Who Should Consider Semaglutide Therapy in Miami Lakes, FL?

The Harris Chain of Lakes in Central Florida is one of the state’s best bass fishing destinations. But after visiting Lake Harris for the first time with Bassmaster pro Tim Frederick as my guide, the fishing was even better than I’d expected.

“The Harris Chain is a great place to fish no matter what you like to do as far as bass fishing, crappie fishing, shellcracker, bluegill, it has a mixture of everything,” Frederick said. “It has a variety of different covers: Kissimmee grass, a little hydrilla, trees, lily pads. It kind of fits every bass fisherman’s style because you can do anything. It’s a healthy, healthy fishery, and it’s fun.”

I was covering an Epson Tour golf tournament, the 2023 Inova Mission Inn Resort & Club Championship on the resort’s El Campeon course in nearby Howey-in-the-Hills, but I had time for some early morning fishing. I connected with Frederick through a mutual friend, bass pro Bernie Schultz, who said, “No one knows that chain better.”

Frederick, who grew up in Leesburg and was so dominant in tournaments on the chain that he left his job building custom closets to become a full-time pro, had just come home after three events and 24 days on the road.

I met him on an overcast morning at a boat ramp on Little Lake Harris, one of nine lakes in the chain, and he headed north in his 21 1/2-foot Falcon bass boat to a spot where he and his son had caught about 50 largemouth bass a couple of evenings earlier. When we arrived, a member of a local bass club was fishing the spot, so Frederick idled a few hundred yards away to a wooden boat dock extending across a bed of Kissimmee grass from one of the many homes on the picturesque lake.

Casting a shallow-running American Baitworks crankbait, Frederick quickly caught a bass and told me where to throw my lure. After a couple of casts, a feisty bass slammed my crankbait. Those two fish were the first of what turned out to be dozens of largemouths for us, and we frequently reeled in bass at the same time.

It was nonstop catching and releasing for two hours, until I had to return to the golf course at Mission Inn, which has a small marina on the lake that offers rental boats and boat slips.

Frederick noted that given all the different habitats and water on the Harris Chain, it could be difficult to decide where to fish.

“For a first-time angler on this body of water, don’t get overwhelmed, just get on a shoreline and fish,” he said. “I think you can get on a Kissimmee grass line and never lift your trolling motor, whether you’re flipping grass or throwing a lipless crankbait like a Rat-L-Trap.

“Obviously, there’s key spots here and there, but you’ll figure that out along the way. Hard bottom is what you want to find, whether it’s sand or shell beds off the Kissimmee grass. What happens on those shell bars is there’s mussels on them and it keeps the baitfish around. The bluegills eat the mussels and the bass eat the bluegills.”

Frederick, 54, started fishing bass tournaments by himself on the Harris Chain when he was 15. Over the years, he won numerous events and dreamed of turning professional to fish the major bass circuits.

“But I thought, ‘Here I am just a little country kid from Lake County.’ I didn’t know how to go about it or anything,” Frederick said. “As I got older, you’re working and you’re fishing on the weekends. I started fishing a trail that went all over Florida and I had some success on that, I was the leading money winner.”

As the expenses of traveling to and fishing in tournaments increased, Frederick needed to get some sponsors to help defray the costs. His first, in 2006, was Power-Pole. The Tampa company, which makes an innovative anchoring system for boats and recently introduced a trolling motor, still sponsors Frederick, who fishes Bassmaster Opens in the hopes of advancing to the Bassmaster Elite series. The truck he uses to tow his boat around the country is provided by another major sponsor, Eagle Buick GMC in Homosassa.

Frederick qualified for the former FLW Tour for 2016, but he needed help with the $30,000 in entry fees. Lake County, which is home to most of the Harris Chain, stepped up and Frederick, who won the 2018 FLW event on Lake Okeechobee, serves as the chain’s ambassador, recruiting major tournaments to the area.

“My job was tough in the beginning, but it’s gotten a lot easier because now everybody wants to come here,” he said. “It’s an amazing resource that we have. It’s a fisherman’s paradise.”

And it won’t take you more than a few casts to find that out.

What a homecoming from summer travels in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania.

Thanks, Florida Power & Light!

I returned to flat South Florida from a week’s vacation to record-setting extreme heat, 94 degrees at noon on Tuesday that felt more like 100+ and, poof, apagón — a blackout a la Cuba. The electricity is gone in my end of our scorching world, taking along with it Comcast and all internet service.

I wait, and wait, for the return of civility.

This isn’t, after all, poor Cuba, where electricity is rationed and outages can last all day long.

But tough luck on this, the hottest-ever recorded summer in our warming globe. A four-hour power outage in the middle of the day, from 12:12 pm to 4:14 pm, plagued 1,636 of us who live on the west side of Miami Lakes.

