Author: Debbie Roney Smith

In Need of a Vet in the FL Panhandle?

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Live in the Florida Panhandle? Looking for a new, reputable veterinarian? Visit the Panhandle Veterinary Services located in Chipley, FL. Founded in 1976, this is a vet, full-boarding, and grooming facility. There are four doctors on staff, all graduates of the University of Florida. They are a mixed animal practice that caters to small and large animals. They are currently welcoming new clients, walk-in appointments, and farm visits! Panhandle Veterinary Services Website

Reviews rate them as an overall 4.5 out of 5-star rating with 229 reviews. Positive reviewers state that Panhandle Veterinary Services “are always very nice, never pushy and I love that they have a drive-through!” Additionally, they “Explained everything to us and asked if we had questions or concerns.” Overall, it seems that this particular clinic is  acknowledged for its’ “Professionalism, Quality, Reliability, Responsiveness, [and] Value.” Panhandle Veterinary Services Google Reviews

Call them at (850) 638-4857 or visit them at:

Panhandle Veterinary Services

900 Falling Waters Rd

Chipley, FL 32428

Happy Birthday to a Famous Tallahassee Musician

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T-Pain, born Faheem Rasheed Najm, was born and raised in Tallahassee, Florida. His performance name is a nod to his hometown; the ‘T’ in T-Pain stands for Tallahassee! His interest in music was nurtured throughout his childhood by his friends and family; once, his father brought home a keyboard he had found on the street. As T-Pain got older and more experienced, a family friend would often take him to their recording studio to hang out. BY 10 years old he had converted his bedroom into a small workspace with only a keyboard, a beat machine, and a four-track recorder. However, he did not start seriously pursuing a music career until after high school; as a result, he took off in 2004. Now, T-Pain is a well-known American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer as well as the founder of the record label imprint Nappy Boy Entertainment. He’s even dabbled in other multimedia industries: he created an animated special called Freaknik: The Musical, acted in the movie Lottery Ticket, and won a reality TV music competition called The Masked Singer. 

Tomorrow is National Love People Day

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Tomorrow is National Love People Day, an annual event meant to spread kindness and love.​ As an official holiday, it gained traction in 2017 when a Chicago-based church took on the task of making this national holiday more impactful and well-known. Lifeline Church undertook this campaign in honor of their founders, Pastors Reggie and London Royal. National Love People Day is meant to bring communities, families, and the world together in the spirit of unconditional love. This is a day dedicated to inspiring and supporting others with the power of unconditional love.

How to Celebrate: 

Help someone else → random acts of kindness epitomizes the spirit behind National Love People Day. Hold open a door, send a card to a long-distance friend, call an elderly relative, donate money to charity – the possibilities are endless!

Express love through the arts → spread the message of National Love People Day by writing a poem, participating in a poetry slam, dance, take photos of the things you love, paint a picture; art is an amazing outlet in these trying times.

Be nice → like random acts of kindness, being nice is often priceless while being hugely impactful. Offer words of support or show empathy to friends/family going through hard times, share a hug, a cup of coffee, a listening ear to someone you do or don’t know; sometimes the stranger wishing you a good day after holding the door open makes all the difference in the world.

Florida’s Role in Deaf Dog Awareness Week

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Did you know some breeds of dogs have deafness rates of 40 percent or more? Yet most people are unaware that certain breeds are predisposed to hearing impairment, and even less know how to recognize the signs in their pets. Deaf Dog Awareness Week has just come to a close today; it was a wonderful chance to celebrate those special dogs, learn more about adoption and training, and to simply hug our furry friends close.

