WOW!

Wow! is the word that is pretty much summing up my day so far. 

WOW! Did you know that just one little square of Dove dark chocolate, eaten at 6pm, has enough caffeine in it to keep me awake until 3am?  Ya.  WHeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

WOW! Have you SEEN the beaches today?!?!? I'm thinking that the fishing pole is coming out later!  Little to no surf, the annoying touchy freely June Grass is out of the swimming zone, and the water is so clear I think I can see Miami from here.

WOW! Have you seen the temps?  Ick.  We are under a heat warning from noon to 7pm today and tomorrow.  A High pressure system sitting on our heads will allow for very little mixing of the atmosphere and we're just going to sit and bake and bake.  Heat indexes will be near 110 both days.  Meaning, you're going to sweat, and it's NOT going to cool you off.  BE CAREFUL! Take it VERY VERY slowly and drink drink drink.

WOW! Have you heard/read the news that the Walmart chain has decided to no longer sell Florida seafood??  AH ha! What a misleading teaser on the news!! Of course I tuned in to find out what the heck was going on!  Were they choosing not to sell Florida seafood due to some test we haven't seen?  Were they not selling it due to rumours?  What about fish still coming out of the other Gulf states and what did the East coast and Southern Florida do to earn this scorn?

AH HA! Media strikes again !!!!  After watching the show, it turns out that Walmart has decided to close the seafood shops in SOME of their Florida stores.  WHY??? Because they can't sell the seafood in the case.  Simple supply and demand.  The simple truth is, people are unaware that the testing of the fish from the GOM is an ongoing process.  As of now, no detectable amount of either petroleum products nor dispersant products have been found in any of the tests.  Which you wouldn't know unless you searched it online OR caught the one tiny little sentence on some obscure news story. Both Walmart is citing consumer perception for the closing of the seafood counters. The consumers don't perceive it as safe, and therefor aren't buying it. Quite frankly, if this was Texas, and this was about beef, the state would be in an uproar!  COME to think of it, I saw more "buy our seafood, it's FLORIDA seafood", when I lived up North.  (Yes, Yankee by birth, but southern belle in my heart.) Rarely have I seen seafood down here labeled as local.  Well, excluding the guy you used to see off the side of the road, in the old pick 'em up truck, with the propane ring, with a cooler of shrimp in the back of the bed.  Red Lobster has pulled oysters off their menus.  Much to the chagrin of young lovers.  Is it unsafe?  Nope.  In this case it's a mixed bag of perception of it being unsafe and the demand.  The demand is still up there, but the supply is down, which has driven the prices higher than people are willing to pay.  I'm surprised the seafood agency in Florida hasn't stepped up it's marketing campaign to promote our fishy friends: baked, fried, smoked,  or lightly grilled- little pat of herb butter , a little lemon ::drool::  - but I digress.

Truth is, only 1/3 of the nation's seafood comes from this region.  Now I will grant you, having that closed is seriously hurting the region, the fishermen, and all of it's supporting companies, it is by no means throwing us into a seafood shortage, even locally.  It's all about consumer confidence and what moves on the shelves.  (Last I saw, the Vegemite on the top shelf of the International food section was gathering dust like a cactus in a stampede. I don't expect they'll carry it much longer.) When my family was here in June, my mom wanted shrimp.  I went to the local seafood counter of our local store, and the shrimp there wasn't even local.  It had come in from off the sunny shore of the Caribbean !  I was dumbfounded!!!  The seafood manager said they haven't carried local for a LONG time, as their local supply wasn't meeting the demand! HUH?  Well OK then, tarry me banana, Caribbean shrimp it was!

WOW!  So I guess it falls under the great heading of "this too shall pass",those of us along the GOM are really good at living by, be it flooding, hurricanes, oil spills, or alien invasion from space.

Have fun and be safe today!