Author: William Douthwaite

Posted in Travel

Back for more manatees

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Manatees doing what manatees do

Fourteen years ago, I wrote about going to see the manatees at Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, Florida. On that January day, I thought 299 manatees were a lot. We went to see them again today, and the ranger station tote board announced a count of 677. Cold water, cool air, and overcast skies make for great manatee viewing. By the time we got there in the late morning, it wasn’t as cold as the last few days, and some of the manatees had already begun their slow float back to the St. John’s river.

A healthy crowd of locals and tourists came to see the manatees today. The popularity of manatees is an interesting phenomena. They aren’t much to look at. They don’t do anything. They just float around, coming up for air once in a while. Yet we paused at four or five viewing platforms to watch these big gray blobs float by.

Manatees have state and federal protection. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission website, “It is illegal to feed, harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, annoy, or molest manatees.”

Several organizations allow you to adopt a manatee. If you do, carefully maintained scar records enable you to pick out your manatee among all the others in the spring.

According to signs at the state park, manatees have no natural predators other than people. Boat propellers and trash are enough of a threat to earn them a spot on endangered species lists and have their own awareness month (November).

Favorite zoo animal? Typical answers include elephant, lion or tiger, and the giraffes. But when the manatees show up at the spring, we drop everything to go and see them. Their natural charisma makes them irresistible.

Posted in dogs

Where are the leather leashes?

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Photo by Jon Koop on Unsplash

After searching the whole rack of leashes, collars and harnesses at my favorite local pet store, I had to ask an assistant manager, “Do you still carry leather leashes?”

He said, “No, but I wish we did.”

I replied, “I guess they make them too well. You only ever have to buy one.”

Unless you get a second dog. When we took our shepherd/lab mix pup for training, the first instructions were “Get a metal prong collar and a six-foot leather leash.” We were glad we did. Nylon and cotton leashes cut into my hands, unlike the leather, which gets more comfortable the more we use it walking, exercising and training a large (or small), energetic dog. The one we have has lasted over twelve years. Even the vet commented, “Nice leash!”

Our newest pup, a Great Dane, isn’t large yet. But she visibly grows each day. With a Westie one hand, we need a second leash for the other. None of the local pet stores have leather leashes. I found a cheap nylon one on the pet store clearance table that will do for now, but it’s junk and I hate it. So it’s off to Amazon we go.

I like to support local businesses, but they don’t often have what I need. I don’t enjoy feeding the Amazon monster, but there I can usually find what I’m looking for.

Posted in minimalism

The journey of decluttering

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Bloganuary writing prompt
Where can you reduce clutter in your life?
View all responses
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

My wife and I are students of minimalism in pursuit of the uncluttered life. However, on any given day, there is a drawer, a cabinet, a closet or some room that can be de-cluttered. It is never-ending quest. Where can we reduce clutter in our lives? Just about anywhere.

The normal rhythms of life constantly contribute to clutter. No matter how good I set up my filters, spam clutters my email inbox. We accumulate shopping bags with each trip to the store. Books we’ve read and will never read again fill up shelves. Dog toys are strewn around the rooms of our home. Souvenir pens, extra birthday cake candles, and unused plastic forks accumulate in kitchen drawers. Receipts from the store, records from the veterinarian, and daily-arriving tax documents suddenly generate a pile on my desk. Dumbbells litter the floor of the garage gym after a workout. One bedroom closet is cluttered with items from decluttering efforts that we intend to sell or donate.

Where can you reduce clutter in your life? Do it right where you are. Put something in its place. Throw something away. Add an item to the donation pile. Sort the mail over the recycling bin. File away the important receipt.

Don’t think of reducing clutter as a destination. It’s a journey.

Posted in dogs

My favorite animal? It’s not even close.

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Bloganuary writing prompt
What is your favorite animal?
View all responses

Anyone who’s read any of my blog posts would know that dogs are at the top of my list. My life has been filled with dogs and dog stories. I love going to the zoo to see the elephants, lions, and giraffes, but I love coming home to our dogs even more.

Other pets along the way have included aquarium fish, hermit crabs, a few cats, and a parakeet. They all had bit parts in our life. All the awards for best supporting actors go to the dogs.

