worms don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long (approximately one hour).
• If a worm’s skin dries out, it will die.
• Worms are hermaphrodites. Each worm has both male and female organs. Worms mate by joining their clitella (swollen area near the head of a mature worm) and exchanging sperm. Then each worm forms an egg capsule in its clitellum.

• Worms can eat their weight each day.

These type of events are awesome to people watch..It's a chance for folks of all walks of life to make a statement!

Multiple choice?

You talk'in to me?

Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino Extra Hot With Foam Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended, One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice

Don't you want to go?

Did not see these much up east

Add caption here

All in all is was a good day out of the house and away from such things as the computer. Boo-Boo had a great time too, he was all about doing it all by himself today....