Big doings week-end

There is A LOT going on in our little corner of earth over the next few days.  Let me start be describing the one thing we will not be doing & yet benefits us greatly.  Wait, let me back up.

How do you feel about football?  College football? Gator college football?  Well, we have a love hate relationship.  More like a like, don't really care relationship, but whatever.  The short version is when there is a home game we do everything we can to get the hell out of Dodge.  It is not just what the people attending the game do.  I don't mean drunk & disorderly, although that is a factor, I mean thing like the university reselling ALL THE PARKING SPACES to alumni & other fans, so if you have not done something about your car before the end of business Friday, you can count on getting towed & fined.  When you consider how much it costs to park near A's building (I will give you a hint: it is more than $500), you can see how it might get old.  Fast.  But added to that are all the people not attending the game, who just want to hang out & bask in the drunken halo outside of the stadium.  & that is before we get into any real rivalry games.

Well, this weekend is the most famous college football rivalry of all time:  The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.  & the good news is it is so damned big (& the rival is so damned close), they have all agreed to move it to Jacksonville & we get our town back.  Which means we will be able to move about freely & do everything else going on this week-end.

Today is the first day you can vote in the election here in Florida.  I am told that this is the second busiest day (the first being the actual 2nd Tuesday in November), but I probably won't get there until Monday myself.

Today is the first day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We actually have a FOL booksale twice a year (we do love our library) but the October sale is usually the BIG one.  We will not be there this first day, but we do plan to go Sunday (the book sale runs Saturday to Wednesday).  We are arriving late because

Saturday is the only day of the Bat Festival at the Lubee Bat Conservancy.    We have never been, but I am determined to go this year. 

Yesterday I was on campus, for the first time in a long time I might add, & was talking with the most recent set of undergrads work-studying in the Herbarium when one of them bemoaned the "home game" being "so far away" & how he was just going to have to watch it on tv because without football there is "nothing to do in this town".