Mild-mannered Gabriel the Labrador retriever pinned a suspicious repairman against the wall in our Baltimore home. Chica was the world’s fastest three-legged chihuahua. Michael the Labrador had enough energy to accompany me on six-mile runs through the snow in Des Moines, Iowa. Samson the lab/shepherd mix ran off energy by chasing a laser pointer at breakneck speed up and down the street. Sable the Bassett hound howled along with every siren in the distance. Gabriel and Rachel, yellow and black labs respectively, retieved balls until they dropped from exhaustion.

Each one was fluent in the dialect of our home. Their vocabulary included “ball,” “bone,” “park,” and “bike ride” as well as the requisite “sit,” “come,” and “heel.”

More than just animals or pets, they’ve always been our guardian angels. Presently assigned to us: Winston the West Highlands White Terrier and Willow the Great Dane.

Posted in Christmas

Let’s do it. Let’s send out some Christmas cards.

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“Hey, thanks for your Christmas card. It was really great reading about your year.”

Two people said that to me yesterday. But in the past few weeks, as classes and meetings and activities have resumed, I’ve heard it from three other families. I had no idea that a Christmas card, along with a simple one page letter about our 2023, would bring a grateful response.

This past Christmas was the first time in seven years that my wife and I sent out cards at all. Back in the nineties, before social media, we sent out about forty or so each year, and received at least as many. It was the way to keep up with family and friends in the places where we had lived.

In time, the amount of cards decreased. If we hadn’t heard from someone for three or four years, we dropped them from the list. As our list of friends on Facebook grew, we already knew what was going on in everyone’s life, so a Christmas letter was redundant. Emailed cards and greetings replaces those delivered by the mailman. Our mailing list shrunk until we finally concluded, “Let’s not.”

This past year we met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. We wanted to and needed to strengthen our connection with them. However, we’ve retreated from the advertisement-ridden, spam-filled, and bot-controlled social media world. “Let’s do it. Let’s send out Christmas cards this year.” So what if we had only gotten about two-dozen this year? So what if we would send out a variety of left-over cards from years gone by? So what if first class postage costs a whopping $.66? We’ll enclose an illustrated letter about our year and see what happens.

Of the cards we received this year, only contained had a newsletter. It was three narrow-margin pages of single-space, small-font prose, with a blurry photo collage on the fourth side. It was the epitome of TL;DR (too long; didn’t read). I was in charge of the letter, so I was sure to include lots of white space, a few high res pictures, and the facts, just the facts.

Next we had to assemble our mailing list. We had very few. Some we could look up online. But most name and address searches want your money before they will give names and addresses. My wife sent off a few emails to the right people, and we got all the info we needed.

When we had them all addressed and ready to go, I waited in line at the post office for about twenty minutes to get some Christmas-y looking stamps. We got them in the mail on the last day for delivery before Christmas. Mission accomplished.

We’re thankful for this chance to cultivate new and old relationships. (Oh, and by the way, we send out cards with baby Jesus on them. Just sayin’.)

Posted in communication

Can we talk?

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Bloganuary writing prompt
In what ways do you communicate online?
View all responses
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Carefully

I carefully choose my words. How many times has my online communication been misunderstood? Recipients hear emotions in my texts that I never intended. A missing exclamation point means I’m not excited. A delayed response is interpreted as disinterest. One cannot be too careful when communicating online.

Inefficiently

Everyone has a preferred means of online communication. Some send texts. Others use Messenger. Many turn to email. A few respond immediately on Telegram or Google Chat. Still others are only found on social media. Ironically, with so many ways to communicate, it is harder than ever to contact someone. If you want to reach a lot of people, you’ve got to be on a lot of different platforms.

Ineffectively

“Did you get my text?”

“No.” Or, “I did, but forgot to reply.” Or, “I did but thought it was spam.” Or, “No, my phone was dead.”

When I was working, I sent out a email newsletter opened by less than half of the recipients. Important weekly updates were lost in sea of spam.

Less frequently

More and more, I call. Online communication has lost it’s appeal.

Posted in dogs

A pile of puppies

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Bloganuary writing prompt
Think back on your most memorable road trip.
View all responses
Photo by Garrett Karoski on Unsplash

We were dog-less for the first time ever. That spring, we put both of our Labrador retrievers to sleep. Gabriel was fifteen and simply aged out. Rachel, age ten, started limping with a tumor in her rear leg the vet said was most likely a cancer you could treat but not cure.

