Update on My New Floridian Life

We moved out of the hotel and into the new home. Dad returned from Paris. The house is full of our furniture and the number of boxes obstructing our passage is quickly diminishing. The music and several T.V.s are up and running, and the large black dachshunds next door have discovered Tidbit and vice versa, so it's goodbye to the quiet we had before!

The dock is very different from the one we have at Lake of the Ozarks - it's on piles, instead of floating, so it doesn't go up and down with the tides, and doesn't rock in the wake of boats or dolphins. When the tide is low it's several feet under the dock, and reveals a mass of white-grey-green barnacle/shellfish-stuff encrusting the wooden pilings. I need to catch up on my vocabulary to describe such things - I've just spent too much of my life far from the sea. I am nearly as surprised as Tidbit by the salty taste of the water.

Yesterday we worked. I pulled the tape off of so many boxes that the tips of my fingers ached and felt carpet burned. I also set up the home computer and everything, and it's all running very well now! The house begins to feel a bit like a home. Our furniture is all here and some rooms, such as the Master Bedroom, are even respectably nice. Both bathrooms and the kitchen, however, are still miserable - probably will be until we make some fundamental changes to the house. But ah well. The big piles of book boxes from my room and the office are gone, as are most of the random boxes in the family/dining room and my parents' closet.

Last night while we were trying to set up the home gym, the weight machine fell over on me. It only fell about forty five degrees, and while it hurt, I knew right away I wasn't seriously injured. Took a while to convince my parents of that, though, and they ran over and started patting me everywhere and asking what hurt. I was more worried about my laptop, which was also involved in the accident - it has a good scratch in the screen, almost penetrating. But it doesn't affect how it works at all, so I'm grateful for that.

Immediately following this incident Teddy and Maxine arrived. They are, or Teddy is, if you want to be specific, our only blood relatives in Florida. Teddy is my grandmother's brother, and Maxine is his wife. We visited them in Florida once growing up, and of course we've seen them at numerous family functions across the States (okay, so overwhelmingly in Missouri), so they are a slice of home, family, normality, if those can be associated.

They are very Floridian. Maxine is from Tennessee and speaks and cooks with a decidedly southern style. I volunteered to help her cook for Thanksgiving, as we'll be spending this Thanksgiving with them, and I've heard she makes cornbread stuffing and sometimes deep-fries the turkey. Teddy has such a strong something accent that he can be difficult to understand at times. He is bald and almost a caricature of himself, but very nice, underneath the bravado ;), and a 'hoot', as my mom puts it. He goes freshwater fishing on a fast motorboat in gator infested, inland waters.

We went out with them to a restaurant in John's Pass called Gators. I had this massive appetite, I dunno where from. I helped with the peel and eat shrimp and gator appetizers, and then ate every bite of my blackened Mahi Mahi with yellow rice, and then got a dessert - Key Lime Pie - to split with my sister. It was all good, especially the Key Lime Pie. What's very strange is that I never, ever order dessert - I'm usually so full that I bring half my entree home and still feel abused. And afterward I was contented, but not so full as I usually am - I could have helped out with another few desserts, or another round of appetizers, had there been more to come!

The sunset was unbearably lovely. Pictures later, I'm planning to post a few from the move.

My 'room' consists of a bookshelf filled with books, two crates with clothes, one crate of debris, one crate labeled sentimental, an alarm clock, and an air bed, all in the home gym. It's cozy. No, really. Well, there's nowhere to sit down on, or anything to eat. (/tolkienfandom) Tidbit and I slept there last night and it worked out pretty well. This house is wired really poorly, and all the light switches and knobs are on the outsides of the rooms they belong to, meaning that I have to decide whether I want my light on or off /before/ I go into my room and shut the door. Luckily my closet has it's own light, and a pretty nice one, which I have been reading by.

Today I woke up when Tidbit wanted to go outside. It was about half an hour earlier than I would have liked. She went out and hunted for geckos and I got out Liebe Total and read about five pages, underlining, but not looking up, the words I didn't know. I can never decide whether it is better to read, ignoring or figuring out from context the words I don't know, or go through making a notice of them, maybe looking them up if I have the computer handy, and that's it, or to go through and study every new word. It's hard to say, so I sort of play it by ear each day. Liebe Total is pretty easy, and from the subject matter I think it's written for teenagers, which would explain that. German prose, such as in a newspaper, can be very difficult - making it one of the few languages that I'm almost as confident listening in as reading it! But Liebe Total (actually, Immer Cool Bleiben, the first novel of two in the book) is very reasonable.

Then we did a bit more work, and then I went to the grocery store, Winn Dixie. At first I worried because they didn't seem to have anything I sought. Organic 1% milk, for example. I found the ordinary milk, a small enough section, and beside it saw several organic varieties. There were three kinds each of organic whole, and skim milk, and two kinds of organic 2%, and one kind of organic 1% chocolate milk! Finally I asked someone and it turns out they keep it in a different area of the store. ?? Similar thing happened with the feta cheese, all the flavoured and low fat kinds are at one end, and the ordinary varieties at the other.

I've been attempting to cook with the new kitchen and sometimes it has me pining for my 'kitchen' in the dorm. The drawers don't pull out well, the stove and oven are old and hardly trustworthy, we have no microwave, etc... but we brought the knives and pans, etc, from home, and they are quite nice. :D I can cut through onion and garlic like butter! Right now the smell of Greek chicken and jasmine rice are permeating the room.

My main complaint here is the sun. It takes me down. I was sensitive enough to the heat in St. Louis, but I dunno... here it's a drier heat, which most people prefer, but not me, for some reason. A wet heat exhausts, sure, and may even feel hotter in the mouth and nose, but this dry heat makes my skin burn and itch. Or maybe it's that the sun's rays are so much stronger closer to the equator? It's thoroughly unpleasant and I can't even describe it in a way that does it justice. I realize suddenly that before this I never really went to Florida in summer, usually in Winter, and found it balmy enough then! I'm just not built to survive this climate, or this latitude, or somethign!