Florida has a special part to play in this week-long holiday. Gisele Veilleux founded a small foster-driven non-profit dog rescue located in Central Florida in 2009 called The Dog Liberator. A no-kill shelter, it rescues approximately 200 dogs per year. The Dog Liberator focuses on rescuing herding dogs in danger, thus preventing highly adoptable dogs from being destroyed. Veilleux published Deaf Dogs Hear With Their Hearts in 2013. It is the true story of China, a deaf and partially blind dog who inspired great things. China, an Australian Shepherd, was rescued from a kill shelter when she was still a pup and had been abused by her former owner. The effect China had on Veilleux and her daughter helped inspire Veilleux to focus more heavily on supporting hearing-impaired dogs. Thank goodness for animal-loving Floridians! 

5 Things Happening on the 25th

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1. Heritage Day

Previously known in South Africa as Shaka Day, a day commemorating the Zulu King of Shaka who united clans to for the Zulu nation. Since 1955. South Africans have celebrated the renamed Heritage Day by remembering the cultural heritage of the many different cultures that make up their nation. Often called the ‘‘Rainbow Nation,’’ South Africa’s cultural roots are rich, vibrant, and incredibly diverse cultures. Want to celebrate and better understand this beautiful smorgasboard of cultures? Read up on South Africa’s history; research it’s cultural past, explore the intense political history, the racial injustices, the complex languages, and their culture in general. 

2. National Comic Book Day

National Comic Book Day honors the art, artists, and the stories of comic books. Fans, collectors, readers, writers, and artists come together to celebrate this generational, cultural crossing genre. Comic books has grown as a genre to include full-length books, graphic novels, comic strips, manga, comic collections, and digital comics. Additionally, comic books have inspired countless movie adaptations – the Marvel Cinematic Universe would not exist if comics didn’t. Celebrate by discovering new comic books, reading old favorites, sharing your passion with those in your life, watching television shows/movies based on comics, or look for online celebrations you can join. 

3. National Cooking Day

A day meant to encourage and inspire people to discover something new and enjoyable in the kitchen. Learn a new skill by preparing something new and delicious for yourself or loved ones. National Cooking Day is a day for passing on recipes, making fulfilling meals, experimenting with new recipes, baking with loved ones, throwing social-distancing-safe potlucks, hosting meals, or maybe just whipping up your favorite comfort foods to enjoy in your pjs on the couch. Connect with friends and family or practice some filling self-care this holiday!

4. National Daughters Day

A special day created to celebrate and cherish daughters. While there is a National Sons & Daughters Day, this event is a response to the growing awareness of the inherent struggles womens go through in society. From the very beginning, society viewed women as inferior to men, limiting their potential due to male privilege dominated at the time. This is an opprotunity to learn and discuss gender discrimination and inequity. Help your daughter grow into a well-rounded, emotionally fulfilled woman by celebrating them today. Explore this parental blog about teaching kids about gender equality and this education blog to learn more!

5. Sport Purple for Platelets Day

Supports those suffering from Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), a disease that causes excessive bleeding, bruising and fatigue due to low levels of platelets (those are the cells that enable blood to clot). Unfortunately, ITP is widely unheard of and not much is known about the hows and whys of the disease. It was one of the first autoimmune disorders discovered, proving that a human body’s tissue could be attacked by its own antibodies. Despite this groundbreaking contribution, research into ITP never gained significant financial traction. The Platelet Disorder Support Association (PDSA) sponsors Sport Purple for Platelets Day in order to raise awareness and funds for those suffering and for research. So sport purple today to show your support for this life-shortening disease! 

 

All About Walking Indoors

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It’s well known that cardio, also known as aerobic cardiovascular or cardio exercise, is important for physical and mental health. Benefits of cardio include:

  • increases stamina
  • positive effects on mental health 
  • gain and maintain muscle
  • lose and keep off fat
  • boosts immune system
  • helps prevent and/or manage chronic conditions
  • strengthens the heart (among many others like the lungs)
  • …and more!

However, it’s so hot outside these days – especially with Southern humidity! – that going outside to exercise seems daunting. Heck, it can even be dangerous; working outside under the hot summer sun – the calendar may say autumn but we know better – can cause heat exhaustion or heat stroke. So stay inside and beat the heat with indoor walking! Don’t mist this opportunity – what? You didn’t like the pun? How cold! 

