Life on Florida’s West Coast

Travel as a Christmas Tradition

I talked to my grandmother up in West Virginia today and she was telling me about the flooding in some parts of the state. My dad, who lives close to DC, was telling me about the winter weather there. As much as I love Florida is December (even though it is raining tonight), I miss being somewhere that is more festive feeling simply by virtue of the chilly weather and the impending snow.

I have a very good friend who always leaves Florida for Christmas, but she and her family all head out to Las Vegas. Seems to me that Vegas isn’t any more festive than Florida, but they love the tradition. They stay in some of the nicer discount hotels Las Vegas has to offer and spend more time and money of lavish meals and shows and little bit of gambling. My pint is that leaving Florida is part of their Christmas traditions and I think it’s a great idea.

I would love to make going north part of my annual tradition, but I only have my daughter every other Christmas, so it would have to be bi-annual, I suppose. Looking forward to days of mittens and seeing your frosty breath in the air would add to our holiday anticipation. We actually did spend last Christmas up at my dad’s. The only snow we saw was on the drive through the Maryland mountains between my dad’s and my grandmother’s in the Ohio Valley. We did get to see snow, though, so I should be grateful. It was very cold, very wet, and perfect for snuggling next to the fire. Too bad Gigi got strep throat while we were there. Maybe we can give it another try in 2008.

Flu Shots

Starting in September, all children in New Jersey attending preschool or licensed day care centers will have to get an annual flu shot.

Wow. Flue shots are such a hot button topic, with many people on both sides of the issue. If we lived in NJ, Gigi would have to get a flu shot and that upsets me. I am not sure even yet if I want her to get flu shots Her father was going to take her to get a free flu shot administered at his workplace (he works for a huge hospital conglomerate in the area), but I asked him to take a step back and think about if she really needs it or not. Lots of kids in her school have been sick already this year, but she has been fine to date.

In the past couple of years, I have got the flu once per year and Gigi has missed it altogether. It seems like I am actually the one who would benefit from having a shot before entering a school or other workplace rather than my daughter.

So ti comes down to figuring out if administering flu shots to all preschoolers will substantially cut back on how many children in any given classroom actually suffer flu symptoms each year. I will be curious to watch and see what happens in New Jersey.

Alternate PPC Networks

This one is for all of you small business owners who find their way to my blog. I have a mailing list with over 1000 members who are nearly all small online business owners, and I understand the struggle to make a mark online. I see how competitive the market place can be and how important affordable, effective advertising is if you want to rise above the rest.

Google and Yahoo Are Expensive
Are you looking for a way to advertise online in the highly competitive PPP (pay per click) environment? Sometimes it might not seem like it, but there actually is a world outside of Google and Yahoo when it comes to the world of PPC. Adknowledge’s BidSystem can run text ads at up to 30% less than the Google Adwords or Yahoo network prices. Their system has click fraud prevention measures and you do not pay for low converting users, which removes a lot of the risk of PPC advertising.

Why Contextual Advertising?
Contextual advertising is the current online trend and it seems to be the best bet, because you’re ensured that your ad is being displayed to users who are interested in similar content and topics. If a user does a search for Florida beaches and sees ads for a Florida hotel or travel agency on the resulting site, they are more likely to click on the ads since they arrived at the site already interested in the subject matter.

Try This
If you want to see how BidSystm will work for your advertising needs, now is a good time to give them a try. If you sign up now they will give you $50 in FREE PPC Advertising. You can’t lose with a bonus like that.

Tragedy at the Skyway Bridge

Earlier today I heard a snippet of news on the radio about an active search and rescue going on at the famed Skyway Bridge. The announced said he thought that a van may have gone into the water. I shivered a little and thought of my own van plunging over the side and that tremendously long drop.

There was also news of bodies being found in a Largo apartment after neighbors reported hearing gunshots. At the time I am not sure if anyone was reporting that the two items were related.

Now that more details are available, it seems that a teacher for Pinellas County and USF is at the heart of both situations.

