Month: June 2015

We are creatures of habit. We like consistency and familiarity. It makes us comfortable. We may step out of the box, at least with one foot, to do something new once in a while, or explore new places, but make a game changing shake up? Are you kidding? Why do you think McDonald’s is so successful? It was marketed on the premise that it’s familiar no matter where you are in the world. It’s comfortable.

Change is harder for some than others. My daughter handles big changes in her life with amazing grace and enthusiasm, but when her husband organized her earrings to make her life easier you would have thought he changed her cell phone number! Then she says to me, “I really don’t mind change.” Really? How about I rearrange your furniture? My son is “Mr. Sentimental”, so any change in his life is met with a flow chart of possibilities and probabilities. My husband and I have been toting around boxes of his stuff and storing them for years because he doesn’t have room for them at his place, but he can’t bear to part with them either. Don’t judge us! He’s our son, but I swear the free storage is coming to an end….soon! Very soon!

I walk counterclockwise around the pond every morning. Occasionally I will give in to my husband’s suggestion that we walk clockwise for a change. My whining about it is met with his sarcastic remarks about understanding how it’s so much harder to walk clockwise. After all, “it is uphill that direction.”  Seriously! It’s Florida! It’s not uphill in any direction and he’s lucky I’m wearing sunglasses so he can’t see the narrowing of my eyes as I glare at him, but I’m sure he senses it! The truth is, it just doesn’t feel right. It’s like sleeping on the wrong side of the bed. You know what I’m talking about.

The landscapers are at work around our place. Vegetation grows in Florida like the real life version of Jumanji, so if you don’t take serious action you’ll need a machete in no time just to find your car. But, give a man a chainsaw and he suddenly becomes Paul Bunyan’s smaller sidekick! Branches are dropping, palms have new haircuts, what was once dense is now not! I don’t like it! Why? It’s different!

We get use to things the way they are, but the changes that are being made to the landscape around here actually look nice. Thinning the vegetation allows more sunlight to feed and nourish those plants left behind. It’s healthy for them, making a case that change is actually good for all of us. It allows us to grow. Change doesn’t mean leaving everything behind. It’s just moving on. Change is hard, but it means we’re alive, and that’s all good.

Summer is here. Our first summer in south Florida. I know what you’re thinking! “Aargh! The humidity!” And you’d be right! It’s not like we were unaware. We’ve been here before in the heart of summer, but we’ve never been here for the duration where it begins to sit heavy on your chest, back, and legs like an elephant who has decided it’s time for you to give him a ride! Movies like Mosquito Coast, Apocalypse Now, and African Queen come to mind. Do you have a visual yet? Even the plants seem to groan under the weight of the Florida summer sauna.

I’ve noticed it take longer to get from my car into the store. I feel like I’m walking in slow motion, slogging through thick quicksand and the store is a mirage that keeps getting farther away the closer you get. You step outside for a few minutes and the ability to take a deep breath has evaporated! That’s the only thing that has evaporated!!! This isn’t Phoenix you know, where everything evaporates and you can’t even tell you’re sweating! Here you know you are sweating, I think! I haven’t decided if I’m sweating or it’s just that the water in the air has found a place to puddle…under your eyes, on your shirt, behind your knees. You get the picture. Don’t even bother hanging a beach towel over a chair outside to dry. It could take days for that to happen, perhaps even an entire season! You step back inside and suddenly you’re freezing! It’s not that the A/C is turned too cool. It’s that you’re wet!

I was here once in August helping my daughter move. By the end of the day I thought I was shrinking. Simply melting into a puddle on the ground. I had to be, because my t-shirt was now down to my knees. I could have been wearing it as a dress! Who moves furniture in a dress? What was happening!? It was that trip where I made a side excursion to Phoenix on my way back to Colorado. I was actually excited about the experiment I was about to set out on. An opportunity to see what was more uncomfortable, 92 degrees with 87% humidity, or 112 degrees with 9% humidity? I couldn’t tell. It was just different and equally miserable!

My husband often walks outside and exclaims, “It’s not too bad!” I haven’t decided if he’s making an observation or trying to convince himself it could be worse. It definitely could be worse and it just might get worse! I don’t want to jinx anything just in case Mother Nature overhears and decides to let me see just how bad she can be!

Thank goodness for air conditioning and swimming pools! I grew up in the Valley of the Sun without climate control in our house or in our car. I was in the 5th grade when we bought a house with central air conditioning for the first time! The lap of luxury that we now come to expect and take for granted. That’s right! I was tough! Now I’m spoiled! I have a car with air conditioning, a home with air conditioning, stores with air conditioning. I can hopscotch from one to the other and if that is not enough I’m off to the pool or the beach. I’m good with being spoiled!

Which is better or more miserable, depending on how you look at it? A dry heat or a humid heat? I feel for my family in Phoenix. It’s been 113 degrees, plus or minus all week long! That kind of heat is intense! It’s hot, sizzling, scorching, blazing! This time of year Florida is hot, sultry, sweltering, steamy! Feel the difference?

