Driving around there are lots of lights and decorations. One guy even plays Christmas carols and has mechanized statutes that move to the tunes.
But more frequently one hears the sound of an air blower (like a big fan) to keep inflatables of all sorts upright. Weirdly, most only run their blowers at night, so during the day the decorations are a deflated blob on the lawn.
So here's the deflated decorations - an orangeish blob in the yard with a hard plastic Santa looking on.
And here's an exception to the rule - a fully inflated Santa almost as tall as this two story house - inflated during the day (complete with noisy blower and, out of picture, animated blow-up reindeer drinking from a trough)! Go figure . . .
But the best bit was a tour of 1920s homes in the section of St Petersburg known as 'the Old Northeast.' The homes are decorated inside and out for the holidays. For us, that kicked off a run of 6 Christmas parties in 8 days. |
| Serenaded by hand bells on the home tour |
I even made the front page of our local paper. And have had more fun making little Christmas ornaments - a good break from cleaning up the second water leak in 6 months (from the unit above this time). It took a specialist 3 hours to find the leak - thankfully not much damage, but lots of hassle moving furniture, pulling up carpet, repairing drywall.
Today Duke Energy turned off our power at 10:3 am to finally replace the wooden light pole that caught fire last summer (see post of 6 August 2017).At 5:00 pm we heard a big bang and saw sparks as, having finished installing the new pole, they tried to restore power. At 8:06 pm with 5 Duke Energy trucks on-site our lights finally came back on! Felt like a hurricane rehearsal - let's hope not!
And for some more Florida fun, here's a local mishap.; it had been propped up for several weeks looking like it was about to be moved to a new location, and then one day . . .
. . . not sure how the house move turned into this disaster, but the plot of land is for sale.
See the back of the building up in the air and the front crushed?
Our weather has been all over the place - as cold as 45F (7C) and as warm as 82F (28C) with lots of wind. Tuesday morning we had heavy fog. But many beautiful sunsets.
Hubby's sent out some Christmas letters, but I haven't managed to address any - yikes. But I do wish you all Happy Holidays!
I expect on our beach we will find a fir tree decorated with ornaments on Christmas Day. It's never dull living on the beach!
