Hiking at the Hog Pond area of the Withlacoochee State Forest

We had cold cereal and a bagel for breakfast after doing our morning language lessons. Mark and I took the dogs on a walk around Eldred, Bassett and Cedar Gate then came back to the Whittington's house on Standish Drive. The walk was short since we planned to take the dogs on a longer walk this afternoon.

The weather at home continues to be cold and snowy.  The thermometer at home showed -1.3 degrees this morning.  We are happy to be in Florida with much warmer weather.  All of the locals think that these days in the 60s are cold but we are enjoying the escape from the extreme cold at home.

Mary and Cindy continued to work on their genealogy in Familysearch.com while Mark and I went out to the garage. Mark cleaned and straightened in the upstairs room while I sorted the things that I would leave for Mark to continue working on finishing the room. I know that he would need one of the finishing nail guns but he has plenty of tools and supplies for finishing the drywall. I packed up the MantisX laser academy shooting system and my two pistols to come home with us.

Mark came down and we put another coat of primer over the patch in the garage partition. We put a large fan on the floor to speed drying then used a can of orange peel texture spray on the wall. It didn't give quite enough texture so Mark tried his can of knockdown texture. This would normally give a lot more texture than the orange peel but he set the spray to the lowest setting and moved quickly to get a texture matching the rest of the wall.

While the texture dried, we went in for a lunch of cheddar cheese and leftover beans in a tortilla wrap with salsa. We discussed afternoon plans for a walk to the Hog Pond area of the Withlacoochee State Forest.

The texture spray was dry after lunch so we applied a coat of white Behr Marquee Satin Paint. To get a match, we painted the entire wall, ceiling to floor rather than just the patch. The wall looked good although it would require another coat in the patched area.

We gathered a few things and loaded the dogs into Cindy's Toyota Highlander to go on a walk through the nearby Hog Pond area of Withlacoochee State Forest. There was only one vehicle in the parking area when we arrived, and we put the dogs on leashes to take them on a walk on the trails..

This area has a variety of habitats including palmetto thickets, areas wooded with live oak trees, scrub meadows and sandy prairie. We saw a lot of evidence of tortoises in the area but the day was just in the low 60s so we didn't see tortoises. Two armadillos were very near us and appeared to have little fear. Of course, there were a lot of squirrels to excite the dogs. We saw tracks of raccoons, deer and wild hogs but no other animals. Two young men came by us, one on a Segway electric bicycle and the other on an electrically powered skateboard with one large wheel. By the time we were back to the car, we had walked between 6 and 7 miles.

After the short drive back to the house, I vacuumed and cleaned the inside of Cindy's car while Mark got dinner started then came out to brush down cobwebs on the front of the garage. I put one last coat of paint on the garage partition wall.

Dinner was cheesy potato soup made from Bear Creek soup mix along with a garden salad and hard rolls. Everything was very good.

We watched two episodes of Vienna Blood on PBS after doing our evening language lessons. We turned in by 10 pm.