Pros and Cons

For the past several mornings I have taken the dog for an early walk.  Early for us is 7 am.  I love walking at this time of day and seeing the neighborhood when most people are not out.  Our neighborhood is very nice -- large lots, tons of trees and foliage, every house different and unique as opposed to cookie cutter.  When we were preparing to leave Baltimore, I felt that I was going to miss the variety of plants and trees.  I assumed that down here there were only palm trees.  This was a very wrong assumption.  :)  I love looking at other people's landscaping to see all the different kinds of things they have planted, and in our neighborhood there seems to be a lot of area remaining as it was before the houses were built.

Lest you think it's all fun and contentment here... this morning I saw the second Florida roach in the house.  It was in the drawer under the sink where I keep my hair supplies.  The first roach was on the ceiling in the kitchen, Monday night, and Dan got up on a stepstool to grab it with a wad of paper towels.  This second roach I thought I would get with a wad of toilet paper, but I hesitated out of sheer disgust and terror and the thing scurried away.  UGHHHH.

I found an informative link from the University of Florida that talks about dealing with the roaches (http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ig082), but unfortunately for the moment we are apparently providing a perfect place for them to live and breed, with all of our boxes sitting around and nice tight dark piles of stuff.  It makes me even more motivated to unpack.

I have not yet told the girls about either of the roaches.

I could be writing about so many other adventures and experiences we are having as transplants to Florida, but you can see I am fixating on these nasty bugs.

A Week In

A week ago this evening we had just arrived at our little apartment at a retirement community near Orlando.  I simultaneously cannot believe a whole week has passed, and cannot believe that we have only been here a week.

Slowly I am getting used to things.  For instance, we get a storm of some kind come through every day.  Seriously, every day this week.  Sometimes it will just cloud up and thunder will boom for a while.  Sometimes wicked lightning storms scare me.  Sometimes there is a torrential downpour.  Sometimes the wind blows but no real rain falls.

At least the clouds bring a drop in temperature.  It is really, really hot here.  The sun blazes down with intensity that is different than in Maryland.  It's so bright that it still surprises me.  But when the sun is not shining, it actually can get relatively cool.  Evenings are almost always very pleasant, unlike Baltimore which remained hot and stuffy all night.

Thea has been in high school for a week and she really seems to be enjoying herself.  I had some trouble getting Faith and Holly enrolled in school, but everything has been worked out for them to begin on Monday.  Holly is beside herself with excitement.  Faith grumbles but I think she is interested in how it's going to be at a different and larger school.  I am looking forward to having all of them out of my hair at once so I can actually get some work done.

I still feel unsettled and transient.  We have another two weeks here at the old folks' home and then we go to our rental house.  Since we will be there for at least six months, I hope it will feel a little more like home.

Pictures next time.

Sky

The kids have been going to Vacation Bible School at our church this week in the evenings.  Holly is an attendee, but Thea took on the role of one of the crew leaders and Faith has been an all-around helper.

I was one of the program leaders at VBS my first year at this church.  I had two little kids plus a crawling baby, and I was lonely and tired in the evenings, and thought it would be a good chance for us all to get out of the house.  I don't usually like to be up in front of a group, even a group of kids, so it was out of character for me to volunteer.  I still am not sure what possessed me to do it.

But, I'm glad I did.  I met a lot of people in the church, made some friends, and focused on something outside myself and my troubles.  It was a good, good thing.

I'm gonna miss this place!  It's a flawed little church, but there are earnest and accepting people here who love Jesus, and I have been blessed to be a part of it.

Sunset

While I was in Florida in June I marveled at the beautiful sunsets.  But apparently I had just not paid enough attention here at home.  Yes, even in Baltimore...  In the evenings when I take the dog out for his walk, I look down my street, towards the place where train cargo is unloaded all day and all night and trucked away by huge rigs, and above that place is a colorful display in the sky that surprises me every time.

