Elevate Your House

Two years ago, Clearwater Beach was hit by Hurricane Helene and suffered severe damage to many homes.  As we walked around the North Beach residential area, we saw the unusual solution you see below.  We talked to a local, and he said that some people opted to have their homes lifted instead of having a total rebuild.  The entire house, including the slab foundation, is raised and a new foundation is built.  How high it's raised depends on a number of factors to keep it safe and is ruled by FEMA and Pinellas County building codes.  

This house-lifting job was being done by JAS Builder, which you can learn more about at the following link.

https://jasbuilder.com

Using AI On An Excel Spreadsheet

I have a spreadsheet with names in column A, street addresses in column B, and city/state/zip in column C.  I needed to know which one(s) had the most characters so I could be sure that the labels I create from them would fit in the space I had.  I've done this before by using some Excel formulas, but then I thought maybe AI could do this for me.  I uploaded the spreadsheet, which has dozens of sheets, and asked ChatGPT, "Using the 'Summer 2026' tab, find the longest strings in columns A, B, or C."  In a few seconds, I had my answer, as you can see below, which was 34 characters.  Slick!

https://chatgpt.com

Garlic Butter Shrimp Pasta

This recipe takes less than thirty minutes and delivers the buttery and garlicy taste you would expect from its title.  All the messy details are at the link below, but the short story is you cook the pasta, cook the shrimp, make the sauce, add the shrimp, and add the pasta.  "Easy, quick, and delicious: my three favorite dinner adjectives."

https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a51270/garlic-butter-shrimp-pasta-recipe

Elemenopillows

We met Karen Larkin at the Columbus, Ohio, airport while waiting for our flight to Florida.  As we talked, I found out that she is the owner of a pillow cover business called Elemenopillows.  She came up with the name long ago when her son asked her, “What is an Elemeno?"  I'm sure you remember learning your ABC's by singing them, and like everyone, we smash together the l, m, n, o, and p together, and it comes out "elemeno p".  She decided to incorporate that into the shop name, and the rest is history.

Karen said she's sold over a million pillow covers over the years, and you can check out all of her amazing designs at the link below.

https://elemenopillows.com

Point-Of-Sale Advertising

Coco's Crush Bar, located in Clearwater Beach, Florida, is home to its famous Orange Crush cocktail, the drink shown on the right below.  Some smart lawyer figured out they could reach their target audience by supplying the paper coasters you see on the left.  Pure (and pour) genius.

https://cocoscrushbar.com

Doodie Calls

On our recent trip to Clearwater Beach, Florida, we came across another cute name for a porta-potty business, Doodie Calls, as you can see in the picture below.  They are one of Florida’s largest portable sanitation companies and offer standard portable toilets, high-rise units, ADA-accessible units, hand-washing stations, and luxury restroom trailers.  And you have to love their phone number!

https://doodie-calls.com

Using AI To Get A Proper Pronunciation

There are a few street names where it is not obvious how they are pronounced, so I turned to the Google Gemini AI chatbot for help.  I asked, "How is Schuyler pronounced?" and it not only gave me the proper pronunciation "SKY-ler", but also the information you see below on its Dutch origin.

The second street name is Lefevre, which is broken down phonetically as "luh-FEE-ver" in English-speaking countries and "luh-FEHV-(ruh)" in its native French (make sure to roll that "ruh").  

I have a bug about me that wants to know how to properly pronounce words, and AI makes quick work of that.

https://gemini.google.com

Spaghetti

We recently took a cooking class at Dorothy Lane Market from our favorite chef, Mary Cooney.  One recommendation she made was to be selective about the pasta we buy, and she named De Cecco as one of the best available in most supermarkets.  That's all we've been buying since.  The pasta is extruded through bronze plates, creating a rough, chalky, and porous surface, which allows sauces to cling perfectly to the noodle.  They use coarse-grain 100% durum wheat semolina, slow-dry it to preserve the natural sweetness, aroma, and color, and knead it with cold Majella mountain spring water.  We buy the #11 thin spaghetti that ends up expanding to the size of regular spaghetti.

https://www.dececco.com/us_us

Sad Sign

At our golf course, Walnut Grove, the driving range is next to the 18th fairway, and the people practicing have to stop hitting when golfers are coming down that fairway.  The club decided to make signs to remind both the golfers and those practicing, and made sure they were visible by putting them directly in their line of sight.  It didn't take long for an errant tee shot to knock a hole in the sign at the 18th tee.  The ones at the practice tee faired much worse.  The replacement signs are now safely off to the side and (probably) out of harm's way.

https://walnutgrovecc.net

Relative Finder

I have done the genealogy on several family trees, and recently needed to find out how two people were related.  I found Relative Finder (the link below), a free (I love free) website that works with FamilySearch.org, the free (ditto) genealogy website.  I signed on, selected the "Connect" option on the left-hand side, then selected the "See the relationship between two deceased people" option.  I entered my FamilySearch ID in the first input box and Robert Jacob Fleckenstein's FamilySearch ID in the second.  The results are shown below, but I did have to perform some cut-and-paste to make it readable.

The relationship of "1st Cousin 1 time removed" takes some explaining.  The "1 time removed" means Robert and I are separated by one generation, with Robert being older. "1st Cousins" would normally mean we share the same grandparents, but since we are a generation apart, that's not possible.  Our common ancestor, Joseph Eggenschwiller, is Robert's Grandfather, but my Great-grandfather. 

 Relative Finder can be found at the link below.

https://www.relativefinder.org