Indoor Walking Tips

WALKING IN PLACE: a low-impact activity, not only does it check the cardio box but also counts as stretching. As an exercise, it primarily targets the quads; additionally benefits the abs, hamstrings, and hip flexors. 

Walking in place is something of revived phenomena right now. Not only does it provide an escape from the weather, it also offers a safe alternative to going to gyms. Check out ‘walking in place routines/workouts’ on Youtube for a wide array of demonstrations for everyone from athletes to the elderly and even parents with kids! 

Indoor walking is built on the repetitive movement of marching in place. This can be hard on your joints, so consider switching it up by…

Adding movement: walk around your coffee table, down the hallway, climb stairs if you have them, or add simple side-to-side and forward-and-back movements. You can also try…

Adding weight/resistance: add easy resistance to marching in place by using light dumbbells in each hand. Or, use a weighted vest. Stay safe – DON’T wear a vest that’s more than 5-10% of your body weight! Additionally, exercises or stretches can increase the energy burned as well as tighten and tone muscles. Some easy exercises to add if you have dumbbells are bicep curls, shoulder presses, triceps kickbacks, and lunges. No equipment? No problem – try adding bodyweight exercises like squats or side-lunges.

If it feels too easy, try creating your own cycles using walking and various change-ups (or check Youtube!). For example, when you’re binge-watching a show through your streaming service, walk-in place while the episode is playing. Then, during the credits and while the next episode loads, perform x-number of squats, x-number of jumping jacks, and x-number x = whatever number you’re comfortable with of lunges as many times as you can. Return to walking when the next episode starts.

Weather or not you plan to try indoor walking (read more here), the joke below is guaranteed to make you laugh out cloud!

Why do cows lie in the rain…?

…to keep each udder dry!

Snakes and the Coming of Autumn: What’s the Link?

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As you may know, the autumnal equinox – also known as the September and/or fall equinox – falls tomorrow, September 22nd. The fall equinox is the astronomical start of the fall season if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and the beginning of the spring season if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere. The 2020 fall equinox arrives here in the Northern Hemisphere on Tuesday at 9:31 A.M. EDT – did you know the actual time changes each year? This is the latest start to the fall equinox since 2015!

Linguistically speaking, the word “equinox” comes from Latin aequus – which means “equal” – and nox – which means “night.” Equal night, equal day: on the equinox, day and night are roughly equal in length. Throughout history, cultures have marked the autumnal equinox. In England, the Druids observed this important change of seasons with feasts, harvests, and celebrations. For the Druids, the fall equinox indicates that:

“The Wheel of the Year turns and the time of balance returns…marks the balance of day and night before the darkness overtakes the light…the time of the second harvest…[the] central theme – thanking the Earth, in her full abundance as Mother and Giver, for the great harvest, as Autumn begins.” (source of information with quotations)

Some cultures even built monuments to celebrate and honor the autumnal equinox. Most well-known is the work of the Maya, who constructed the El Castillo step pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico. Anthony Aveni, Colgate University professor and author of The Book of The Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays, reports that there is a legend from Mayan culture that tells the story of an ancient feathered serpent god that descends from the sky on the equinox. So the pyramid was designed so that a snake made of light would appear to slither down the steps only during the autumnal AND vernal equinoxes. This effect not only creates a slithering snake but also connects a sculpted snake’s head at the bottom to the snake’s tail at the top of the pyramid. To this day, there are crowds of people at the El Castillo who hope to catch the light-snake slithering down the steps. (source)

 

World Peace Day is Tomorrow!

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Heads up people – tomorrow is World Peace Day!

The International Day of Peace (also known as World Peace Day) is celebrated annually on September 21st. It is a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace between all nations and all people. In this modern era (and an election year no less!), violence, war, and other negative themes often monopolize the news cycles. The International Day of Peace is an inspiring opportunity to not only remember the good people are capable of but also put peace and goodwill into the world through your own actions. 