Oliver Bernsdorff (also known as Thomas Bernsdorff) 36, was a suspect in the shooting deaths of his ex-wife, Jennifer Davis, 27, and her lover Andrea Pisanello, 53, who lived at the Monterey Bay apartment on Ulmerton road where the bodies were found. Neighbors reported hearing shots fired at 6:45 a.m. One child, a girl of 4 or 5 years, was found alive in the Largo apartment. This child is assumed to be Pisanello’s daughter.

The neighbor who lives above the Largo apartment says she heard 4-5 shots around 6:45 a.m. and then what sounded like hammering. She then heard a baby crying and yelling “Mommy! Mommy!” Another neighbor heard the two women who live in the apartment yelling before the shots were fired and saw a man wandering out behind the apartments who said he was lost just minutes fore the shootings. Another neighbor reported seeing a white van quickly leave the scene. Yet another neighbor says Davis was heard arguing on the phone yesterday and made a comment that if anything happened to her, people would find something in her car. There was turmoil brewing.

Then at around 10:30 a.m., a man’s body was found shot in the head in an apparent suicide inside a 1992 Toyota van registered to Bernsdorff. This is on the far Manatee County side of the bridge. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper saw the van swerving as it headed south on the Sunshine Skyway signaled for the van to pull over. As the van left the road it kept rolling into a stand of mangroves and when the trooper approached the van he saw the driver was dead. There was a handgun was inside the van.

If that is not enough, the bodies of his two children were found at Bernsdorff’s Clearwater home.

Bernsdorff filed for divorce from his wife back in August and the settlement gave him primary custody of their two children, 4-year-old Olivia and 2-year-old Magnus. Davis was ordered to pay child support and had fallen into arrears.

Records indicate that Bernsdorff was in debt, including $135,000 in student loans, $27,000 owed the IRS, a $33,000 private loan and $50,000 in credit card debt. He taught for the Pinellas County School District, as an adult basic education and GED prep instructor with the Clearwater Adult Education Center as well as taking on classes as an adjunct instructor at USF’s St. Petersburg campus.

The couple got married just a few months before my ex and I got married. I am looking at their wedding pictures online and seeing how much can change over time. I’m incredulous as I look over the webpage built by Bernsdorff. At one time he was obviously amazingly proud of his wife and his family, of the birth of their son at home, of their lives. Apparently, Davis confided to her ministers that her husband had been abusive throughout their marriage. More recently, Davis had begun living with her lesbian lover.

Bernsdorff, Davis and Pisanello had attended Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater for several years. A friend commented that the separation must have driven Bernsdorff to this. Personally, it would be hard enough for me to see my spouse take up with someone we both went to church with – especially if it was a same-sex relationship. I understand his anguish, but I cannot understand his decision to end his life, his wife’s life and the lives of his dear children.

Details continue to come to the surface.

Edited to add:
I got a call from one of my best friends the next night, because she really needed to talk. It turns out that Jenn was one of her friends. They had been in a breastfeeding group together for a couple of years, because their daughters were born 10 days apart at the same hospital. When the Bernsdorffs owned a party business, my friend had a job working for them as a birthday party hostess. She worked every weekend throwing parties for kids. She loved it. Thinking back on it, I can see now why I felt like these people were so familiar to me as I read the news stories. I’d heard about them a lot and received a lot of e-mail forwards from my friend that had originally come from Jenn. May she and her loved ones rest in peace.

Dear Santa

Our household is smack dab in the middle of a seasonal crisis. I think I may have written earlier about my own personal dilemma in trying to figure out if I was going to tell my daughter whether or not Santa Claus is real. I went with the whole honesty is the best policy mantra and my own daughter laughed at me, rolled her eyes, and informed me she did not believe me. She had chosen to believe in Santa.

So, last week she told me she knows Santa is not real. Yet, she is not ready to fully give up on the belief. She wavers daily. She goes from sagely telling me that she knows Santa is just a story and Mommy brings all of the gifts, to worrying about whether or not Santa received her letter in time. Hence the crisis – Gigi is right at that time where she is honestly trying to figure out what she believes about Santa.

