This non-travel update is for February 2023. As a reminder, we’re staying at the Flamingo Lake RV Resort in Jacksonville, Florida, USA for 3 months so I can get a cochlear implant in my right ear at the Mayo Clinic here. So, we’re settled down for 3 months, unfortunately, and our life will be relatively dull. I don’t want to bore you with daily accounts of how we slept and what we had for lunch so I’ll just put in some highlights.

The Cochlear Implant:

2/6 – Patti drove us down to the Mayo Clinic for my “pre-op” visit which consisted of 5 appointments designed to inform me about what was going to happen during the surgery and determine if I will physically survive it. I received the “green light”.

2/13 – Surgery Day! We got to the hospital at 6:30 AM and I was asleep on the operating table by 8:30. Patti got updates throughout the 1-hour procedure. I woke up and the nurse gave me some cranberry juice then told me to get my clothes on and wheeled me out to the car that Patti had brought up to the entrance. We were home by noon. They don’t let you linger at this place!

They put a plastic cup over my ear to hold down the packing. I wasn’t really in that good of a mood when we got home, surgery isn’t my favorite thing to do, and there was some pain, and a lingering feeling of malaise from the anesthesia. I laid down on the sofa and took a nap.

Two weeks went by as I recovered from the surgery and then started getting out more.

2/28 – Activation Day! We spent 2.5 hours with Millicent, my audiologist. She gave me all my new equipment and activated the sound processors. As expected, everything sounded very strange. Various descriptions of how the implant sounds at first are: robotic; electronic; like Mickey Mouse. I would add that Patti sounded like the teacher from the old Peanuts cartoons, which if I’m not mistaken was done with a trumpet with a cup mute.

Millicent used her computer software to “Map” the sound processor. I took a picture of the screen. The electrode array that is now inserted into my cochlea has 12 electrodes running along its length of 28mm. Each electrode has a “center frequency”. For example, electrode #2 has a center frequency of 235 Hz, which is close to the B-flat below middle C on the piano.

This is pretty cool, from an electrical engineering standpoint.

Then we spent 15 minutes with the surgeon, Dr. Breen. He went over the results of the post-operative CT headscan and looked at the incision site. He said everything looks good and released me from the post-op restrictions (no jogging or swimming, don’t lift anything over 10 pounds, etc.). Now I have to carry the groceries again, I enjoyed having Patti do all the lifting for two weeks. She’s at least as strong as I am.

Here’s the CT scan showing the implant on the side of my head. The smaller, very white round spot is the magnet, to which the external coil is attracted.

Here you can see the sound processor, with its round coil stuck to the magnet under my scalp in the implant.

Here’s some of the more critical equipment. I have to learn how to use it all.

I’ve added the new chargers to my charging station, which is on a TV tray.

I have a lot of various electronics to keep track of now and charge when necessary. This is going to make it harder to travel, so I have to figure out how to make it as easy as possible.

Patti’s Nesting Instincts:

Since we’ll be here for 3 months Patti has been doing a lot of what I like to call “feathering her nest”. She’s bought a lot of things to make herself more comfortable here such as cleaning supplies and we’ve acquired some cardboard boxes she can use for organizers. She asked the park for two chairs and she made a long list of items that are broken or need some maintenance. The maintenance guys spent a few hours one day replacing the ceiling fan, some of the window blinds, and the bathroom faucet. Patti has also done a lot of cleaning. Here she is cleaning the outside of the living room window.

And here she was cleaning the inside of the kitchen window frame. She has a lot of energy for cleaning and is quite limber for an old broad.

Downtown Jacksonville:

One day we walked around the downtown area of Jacksonville and the Riverwalk which is a pleasant place. There were four food trucks on one street and we got BBQ at this one. The BBQ baked beans were some of the best I’ve had.

I had not thought about it before but it should have been obvious that Jacksonville is named for Andrew Jackson. Here I am with his statue.

This cool destroyer was moored along the Riverwalk, it’s the USS Orleck. It’s part of the Jacksonville Naval Museum.

• Named after Lieutenant Joseph Orleck, Commanding Officer of USS Nauset, killed in action on 9 September, 1943 during World War II, & posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.
• Gearing Class Destroyer, keel laid in 1944, launched on 12 May ‘45, & Commissioned 15 September, 1945.
• The “Top Gun” of Vietnam, fired 11,000+ rounds earning the nickname ”Grey Ghost of the Vietnam Coast” & netting an astonishing 14 battle stars throughout the war.
• In the Korean War become the charter member of the “Train Busters Club” and received 4 battle stars during the war.
• Received updates to original hull frame that included: ASROC (Anti Submarine Rocket launcher) & DASH (Drone Anti Submarine Helicopter system).

I liked the city skyline from across the St. Johns river.

We saw this big Live Oak tree five years ago when we had a day trip to Jacksonville and we re-visited it. It’s still big.

