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!

Florida - First Impressions

We are staying at a beach hotel, overlooking the gentle surf of the Gulf of Mexico and listening to the sound of the gulls. Those who have lived their whole lives by the sea, I know, regard them as pests, but they are still something marvelous for us - part of a vacation. We are still vacationing, in a way, since we're staying in the hotel instead of our new home. It's a fixer upper. We knew that, but we didn't really understand it until we arrived. The yard is smaller than we thought, the colour schemes uglier, the kitchen thirty years old. We've decided we must gut the house, and not only eventually but soon. It was supposed to be clean when we got here, but instead the whole thing is filthy. My mom's losing it. Well, part of that is just what you get for putting something, anything, on a pedestal.

We got up early today for the movers, but both the car mover and the furniture movers have delayed until tomorrow, so the only reason for waiting was the cable hookup. The hours dragged by. Melissa and I took a short trip to Winn Dixie, the southern grocery store. It's the closest one to our new house, so we familiarized ourselves a bit. They were very nice and we got a loyalty card. Quite near Winn Dixie is a little used and new bookstore and a library - the only one on the island, I think. We have to go to the mainland for Wal-Mart but it looks as though most of our other basic needs can be taken care of here.

I snuck a quick visit to the little bookstore. They had all the major categories, although even the new books (what few there were) looked used. They have a rare book section. The signage is bad so it took me a while and a lucky angle to find the foreign language section, but I was in for a nice surprise there. They had a reasonable collection of Swedish and Norwegian instruction books, the Norwegian ones predictably and unfortunately below my level, and most of the moderately sized shelf was German. In this part of the world I would have expected something more like the Borders back home - two shelves of Spanish, a handful of books in French, and, if you are lucky, one or two in German or Italian. As I was scanning the shelves, aware that I needed to get back home, I found a book in Finnish. Imagine! I bought it right away, even though it's a romance of some sort and I probably won't like it. Finnish! And for 3$! I spoke to the lady and she says if I come back later this week she'll give/sell me a stack of Norwegian magazines that her Norwegian friend gave her. If I'm incredibly lucky, I figure there's even a chance I'll run into one of her Norwegian friends. Wouldn't that be marvellous?

Yesterday at Wal-Mart I picked up a three dollar copy of Wuthering Heights. I'm enjoying it so far - reading about the wild, rugged, dark moors from the comfort of our little wooden dock. My skin is starting to colour already, although I try to keep in the shade. It's not burnt yet, but already glowing, and I can't allow it to get a bit worse. I'll be the strange northern girl who hides her lily white skin inside with her books if I have to be. For the moment, though, I notice the tides coming in. We have tides! The water was a foot or two under the dock when I looked out this morning, and it's near noon now and there are little waves and the waters almost up to the bottom of the sea wall. I see glinting in the water - little silvery fish are darting to and fro.

I could live here - just relax, live simply. Not worry about the ages old dirt under the stove. Cook in my rice cooker, sit on the floor, even, if I didn't have any proper furniture. Amazing how far some snacks, a few good books, and a computer will take you. And the location, if I needed more than that! But that's my age speaking, I guess. Tidbit snoozes on the sunbaked wood at my feet. My mother hollers and I go in to see what's bothered her.

We see something strange. While trying to clean out the refrigerator shelf in the sink, it collapsed and broke - the glass shattered. Little fragments cover the counters and the basin of the sink, falling down into the disposal. A giant mess. But what's really odd is that the glass continues to crack, splinter, fall apart. For long minutes it continues to crackle - a fragment of glass, lying in the sink, suddenly develops a long hairline crack along the middle, and then snaps along that line with a sharp sound. The sink full of glass crackles and glistens.

Tidbit loves to hunt geckos. They are her new squirrels and she doesn't yet know whether or not they are possible to catch. She catches them sunning themselves on the walks and runs at them. They remain still until the last moment, and then dart away, quick as lightening, into the lattice or bushes or lime trees. One evening she goes at one with such vehemence that the force of her impact throws her onto her back. For a moment she looks like a ladybug flipped over, running her little feet ineffectually in the air.

I've enjoyed almost all the food I've had on the island, and I'm eager to explore all the nooks and crannies, the variety of restaurants. Besides all the marvellous seafood there is more Thai food than I've ever seen before, and there seem to be a thousand places selling fresh fruit. Other surprises - a mariachi band beside one of these fruit stands, in a sort of alley on the way to Wal Mart, singing and playing for all they were worth, and hardly anyone to listen... a European Grocery next to the post office - I went in, and was a bit disappointed to find mostly Slavic products which I couldn't read and had no special attachment to. I did buy Nutella and have gotten my sister hooked on the stuff.

I've ordered a library card. On Wednesday they have a writer's group. I think I'll attend, for the few weeks I'm here. I'm hoping it'll be a casual sort of thing I can pop into on breaks.

Business and Bad Omens

Every day from now to the move is full of appointments. Today I have to see the dermatologist, then go off to school for attempt #2 at a surprise attack, then pedicure, then haircut, then babysitting.

I'm not sure I'll even try to do anything for Japan until I'm in Florida. It's just too hectic here. That said, I'm calling Laura on Sunday to ask her what she's done, and I'll probably go ahead and order my rail pass. I think I'll send everything to her house because it's more permanent, and just in case things get lost in the mail or whatever we're there until the end, so we have the most chance of receiving it.


The days leading up to the move have seen some bad omens:


Bees in the Birdnest:

We tried to take down the birdhouse for Mrs. Maniscalco, because she said she wanted it. I walked across the mulch barefoot towards it, looked down to see no fewer than three spiders, none of them poisonous. I swallowed and kept walking until I had my hands around the long wooden stem of the birdhouse. I heard a fantastic hissing noise and quickly backed up, not knowing whether I had hallucinated or what. My sister tried next and heard the same thing. Bees! She said. And, sure enough, a bee flew out of the hole. My dad went out next and grabbed it, running upstairs with it. We thought there was just the one bee, and eventually it flew off. Then suddenly a whole swarm flew out. My dad finally had to powerwash the inside of the birdhouse with the hose, and afterwards kill up to 20 bees by stomping on them. A bit sad, really, but what could we do? The honeycomb itself, with the honey in it, came out too.

Yesterday I went to that spot and found scores of homeless bees, wandering aimlessly or else sucking the honey from their squashed honeycomb, pieces scattered amoung the dead and blackening bodies of the rest of their family.


The Dead Snake:

In our front yard we have some bricks that line the garden. A snake managed to wedge itself between two of these, and we can only assume that it became stuck there and so died. It was a green-grey snake, and a reasonably sized on. We went over to see it and found that it had been dead a long time. It split open at the gentle poking of a stick, and it was crawling with maggots from tail up.