I am apt to help her believe for at least this one more year. In fact, I am thinking that uses a service that sends Letters From Santa might be a nice touch to tie up loose ends this year. You personalize a letter with your child’s name and other details and they get a real letter in mail from Santa. There are different shipping options, so there is still time. I may as well help prolong Gigi’s precious childhood. Kids are growing up all too fast in our current society.

Strawberry Festival Ticketing Now Working

Tickets for the 2008 Florida Strawberry Festival should have been available for purchase Monday morning – two days ago. The online ordering system was fraught with problems, making ordering possible only sporadically.

After two full days of problems the system is finally up and running without a glitch. You can also obtain get by calling the festival ticket office at (813) 754-1996 or by visiting the ticket office at 2209 W. Oak Ave., Plant City.
The festival is set for February 29 through March 9 with headliners such as Alan Jackson at 7:30 p.m. March 2 and Sugarland at 3:30 p.m. March 9.

Free Photo Calendar

Since I mentioned earlier today that I am putting together digital scrapbook pages in order to order calendars for my parents, I wanted to also give everyone the link I am using to order the calendars, since the calendars are free. Yep, free. What could be better than a free photo calendar? I’m doing the photos for the wall calendars, since you can use one picture for each month – plus a cover, which I forgot that I still need to design!

So, here is my link for the free photo calendar. I am ordering one tonight and my sister is order another. They should round out our gift lists quite well.

Here is one page. It would be a lot of trouble to post all 12 months, plus it might just annoy all of you anyway?

What to do in Florida: Tampa Bay

Because this blog is The Suncoast Scribe, I try to write as often as possible about news stories that are of national interest, but Florida-centric. I’ve also given you some great Obscure Florida travel guides and tips about visiting other locations in the state. I plan on doing this more often so that all of you who love to come to Florida to play (and there are a LOT of you) might be able to benefit from the recommendations of someone who actually lives here all year.

The Big Guava
And, since I am actually living right here in the Tampa Bay area, I thought it was high time I shined the proverbial spotlight on some of the attractions around The Big Guava – a term coined in the 1970’s by Tampa columnist Steve Otto and based on the pioneer Gavino Gutierrez’s ascertain that this area was perfect for cultivating guava commercially.

What Not to Miss
Most tourists are aware of Busch Gardens and all of the spring training events for teams like the Yankees and the Phillies, but if you have the time to explore the area I would suggest taking advantage of least one lunch or dinner cruise. We have access to not only the lovely Tampa Bay, but the Gulf of Mexico as well. And, for a perfect series of family-friendly outings, you should plan on penciling in time for the Florida Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Lowry Park Zoo. You should absolutely make sure you have at least one day set aside to enjoy one of our many white sugar sand beaches, some of the best in the world.

Buy Discount Tickets
I know that if you were to just do the tings I mention in this article, you will be out a pretty penny in ticket prices alone. That’s why you need to plan ahead and buy your tickets at discounted rates. Trusted Tours and Attractions offers discounted tickets to most of the popular area attractions. Plus, if you sign up for their Trusted Travel eNewsletter, you will be entered into a drawing to win an iPod Nano. That would be a sweet toy to bring along on your vacation here in Tampa.

The Weather is Lovely
For all of you out there in ice storms right now, think about taking a break to come share some of our sunshine and southern hospitality. Citrus starts coming into season now and hurricane season is over. Things here in the Tampa Bay are absolutely perfect.

Scrapbooking Freebies

I never was much of a scrapbooker, mostly because I hated to see so much wasted space on a page in my photo album. So, I usually just put the pictures on the pages and added some pretty embellishments. I think I got through my daughter’s 7th month before I stopped. Things just got too hectic – and they have yet to calm down.

My sister suggested that we have calendars made for our parents with the kids’ pictures on the different months, but I thought straight pictures would be too ordinary. So, I started playing around in Photoshop, because I really am very good with Photoshop. ? Somehow I came across some digital scrapbooking freebies and I realized I was wasting my time doing my won graphics when there are thousands of high resolution, print quality frames and templates and embellishments out on the web for free.