Seaton Creek Nature Preserve:

This preserve is only 5 miles from us so we drove over there one day and had a nice nature walk.

“Seaton Creek Preserve is a pristine 840-acre preservation park on Jacksonville’s Northside and is thought to be the site of the southern-most battle of the American Revolution. The park offers three trails covering about five miles, three creeks with a kayak landing on one and access for hikers, off-road bicyclists and Equestrians with parking for horse trailers.”

It holds some interest for Revolutionary War historians.

We did about 4 miles and had a nice walk.

Exercise:

We’ve both been jogging around the park and back and forth on the access road. I also go over to the fitness center to use the elliptical machine and the weight machines, and Patti does her weighted hula hoop at home. She has just enough room to not knock stuff over.

Atlantic Beach:

We had a nice day trip here.

“Atlantic Beach is a city in Duval County, Florida, United States and part of the Jacksonville Beaches communities. When the majority of communities in Duval County consolidated with Jacksonville in 1968, Atlantic Beach, along with Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach, and Baldwin, remained quasi-independent. Like the other towns, it maintains its own municipal government, but its residents vote in the Jacksonville mayoral election and have representation on the Jacksonville city council. The population was 12,655 at the 2010 census.”

I would add that rich people have multi-million-dollar houses there, and it’s not a place we could afford to live, but there are quite a few beach access points and we parked the car at one of them. It was about a 40-minute drive for us.

The beach is typical of the Atlantic coast here, it was cool, breezy, and foggy with hard-packed grey sand.

We walked about a mile north on the beach then went one block inland for the walk back to the car, and Patti found a swing.

Amelia Island:

We had a nice day trip to Amelia Island.

“Amelia Island is a part of the Sea Islands chain that stretches along the East Coast of the United States from South Carolina to Florida; it is the southernmost of the Sea Islands, and the northernmost of the barrier islands on Florida’s Atlantic coast.[1] Lying in Nassau County, Florida, it is 13 miles (21 km) long and approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) wide at its widest point. The communities of Fernandina Beach, Amelia City, and American Beach are located on the island.”

It was about a 45-minute trip to the visitor welcome center there.

The nice women at the welcome center gave us plenty of advice and maps about how to spend our time on the island. The first thing we did was eat our picnic lunch on a bench along the Amelia River.

From the marina here you can get on a tour boat that takes you along the river, we decided to do that another day. The weather was very nice today and the marina and river were pretty.

I like old anchors and we found this one at the river.

Just like in St. Marys we got a self-guided tour book featuring some of the old buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s. Here’s one, the Lesesne House.

Main street was very quaint.

We drove a couple of miles up to “Old Town” and found this canon at Plaza San Carlos, the site of old villages and forts.

The old Amelia Island Lighthouse was closed but the Fresnel Lens was rotating, it glinted in the afternoon sun.

I think this invention is quite ingenious.

“A Fresnel lens is a type of composite compact lens developed by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) for use in lighthouses. It has been called “the invention that saved a million ships.” The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design. A Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens, in some cases taking the form of a flat sheet. The simpler dioptric (purely refractive) form of the lens was first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel. The catadioptric form of the lens, entirely invented by Fresnel, has outer elements that use total internal reflection as well as refraction; it can capture more oblique light from a light source and add it to the beam of a lighthouse, making the light visible from greater distances.”

We went out to one of the beaches for a walk, it was a nice clear day, just a bit cool but not uncomfortable.

We had a nice time on Amelia Island and plan to go back for more exploration, particularly at Fort Clinch State Park.

The RV Resort:

This is a pleasant place, there are about 400 lots and we’ve heard that over 100 people live here full-time in their RVs. When the weather is nice we eat lunch on the front porch.

We get some nice sunsets over the lake here, which is a nice way to wind down.

Catty Shack Ranch:

We went to this big cat rescue, which is only about 10 miles away.

They had a lot of Siberian Tigers.

And a Black Panther.

And a Florida Panther.

This Serval was a very pretty cat.

And the Caracal Cat was interesting looking too.

And of course there was a Lion.

We had a nice time.

The Flea Market:

There’s a Flea Market 5 miles north of us open on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s a typical one, lots of old junk for sale, plus new stuff.

There’s also a gator pond.

Future Plans:

• From now until May 2: we’ve got a “vacation cottage” reserved at Flamingo Lake RV Resort in Jacksonville, Florida. We’ll need to go back to the audiologist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville a couple more times so she can make changes to my programming.
• May 2 – June 2: we’ve got a mobile home reserved at the Twin Shores Mobile Home Park on Longboat Key near Sarasota. We’ve stayed at that park before but in a different unit.
• After June 2, no plans yet, but we’re thinking about doing a road trip up the east coast to Maine and back. I don’t want to decide anything definite until I see how the cochlear implant is working out.