The reason given to customers: Damage to FPL equipment.

Long exposure to heat, which can have grave health and economic repercussions, is no joke.

I had a taste of what prolonged time in the heat can do when I recently spent too much time mowing, weeding and raking.

Too hot, too humid, my brain was telling me to rest, but I wasn’t listening — until I felt nauseous and dizzy. I got off easy. I lost a day’s work.

Unlike with an oncoming hurricane, there’s no warning, no prep time to cope with a long-lasting power outage in this new world of climate change-induced conditions. The situation is made worse because losing electricity also leaves you without other much-needed services.

No Wi-Fi.

Only a tiny bar was visible on my iPhone, sitting there like a lonely tip of an iceberg dropped on its side.

“SOS Only,” the phone ominously read right after a last call rings — from the boss — and you’re uselessly screaming “hello, hello.”

There’s nobody there.

You’ve been officially cut off from the world.

How hot is South Florida? Beach sand was 137 degrees and playground floor reached 177

There there the loss of perishables in the refrigerator.

The power went off as I was walking in the door and rushing to store $189.30 worth of groceries from Whole Foods — mostly seafood, poultry, sushi, cheese, milk, salads and other vegetables that require refrigeration.

Silly me, hadn’t even noticed the electricity gone, but one of the smoke alarms started beeping.

Darn it, do I have a new 9V battery somewhere?

I thought the problem was that small until I opened my darkened refrigerator and realized what was happening — one appliance at a time. The stove’s clock was off and Alexa was silent when I coaxed her to wake up: “Good Morning!”

A hurricane pro by now, I went into mitigation mode — disaster from the loss of food and money was abated by one factor: Early June, whether there’s a hurricane or not menacing the Caribbean, I prep for storms and/or power outages by stashing mounds of ice in different sized Ziploc bags in the freezer.

So I ice-packed the most at-risk food and prayed that the rest would survive in the still-cool refrigerator. I ate the sushi for lunch, followed later, when the outage seemed interminable, by a snack pack of salmon flakes, plus cucumber and radish slices.

With all the electronics out and no one to talk to, I read a week-old Sunday New York Times I bought at Pittsburgh’s Indie Riverstone Books. And I consoled myself thinking that I can survive any apocalypse as long as I’m surrounded by the thousands of books I own.

But, can I really?

Hurricane prediction raised for remaining season, thanks to a steamy Atlantic Ocean

The personal fan I bought with a rechargeable battery and a six-hour run time didn’t work. I should’ve checked it, instead of buying and storing it awaiting a hurricane.

Likewise, a charging stick had barely enough juice to add a few percentage points to the phone.

I started a pricey to-get list of improvements: Install a generator. Upgrade charging/connection capacity — and quickly recognized how privileged I am to be able to do so while others not only suffer in Cuba but right here in the United States, hailed as the richest country in the world.

No matter how much I tried to not let the power outage ruin my last day of vacation, the familiar anxiety of hurricane season kicked in.

I had been happily roaming the gorgeously green and summer-hot — yet, cooler — Laurel Highlands, so much so that I canceled my return flight and opted for the 1,223-mile drive through West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Blame that move on my infatuation with John Steinbeck’s classic, “Travels with Charley,” his epic 1960 account of cross-country travel with his dog to take the country’s temperature. As Steinbeck brilliantly put it, “People don’t take trips — trips take people.”

That’s exactly what happened to me.

In West Virginia, the GPS instructed me to get off Route 79 — then, left me stranded on a “scenic” but endlessly “No service” road going around a mountain as if I were on a carousel. The only soul in sight, a man standing outside a trailer that has seen better days, wanted me to go inside to use his alleged internet. But this old newshound knows better.

I kept driving south, reaching the town of Clay, where there was internet, though I no longer trusted it — and three locals at a nice gas station fought over which route I should take.

The experience turned into a priceless travel moment, but by the time I made it home past midnight on Tuesday, all I wanted was to kiss my cool, tiled floor.

The joy was short-lived, but distress is the better teacher.

Many of us have invested in wind protection by installing hurricane-impact windows, and finally this year in Miami-Dade, low-income residents are getting some financial assistance to do so from the government.

But the warming Earth is more complicated — and here to stay. This summer’s experience calls for still more ways to better prepare for extreme heat situations and new policies from government and service providers.

Tuesday’s prolonged outage wasn’t due to a construction accident nor the result of increased demand from extreme heat on the power grid, FPL spokesman Shawn Johnson told me Friday.

“Some underground equipment went bad and had to be replaced,” he said.

The company said in a statement: “Initially, roughly 2,400 customers were impacted by the outage, but FPL crews restored service to half of those customers within about 30 minutes using smart grid technology.”

Here’s hoping everyone in South Florida gets that kind of service.