There are some amazing people in the world! True thinkers not contained by any box. Like the engineers that went to work to bring back the astronauts of Apollo 13. We don’t even know their names. Disney Imagineers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Madame Curie, and people you’ve never heard of but know by their inventions, like Bette Graham (Liquid Paper), Stephanie Kwolek (Kevlar), and Mary Anderson (windshield wipers). There are so many more. These people are simply amazing! You know what they all have in common? None of them attended year round school! What? How can that be possible? What about the “Summer Slide”?

The “Summer Slide” is one of my big pet peeves. The idea of it irritates me and I find it personally insulting. The Summer Slide insinuates that I am as dumb as dirt, as are the people who grew up just like me, enjoying a summer full of nothing but free time!

The summer slide theory is that during summer break kids slide academically, resulting in the need for remedial work when they return in the fall just to get them back to the level where they left off in May. How much slide depends on who is doing the study and their agenda, but generally it’s 2 months. Apparently the kids most at risk for sliding are low-income, because they don’t have access to the organized summer camps that the more affluent have. That slide doesn’t end with a slip in academics. Some fear that summer vacation also results in weight gain, especially for those children that are already fighting the battle of the bulge. Good grief!

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. You only went to summer school if you failed to keep up during the school year and that didn’t seem to have anything to do with economic standing. It depended more on how much you messed around during the school year. My summer was filled with reading, swimming, playing ball, watching tv, playing with friends, irritating my sisters, and probably irritating my mother. I slept in, stayed up late, babysat for the neighbors, rode my bike, used my imagination, the list goes on. The most important part…the days were my own to do with as I wished.

We were not well off, though I never felt like we were poor, even when we didn’t have things. I did not go to summer camp, or to fancy day camps. That’s not to say I never had an opportunity for organized activities. I remember a couple of weeks of a parks and recreation arts and crafts class one summer, another summer I attended a week-long church camp, and for two weeks I attended a band camp for kids of all ages and economic background. That was pretty much the extent of organized anything.

What I did have was a mother who took us to the library and let us check out 10 books apiece. Remember that place? It’s a building filled with books that anyone can take and read. It’s amazing and it’s free!!! I had sisters and I had friends. I’m pretty sure that describes most kids and we could find plenty to do that didn’t require money.

During the school year you hear parents complain of too much homework, too many activities, not enough down time for our kids to just be kids and then we turn around and champion year round school! Why? Cheap babysitting? Down time is what it takes to allow the imagination to get out of the box it gets stored in during the school year and stretch its legs! Summer is for discovery, experiments, dreaming without being restrained by the ticking of the clock. We can exercise our brains without the confines of right or wrong answers. Those people I mentioned before…that’s what they did on their summer vacation, so when it really mattered, they could make it count!

Our kids are young for such a short time. How about for just a little while we afford them time to just be little kids. Let them play, let them imagine, let them dream, so one day they will know how to dream big and make amazing things happen.

A friend of mine once told me, “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”. Monday, June 1, was the official beginning of hurricane season and though a hurricane hasn’t hit Florida since 2005 it’s not of matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I plan to be prepared. I’m not really a wind person, so when you tell me we are entering the season of the most powerful storm on earth you’ve got my attention!

I’ve experienced Mother Nature during some of her moodiest moments, from haboobs in Arizona, earthquakes in Wyoming and California, to wildfires and blizzards in Colorado. Hurricanes are new to me. I find big weather a bit terrifying! A hurricane can be 600 miles across with sustained winds greater than 157 mph. It will usually last for over a week before dying a natural death. Water is the biggest killer as hurricanes mark their territory with storm surge, high surf, rip currents, and inland flooding. Then there is the destructive winds and if that isn’t enough for you, they spawn tornadoes! 101 tornadoes were formed by Hurricane Francis before she met her demise! Mother Nature does a good job at getting your attention and if you fail to take notice you may be reminded in the harshest ways that you are very small indeed.

When our son was accepted to college in Florida we immediately thought of the vacation opportunities, but we also did the math on the hurricane strike probabilities. We figured that in 4 years he may get hit once. Hmmm. Visions of Disney World, NASA, and Key West danced through my head and overrode our concerns. Besides, I was never really any good at math and our equation could be way off. In fact, before he graduated in 4 years he had encountered three hurricanes…Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma. The first hit within 2 weeks of starting school and the second 3 weeks later. By the time Wilma hit the following year he was a pro and Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel was my new best friend! Our law of probabilities were all off and possibilities morphed into reality. I became proficient at scaling the back of the couch, hurdling the coffee table, and vaulting over the kitchen table to get to the phone as it rang in hopes our son was calling to let us know what was happening and assure us he was safe.

Our daughter, by contrast, made her move to Florida 2 years later, graduated, found a job and has never left the Sunshine State. She has been here 9 years and though she has sat through plenty of tropical storms, she has yet to endure the full power of a hurricane. I’m good with that, but it can’t last.

What was I thinking when I suggested to my husband that we move to Florida?! You’d at least think we would have waited till the state had taken another mathematical hit! Sort of a big storm law of reducing your odds, but no! We charged ahead knowing that Florida is due for another weather reckoning just by the law of averages. So, here we are, one week into hurricane season. All is quiet, but as requested by state officials and common sense I am prepared, physically. Mentally? Well that’s another story. You never know until you face the big bad wolf as he tries to blow your house down.