My week in Florida

We left marietta at 6:15 Friday night. Long drive, no fun, kinda depressing with 4 people in a 2 door Civic, but hey, Florida's worth it.
Arrive at TJ/the Zynda's house at about 9:50 a.m. Saturday morning. Mrs. Z is there to greet us and Big Ted (TJ stands for Theodore James, and his dad is Ted also, so we refer to him as big ted) is in Jacksonville with TJ's 28 year old brother. So we try to settle in a bit, nice house, a very florida house - all white on the inside and kinda open looking. Then there's a pool out the back with a screen and an overhang - so it's like they have an extra room outside, which is cool. The outside just kinda looks like a typical FL house, with those rounded shingles and whatnot. But anyway, Saturday was then spent sleeping all day. I think they may have made us dinner, but i can't remember what it was.
Sunday morning greeted me with 1 of the poodles (they have 3) licking my face at like 8 a.m. I wasn't very pleased. However, i was sleeping on a foldout couch bed with a tv in the room, so I guess it was worth the tv. But anyway, i drifted back out and woke up again at like 9:45...and I became James Bond upon hearing "my name is Pussy Galore"...if you know Bond, you know the next line/what I was thinking was "...I must be dreaming." That's right, I woke up to the smell of bacon. Curiosity got the best of me and I walked downstairs and was greeted by both parents in the kitchen by a "good morning...how do you want your eggs?" Sunday was off to a sweet start. Huge breakfast - I was like a king since I was the first awake - pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, fruit...outstanding.
Anyway, so then we spent Sunday at the beach for a couple hours - it was insanely crowded, and then drove around Naples just for kicks for another hour or so afterwards, which took us to dinner time. We went to Cheeburger Cheeburger to do the 1 lb. challenge. TJ and I both downed the pounders without much trouble, got our pictures taken, and made fun of Hop and Zac for getting little wiener burgers. Then we hung out, that was it for Sunday.
Monday was pretty wild. We went to a hosue that belonged to a guy mr. Zynda worked for and was pretty good friends with - it was on the market at $8.9 mil, to give you an idea of how big it was. It was on the water, with something like 150 feet of waterfront - which is a lot. 6 bed, 7.5 bathroom house - insane. Pool area (endless pool) was all stone floored and was probably about 2000 sq. ft. itself - it was enormous. Anyway, we went jet skiing. It was tons of fun, we spent most of the day out there screwing around, saw some dolphins on the way back in - had a good time. I don't think we did anything that night, so that was Monday.
Tuesday was back at the beach. A different beach, this one had a big passageway that sorta drifted back through some woods, but it was opened enough to be fine to swim in, so we did that. It was really cool though because the current would take us out to the edge of the ocean part and there were like 10 billion little fish that we were catching with our hands becuase there were so many...it was cool. There was also a huge jellyfish that may or may not have been dead when TJ threw a rock really deep into it's jelly-skeleton...which led this douchebag to turn around and be a hardass and pick it up and toss it back into the water. So Tuesday night we went fishing at the previously mentioned huge house, fished off of the back deck (by the way, those people live in miami for most of the time...just 2 hours away...and weren't there all week) and taht was alright. We caught some stuff, threw it back, beat the shit out of a catfish, yadda yadda yadda. So we had some bait left over, and that brings me to wednesday.
Wednesday we fished at the other insanely huge house of a guy t hat big ted knows. This house included $500,000 marble flooring, a $70,000 piece of "artwork" out front, a $13,000 5 foot long section of glass in front of the wine cooler, 7 flat screen TV's on swivel-bases on the walls, zebra wood all over everything, a movie theater (with 8 automatic recliners - you press the button and it reclines for you...for the truly lazy man), an elevator, an endless pool that appears to drain into the ocean, a fountain that drains water into the pool, 5ish chandeliers from Italy, a player piano, chaise lounges from Italy that were in the thousands, a steam room/shower, green marble bathtubs (apparently that stuff is insanely rare/expensive), and 2 other lots - one for the 4000 sq. ft. guest house, and one is a park, where friends of theirs have gotten married (it includes 2 fountains and a gazebo). According to big ted, this house would go for roughly $14 mil. So we fished there, and manatees are really into this corner lot we were at, so we got to see a manatee from about 10 feet away, pretty cool. Wednesday night was nothing that i can recall...but maybe it was dinner at the Rib place...yeah, that sounds right. Later that night was the funniest moment of the trip. Ashley (TJ's 25 year old sister) was home and her boyfriend Kalen came after we were back from dinner. Kalen seemed like the kind of guy who tries real hard to impress the parents, but it's probaby a lost cause. Apparently when big ted first met him, he took Kalen out for a ride in his truck and showed him a shotgun (uncle Buck-esque) and mentioned how the thing could "dot an i from 300 yards" - pretty funny stuff. Anyway, Kalen came into the house...stood by the couch for about 10 seconds as he was being introduced to us. After we shook hands, he leaned back by the couch to pat Jake, the 1 year old male poodle. No more than 5 seconds later, Jake was humping the crap out of poor Kalen's arm. Now, I'm not gonna explicitly say what happened, but moments later, Kalen went and washed his hands as the rest of us laughed until we cried...funniest thing I've ever seen. And that was Wednesday.
Thursday was "let's find the biggest hicks in Florida" day. WE went to an airboat tour place that also had an "animal sanctuary" which was like "some fenced-in-areas with exotic animals in them." We paid 8 bucks to get in and we got to see tons of alligators, feed some fish, see panthers, crocs, sea turtles, and the coolest animals in the world....deer! That part was gay, but there was also an alligator wrestler. This guy first let us hold the littler gators, which smelled awful, but felt really cool. Then he went on and drug "George" out of the pool that he seemed awfully content laying in. George was a 9 ft. gator, apparently about 350 pounds, and an alligator, thus making our wrangler an idiot. Anyway, the guy showed us how the cool thing about gators is that if anything touches their tongues, they shut their jaws with insane power. He tossed a really really small pebble into its' mouth at one point and it sure did snap - pretty cool. Anyway, he did that ridiculously stupid stuff like goign chin-to-chin with the gator and putting his arms out. He also showed us that he had had a few fingers almost bitten off...which one might think, would inspire him to stop putting his hands in alligators mouths, but that wasn't the case. Anyway, the best part about this was that one of the few other people who were watchign this asked how big gators get. The guy responded with "i've seen a 16 footer, and i know it was 16 feet because we were in a 16 foot canoe. Me and my buddy were out Gigging Frogs -" and my heart stopped. Someone out there really does gig frogs. I froze. I couldn't believe it. This guy was that much of a redneck that him and his "buddy" go out into the swamp to stab frogs with tridents...what does one say in respond to this? Nothing, was my response, i was completely speechless. So that was the highlight of that day.
Friday and Saturday we just hung out, nothing too interesting, we laid by the pool and watched basketball...I'm really tired, and i wanna post about basketball, but it's gonna have to wait til tomorrow or the next day, since no b-ball is going on for the next few days.
so as always, go Browns, Cavs, and Tribe!