How to fill time in retirement

Today my niece Lori is having a Birthday. Happy Birthday, Lori! Another year around the sun. But I was thinking, what are we really celebrating? The number of years is unimportant, what we should be celebrating is that the person was born. She came into our lives to make the world a better place. My sister Patsy had married and moved to Hawaii, there wasn't a place farther away from our home state of Vermont. Her husband was a surfer and they lived on the North shore of the island of Oahu. My first visit to meet Lori was when she was still a baby. For two weeks, my parents and I lived in Hawaii. We lived in Haleiwa, slept in a rental shack on a dairy farm. Dad and I would take the bikes through a sugar cane field so we could get to town to mail our postcards. We spent a lot of time at the beach as seen in the photo above. Me with Lori and my sister Pat. That is my mom Stella in the background. We were all so happy to meet Lori. I have visited Hawaii for four whole weeks an...

I finally went to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge on the Kennedy Space Center. You cross the Max Brewer bridge in Titusville and there is a visitor's center. More on that later, but after my visit to the Refuge, I stopped at a new restaurant in Titusville for lunch. It is called Pier 220 Seafood & Grill. I asked Nancy what use to be there, you see Nancy grew up in Titusville. She told me it was a bait shop...Hmmm. They have a big dining area inside and a small bar outside. The wind was blowing and it was a cool 88, so I sat outside. This is the view from my seat (barstool); that is the Max Brewer bridge above me, some seats for the bar area, some with umbrellas, and a view of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at KSC. The VAB was where the Saturn V was assembled for our trip to the moon. Shuttles were hitched to the rockets in the VAB... I ordered a Corona Light, not realizing it would be served in a can. I survived. My lunch was a Caribbean Salad with...

Part of our discussion before we visited this new place was about how there are not many restaurants on Sarno Road. This place had a certain familiarity, as I had been to a wedding reception here back in the 1980s. Also, the same building for a while was my place to vote. It use to be a Realtor building that was right across from the current Brevard  County Service complex that I remember to be an A&P supermarket. I have been coming to the area for a while. This new restaurant is called the Grille at 1450: A Global Kitchen. It serves tapas from around the world and we tried more than I should have eaten, but everything was great. It appears that they still do wedding receptions as one large room was set up with different configurations of place settings at about 8 tables. I snuck my head in because I had done some of my famous wall shadows at the reception I had attended. My cousin Jim had married Janis, and I entertained with dogs, birds and Richard Nixon. Ask me someti...

So it was a typical Tuesday and I was meeting with my Old Fart's group at 4 pm for some beers and discussion. We meet at Lou's Blues, my Google Timeline says since January 2016. Over three years, and they still let us in. On the past Sunday, I was here to see the Flutie Brothers Band with Doug and Darren Flutie. No one was here on this July 2. After Lou's, Mac Monroe and I usually go and get some dinner. I wanted something better than normal since I had worn a nice Hawaiian shirt; we headed down to Ocean 302. It was closed for the whole week of July 4, the sign did say they will have a new summer menu when they reopen. Mac suggested we keep heading south in Melbourne Beach to the German Cafe called Coconut Cove. That is where we headed. In three years of dining out, I have only given two places a 5.0 (Memorable), this is one of them. There were a few cars in the parking lot but there were spots so we went in. They had a table for two inside and our first waitress was T...