Fresh Start in the Sunshine State

When we moved to Florida my physical pain all but disappeared. The cold and extreme weather changes of Oklahoma are absolutely a pain source and trigger to some of the rougher pain symptoms. The good food and constant activities of the day to day restaurant drama kept me well fed and distracted. We even found some sources to help out to cope mentally further. The problem was I felt like I had completely lost everything. Before the move we had to organize, purge, and pack a whole house worth of items. I’m a bit of a hoarder, but I prefer to consider myself a collector, as the items I save and gather have purpose or meaning. I tie important memories to physical objects extremely easily. I blame it on my Dragon type personality that craves to hoard away any possible valuables. I believe this also comes from when I was a child, I would always somehow have exactly what someone else would need just because I randomly kept it. I was so crafty and could create something out of what others viewed as trash. My jewellery collection as a child was excessively massive as well. I loved going to garage sales and goodwill stores. Used book stores and antique stores hold lots of positive memories for me. I have an extreme eye for detail so finding a small treasure in an ocean of junk is a SUPER skill of mine. A week before the move my childhood cat passed away at the old age of 21. Hanna Panda was with me for so much of my life and meant a lot to me. She was my protector and you could always find her guarding my bed. It seemed massively symbolic that she passed the week before I had such a massive life change, moving so very very far away from "home."

Before the move but after the "stuff" purge, we actually recovered my husband's stolen car. It was disgusting and completely trashed, abandoned in a city parking lot a couple of towns over. I felt so bad for my husband who had to drive it back home. The insurance declared it a total loss and issued us a check. It was so unsettling to see such a loved possession disrespected and messed up in such gross evil ways.

We had to buy a car as soon as we moved to Florida. We knew nothing about car buying and were totally on our own searching in a strange new town. We found a semi-decent priced option in a Hyundai Sonata that test drove okay, so we went with it. Signing the papers was so stressful. We felt we were being swindled every step of the way, but we had no experience with the process to know what was normal or not. It seemed like those few hours actually doubled as they crept by so slowly. We needed a car for commuting to work and getting Rayne to and from school during the weekdays. Sometimes Jake was able to take the car and I was able to borrow his Mom’s car to get Rayne from school. My day consisted of soooooooo much driving. Taking Rayne to school, taking Jake to work, driving back home, picking up Rayne from school and then picking up Jake from work and driving back home. The restaurant was 30 min away and Rayne’s school was 20 mins. That’s a bit over 2.5 hours of driving every. single. day. Thankfully the landscape was gorgeous and the drive beyond beautiful. Even at night you felt like you were on some sort of SUPER nice, well cared for paved road straight through a foreign jungle wilderness. During the day you could get stopped at a bridge crossing and be entertained by passing dolphins while you wait. Or see massive ospreys swooping down across the road to get to their street light nests.

Ocean living is a lifestyle that cannot be matched. We lived on a super tiny island right on the water. The condo was so fancy it even had an elevator to take you from the bottom floor (garage, storage and a fully screened in oceanside hot tub patio) all the way up to the 3rd floor where the 3 bedrooms were. The 2nd floor was the kitchen, dining room and livingroom with a wrap-around outdoor balcony patio with double access on the north and south sides of this floor. One year we actually sat down to Christmas dinner and enjoyed a show from a huge pod of dolphins passing right outside the dining room windows. The manatee also liked to graze and slowly make its way around docks right outside. The water was so clear you could sometimes look off the dock and see small sharks swimming around too. The in-laws would rent a boat and attempted to go out once a week on the ocean. We would see dolphins out there often, as well as lots of manatees! The wealth and size of the houses, yachts and cars is a whole different lifestyle than I had ever even been exposed to before. Oklahoma is much different in that aspect. You can see wealth occasionally but it’s not the same. It’s typically used to buy lots of land and hide away. The cars are the status symbols and that's about it for what you will publicly see. In Florida it’s a whole different level of competition and popularity status around displaying your wealth.

I didn’t make any friends and I was no longer able to chill with my besties now 2000 miles away. My husband worked all day and night, and the only thing to talk about anyway was just the restaurant and restaurant things. I fell into grounding myself via music and started working on restaurant stuff too. I was given the job of recording bills and payments. I took over their social media accounts and email lists. Then, after a while I started the job of daily cleaning tasks around the restaurant too. I deep cleaned the bathrooms, swept the whole floor everywhere and mopped the entire place as well. Every. Single. Day. For 220 days straight. Only skipping black friday and my birthday by cleaning double the days before (in the morning before opening and at night after closing.) The consistent schedule and moderate temps helped my pain. I was no longer doing the insanely tough manual labor of working at the animal shelter either, keeping it to more light manual labor with the occasional deck scrubbing and window washing only.