Lots Of Living To Do

This week I took my children to the pool. Within two days Savannah went from needing a floatation device, water wings, and goggles to being able to swim laps while snorkeling around the pool and dive to the bottom to pick up diving rings with the help of nothing more than a snorkel mask and some fins. Hope went from sitting in a round baby float and refusing to get wet from the chest up to swimming around the pool in a floatation device that allows her to be submerged up to her armpits and able to "swim" and is now brave enough to put her face in the water with a snorkel mask on. They both did all of this on their own. Logan has graduated to being able to dive to the bottom just holding his breath. Progress is being made all around. Even I can swim two or three laps before getting winded and feeling the ache in my previously collapsed lungs. If someone had told me in March that I would be swimming at all right now I would have quickly reminded them that I would be the girl with the x'd out eyes by now. I am interested to see what all happens next week.

I bought two books today. Both are books are by John Cadwell Holt, founder of the unschooling movement and his views on learning and child development. I have been wanting to read both for a long time. I am finally making the time to do it.

I am still working on pictures. I plan to really get my shit together within the next couple of months and get all of the print pictures scanned in. I need to find out if there is such a thing as acid free art/drawing paper. If there is I need to buy a serious assload of it for the kids to use for their artwork as they are going through printer paper as fast as I can buy it and because I would like to use some of their drawings as backgrounds in their scrapbooks. Currently, I have enough artwork stacked on my bedroom floor to fill about two fifteen gallon trashbags with nothing but paper. That is just artwork from the last few months. I have serious issues with clutter so you can imagine how much I want to get this project going. I can't throw it away. Each one is a masterpiece! I made some pretty neat giftwrap last year with some of their drawings. Now I wish I hadn't done that so much.

This week I am going to go repurchase the paint for my bedroom and get it repainted because the clash of teracotta orange walls with my red floral comforter is just more than I can bear anymore. I also need to get the two six foot long pieces of L shaped lumber I stole from the parking lot (I realized later that the neighborhood boys had been using it to make skateboard ramps.) finished and hung as shelves somewhere in my apartment. We need to do something about my dining table too.

These things have been waiting for me long enough.

In other news, we took a long drive through the Everglades today. I am fascinated with the now closed Copeland Road Prison that is located out in the middle of nowhere in Collier County. We drove past there in April 2002 and I saw a scary shirtless man standing in the screened doorway of what I thought, at the time, was some sort of rundown looking one floor apartment housing. It turns out that it was a prison but it had no fence around it. I found it extremely disturbing. Today we went back to drive by and take pictures but it has been closed. We found a sheriff sitting in his car on the property and asked him about it. It seems it was a state prison and the land was leased from a private owner who plans to just leave it as is. The series of creepy buildings are just empty. Some doors are just hanging open. One tiny little shack has a sign nailed to the door that says "Caution. Caustic." I found that odd. The whole place was both spooky and interesting. I kept thinking that there were some really horrible secrets lingering in the air there. I had written a whole documentary about the place in my head complete with torture and death and horrible stories that would make the little hairs stand up on the back of your neck by the time we got home.

It was out in the middle of the swamp people. With no razor wire, no fence. It was creepy. Especially when we were there the first time and there was a person just standing there.

I wanted to go back today and take pictures of all of it but I was too intimidated to go back and ask the sheriff if we could. I bet since it is private property that he would have said no. I don't know why I have always been kinda fascinated with prisons. Maybe I visited my dad in prison one too many times when I was little and that messed me all up. Freaky. I came home and immediately looked up everything I could find about it. Then I found a bunch of interesting stories from prisoners from various Florida prisons. Granted, I am a firm believer that a lot of what happens to people in prison is their own Karma biting them in the ass. Yet some of the stories of wrongful imprisonment and corruption within the institutions is interesting to read. All I know is either way I don't ever want to be on the wrong side of the bars.

A side note: The prison I am referring to above was mentioned in the book that the movie Adaptation was based on. It is clear that the woman who wrote that book had visited that area. Today we had made several comments to each other about how much the area we were driving in reminded us of the setting of that movie and how much the people we passed looked like they could have been characters from it. Then while we were looking for information about the prison we found that.

Posted by gwendolyn on June 29, 2003 at 12:15 AM