Internet access at last!

Oh Team Wy fans, I am so glad to be back online. I feel like things are beginning to get normal again after all we’ve been through. My first post from Florida, and I’m sitting in our huge living room amidst stacks and stacks of boxes. It’s pretty crazy here so far.

Play-by-play of our sojourn to Florida--no, that’s way too difficult. Use your imagination; it was hard.

The first truck we rented was too small so we had to get a bigger truck and unload everything from the smaller truck and put it on the bigger truck. The trailer we got for our 4 cylinder car was bigger than the one we were supposed to rent, so we were heavily warned against going over 55 miles per hour with it since our car wasn’t technically rated to haul something that big. We stuck to 55 for the first two legs of the journey, then the home stretch into Florida we were so exhausted and road weary that we blew through Georgia at 65 mph, trailer hitch be damned. Then we got here and it was so hot and muggy that Matthew nearly died from unloading the truck. I mean, I guess that’s what we expected from Florida in August, but nothing could prepare us for the reality of being this hot. Maybe if we had conditioned ourselves in Chicago by going to saunas a lot. Which would have been nice. Now when I need a sauna I just go out on the porch.

Florida. We traded a rat problem for a backyard full of lizards. The squirrels are smaller here but not a different species than the gray squirrel. There are things called “live oaks” which I haven’t seen yet. Our backyard has tall palm trees, and somewhere is a small orange tree. Our front yard has a tree *covered* in Spanish moss. Everything I saw and photographed at the green house in Chicago is just growing here in people’s yards. I tried to steal a shoot off some sort of prickly palm tree, but I couldn’t get it to break off and the dog was ready to move on. Apparently there’s serious city council rules here about trees anyway.

And it’s hot. I hear Chicago is having a terrible heat wave too, so I feel better knowing that I’d be suffering there too. And it’s refreshing that my friends are experiencing the same thing as me. Someone who was once my friend said, “You’ll hate Florida. Sure it gets up to 100 degrees here in Chicago, but that only lasts a few days. In Florida, it’s 100 for the whole summer!” I feel vindicated that she’s sweating too. And I love Florida, despite it being hot, so there.

There’s a lot to do in St. Augustine. Our best friend here calls and invites us out to see bands play, go to movie festivals, visit a women’s craft fair, and god only knows what next. We love it.

We ride our bicycles everywhere we go because nothing we need is more than a bicycle ride away. Everyone at the library where I work laughs at me though because of how sweaty I am. They like teasing the northerner about the heat, so I let them. There’s a fellow Midwesterner there, so I bond with him a lot.

Today my goal is to sneak out of the house and see if the local Home Depot has irrigation tubing of the right heft for making hula hoops. I gave my hula hoop to a friend because I knew it would be a while before she could afford one, and she did so much to help me move that she deserved it anyway. Any trooper with that much fire power earns a used hula hoop, so don’t forget it dear reader! I’m also going to try and sell hula hoops at my friend’s shop here in town. I don’t know if it will catch on, but it’s worth a shot.

My new library is a mixed bag. I was hired to be their first archivist ever, so I have to bring together all of the materials they’ve been collecting and arrange them according to archival principles. So far I’m in research stage and I’m gathering information about local historical societies, arrangement principles for college archives, and the history of the college and its founder. I’m busy, but not working hard yet. It’s a big job, one I hope I can accomplish, but it will take time. The people at the library are great though, and even though I can’t remember all of their names at all, I really enjoy being with them.

That’s all the news my tired fingers will type. I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long, but I promise to share more adventures as they happen. I wish I had kept a travel journal on our way to Florida, but I never would have had the energy for it. The trip itself was exhausting, and we haven’t had a recovery period yet.

Love, love, angels.