So, I have been feverishly collecting things I like from various sites. I will eventually burn a disk for my own future use. It occurred to me that it might be nice to share with my readers one or two cool freebies I have found each week? Would you like that?

Here is my first. It’s Gina Maria’s Gingerbread Alphabet. Click the image for a link to her blog.

What to do in Florida: Amelia Island

First of all, let me just say that Florida is absolutely perfect this time of year. Today it will be right around 84 degrees and the skies are clear as can be. There is not a drop of ice or snow to be heard of here, and you can even go bare footed if you so desire. Yes, Florida is the place to be right now, especially with all you out in the Midwest iced over and enduring the miserable cold.

If that is not enough of an incentive, most of the hotels and Bed & Breakfasts in Amelia Island are offering a deal where if you book two nights, you get a third night for free. Can you even think of a way to top that? This Lodging Special is available through February 29th, 2008 – so there is plenty of time to march right in and tell your boss you need a week off to warm your bones.

Amelia Island is amazing. I’ve been there and I can attest that in a state filled to the brim with incredible beaches and little corners of paradise, Amelia Island is one of the best we have to offer. You can fish, boat, walk along the white sugar sand beaches, hunt for shells, or just grab a mindless book and lay in the sun. The island is tiny, but the list of things to do and see is nearly endless. Believe me when I say this is where native Floridians go for honeymoons and romantic getaways. It’s indeed that stunning.

Gore Kayaks to Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony

That should be the headline today as Al Gore accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today.

Of course, I want to ask you to remember that Gore did not win this award on his own – as he may wish the world would go on believing. He has to share the award and the $1.6 million prize with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Nobel committee called Gore “one of the world’s leading environmental politicians”.

So, how DID Gore travel to Oslo, Norway? Did he kayak, walk, or perhaps ride a bicycle? Did he make sure that he did not leave a carbon footprint or use up valuable fossil fuel resources? Did he turn the electric off in his 20-room Nashville mansion to make up for the difference?

Oh! That
S right! Gore buys people off to reduce his carbon footprint. He purchases energy credits (from his Own non-profit organization, no less) and makes donation to the needy. Sure, yes…that certainly makes up for the waste he generates monthly. I’m just not quite sure how our CO2 emissions can be counterd simply by spending money.

Gore’s an ill-informed tool, and Chicken Little to boot. Someone please enroll the man in a comprehensive course about the history of our plant. Just a couple months ago, scientist began publishing studies that overturn  the IPCC’s scientific “consensus”.

Merry Christmas, Olga

Here in Florida we have pretty much put our hurricane kits away. Cruise ships are going back to their regular non-hurricane routes, and the general mindset here is just more pleasant. Of course, it’s been a couple of years since Florida has been hit with a very bad storm. I sure wish someone would tell the home owners insurance companies to back off and stop raising rates.

Anyway, here we are off-season and well into December and along comes a storm that could potentially be named Olga. There is a disturbance near the Caribbean Sea that some forecasters are watching to see if it turns into Tropical Storm Olga. If it does, it would be only the 10th December storm since 1851.

Even if it the weather does develop into a tropical storm, Florida should be safe with the storm’s path likely taking it close to Puerto Rico and the mountains of Hispaniola.

Unfinished Business Pacquiao vs Marquez II

You know there is going to be a good fight when the biggest thing at stake is a rematch of a split draw that invited a lot of controversy in the past. Las Vegas will play host to the one of the biggest rematches of the past several years when Manny “PacMan” Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez get in the ring together on March 15, 2008.

Pacquiao and Marquez first met May 8, 2004. That was the fight where Pacquiao knocked Marquez down three times just in the first round, but in a dramatic turn of events Marquez kept at it and the match was called a split draw. Four years will have passed by the time they fight again at Mandalay Bay and boxing fans are eager to see what happens this time. There are fans on both sides of the brawl, each with their own opinions about 2004’s split draw.

