Bubbles, bubbles and more bubbles. You knew I’d have to talk about the bubbles. We’re getting a TON of web site visitors from all over the world. This is happening because our “Bubble Cam” has been listed as the “Editor’s Choice” at AllCam (http://www.allcam.com) and we’ve been listed as one of the top ten cams at EarthCam (http://www.earthcam.com) and EarthCam For Kids (http://earthcamforkids.com). Our server has logged visitors from England, Ireland, Germany France, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Iceland, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Spain and Israel to name a few. They’re all here to blow bubbles on our patio. They’ve been activating the bubble machine on our patio an average of 200 times a day. Grab your calculators and do the math with me. The bubble machine is programmed to operate only during daylight hours. This time of the year we get around 11 hours of daylight which means we’re blowing a 30 second blast of bubbles every 3 minutes 20 seconds. (Is that what’s on your calculator?) Keep your calculator out… The bubble machine is rated for 500 bubbles per minute (BPM) which means our 30 second blast produces around 250 bubbles. Our current bubble production at 200 sessions per day is averaging 50,000 bubbles per day or 1.5 million bubbles per month.

This seems about right. There sure are a lot of bubbles floating around the patio, house, driveway, yard, street and the yards or our neighbors. If the weather is good we have the patio door open and we end up with bubbles drifting into the house. We can’t eat meals or have drinks on the patio without swatting incoming bubbles away from our food. We originally had the server "announce" a new visitor to the bubble cam by synthesizing speech through the computer's speakers. We've since turned this feature off.

We’ve been all over town lately buying every last little bottle of bubble solution we could find. We tried making our own bubble solution because commercial bubble solution is getting in short supply at our neighborhood stores. This turned out to be a miserable failure. Apparently high-tech bubble blowers are very picky about the type of bubble solution. Late last night we braved the newly opened Wal-Mart Supercenter in a neighboring community to try and get bubble solution. This new Supercenter is one of the first in the area and the parking lot has been packed all week. We’ve finally figured out that people in south Florida don’t buy sport-utility vehicles for the snow. They keep S.U.V.’s on hand so they can jump the curb and park in the grass at Supercenter grand openings. Even at 10 pm last night the parking lot better than three quarters full. Thankfully the will be stocking the 1 gallon jugs of bubble solutions (although they were temporarily out of stock). We bought their whole shelf of 16 ounce bottles to hold us over until the 1 gallon containers come back into stock.

Don’t get me wrong… We love the bubbles. Andie has always adored bubbles. She played with them as both a child and an adult. Prior to the bubble machine we always had a variety of bubble toys along with an ample supply of bubble juice. She’s delighted that she can experience showers of bubbles created by people all over the world. I’m having a blast (no pun intended) just keeping up with it.