Jan4 -Still stuck in Wauchula

Here we sit rather impatiently waiting for our MotoSat dish to be fixed. Through a series of ongoing misadventures (wrong parts shipped, parts forgotten to be shipped, and the holiday hours for UPS) we are no further ahead than we were on Dec 23 !!! It has turned really cold here, once again WE experience the new record breaking temps. Has been down in the 20sF overnights and highs of only 48-58F, but at least the skies are clear, blue and sunny.

We ended up taking our new computer back to Tampa, after all the running around we did getting it set up, because neither of us could get the mousepad to work. Thought better now than later !! Will now look for another replacement before this one totally gives up on us.

Jan 5

We woke up to 28F this AM with a very heavy frost everywhere. This is really damaging to the fruit crops around here, not to mention all the landscaping materials. The thousands of acres of strawberries have been watered to form an ice cover around them to avoid freezing completely. Some fields have close to 100 pickers working into nightfall trying to get the crops off. The citrus haulers are one behind the other past our park here heading for the processing facilities. This area has huge open pit mines producing phosphates for agricultural fertilizer. They supply 75% of fertilizers in the USA.