In Our Own Way

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go.

Departures

Elsa? [P.S. Who Are We, Anyhow?]

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We’re nowhere near ready to get moving tomorrow, as nominally planned. Our muscles and bones probably need another good several days’ recovery time — and, of course, The Stepdaughter’s House o’ Canines can’t be beat as a place to decompress.

Unfortunately, we have our last doctor’s appointments in Tallahassee on Wednesday afternoon, around 3:00 pm. So we have two choices, given the approximately six-hour drive in perfect conditions:

  • Leave tomorrow and stay overnight at a friend’s house in Tallahassee. (This has been the current plan for a while now.)
  • Leave Wednesday morning and drive straight through to the doc’s office.

But then there’s the small matter of Tropical Storm Elsa… C\

The tracking map as of a couple hours ago is shown at the right. Here at The House o’ Canines, we’re located midway between Port St. Lucie and Palm Beach. We’d probably be leaving around noon tomorrow, July 6; as you can see — note the time stamps for each of the forecast tracks — we should have a pretty clear shot back to Tallahassee over the succeeding six hours. On the other hand, by the time of our appointments Wednesday, Tallahassee may or may not be affected…

…and the medical facility may or may not be open, even if just out of simple caution.

[Aside: another little wrinkle, nothing to do with the weather: we arranged to change our mailing address down here, back in the middle of June. This automatically covered not just our mail delivery but also our drivers’ licenses, car registration, and voter registration. In the meantime, we also had new checks printed with the new address. However, as of today, we have still not received the new DMV papers, or the checks… but we have our updated voter IDs, by God! I went over to the DMV office first thing this morning to see what could be done about the problem from their end… but of course, they’re closed today for the “July 4th Monday” holiday. Argh.]

Well, nobody ever said this had to be easy!

Gone

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…and no, I still haven’t memorized our new “home” address. It’s a good thing my computer has!

We pulled out of the hotel parking lot in Tallahassee yesterday at around 2:00 pm. It felt not very much like a triumphant departure — we were (are) both too tired to celebrate, what with a six-plus-hours drive still ahead of us. But we did bump fists, so that counts, right?

(Well, technically we bumped fists twice. I’ve never mastered the art of the cool-guy fist bump. When The Missus first raised her fist, her eyebrows raised and face all expectant, I got the right idea — but with poor brain/fist coordination, all I managed was a weak, upside-down response. “Damn it,” I thought, flipped the fist around, and successfully pulled off Try #2.)

Instead of the faster –but higher-pressure — highway route, we opted for “the back way,’ at least to start out. (I’d even mapped out an entirely “back way” to South(ish) Florida… but to follow through on that alternative, we’d have to have left by noon. No way!) It drizzled a bit, but by the time we stopped for a fast-food mid-afternoon bite to eat, it was obvious we’d have to switch to the all-highways option…

This being Central Florida, the serious rain started a few minutes later. And continued, almost whiting-out the way forward, until we finally pulled off at the Stuart exit of the Florida Turnpike, seven-and-a-half hours after departure.

Whew!

Not Quite the Catastrophe Which Seemed to Loom

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The “moving and storage” aisle at Home Depot. I’d been sent there in a rush because the mover said we’d need about ten “small boxes like that one [points to Home Depot small box on floor].” The aisle wasn’t closed that long — the forklift operator just had to take down a pallet of something-or-other, so it was actually a wise precaution to bar customers. But it did make me laugh — laugh hard — although I forced myself to pause long enough to get the photo.

That headline is a joke, of course. It seems to suggest it might’ve turned out to be a different catastrophe altogether — but no catastrophe at all, really… just really, really, really hard work for about four straight days.

We’re still not really done as of today, Wednesday. I have a few things to move to the storage units. (That assumes I can fit them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of the larger boxes and other loose items get, uh, “lost” should I pass a generic construction dumpster en route.) We still have a few things to get out of the refrigerator to be thrown out/recycled. We’re also storing a few things at our friend Leah’s house. And, finally, we’ve got several boxes of what-not to take down to The Stepdaughter’s house, for our first several nights “away” — that’s gotta be put in the car just for tonight.

…but all that stuff has to happen this morning, in anticipation of the arrival of the cleaning crew “sometime” this afternoon. (The woman who owns the cleaning service is Hispanic, and she and The Missus have been communicating via text messages in Spanish (at The Missus’s end, with the assistance of Google Translate). So there’s apparently a dense fog of gray clouding the arrival time.)

The agenda tomorrow suddenly much simpler: we get up, take showers, load our luggage into the car, check out of the hotel, head to have our routine labwork done prior to next week’s doctor’s appointments…

…and then we are g, o, n, e.

Some Stuff We’ll Leave Behind

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While trying to rearrange boxes in one of our storage units — clearing space for stuff from the apartment — I came across this old camera bag, purchased (I think) sometime in the ’80s. Couldn’t believe I still had it; couldn’t believe all the old camera gear was still inside. (By the way: no, this gear is NOT compatible with my current camera — or, really, with pretty much anything still being manufactured.)

Neither of us feels any real emotional connection to Tallahassee itself anymore. Oh, The Missus still has a handful of friends in town, but she’s pretty unapologetically blunt: once “the kids” left town to live hours away, she was pretty much done with it. I have one friend nearby, whom I know mostly from Facebook; I’ve had lunch with him a couple times, and will do so again next Thursday, but that’s it. All our friends from years ago have been gone (one way or another) for years — decades, even. And although we both liked and were friendly with people we worked with, those “friendships” went more or less by the board in 2020. Since we retired, we hear from “work” pretty much only when something has gone wrong that no one else knows how to fix (haha).

Still, a few elements of Tallahassee will linger in our heads after we leave. I can imagine wanting to reexperience a few of them, if/when we come back to town for favorite doctors’ appointments or whatever — favorite local (non-chain) restaurants, for example. And it’ll be interesting to see what comes of some still-in-the-works construction projects: big hotel/shopping districts, various roadways both improved and flat-out new, parks, and so on.

A couple nights ago, we (with The Stepson) went to one of favorite newer restaurants, Backwoods Crossing. It’s out on the eastern side of town, near the interstate, and when we left, although it was around 9pm and hence after dark, we decided to drive through the neighborhood where our house was. (Well, where it still is, but you know what I mean.) A strange experience… We recognized our old neighbors’ cars and so on; the house itself — we don’t know anything about the current owners — had two cars in the driveway, and absolutely no lights on. (?) Strange, like I said… but probably not the last time we’ll feel that way. For the upcoming trip, The Missus has been busily looking up the street addresses of all the houses she lived in over the past 50-60 years because she wants to drive by them, too. She has no current emotional connection to them, of course; they’re just symbols of emotional connections gone by. I suspect we’ll both come to think of Tallahassee that way.

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