OK I got all that off my chest.  I have awakened to a new day, no stress so far, soft breeze blowing in through the open sliding doors and the sweet smell of moist earth and rain-washed (yet still pollen-filled) air. 

These are the types of things I will miss about Florida, along with waking up on a January day to 70 degree weather and the vast expanses of Gulf and Bay waters that are readily accessible.  It's not enough of a tradeoff though, for my feeble attempts at staving off the certain economic disaster that we are facing if we remain here.

I am perhaps more angry about the economy than anything and it is not fair to take that out on little old Florida but the economic woes of the nation are affecting me here and now.  I listen to folks in other parts of the country who are experiencing the same thing.  If I wanted to dig further, I guess I am angry because of the frustration with a state government that spends money like a drunken sailor and has no way of recouping operating funds other than on the backs of its citizens.  As a teacher, I feel helpless.  I am not valued, not paid enough to care, frustrated that I have adopted that attitude and beating myself up for staying here longer than I should have.  As Hotzstuff says, "you can't go back and change the past," so it is useless to berate myself.

I am also going to miss BBQ, some really fine restaurants, and relatively inexpensive shrimp.  And grouper, which I will have to trade for haddock which isn't a bad tradeoff at all.  And Cuban sandwiches. I will also miss banana pudding, macaroni and cheese as a normal side dish, red velvet cake, fried chicken and mashed taters.  Yeah, ok, I know I can cook all these things up north but I am declaring war on food that makes me look like someone stuck an air hose up my butt and inflated me.  I will leave the 100 pounds I gained in FL somewhere in the hiking hills of New York.

Most of all, I will miss my three female friends and my sister in law, who is mad because I'm leaving her here but not mad enough to move with us.  Born in Thailand, she prefers the warm weather and I do not blame her.  Some bodies are acclimated more to the tropics.  Personally, I look forward to not sweating between my front door and the car.  I will think of her fondly whenever I prepare Thai food which she taught me how to cook.

Airplanes fly both ways.  I may become a snowbird yet.  I wouldn't mind visiting during spring breaks and if I am ever allowed to retire, I can see myself joining the throngs of "Q-tip Heads" that make their yearly migration to Florida.  I have made good friends here, I have family ties (Warrior Stepson will probably make his home here when he returns from Iraq) and would probably make a better visitor than resident.  Who knows?  One thing I have learned is to never write the future because nature has a way of changing things once I think I have a permanent plan.  Good thing I can roll with changes.

Living in Florida taught me one thing: I am a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee.

I can't help it, sorry, Floridians.  You won't miss me, I'm sure, with my queer ways and the ever-contemplative Buddha in the front yard.  My affronts to my neighbors will be replaced with happy bunnies and rainbows.

I delicately extend my middle finger to you of too much faith and not enough compassion.  I say "feh!" to your agonizingly slow everything, your vacant stares and long periods of silence at the drive-thru while I decide it's not worth it after fifteen minutes sitting in line and drive away.  I didn't even make it to your pay window, you idiots and you cooked the food but lost the sale.  I laugh at your racism, confounded by the fact that the twenty-first century started eight years ago and you haven't made it, socially, past the beginning of the twentieth.

I shrink from your putrid air, your endless stream of traffic in all directions, your cockroaches as big as saucers that crawl up my sleeve during a Thanksgiving shopping venture. You were lurking in the ginger snaps.  The old man stared at me after I screamed and sent you careening down the aisle and said "you ain't from 'round here are ya?"  The quick brown gentleman squashed you underfoot.  I think he enjoyed it.

Your grass cuts my feet, your logic numbs me, your voting practices are suspect and but for a small circle of friends (they know who they are), you have kept me virtually a stranger. I have been a citizen only because I took up space.  You gave me a cheap education and for that I should be thankful.  And you introduced me to my husband and for that, I give you credit because both of us came here seeking peace and beauty but could only find it in each other.  His fond memories of the Florida of his youth are forever buried under slabs of concrete; these tombs forever monuments to urban development and the Big Yellow Taxi theory.