Today after I admired the western sky, I turned to the east and there was the almost full moon, a beautiful peachy-pink.

Which means I spent the rest of the dog's walk humming "Pink Moon."  :)

I think I will miss the city a little bit after all.  I'm excited to be starting a new chapter in my life down in Florida, for many reasons, but Maryland is home, and I took some pride in being a Baltimorean.

"Pink Moon" by Nick Drake

Stormy weather

So we got hit by that big storm that swept through the Midwest and then smacked DC/MD/VA.  I don't really have a terrible story -- we didn't lose power, nothing fell on our house or off of our house.  Lots of people have it really bad right now, but we don't.  We are very lucky and grateful!

So I'm really not complaining... but I was kind of sad about my tomatoes, our one casualty.  Here are my tomato plants on June 19.

They are almost as tall as me at this point.  Ten days later on June 29, they were way taller than me.  They were being barely contained by the tomato cages I had planted them in.  Then this "derecho" came through and flattened them.

All ten tomato cages blew over and left a tangle of twisted branches and wilting leaves.  So sad.  But we will rebuild!

We got some stakes and did our best to pull the cages back up and lash them to the stakes and to each other.  It's kind of a mess of wire, wood and twine, but it holds up the monstrous plants.  And, there was a silver lining:  Deep inside the hedge of tomatoes, I found two yellow pear tomatoes that had ripened!

I admired them for a while and then I ate them.  They were so good -- sweet and tangy.  There are literally well over a hundred more green pear tomatoes where those came from.  We're going to be popping them like candy!

In less tasty news, I cut the bejeezus out of my finger tonight.  Dan sharpened some of the knives in the knife drawer.  Imagine that!!  I am used to having dull knives.  So after I cursed a bit and bled all over, I sat down and held a paper towel tightly around my finger.... and then started to get light-headed and nauseous.  This is something that has come on in just the past 10 years or so.  I used to be able to donate blood at our office blood drives.  I didn't LIKE doing it, but I could, and it felt like such an important thing to do.  But sometime in between having Faith and having Holly, I got to the point where I could not donate blood without becoming faint and dizzy, having the Red Cross people get worried, and having to end the donation without finishing.  I was really disappointed in myself;  I felt like a huge baby.  And I couldn't really understand what the matter was!  I mean, I'm not queasy about blood, either my own or other people's.  It seemed like more of a physiological reaction.  Finally a nurse told me I was having a vasovagal response -- meaning that yes, it was a physiological response to stimuli and did not mean I was a giant wuss.  Basically a trigger causes a malfunction in the way the brain handles heart rate and blood pressure.  My blood pressure drops crazily.

Anyway, so I sat there with my bleeding finger, and got nauseous and dizzy, and had to go lay down on the couch and actually cried a little bit.  I felt pretty silly in a minute, when my senses came back, but HEY!!  I have a VASOVAGAL response!  I'm not just a big baby!

Update: Strawberries!

Tonight's harvest:

Six very small strawberries.  They may be all I will get this spring from my rebounding plants.

You would not BELIEVE how delicious they are and how sweetly I am savoring them.  Worth it, oh yes.

Spacey

I don't have a "bucket list" or anything, but one of the things I always wanted to do was see a space shuttle launch in person. From the first launch I watched on TV as a child to the one I just watched a few minutes ago (Endeavour), I have been excited and moved by the power and the spectacle of lift-off every time.

I guess I never considered that one day the shuttles would be retired, or maybe I didn't realize that so much time had actually passed. With the last shuttle launch taking place next month, turns out I'll never get to cross that item off my mental to-do list.

I'm not crying about it or anything, but just now I found myself thinking about what this means. There are plenty of other things that I intend to get around to doing someday -- some long-term goals, but also things that I could easily do today that I just put off -- and for each of these things there will come a day when it's too late. It will sneak up on me, just like the final space shuttle launch did, whether it takes a day or two weeks or (unbelievable!) 30 years.

Turns out I need to get busy living!