Camp Conner-Byres

Not much happens at Bream Lake that the rest of the world would find exciting. We ventured out to the lake house today to check on things: make sure the plants were watered, feed the ducks and shiners, and hang our new L.L. Bean Lake House sign. The only other event that is occurring is the beginning of the paving of the dirt road that leads to our lake house. In a previous blog I described the travails of traversing this thoroughfare. A journey down this catastrophy of a road will jolt your fillings and push the family car significantly closer to the "previously owned dealer". They , the county road people, are beginning to make signs like they are serious about smoothing our journey to Bream Lake. Let us pray. More on this later.

Moo looks

My wife and I make frequent trips to a farm near Bream Lake where we know we are welcome and we visit the various denizens inhabiting the several hundred acres. Among them are a miniature horse named Neigh, two full sized horses, two dingo-like dogs and many head of cattle. We feed the horses carrots and the dogs get dog biscuits. Alas, we do not feed the cattle. The reason is two fold: there are too many of them and, besides, they are already provided with plenty of grass and hay. We do feel enormous pangs of guilt, though, because the cattle always rush to the fence when we come and persist to give us the most baleful looks I have ever seen.

Full Moon over Bream

A full moon is particularly nice at Bream Lake. Our house is on the western shore and looking across at the eastern horizon at the moon rising is very nice.

Look to the Skies

I strolled out to the dock this morning and saw this in the sky. If you've been to London and seen The Eye, it should be familiar to you. It's come a long way!

Buzzards

They have returned: the buzzards, or, perhaps more properly, the vultures. Here they are, perching on the end of our dock at Bream Lake, trying their best to look like little wrens so we won't notice them and shoo them away. I have mixed feelings about these creatures: on the one hand I appreciate the job they do for us. They are nature's sanitation department. They scavenge for dead creatures , eat them, and clean up the countryside. This is good. They also congregate in large numbers and roost in trees near ones property, creating, as a group, the most God-awful stench imaginable. I guess they're like a jail house: necessary- but "not in my back yard". I think the plusses outweigh the minusses.

Eat your heart out Architectural Digest !

Our clothes dryer at the Lake Bream house went on the fritz and we purchased a new one. I think the old one looks rather nice on the porch. My wife has another opinion. What do you think?

October Days

The days are long, lazy and beautiful at Bream as we head towards Halloween. The hurricanes are not happening this season and, as a result, the heavy rains have not come. For the past several weeks it seems that no moisture has come and the lake is receding back towards the level it was when we first came to Bream. Our good neighbors for the last several years, the Rudds, have gone to live in Virginia, so we are awaiting new neighbors who expect to build a house next door. In the image you see here, Jerre is watching the shiners and minnows gather around her feet and vie with Ogden the turtle for the catfist pellets she throws into the water.We experienced a little excitement two days ago when we heard 4 gunshots being fired a few houses down. Nothing unusual in this pistol packin' community. Ah, well...

Jerre's Turtle

The turtles at Bream Lake are usually very shy creatures. From our house we can see them sunning, down on the dock, three sometimes four abreast. Always, when we approach them and try to get within 50 feet or so...they scatter. As of late, my wife Jerre has been going down to the dock early in the morning, at first to feed the fish with catfish pellets and to feed the ducks with corn. Imagine her surprise when a rather large turtle popped its head up and started taking the pellets. After some time the turtle was practically eating the pellets straight from Jerre's hand. This has become a daily routine, much to Jerre's- and the turtles- delight. Note in this image, the fish striking a pellet the moment it hits the water, causing a spattering of water.

Finding Nemo

These lads , tidying up around the dock, seemed to come accross a very interesting creature. Look closely.
Interesting things can be found in Bream

Crikey !

And who says Bream Lake isn't interesting ?

Edwin the Bold

My wife, Jerre, has a penchant for naming every creature with which she comes into contact. While she was sitting on the dock, feeding the fish with catfish pellets, early this morning, a particularly bold egret landed near her. Whether he was looking for his share of pellets or simply waiting for the feeding fish to emerge so that he could dine... who knows? At any rate the egret remained on the dock with Jerre for at least 15 minutes and eventually left. At that point Jerre pronounced that the curious fowl would henceforth be known as Edwin the Egret. So-be-it.