The evolution of World Peace Day to the International Day of Peace is an interesting one. In 1981, the United Nations unanimously voted to sponsor a day in honor of peace. However, there was never an actual plea for people/countries to stop fighting and it had no specific date. Jeremy Gilley, an impassioned British citizen, began a campaign to create a more impactful annual celebration of peace. On September 7th, 2001, the UN officially created the International Day of Peace and dedicated September 21st to the new day, a day that asked all people and leaders of the world to agree to ceasefire in active conflicts and vow to pursue the path of nonviolence. As the official Peace Day website states, it is a day that “provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to Peace above all differences and to contribute to building a Culture of Peace” (source).

2020 is particularly significant for this established event because it is the 20th Anniversary of the UN Resolution on the Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. This specific program was a new concept that linked eight action areas for maximum impact and took ten months of negotiation to hammer out. The eight action areas are as follows: culture of peace through education; sustainable economic and social development; respect for all human rights; equality between women and men; democratic participation; understanding, tolerance and solidarity; participatory communication and the free flow of information and knowledge; and international peace and security.

Additionally, this year’s celebration is marked by the ongoing world pandemic. The UN declared the 2020 Peace Day Theme to be “Shaping Peace Together,” a theme that specifies “spreading compassion, kindness, and hope in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

How you and yours can celebrate/promote World Peace Day:

  • Observe the global “Minute of Silence;” the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Pathways to Peace inaugurated the Minute of Silence in 1984. At noon in each time zone, the Minute of Peace creates a moment of silent reflection, amplifying what NGO calls a “Peace Wave” around the world.
  • Light a candle in honor of peace
  • Read/write/share peace poems, stories, et cetera
  • Read about different peacemakers or watch a film (List of Peacemakers in History)
  • Make/write down peace promises in your own life (ex. smile more, let go of road rage, et cetera)
  • Plant a peace garden (more on peace gardens)
  • Give someone a peace lily
  • Share messages of peace on social networking sites (ex. share your creative peace projects, repost quotes on peace, et cetera)
  • Check out the Mosaic Children’s Project; listen to their music, donate, and share (Mosaic Project website)
  • Resolve to create more peace in your life with yourself and those around you (ex. reach out to a family member you recently had a disagreement with, practice pausing for three breathes before reacting/replying in trying situations, send a letter to a friend you haven’t talked with in awhile, et cetera)
  • Write to lawmakers to adopt more peaceful approaches to domestic issues and international relations
  • Organize or join a Peace March (event map for International Day of Peace)

Talk Like a Pirate about Florida’s Booty

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A’hoy matey, today is Talk Like a Pirate Day! It has its origins in Oregon; in 1995, two friends from Oregon jokingly created the holiday while playing racquetball. It was celebrated amongst their friend group and community for years until columnist Dave Barry became the spokesperson for National Talk Like a Pirate Day in 2002. Since then, it has blossomed into a beloved faux-holiday that encourages the use of the vocabulary popularized by movies like Pirates of the Caribbean as “pirate lingo” to offer a fun opportunity to break out of your daily routine, learn some history, and celebrate a bygone era. So join me, maties on a brief adventure exploring the pirates that skulked about the Florida waters!

The earliest recorded pirate attacks began after China’s Han Dynasty fell in the 2nd century but piracy in Florida was prevalent in the early 1800s. This wave of piracy occurred after The Golden Age of Piracy, a period spanning the late 1600s to the early 1700s, the era that most people think of when the word ‘pirate’ is mentioned: think Black Beard, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tortuga, Anne Bonny, rum, and Calico Jack Rackham. Florida’s age of pirates came around a century after this Golden Age.

