Early AM

I figure some of you nutty squirrels out there might want to see what the sunrise looked like this morning. Well, here you go.

Air Force One, Circa 1980

After I posted some pictures of Air Force One the other day, I remembered these old pictures I have from 1980. President Jimmy Carter flew through Lakeland, Florida, on a campaign stop, and Mom pulled me out of school for the occasion. I think I took these pictures with a little Kodak 110 camera, but I'm not sure. Even back then, I was smart enough to take two shots and put them together to get the picture I wanted. Heaven knows how I got so close that the whole airplane wouldn't fit into a single shot. (Pretty sure this was taken well after President Carter had left the airport.) This was in ye olden days when cameras had fixed lenses. Oh, and film, too. The shot below shows one of Lakeland's finest at the time, and that's Air Force One coming in for a landing behind him.

I figured that certain things about former presidents would be public record, but I had no idea. According to documents from Carter's Presidential Library, Air Force One landed at Lakeland Municipal Airport at 11:03 am on October 31st, 1980. I'm surprised there's no note there concerning exactly when some 10 year old kid photographed Air Force One.

Back In The Pokey

Guess who's back in the slammer? That's right, it's our favorite car thief. She's lost 35 pounds and perhaps some of her teeth, but it's still her. Oh, and her hair has changed color. Yes, this is the one who stole my car last year, and still calls my office and yells about how we took her car and her stuff after the death of her estranged husband. We eventually had those calls automatically routed to a voice mail box. It took about 5 days for that box to fill up with 99 messages. About once a month I'd delete a few of them, and a week later it would be full again. I'd wait two months, and she'd still fill it up again when I emptied it. I'm going to empty it now that I know she's in jail to see if maybe she's calling us from the pokey. I should share some of those messages with you...

Twins!

I happened to catch a couple of dolphins frolicking in the water under the New Pass bridge off Longboat Key today. I was wandering over to the Quick Point Nature Preserve when a fisherman pointed out the dolphins. I watched them from shore for a few minutes and realized they kept surfacing in about the same area. So I walked up onto the drawbridge and waited. Sure enough, I caught them coming up for air maybe five or six more times before a boat came through and disturbed them. While this is not the first time I've managed to get pictures of dolphins, these are probably the best I've gotten.

A Bridge So Far

One of the other things I shot last night was the Sunshine Skyway, the bridge across the mouth of Tampa Bay. I'd been meaning to get up there to shoot it since they finished repainting it almost a year ago. This is from the south rest stop, probably a little over a mile away from the center span. The yellow support cables are lit from beneath, so the ones you see the best are the ones you can see the underside of. This was probably a two minute exposure, and that's why the headlights and taillights are long trails on the approach. And it was a nice clear night so you don't see a lot of scattered light in the atmosphere.

A Ghost!

As it turns out, I did spot a ghost yesterday when I was out and about on Mullet Key. As I walked down the beach, I saw this ghost crab duck into his hole in the sand. I crouched down nearby and trained my lens on his hole in hopes that he'd come back out once he thought it was safe. It took a little bit, but he did come back out and here's the picture to prove it. It's been years and years since I got a picture of one of these guys. I think the previous shot was so old it pre-dates the blog. No, I'm mistaken. It was 2005, the first year of the blog, and you can see it here.