Friday, June 13 Today Mark had to work, so Andy got up early to take him in. On the way home, he bought some McGriddles from McDonalds so we would have stuff to eat when we woke back up later in the morning. As it was, Andy and I slept til about noon, had the McGriddles, and talked about what we should do for the day.

We decided to go to the Lee County Manatee Park. We werent sure if we would see any manatees, as it is not "manatee season" (the manatees only come to inland waters from November to mid-March to escape the colder Gulf and ocean waters), but we decided to go see what there was there. We didnt end up seeing any manatees, but saw a lot of butterflies and "push-up" lizards (the lizards raise themselves up with their arms, looking like they are doing push-ups). Some of the butterflies were beautiful, and they had ones that I have never seen before. We also saw this huge orange grosshopper-thing (my mom tells me its a locust), it was pretty gross.

After leaving the manatee park, we went over to Mark's surveying job to pick him up. On the way back to Mark's house, we stopped at Eckerds to buy Father's Day cards, then headed over to the post office to mail them. On the way back, Mark stopped off to make his car payment, and then we were headed home. As Mark didnt have that long between jobs because of our errands, we decided to cook up the rest of the burgers for dinner. Mark then hopped into the shower. While he was in the shower, it started to storm. The power went off momentarily, and it was raining pretty hard. This took care of our afternoon plans, which were to go to another nature park, the Slough Preserve, where they were supposed to have gators and all sorts of neat stuff. When Mark got done with his shower, he was running late, so we booked over to UPS as fast as we could, considering it was a torrential downpour.

After we got Mark to work, it had stopped raining, but was still lightning. As we had nothing else to do, we decided to drive over to the Slough Preserve anyways and see where it was. Well... the idea would have been scratched regardless of the storm, because it was closed for renovation. Oh well.

We ended up heading over to Best Buy to walk around for awhile, then to Books-A-Million (Andy bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone!!), and to Old Navy for a bit to see what they had on sale. It had stopped lightning by then, so we decided to head down to the beach for a bit and walk around by the shops. We didnt quite make it that far, and stayed in this one store the entire time. After leaving, we went over to Juicy Lucy's and got some lemonade, then headed over to UPS to pick Mark up from work.

We were all sorta hungry by then, so we decided to go to the Waffle House for a late-night meal. There were a few around, but Mark decided to go to the one by the beach, which was cool. I hadnt been to a Waffle House since I was real young and we were on vacation in Kentucky - my Aunt Linda worked in one. The food was good, we all got breakfast-type stuff, eggs, waffles, etc. though it was greasy. After leaving Waffle House, we decided to go back down to the pier, as it is open all night long. We looked at the stars for awhile, I found the Big Dipper, but could not find the Little Dipper. There were a lot of lights around, and the moon was really bright, so it made some stars really difficult to find.

Walking out to the end of the pier, we saw, of course, more lightning, but not much else as it was too dark. We looked at the stars some more, then decided to go home. We watched Something About Mary again, and all fell asleep.

then || now