A Glimpse Life in Boca Raton, Florida - in Pictures

I've been playing with my DSLR whenever the weather permits, and sometimes even when it doesn't. I can't wait to get to play with it up at Disney too. Since we've had a few posts mentioning Florida life - I figured I'd throw together some of my recent snaps around my town and my house, that represent a little bit of what living down here is all about.

Here's a big part of the story lately. RAIN! We're in the summer rainy season, and it started early with a bang. Here's a shot in my backyard looking north as the thunderstorms loom:



From my backyard, over my neighbor's house, some nasty-loooking wall cloud formations. We get serious thunderstorms here in South Florida, and they are all potentially tornadic, but rarely ever bloom into full-blown tornados:



Our rich little town recently put up a brand new library - nice one too, with computer rooms, dvd/movies, cafe and sushi restaurant, etc. And for a backdrop...what else! A big looming thunderstorm!:



This is the center of the city - a shopping/restaurant/living district known as Mizner Center. That name gets alot of mileage down here - Addison Mizner was the railroad magnate that built the line stretching through all of Florida down to the keys that put Florida on the map in the late 1800s. Our little resort town started as a location for one of his glamorous hotels after the turn of the century - before that, we were nothing but a small outpost in a Spanish colony:



Those colors are universally used here in Boca - pink/salmon and teal/blue. The city really goes for a clean, matching, resort-like look, from houses to offices to restaurants and complexes. Lots of money means lots of rules about appearance, and lots of forced compliance! No billboards, building signs only allowed in certain colors and of certain height, only certain types of trees allowed, etc. It does keep the place pretty though!

My excurion to the beach unfortunately was met with grey looming clouds and a wind picking up from the thunderstorm right behind...but still, people won't be denied their play at the beach as you can see:



Boating, diving, watersports - all common in our little beach town, interlaced with canals, inlets, and waterways with access to the sea even 10 miles inland. Some watersports operators run businesses out of the area, like dive boats:



Those who live near water are probably more familiar with these than others - drawbridges are everywhere in our town. The coastal area is a series of islands, cut off from the mainland by our intercoastal waterway, and then subdivided into separate islands by all the ocean inlets that allow boats out to sea. Drawbridges connect all of these islands together - so the sailboats and larger boats can get by without building huge unsightly high bridges in town. On a busy summer beach day - boaters build up by the dozens waiting for the bridge to open for them, and when it does, traffic can back up for hundreds of cars waiting for it to close again!:



Having living things all around...and often IN...your house is part of Florida living. In any given day, I'll spot several dozen varieties of birds, squirrels, mice, raccoons, oppossum, armadillo, dozens of lizards, toads, and snakes around my yard. Only three of those things have never been in my house before...so if you're scared of animals, Florida might not be the best place for you! I feed birds, squirrels, and lizards around my house, and they've become like outside pets now. Here's one of my buddy squirrels enjoying a peanut I gave him:



This is Fred...a northern curly-tailed lizard that hand-feeds ants from me when I go in the pool - he sits on the rim and waits for me to fish out any bugs that happen to have fallen in the pool:



This is a thrasher...one of the many bird types living in my backyard. He comes and begs for peanuts every evening when I get home from work:



Here it is...another early evening rainstorm. It comes almost daily. In fact, it's looming outside my office window right now. This one was later in the evening, around 8pm. I had to go up to ISO3200 to get enough light for the shot - boy do I love having a DSLR so that I actually CAN shoot at ISO3200!:



Of course, there's an upside to all the rain and sun...lots of blooming things! Plants and flowers grow like crazy - I'm not much of a big-time garden guy, but I do have some decorative flowers that are sturdy enough to not require much attention around the yard:





That's it for now - the past few weeks of general boredom snapshots around my yard and my little section of Florida. Heat and rain have kept me from any of my wildlife walks, but I like to bring the camera along on a weekend drive in case anything strikes me as interesting.

Hope you enjoyed a little tour of life in Boca. Comments, questions, critique welcomed!

 

Tell me, what is this thing called "Rain"? Is it similar to the legend of the thing known as "snow"?


And if the lizard's name is Fred, what have you called the thrasher?



nice shots Justin, thanks for sharing!

 

Justin these are great shots! My dad lives over in Naples, and it is very similar to Boca. I love it down there, I just wish I could get my wife to feel the same way.

 

The thrasher is a female...so naturally, it's Ginger.

I've got alot of names around the house actually - any of the 'regular' animals I feed that I can identify amongst others, I'll assign them a name. In squirrels, I tend to name them for their traits - I've got a Speedy (charges up my leg like he's tackling me), Stumpy (lost the end of her tail), Limpy )tail drags on the ground - can't lift up), Leper (had a weird leprosy disease when young which healed but left him with scars on his nose and feet), and Spot (yep...right on top of her head). For Blue Jays, only one has earned a name, because it feeds out of my hand...Slick (he just looks like a 'Slick'). Thrasher is Ginger, curly-tail is Fred, and the male Cardinal is Lou. None of the others do anything special to get a name!

I know you Austin folks know about rain - I haven't followed lately if you're going through a dry-spell but you guys were getting a ton of it in the beginning of this year!

Polynesian - yep...Naples is pretty much our mirror image - looks similar, Spanish design, lots of tourists, swamp on one side, beach on the other, and the sun puts on a show over the water every day. It's just that everything's exactly the opposite of here!

 

Thanks both. Cooleo, I know you got the animals - pretty much the same swamp denizens we have (though we don't have nutria here...but I don't know if you've got black bears).

DisneyGeek, do yours up! It's fun, just pick some shots about town that tell a little bit about where you live or what your day is like. It's a fun photographic experiment too!