Of sunsets, kittens, euthanasia, and head colds

I went up to GA for the Thanksgiving holiday break. In some ways it was not what you’d call a happy holiday, although I’ve certainly had worse. Two of our elderly cats – Tuffy and Grey – had to be euthanized. Both of them had chronic illnesses that had plagued them for years (and for which they had been treated for years), but they had finally reached that point. Tuffy was 13, and we’d had her since she was a kitten. Grey showed up, fully grown, on my doorstep in the fall of 2009 and had been part of our lives ever since. We have a lot of animals, my mom and I, and as a result, we experience animal deaths more frequently than people who only have one or two pets. I’d like to say that it gets better with experience, but it never does. It’s been five days since we buried Grey and Tuffy, and I’m crying typing about it. They will be missed.

Grey and Tuffy

But there’s never a shortage of homeless pets.

This is Sunshine. My aunt (who lives in an assisted living facility not far from my mom) found her in the woods by her home, and brought her to my mom. Our home is not the best place for her, as we do have several cats with feline leukemia, but when the only other option is tossing her out on the street (don’t even get me started on the local animal control situation…) I guess it’s the best chance she’s got. She’s been vaccinated against feline leukemia already, although she’s also developed a head cold, which we’re keeping an eye on.

For Thanksgiving proper we drove down to F’s house at Dekle Beach. The weather was beautiful: chilly (for Florida), but with bright sunshine and crystal clear skies. The sunset was pretty spectacular. I promptly developed a rather nasty head cold and spent the time feeling rather wretched.

I’m back in Orlando now for the tail-end of the semester. I have one presentation left to give and I’ll be done. I don’t even have any finals. (I know; it confuses me, too. Don’t get me wrong, I like not having to take finals, but not having finals just seems wrong somehow.) And speaking of finals, I can’t leave Orlando for a few more weeks because my students most definitely do have finals. I don’t control their official exam schedule, and the school has decreed that one of my sections will take their final on the very last day of finals… and I can’t leave until they’re done. I’m hoping that the extra free time I’ll have before going back up to GA will enable me to get a head start on my Christmas vacation project: designing the ESL curriculum for a major league baseball team’s training program in a Caribbean country. I should probably point out that I know sweet fuck all about baseball, but hey – I did order both Baseball for Dummies and the Idiot’s Guide to Baseball. I have to have this done by the beginning of January, so it’s definitely going to be my project for the break – unless I can get a good chunk of it knocked out beforehand.

I only have one semester left before I AM YOUR MASTER. Er, before I have my MA in TESOL. I’m still feeling fairly ambivalent about whether I stay in the US or go back overseas. I’ve applied for a pretty prestigious and rather competitive position which would definitely involve going back overseas (most likely to somewhere in the former Soviet Union), and if I am offered said position, I will most definitely accept. (There’s more than one ‘position,’ BTW, and chances are good – especially as they have a hard time filling their positions in the ‘stans.) Unfortunately, even though I submitted my application last month, I won’t hear from them until sometime ‘between early April and late June.’ Great. Meaning that if I don’t get it, I’ll be in a bit of a bind. June is a bit late in the year to be applying for teaching positions. However, I really do not want to be in a position where I am telling others that I cannot accept their job offer as I am waiting to hear from someone better, so I’ve simply decided to hold off on the job search until I find out one way or the other. However, I do think I will be confining said job search to the southeastern US – maybe even to FL – if ‘the position’ falls through. I guess we shall see.

Laborious Driving, Beachless Beaches, and a Turtle

This holiday weekend I did a LOT of driving. I drove from Orlando, FL to Dekle Beach, FL. From there I drove up to Waycross, GA, then back down to Orlando. I’m including a map so you can see what I’m talking about:

As I mentioned in my last post, my mom’s boyfriend, F, has purchased a vacation home in Dekle Beach, FL. Now, despite being named Dekle Beach and being located along Florida’s Gulf Coast, there is no beach at Dekle Beach. There’s a lot of scenic marsh, but no beach. There’s also not much of anything there (they don’t even so much as have a convenience store). It’s a pretty tiny community, and its one claim to fame is fairly horrific: ten people were killed there (including a family from my hometown) back in 1993 during a freak storm that pretty much appeared out of nowhere. (See the wikipedia article on the storm, as well as an article in which survivors recall the events of that evening. It's pretty harrowing stuff.) F’s house is one of the ones that was around before 1993 and survived the storm, so here’s hoping it survives whatever else Mother Nature throws at it.

The plan was that I would drive up from Orlando, mom would drive down from Waycross, and F would drive down from his home in north Florida. I thought the goal was to get there around noon. I got there at 12:45 and no one was around. I should also mention that while mom and F have keys, I do not. Also, the AC in my car works well while the car is moving, but not so much while it’s sitting still. And it was Florida in late August, meaning that it was HOT. Mochi and I went for a long walk around Dekle Beach (although eventually Mochi just sat down and refused to go any farther. He does have awfully short legs, and it was quite hot out). We then sat in the screened in area underneath F’s house, waiting for someone to come and let us into the air conditioning.