Some say that a more disciplined Pacquiao is stepping into the ring. He has stated that he feels he has improved a lot as a fighter and anticipates knocking out Marquez.

Marquez has made it clear this fight is not about money for him, but that he knows there is unfinished business and he wants to see it resolved. He wants to show Pacquiao and the world what Mexican fighters are all about, putting to rest the streak of victories Pacquiao has had against Mexican fighters of late.

We can hope to see even more statements like these ten days from now at the press conference scheduled for December 20 in Los Angeles. After that, it will be time for both men to pout their fists ahead of their promises and that is what is making Pacquiao/Marquez tickets such a hot commodity.

HBO is carrying the Marquez-Pacquiao II fight on PPV and representatives of the cable company are calling it one of the ‘must-see’ fights for 2008. You can still get tickets for the fight in Las Vegas, but if you are unable to get out to Nevada, PPV is the way to go.

Florida Has No Helmet Law

Every time I see a motorcycle weaving in and out of traffic on a busy, fast-moving roads, I stop my to think about how I still feel Florida should have their helmet law in place. If I were to be pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt in my van, I could be ticketed.

Motorcyclists often remind me that I should look out for them, since they are small enough to get lost in my blind spot. I agree. I should indeed be a diligent driver. But, so should those on motorcycles. What made me think of this again is the news that a female passenger on a motorcycle was critically injured on yesterday when the motorcycle crashed into a car up in Tarpon Springs.

She was not wearing a helmet.

And, it was the motorcycle that struck a turning car.

Despite a lack of a helmet law, people on bikes can choose to put on a helmet for their own safety. While the driver of a motorcycle might argue that visibility is impaired, why was the passenger not wearing a helmet? Motorcycle safety is the responsibility of the riders. While the rest of us on the roads should be aware of riders, we cannot make up for the shortcomings of helmetless riders weaving thought traffic at high speeds. I saw a lot of comments from bikers and the only one that even made sense was a comment that said people on motorcycles have one way to survive. They need to pretend they are invisible and never assume people see them on the road. Drive defensively to compensate.

Rustic Furniture – Wholesale and More

I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels in my life. I used to travel a LOT for work and now I travel simply because I enjoy getting out and seeing the world around me, or more often the state around me. Last night, my best friend and I were discussing booking one of the theme hotels in Kissimmee for us and the kids so we can take a mini vacation at the parks.

The thing about hotels is that they are either truly pleasant, or a real chore. A pleasant hotel has two things, in my opinion: cleanliness and décor that makes you feel spoiled and surrounded by luxury.

There are companies that specialize in beautifying retail establishments, restaurants, resorts and hotels. When decorators go to work on a hotel, they want it to look nice, but they are often restricted by budget issues. That’s why buyers tend to gravitate to businesses like Tres Amigos, a seller of rustic wholesale furniture, who in their own right have a large buying influence and can obtain décor at much lower prices because of the volume at which they purchase.

Tres Amigos focuses on Spanish Colonial, Tuscan, Rustic and Southwest style. And, although they sell to everyone on a per piece basis, it only takes $1000 to bump up to wholesale status. And because of the sheer volume of their business, they are able to cater to huge projects just as easily as they can to the small ones. A hotel planning a folksy southwest look will find their selection of Mexican wholesale furniture invaluable. While most large-volume sellers are going to only offer the kind of items that are “a dime a dozen” in their lack of uniqueness, Tres Amigos has Spanish Colonial wholesale furniture and accessories (among their other styles) that are made exclusively for them so that their inventory is able to reflect a “one of a kind” flavor. They can even work with you to design items that are unique to you.

Additionally, Tres Amigos has a full container program and can source from Mexico, India, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Individual customers like me are not excluded, because they still make their inventory ultimately affordable. And, I stumbled on their hand crafted jewelry selection, which is absolutely stunning and more affordable than I had even imagined. I grew up in a home where my parents decorated using mostly a Tuscan style, so this furniture feels like home as I browse the selections. I’m currently debating one of the armoires they have on their site right now. It would look VERY good in my bedroom.

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