Your state bleeds money.  The chasm between the rich and poor is getting wider and I'm afraid if I spend another six months here I will be numb with apathy and disgust at how you have squandered your middle class which is slowly finding its way to your streets, sidewalks, parks, underpasses and beaches as the new homeless.  If America wants to see the Dream they go to Disney and in years when the Super Bowl or the Republican National Convention are held here they quietly round them up.  Remember what Charlton Heston said:  "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!!"  I want to go as Saul Roth did, with Beethoven and IMAX.  Can I inhale a bit first?

This is an election year and I am voting with my feet.

I want to kill my family.

Let me back up.  We listed the house for sale on Friday.  Since then we have had a few nibbles in the form of people who want to see the house.  Being an old hand at this (my ex and I sold a home about 17 years ago and my sister works in the real estate biz) I knew we would be inconvenienced.  My slovenly ways had to go in favor of washing up dishes as soon as they are used so that in case someone calls at 4:45 p.m. and I am in the middle of cooking dinner, everything will be put away and shining neatly as if the kitchen had never been touched by human hands.  I knew that people would show up early, as well as late.  I knew that we would have total strangers traipsing through the house, peering in our closets (and possibly worse, like going through drawers and medicine cabinets) and running fingers along ledges checking for dust and debris.

I did not know, however, that in a buyers' market, which describes Florida right now, I have to let the folks in who show up early and late, regardless if I am changing clothes and half naked or in the middle of cooking a souffle.  In short, I have to shower before dawn and eat out of boxes and on paper plates or, better, out at a restaurant where we can sit while oddballs eyeballed our cozy little home.

OK, I see I need to back up even further.  Why, you ask, am I leaving said cozy home?  Because Florida is imploding, economy-wise.  I lost half my job in January to a severely curtailed enrollment at the University.  Because I am an adjunct instructor, and the migrant worker of the academe, I lose.  If it weren't for the Professional Writing class I teach, I would be making about 100 dollars a week right now.  The resulting release of many adjuncts from the university has caused a glut of applications at the two-year schools and frankly, January is not the time to be seeking a teaching job in the public school system (not that I would ever teach in the Florida public schools. Call me elitist, but I just can't dumb myself down quite that far.).

Also, after two years of trying to secure a job that paid more than $9. an hour, Hotzstuff has given up with the realization that if you come to FL and you're over 50 you can pretty much expect to work as a greeter at the local Wally World or you'd best come with lots of retirement savings.  Otherwise, stay in the snowy cold with the rest of the suckers. Also, according to Hotzstuff, "Florida just isn't what it used to be."  He recalls the 1970s when USF wasn't much more than a cow pasture with a few modern buildings up on Fowler Avenue.

Skip to the present and why I want to kill my family. 

My seventeen-year-old has a bad case of attitude.  Mommy's buttcrack has been the ATM slot for way too long (I have put an end to that) and I confess that I have also been way too lenient on the boy.  I cannot ask him to do N-E-THING without receiving heavy sighs, rolling eyes ... you know, the usual teenage stuff.  Hotzstuff, on the other hand, has been incredibly resistant to showing the house.  He throws a hissy fit everytime someone comes over early or late, and when I am on the phone with the realtor he goes into hystrionics and jumping and leapin' and wailin' and a gnashin' o' teeth because I will not rudely cut her off to tell him the particulars of what she is telling me.  (If I did that to him I would never hear the end of it.)

So I want to kill them.  OK, I do not want to see them until the house is sold.  I can put up with a lot. I can put up with strangers going through my house, I can put up with the fact that this is a buyers' market and if someone calls at 4:00 and wants to see the house in ten minutes I have to leave because God forbid we should lose a potential buyer in a very very uncertain market.  I can put up with being put out.  What I can't stand is a couple of big baby men whining about it and then taking their frustrations out on me.

Thanks for letting me vent.

P.S.  In case you were wondering, I am going back to New York.  Yankee does not fit in well in the Red State.  I'll probably have to change the name of my blog.