Mochi's a hot dog :-)
Not really what you think of when someone says "it's a beach community in Florida"




There were houses here before the 1993 storm.

Once mom and F arrived, we set off for nearby Keaton Beach. Unlike Dekle Beach, Keaton Beach actually has a small stretch of – gasp! – beach. Unfortunately, the one restaurant located in Keaton Beach has gone out of business (if you’re interested in a cool business location, it’s up for sale…) meaning that our lunch ended up being whatever had been baking in the tray at the local gas station for god knows how many days. Also, the water was incredibly shallow and rather overgrown with seaweed. Not the best beach, but good for a short dip if you don’t mind sitting in the seaweed. There were tons of hermit crabs. I also saw a garfish with a smaller fish in its mouth, as well as a stingray and quite a few sea-birds.

Keaton Beach at low tide: sea grass everywhere!

Mom and me

After our “swim” we returned to Dekle Beach, where we did some more walking (much to poor Mochi’s chagrin), and we may have explored an area clearly labeled with ‘no trespassing’ signs, haha.

It was also clearly marked with these signs about not stealing palm trees. Um, ok.

Mom :-)


The view from F's porch in the morning light

The next morning, I left to drive to Waycross. Somebody has to feed mom’s animals while she’s enjoying the beach house! My stint in Waycross was wholly uneventful, and I returned to Orlando on Monday. I did stop on US 1 to rescue a turtle who was foolishly walking south down the center of the southbound lanes. It terrified Mochi.

I’m still posting stuff regularly over on my Kyrgyzstan blog, so go check it out!

Lagging

I’ve been back in the US a little more than a week. Honestly, I’m not feeling any reverse culture shock at all. What I have been feeling, however, is jetlag. I think I’m mostly over it at this point, although obviously not completely as I woke up before 9am today without an alarm. Trust me, that only ever happens when I’m jetlagged. While it’s not as bad as jetlag from Korea to the US, it’s still rough. It took several days before I could make it through the day without passing out mid-afternoon or waking up around 3:30am. Unfortunately, I’ve a lot that I need to be doing, which makes the fact that my brain has been so time-scrambled for the past week or so kind of a pain.

For those of you interested in my Kyrgyzstan adventures, I have indeed been posting them over on my Kyrgyzstan blog, so go check it out!

My post-Kyrgyzstan adventures haven’t been quite as interesting. I’ve written a syllabus and put together a course calendar for the undergrad course I’ll be teaching starting in a little more than a week. I’ve also started putting together the course website. Yawn. I also have to take several hours of boring online modules, as well as a full day of face-to-face training to “qualify” me to be a TA. Like I’d never taught before or something. Hah. I also have a very part time job (happens only a few days a year, but hey it pays well) which will be taking up pretty much all of next week… meaning I need to get my course stuff and online modules and whatever taken care of before Monday rolls around. In other words, this weekend is going to be pretty much the opposite of exciting.

I drove up to Georgia on Sunday and came back yesterday. Mom and I then drove back down to Florida – albeit to a different part of the state than where I live – in order to help her boyfriend, F, move his sailboat from his dock in Steinhatchee to his new house in Dekle Beach. I’d like to say that we were successful, but alas, the boat never left the dock. We essentially did a lot of driving, a lot of sweating, and accomplished a whole lotta nothing. But hey, the scenery was great. We also celebrated my mom’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM! Back in Georgia, I helped my mom with the mowing (and the towing of the mower from one property to the next), which also involved a lot of sweating. The southeastern US will do that to you this time of year.

Mom and F and the sailboat...
Mom on the boat. Her hand is bleeding, having been thwacked by the centerboard crank.
And this would be the reason we didn't move the boat - we needed to motor it down to the ramp, but alas...
But hey, the view was nice.
F's new house
The view from F's new house
We went for a walk in the marshy area along Yates Creek
Happy Birthday!
Back in GA, Honey and Merlin anxiously await dinner.

Of course, by the time I made it back to Orlando on Thursday and was still sweating, I realized that I needed to have my AC looked at. I’d gotten a new compressor (up in GA) back in April, so there was no reason for me to be sweating in the car. Well, either the guy who installed the compressor forgot to add freon, or the system has a leak. I guess I’ll find out which if my car either remains cool or goes back to being a sweatbox.

In addition to the kinda pricey freon + oil change, I gave in and went to LensCrafters to get an eye exam and some new glasses. I don’t even want to think about the amount of money I had to shell out. And I won’t even get my glasses til next week, as they have to special order my lenses (as I bloody well can’t see) – although at least I made it through one more checkup without needing bifocals. Hah. The doctor said I’ll probably need to get them the next time I get a prescription. Since I’m going from having four pairs of glasses (black, brown, pink, and green) plus prescription sunglasses to just having one pair plus sunglasses, I went with tortoiseshell lenses as those are both black and brown. They’re super cute, but I don’t get to post pictures until next week or whenever they arrive.

So yeah. This post has been disjointed and probably not the  most interesting. Go visit my Kyrgyzstan blog – it’s far more coherent and definitely far more interesting.