This secondary explosion of piracy occurred primarily in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea as a result of increasing American sea trade. In fact, American ships, as well as Spanish and British vessels, were the targets of all manner of pirates, racketeers, and privateers. Pensacola’s first brush with piracy reportedly occurred in 1811 when a U.S. gunboat chased the French pirate ship La Franchise along the northern Gulf. The pirates, unable to outmaneuver the military, ran their ship onto the Pensacola coast, set it on fire, and fled into the woods. Then, in 1817, four years before Florida was relinquished to the US by Spain, notorious New Orleans pirate Jean Lafitte encouraged a group of privateers to raid Pensacola. Nothing came of the plan except a brief panic among Spanish settlers that led them to create a citizen militia.

Things were rather quiet onshore in FL until 1822 when the pirate ship Carmen was brought to court in the recently established U.S. District Court of West Florida in Pensacola. The Carmen was charged with firing on the Louisiana off the coast of Cuba. It’s likely that the pirates on Carmen mistook Louisiana for a merchant ship when it was actually a federal Revenue Cutter Service vessel. The U.S.S. Peacock was present and pursued Carmen. Mike Thomin, a staff member at the Florida Public Archaeology Network, reports that “The Carmen did what most pirate ships did when they saw a naval ship; they tried to run away as fast as possible…pirates did not try to engage a Navy ship. If they did, it was because they mistook it for a merchant ship. As soon as they found out they were dealing with a heavily armed Naval ship; they usually ran away.” (source) The crew was caught, tried, and found not guilty by January of 1823 because of U.S. sympathy for ongoing political struggles across the sea.

Sadly, most of the dramatic, booty creating piracy in Florida occurred farther down the coast near the Keys. Luckily, you can still spend today having pirate-themed fun regardless of the intensity of Florida’s pirate history. Watch your favorite pirate-themed movie or TV show, read up on interesting figures of pirate culture, make a toast to pirates long-gone with your favorite rum, or make pirate hates with your kids and have a wooden-stick sword fight!

Thank Florida for AC

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Dr. John Gorrie

Dr. John Gorrie of Florida is the man behind, arguably, humanity’s most impressive invention for daily use: the air conditioner.

Gorrie was a physician, scientist, inventor, and humanitarian living in South Carolina. His study of tropical diseases led him to move to Florida when he noticed that people in the north weren’t getting yellow fever. He decided to see if the climate had something to do with it, moving down to Apalachicola, then a large cotton market on the Gulf Coast. 

He became convinced that cold was a healer. He noted that “Nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons.” Dr. Gorrie began urging draining the swamps, clearing weeds, and maintaining clean food markets in the city. He also recommended sleeping under mosquito netting to prevent the disease. He had been cooling rooms with ice in a basin suspended from the ceiling which allowed cool air to flow down across the sick patient. However, it was a clunky system that was incredibly limited by the fact that ice had to be brought by boat from the northern lakes; ice came packed in sawdust from the northern lakes between the United States and Canada. Furthermore, ice was incredibly expensive at nearly $1.50 a pound – that’s $44.81 a pound in 2020 (source)!

Gorrie’s design

Thus, Dr. Gorrie began to experiment with making artificial ice. He worked to design a machine that creates ice using a compressor powered by horse, water, wind-driven sails, or steam. This earliest effort to create a practical method of manufacturing ice would guide future inventors in developing the cold-air process of refrigeration necessary for everything from the AC in your house to the AC in your car, and many things in-between. Dr. Gorrie successfully demonstrates the ice-making machine in 1848. However, he wasn’t granted the U.S. patent until May 6, 1851. His design, the foundation of future air conditing designs as well as modern refrigerators, was filled under Patent No. 8080. 

During his residence in Apalachicola, Gorrie served as mayor, postmaster, city treasurer, council member, bank director, and founder of Trinity Church. To honor his impact on the town and the world, the city created the Gorrie Ice Museum in order to explore the doctor, his creation, and his life; be sure to check their website to keep up-to-date with their hours and events (John Gorrie Museum and State Park website). Additionally, Gorrie represents Florida with his statue placed in the National Statuary Hall in Washington D. C., and you can also view the original model of his ice-making machine and the scientific articles he wrote at the Smithsonian Institution.