The Hawthorne Virgin

Jan Zuccarell sees the image burned on the screen of the cell phone as a sign from God.Her son, Ben Zuccarell, sees the image as a cash cow, and wants to sell the phone on eBay. It seems that a child in their family baked a cell phone in the microwave oven and this is what came out on the screen of the cell phone. I think that it looks more like the Grim Reaper. Miraculous things can happen, even in our small little community on the edge of Bream Lake.

The Unimportance of Being Ernesto

Waiting for Ernesto. Nothing there.

Noodling

It is a beautiful day on Bream and great for going about 100 yards out into the lake and "noodling"- that is to say riding astride a styrofoam-like flotation device which is shaped like a giant piece of pasta and spending the better part of an hour gazing up at the sky and hoping a gator d0esn't come along and chomp down on you - or your noodle. No gators today, but just before I took this picture of my wife she had let out a whoop and declared that something had "bit" her. More than likely that something was either a hungry bass nipping at the bright yellow floating ends of her bikini straps or a curious and quite benign turtle. Such are the thrills of noodling in Bream on a lazy August day.

Full Moon at Bream

We had a full moon at Bream the other night (as did most everyone else across America) and it was magnificent. I wandered out on our neighbor's dock just before midnight and captured this image, via time exposure. There was, however, another event going on at the time that was more spectacular than the lunar glow, and that was the sounds coming from Bream: the frogs were in full chorus- from the smaller ones to the large bull frogs. They were so loud that they could have masked human conversation had someone been with me. On nights with a sliver of a moon or none at all, the frogs are much lower in decibels.

Lake Creature

Bream Lake is lovely. It's clean and clear. It's a perfect temperature for swimming during the summer. Bream Lake also contains things that can kill you if provoked. Our neighbor Rick shows us the rather large water mocassin that he dispatched yesterday. The serpent was swimming in an area that we normally use for wading.

Neigh

Neigh is a miniature horse. She's two years old. She's fully grown. She was purchased and placed in a pasture for another two year-old (human) to ride. She will spend many happy days on a sprawling cattle ranch near Bream Lake...and suffer the occasional carrot-feeding visits from my better half and me.

They also serve...

Buzzard's Bay has nothing on Bream Lake. You want buzzards? Boy have we got a deal for you! Most days one can spy 50 to 100 buzzards circling above the perimeter of our little patch of water At first my wife and I thought this was just a simple omen of our impending deaths (since we are both well into our 60's). But since we have been here for over two years and have not yet shuffled off to paradise we have assumed that those magnificent scavengers of the dead are here for other reasons. Probably they find the lake a bonanza of dead things (fish, turtles, disposed-of-bodies, etc.). We have also decided that they roost near here and use Bream as their base headquarters. Of course they are doing us humans an enormous servce by disposing of all things rotting - a task that, given the propensity for the slow paced, "southern way of life" of the local populace, might otherwise never be accomplished. The alternative to the relatively quick riddance of our deceased fauna is too horrible to think about. Here's to our adorable vulture friends.

Shropshire come to Bream

Last year my wife and I spent several weeks in a little village just outside of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, UK. Although the climate was different and the surroundings new, there were many things that were akin to rural North Central Florida. The countryside was beautiful, the rivers idyllic and the people as warm as freshly baked scones. The couple, at whose home we were hosted, is coming to see us at Bream in a few days. In a way: Shropshire come to Bream. Too bad we can't have a bit of England on the horizon.

The Kase of the Kidnapped Kitty

Stumpy is a two-legged Siamese cat that lives at an animal hospital in Keystone, near Bream Lake. He is much loved by the people in the town. About a month and a half ago Stumpy disappeared. Where he went nobody knew. Needless to say, this caused a great sensation in Keystone and, indeed, most of the surrounding area. The community searched high and low (mostly low) for the kitty but he was nowhere to be found. Approximately four weeks after he left he came back. He was left in a cage at the vets, flea-ridden and bedraggled, but none the worse for wear. There was happiness again in Keystone. Pussy had returned.