We’re living in a new natural and political world order that’s threatening our way of life.

The last thing we need is people, politicians and the corporations that serve us with their heads stuck in the hot sand.

This story was originally published August 10, 2023, 5:55 PM.

NORTHWEST MIAMI DADE - The fight to get rock quarry companies to be quieter continues with a Miami Lakes meeting Monday night to discuss what can be done to protect residential homes and public infrastructure.

"The big thing that concerns me is the structural damage," Miguel Martinez, a Northwest Miami Dade resident said.

Martinez has had to fix cracks not only to his house but damage to his roofing within recent years, and he blames the blasting that has been going on about 2 miles away from his home. Rock quarry companies have maintained they are following state standards.

"And you can see it's separating from the wall," Martinez points to the cracks around his home to show otherwise.

It's not just him and his neighbors but, residents that live from 2 to 11 miles away from quarry sites also report blasting damage.

"This is everywhere in this whole town," Angelo Garcia who lives in Palm Springs North said.

Garcia believes the blasting has also caused erosion to the back of his property, and that could undermine the roadway nearby.

Martinez is working with residents like Garcia as part of his role on the Miami Lakes Blasting Advisory Board.

"When you show these monsters that you aren't playing around, that you have hundreds of people going after them, then they will do something, but we have to stop playing games with them," said Garcia.

"The burden is on the claimant and that's another issue is it a specific blast, is it all the blasts those are defenses that the mining companies have used in the past," Steve Herzberg, another board member said.

Residents have been turning to election officials for change, but the road to introducing legislation has faced a lot of pushback. Representative Tom Fabricio has been working closely with colleagues and just recently had monitors installed around Miami-Dade County to collect blasting data.

"That damage should be compensated, if we're able to pass that bill that would be law in Florida, currently that's not the case, ultimately what I think the ideal solution is that the ground vibrations are reduced," he said.

Residents from anywhere they believe the blasts are felt are also being encouraged to fill out their report for the state to conduct further analysis. You can see the form here.

"This is a matter of tax dollars as well from state and local tax dollars, and commercial businesses everybody that feels these blasts in Dade and Broward County have something at state here," Herzberg added.

Residents contend they don't want to stop the rock quarry companies from blasting or operating, they reiterate, they just want the blasting damage not to come into their homes.

Jacqueline Quynh

Jacqueline Quynh is a CBS Miami reporter. My philosophy about news is simple: I aim to tell a story while focusing on the people who graciously let me into their lives.

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"The Hill We Climb," the poem written by Amanda Gorman for President Joe Biden's inauguration, was moved out of the elementary section of one Miami-Dade County public school, the district confirmed Tuesday. It remains available to older children.

A parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center - a kindergarten through eighth grade school in Miami Lakes - objected to the poem, for which they erroneously listed Oprah Winfrey as the author/publisher, documents obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project show.

It "is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages," the complaint said, adding that the poem would "cause confusion and indoctrinate students."

The same parent made similar complaints about "Love to Langston," a poetry-based biography of Black poet Langston Hughes; "The ABCs of Black History" and two books about Cuba, complaints obtained by FFTRP show.

A materials-review panel at the school declined to remove the books from the school entirely, but did decide to move the Gorman poem and two other disputed items to the library's middle school section, which is for grades six through eight, minutes of an April meeting of the committee, also obtained by FFTRP, show.

Gorman, the nation's first-ever youth poet laureate, criticized the decision, writing on Instagram, "Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech."

In a statement to CNN Tuesday evening, Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesperson Elmo Lugo said, "No literature (books or poem) has been banned or removed."

"It was determined at the school that 'The Hill We Climb' is better suited for middle school students and, it was shelved in the middle school section of the media center. The book remains available in the media center," he said.

Lugo did not respond to a request to verify the authenticity of the complaint documents released by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, instead saying the district would process CNN's inquiry as a formal public records request.

The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

An affiliate of personal injury law firm Ward Law Group purchased an office building in Miami Lakes for $21 million.

JIK HQ Building and JIK HQ Land, both affiliates of local real estate firm Kislak Organization, sold the 76,874-square-foot office building at 7900 N.W. 154th St. to Hundredfold Holding 7900 LLC, managed by Gregory C. Ward, the head of Ward Law Group. Coral Gables-based Banesco USA provided a $16.8 million mortgage to the buyer.

Rene Vivo of Vivo Real Estate Group represented the seller in the deal, while Alexander Bernaldo of Americas Commercial Real Estate worked with the buyer.

The three-story office building, the headquarters of Kislak Organization, was constructed on the 6.46-acre site in 1986. This is the first time it has sold.

Ward Law Group, through Hundredfold Holdings, already owns its current headquarters, a 52,745-square-foot office complex at 6625 Miami Lakes Dr. The new office will allow the law firm to expand.

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