Hurricane panels Florida

Before we left Naples John installed the new hurricane-proof panels over all our windows. They are particularly nice because they are transparent and don't give that "cave" feeling. In fact, the effect is rather ethereal and pleasing. We will leave them up until after the season is past.

Wedding guests

For the wedding the church pews were filled with these beautiful colors. (I wore a grey dress. Oh, well, I was ethnic in my own way.) I felt I was in a garden of lovely flowers.

Spiffy

I even had my nails done with gold polish to complete the look.

Side note: the flower centerpieces on the tables had the addition of colored food dye in the water ... I had never even thought to do that. It was very pretty.

Karin's Indian jewelry

To make it even more fun, Karin sent me a couple of sets of traditional Indian jewelry to choose from to wear with the sari. I wore the ones on the right, plus the bangles and all three rings from the left.

Indian wedding

For fun, at the engagement ceremony the evening before the actual wedding, Saroja not only lent the non-indian women guests her saris, but provided help getting us dressed. John had it easy, but mine was more interesting!

I'm still alive!

OK, so Karin has been giving me a bit of grief about not blogging, so here I am.

No photos yet, but at least an update:

I've finished the first (really, really rough) draft of The Book. Isolating myself in the Naples condo makes it possible to write. I have 98,000 words down. Obviously that number will change up and down when I rewrite and throw stuff out and add more in, etc., but that's how many I've actually written at this point. So, I've got a big fat manuscript to show for my efforts at least!

I will put it aside again and let it simmer for awhile, then dive in for a rewrite probably this fall. The good news is, I'm not completely sick of reading it -- yet.

John joined me in Naples for about a week, then we locked up the villa and drove to Daytona Beach for a two-day marriage bash for the daughter of old friends of ours. Brian -- you may remember Raj Boaz? He's two years younger than you. Prem and Saroja are the parents - my age. We've known them since before Prem went back to India to marry Saroja and bring her to the US...40 plus years ago. Anyway, their youngest daughter (they have five children) just married. I will post photos from the festivities later today.

We drove from the beach to Texas to Karin's house. Almost 1000 miles. We were driving across northern Florida, the Florida panhandle, the southern edges of alabama and Mississippi and then into Louisiana. We turned north above New Orleans, then finally west again into western Texas and on to Allen.

We were mostly impressed with how little civilization we saw on that whole two day trip ... a lot of miles with just flat land covered with huge old trees interspersed with flat swamp land with more big old trees. Not very much in the way of farms or ranches or any agriculture. Saw only a couple of city skylines, and those were in the distance ... we managed to drive around all of them with no city traffic at all.

Oh, one impressive part of the journey was a ten-mile-long flat bridge. It was like a boardwalk you might have in a state park with swampland/marshes on either side. But it had semis and cars and such and it went on forever! We spotted occasional fishing boats and fishermen down under the thick tree canopy. It was interestate 12, which is a sort of bypass for N.O. ... I don't know if it even existed when you lived there.

Now we're with Karin and all her family ... including their new kitten. Have you been checking Sheela's Blog? She has a kitty video.

I'll post pix later.