More Paul TV

I recently realized it's been a long, long time since I posted any videos. I guess we don't take that many, and when we do, I never think to post them. So here are three videos Paul and I made today while Becky was at work. We stopped at the school playground by our apartment and Paul was all about this tunnel. Check out his new found word skills!

Hopefully the quality on these videos is not too bad for you. He's doing pretty good with the whole counting thing now too.

He's getting too old, obviously.

Hope you enjoyed them! I'll try not to take so long putting other videos on here next time.

Now we've seen it all...

Up until last weekend we’d been just about everywhere in this state except the far south (technically we’ve never been to Pensacola, but we’ve been close). So we decided before we leave, as long as we’re this close, we’d better go check it out. It was a long, long, long way down the road, but we made it. Miami was incredible, but extremely crowded. The clear blue water, twisting palm trees, and thousands of high rise condos were everywhere, and it looks pretty much like they show it on TV. Unfortunately, we never made it to Miami Beach. We were there, but with ten thousand cars and twelve parking spaces, there was no stopping and looking to be had. It was pretty much a mess. We weren’t actually able to get out of the car until we got just out of the city and stopped at a state park on Key Biscayne.

Now Key Biscayne would have been very nice, but… by the time I got out of the car, I was ready to drown myself in the disappointingly cold water. You see, apparently the state parks in Florida are still operating in 1956… where people only carry cash. As we left Jacksonville on the interstate I said, “Maybe we should have gotten cash… nah, it won’t matter.” Wrong. I got in line at the toll booth to go into the park, and with 50 cars behind me, I handed the lady my debit card. She looked at me like she didn’t know what a debit card was. We only take cash. What year is this? 2009? I’m sorry, what is cash? Those green things with the heads on them? Who carries those?? So she had to fill out this form while the angry drivers behind me cursed profanities in my direction (then they saw my University of Montana sticker and understood what was going on). So I was angry, and all I wanted to do was stop the car and get out to see the ocean. So let’s just stop in this parking lot. That’ll be five dollars… cash only. Right. Ok, I saw a big aquarium back there, maybe they have an ATM, let’s pull into their parking lot. If you want to park in this lot, it’s eight dollars… in cash. How in the Hell am I supposed to use the ATM in this place if you won’t let me park without paying you in cash first?? I already told every other lady trying to rob me that I don’t have any cash!! And if I had had cash before, you people would have sucked it all out of me by now by charging me to breathe the air in this park!!! So the guy let me into the parking lot to use the ATM machine. And I paid him eight dollars just to use it, because there was absolutely no reason to stay at the aquarium. They wanted $70 to fight through the three thousand screaming kids to see a bunch of stupid dolphins. But it was ok, we did see a light house, and I was able to stop the urge to throw myself over its railing. And I got to see the first toll lady again, which was nice. Because I had to leave the park, come back in, pay her $3 for the first time, pay her $3 for letting me come back in to pay her for the first time, and then I finally got to leave. I won’t be going back.

The second day was much better, even though the anger of the first carried over somewhat. The Keys were kind of disappointing altogether. They haven’t built anything new in 40 years, so if the last time you were there was when Kennedy was president, it looks the same, only dirtier. Key West was definitely worth seeing, but you had to drive 50mph for 150 miles to get to it. Take a plane, or a cruise ship, and save yourself the annoyance of two lane traffic and 50,000 tourists. The Seven Mile Bridge was also impressive, and the palm trees were nice. The Key Lime pie was incredible, and I don’t like Key Lime pie, but I could’ve eaten a whole one. Buy a souvenir in Key West, in Key Largo the same thing is three times the price.

Overall, just go to Destin. The beaches there are ten times as nice and not littered with dead seaweed. And in Destin they might actually have those machines where you swipe your card to pay for things. It’s incredible, you don’t have to carry a thousand one dollar bills to pay the tolls when you go to Destin. Or Jacksonville Beach for that matter. Jax Beach is free. It’s free to park, it’s free to breathe. We don’t have palm trees on the beach, but we also have sand on our beach, not sharp dried up sea garbage. Stupid Florida Keys.

Whatever, I’ll stop whining and you can look at these pictures. At least we got some pictures, and we look happy in them. I guess we’ve both worked in retail stores at some point, so we know how to smile through the rage. And Paul, well, he’s always happy.

Until our next fun filled family adventure!

Gotta Wear Shades...

Another weekend is gone, as is the first month of 2009. Time is flying by faster than we could have imagined. In a few weeks it’ll be spring break, and we’ll be packing stuff up to move north. After that, there won’t be a whole lot left of the Florida Sellers. I added a countdown timer at the bottom of this blog, and at the time of this post, we’ve got just a little over 97 days left. And then what? Separate lives in separate states for two months, photo classes and bar exams, job searching and student loan repayments… it’s going to be a rough second half of this year. Right now it just feels great to drive the tight streets through the palm trees with the windows down out at Atlantic Beach… that’s what we did today anyway. If you can’t tell, I’m going to miss being the Florida Sellers. And I may even miss being a lifelong student… what the heck am I supposed to do in September?? No books to buy? No first day of school?? Let’s just hope I have a first day of work anyway. But enough about that, how about some pictures:

He’s doing alright, gettin’ good grades, the future’s so bright… Paul’s gotta wear shades.