A few months later, my wife blindfolded me and took me and our two children for a drive through Iowa farmland. About an hour west of Des Moines, we stopped, I took off the blindfold, and found myself on a typical Iowa farm. What was not typical was the sound of many barking dogs. My wife had brought me here to pick out a Labrador retriever puppy for my birthday.

So I sat down in a big box of eight-week old chocolate puppies to decide which one to take home. There are few things more fun than sitting under a pile of furry, wiggling, wagging, yipping, whining, licking, and sniffing Lab puppies. I picked a male that wasn’t the shyest nor the most aggressive, and we drove home with Michael. While he wasn’t shy or aggressive, Michael turned out to be a wild ball of energy.

That was a memorable road trip!

Posted in Food

In search of a snack

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Daily writing prompt
What snack would you eat right now?
View all responses
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I believe my grandchildren ask themselves this question every time they come to our house. From the minute they walk in the door they are foraging for snacks. Immediately before and after supper, they stand and look in the pantry or refrigerator in search of a snack.

“Can I have a cheese stick?” Cheese sticks have always been a popular snack at our house. But you better have the right ones. If I offer them cheddar, they will want mozzarella. And vice-versa. The swirly combination cheese sticks are usually a safe bet.

In different seasons of life they have preferred different snacks. Mini Oreo cookies were popular for a while. Sometimes they wanted chocolate, other times vanilla. One granddaughter would eat the cream centers and leave the cookie shells behind.

Trail mix is another popular snack. It’s not as healthy as it sounds, since their version of trail mix was mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, and Craisins. Of course, they would eat the marshmallows and chocolate, and leave the dried fruit behind.

Fortunately, the grandchildren all liked fruit. They often choose an orange, apple, or banana. Apples used to be a good grab and go, but now it has to be peeled and sliced up for them. If the kids find out we have strawberries, they will consume them in a sitting.

Chewy fruit snacks have always been popular, too. The word fruit justifies eating a little bag full of sugar.

Me? More than anything else, I reach for nuts. Cashews, peanuts, or mixed nuts are often my snack of choice, especially in the evening watching television. During the day, apples and oranges are the first thing I see when I open the refrigerator, and I might reach for one of them. A few Christmas cookies are still calling my name from the garage freezer, and it’s only fair that I indulge them as well, right?

Posted in business

That’s a business? That’s crazy.

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Daily writing prompt
Come up with a crazy business idea.
View all responses

The problem with crazy business ideas is that many of them already exist.

As I walk by a shop in Saint Augustine that sells nothing but olive oil, I think, “That’s crazy. Can you sell enough olive oil to pay the rent?”

The person ahead of me in line at the convenience store is buying a candy bar to deliver to an Instacart customer. That’s crazy. Someone will pay to have a single candy bar delivered to their home.

Some people make a living frequenting thrift stores in search of items they resell online. The amount of money to be made in resales is crazy.

A Jamaican guy with a truck, a few friends, and a twenty-four foot extension ladder drives through our neighborhood every once in a while, offering to trip palm trees. We’ve hired him a few times, and as one guy scrambles up the ladder with a running chain saw attached to his belt, we say, “That’s crazy!”

The last time I purchased a thirty dollar electric toothbrush, the self-serve checkout screen asked me if I wanted to purchase the extended warranty. Yes, that’s crazy, but I’ll bet some people buy the purchase protection.

And yet, as soon as I start to think, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” another crazy business idea pops up in a strip mall, online, or knocking at my door. Some are legit. Some are scams. Some are profitable. Some aren’t.

So I should be able to come up with something crazy.

  • I’ll come by your house once a week to make sure you have extra rolls of TP in all your bathrooms. You’ll never get caught short and have to yell across the house again.
  • I’ll come and declutter a room (or rooms) for you. I’ve gotten pretty good at this. I’ll get rid of all the stuff I know you don’t use or need. You won’t even know it’s gone.
  • I’ll write a poem you can insert into a card for a birthday, anniversary, Valentine’s Day, or other special occasion. You can sign it like it came from you. (I’ve gotten pretty good at this, too.)
  • I’ll get in touch with your children and remind them to call you on your birthday, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. It’ll be completely confidential. If they get offended, there’s no connection to you and it’s no skin off my nose.

The craziest business of all may have been Crazy Eddie’s consumer electronics chain that was known for entertaining commercials and massive fraud. Family Auto Mart out of Orlando was pretty crazy, too.