One of our favorite things to do when Becky was pregnant was to walk the Riverwalk downtown. We hadn’t been in quite a while (mostly because it’s littered with unseemly characters), but it was the perfect evening and we knew we could do it before night fell, so we checked it out.



The highlight for Paul was watching the railroad bridge come down and seeing the train cross the river. He’s kind of a big fan of all things with motors and wheels. Trains, planes, and automobiles.



Also, we got to board a real life sail boat! An early 1900’s schooner from Virginia was docked at the Landing downtown and it was free to check out, so we mounted the deck hoisted the main sheets (not really, but we did pose for pictures).

Tomorrow (or technically today) means the start of week five of the semester, and next Saturday we’re headed to the farthest southern point in the continental United States. I’m sure we’ll have more to talk about then.

Future Racecar Driver

This is by far Paul's favorite thing to do. We don't understand why, but he loves this movie more than anything. Now he even has a Cars bath towel. We got him a set of the Cars toys a while back, and he "accidentally" through Luigi into the St. John's River last time we were at the park. It turned into quite a tragedy. So Becky had to go back to the Disney store and replace it. Even when the movie is playing and he's out of the room, he'll hear it and say words related to whatever part of the movie is on.


So we're being good parents and getting him addicted to TV early. It's bound to happen anyway.

Hair Cuts and Toilet Seats

Nothing much has been going on around here lately, thus the lack of blog posts. But just so as not to go too long without a post, here you go. The only major thing going on in the last couple of weeks has been Paul’s journey down the long road of toilet use. Yes, we decided to start trying to break his diaper habit. Here’s a picture for your enjoyment:


For some reason it didn't seem to work. Maybe we should have taken the diaper off? I don't know. We should probably read the owner's manual on this kid. If anything, hopefully this blog survives long enough for him to understand that I just posted a picture on the internet of him sitting on the toilet. Other than that, I finally convinced Becky to let me buzz his hair, and we think it turned out alright. So much easier than paying $15, trying to hold him still, and listening to him cry while some poor lady tries to keep from stabbing him. He did great, sat still the whole time and let me do it. Not perfect, but it turned out like this:

And that’s about it. Hopefully this weekend we’ll do something worth blogging about!

Sh-sh-shark!

These pictures don’t exactly reflect the current temperatures here in Jacksonville, but it’s really been an up and down thing lately. Since these were taken over the weekend, it was still warm. Tonight we may hit the coldest temperatures in over twenty years! Crank up the heater and dust off the ice scraper!

We ventured down to Daytona Beach on Monday and ended up getting side swiped right out in front of the speedway. Apparently the kid thought he was Dale Jr. or something, or maybe Lightning McQueen, I’m not really sure. No one was hurt, just our poor little car, but in all truth, Paul has probably done more to it in the last year to decrease the value than this fender bender. So it wasn’t too bad. I was going to show you a picture of the damage, but it wasn’t all that exciting, so here’s a picture of me and Paul instead:

Now that’s exciting stuff. It’s strange to see us at the beach, right? We actually headed down to New Smyrna Beach, about 12 miles south of Daytona, in fabulous Volusia County, Florida. All this time it was this close and we’d never taken a moment to stop and check it out… probably because we’d never heard of it. But we saw a magazine that labeled it as the “Shark Attack Capital of the World,” so we thought we’d go down to let Paul wade in the waters.

He wasn’t too thrilled, especially since we woke him up from a nap to see it.

Turns out all we saw were pelicans. Stupid, boring pelicans. Ah, well, maybe when it gets warmer we can go back and take Paul out into the waves and try to draw in the big fish. Last year there were 24 shark attacks at that beach. No deaths, but lots of half eaten limbs. I wonder if they state that in the brochure: “Come to New Smyrna and leave a little piece of you behind!” Sounds like fun.

But there was a pretty nice set of walkways running through the dunes that we checked out. It was a little windy, but the sunset and the warm weather made for another great day at the beach!

1 of 15 Done

I'm falling behind on these blog posts, so this one is going to be quick and simple. We had a few pictures from last week that I wanted to post, and I now have a bunch from yesterday to go through as well. So I'm posting these first:

One week of school is over already and I'm midway through the second. Paul and Becky made it out to enjoy the sunshine in the park last week while I was in class. Still a little cold at times, hence the flannel Brawny Boy outfit.

Florida Boy in a Montana sweatshirt. I think he may be finally getting over his cold, but I did have to edit out some of these pictures from last week where he had gobs of fluid bubbling out of his nose. Good thing his mother keeps plenty of tissues on hand.

Sweatshirts and sand. I guess we're not tourists anymore.

Love keeps the stars in the firmament, and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides. Each of us is created of it, and I suspect, each of us was created for it.

Apparently Maya Angelou is an American poet (I learned that on Wikipedia). She wrote that, and I thought it applied to this photo. Alright, I'll stop with the sappy love stuff. When I get two more free minutes I'll post the other pics from this weekend.