visits, springs, and things

Melissa, my friend and landlord (who lives in CA) was in town this weekend with her kids. Two of our childhood friends were in the area as well, so we all met up:

Melissa and her two adorable children, Madeline and Miriam
Me with the kids :-)
Chris visits with Miriam and Melissa
And we added a second Melissa to the mix:
Melissa, Miriam, Chris, Madeline, and Melissa

The two Melissas had to head out around 2pm. After they left, Chris and I decided to visit some local springs and historic sites. First we went to Gemini Springs Park, which was really quite lovely. Swimming is prohibited, although pets are allowed AND they have an off-leash dog park section. I wish I'd known; I'd have brought Mochi.

There might be a reason why swimming is prohibited...
Hello, buddy!
There were many trails through huge old growth oaks, just dripping with Spanish moss.


This was actually *very* comfortable!
We left Gemini Springs and drove to Green Springs Park. It wasn't quite as picturesque as Gemini Springs, but it was still quite nice. It was another place in which swimming was prohibited, although the spring hole was filled with teens happily ignoring that directive. They were also repeatedly climbing up very tall trees and plunging a great distance into the water below. Safety first!

The guy in the black pants has just jumped.

Chris (not preparing to jump) on a tree on the far side of the spring.

Then we drove to DeBary Hall
Unfortunately, it was around 5:30pm, and the place had closed for the day. We were still able to explore outside though.
Driving back to Orlando through Sanford, we spotted this large building and stopped to check it out. It turned out to be the old Georgetown school.


Our last stop of the day was at Big Tree Park. The park used to be the location of a 3500 year old bald cypress tree nicknamed 'The Senator' that was 118 feet tall. It was, sadly, destroyed by arson in 2012. Below are some pictures of me, Chris, Melissa, and her husband Alex visiting The Senator in 2006. Under that is a picture of it today.
Poorly made snapshots of snapshots.
At least you can see the tree.
What remains of The Senator.
To read about his sad demise, click here.

Keeping my options open

I’m not really a fan of Orlando. I don’t like theme parks. I don’t like strip malls. Orlando and the surrounding communities are, to me, little more than overpriced neighborhoods linked together by theme parks, strip malls, and toll roads. If I’m missing out on something superawesome about Orlando, please feel free to clue me in, but I’ve been here for a year and a half now and this is what the place seems like to me. I mean, you can drive from Orlando to Winter Park to Casselberry without any sign that you’ve gone from one community to another. It’s all strip malls and boring, identical, overpriced neighborhoods. You head west and you run up against the Disney nightmare. I am not a fan of Disney, theme parks, or crowds, so you can guess that I head west as seldom as possible. Luckily I live in East Orlando.

I’ve pretty much decided that unless I get offered something spectacular overseas, I’m going to stay in the US. Ideally, I’d like to stay in Florida – although I’ve been looking (and applying) at jobs in Georgia and Tennessee as well. Ideally, I’d like to get away from Orlando, as pretty much anywhere else in this state is more appealing. However, I want to keep my options open – especially since there are a lot of jobs in my field in this area.

Assuming that I get a full time job in the US, I am going to buy a house. I don’t like renting. I want to be able to paint my house funky colors and fill it full of cats. I also need a yard to put some of my mom’s dogs in so that she won’t have to deal with them anymore. There are properties in Orlando and the nearby communities that I could afford… although they’re not exactly in the best neighborhoods. (OBT, anyone? Hah.) I started thinking about communities within commuting distance, and ended up checking out Titusville online – and discovered that there’s a good bit of affordable real estate there. Now, I’ve only ever known one person who lived in Titusville, and he has since been arrested for child molestation. He also said the place sucked and was full of rednecks. All and all, it didn’t sound like the most likely of locations. But, I could afford to buy a place there, were I to get a job in the Orlando area.

So, today I decided to drive over there – both to see how long the drive really was (albeit I didn’t do it in rush hour traffic), to see how sucky it really was, and to see if the affordable houses were all in terrible neighborhoods. My thoughts on Titusville can be summed up by saying Titusville: Surprisingly Not Horrible. I expected it to suck, and it didn’t. Yeah, there was a bit of a redneck vibe… but I grew up in north Florida, and (despite my current location) am a legal resident of southeast Georgia. Redneck is relative. The waterfront areas were lovely, the town had some character, and the houses I looked at were in reasonably nice neighborhoods. I’m not sure how I feel about the commute – it was 40 minutes in Sunday afternoon traffic – but it’s doable. Anyway, this is all just silly conjecture at this point, as I have only applied to one job in Orlando so far, but it gave me something to do this afternoon when I should have been grading essays.

Anyhow, here are some shots of the waterfront area in Titusville:

What a shitty day.

Charlie got all discombobulated by the return to Orlando combined with the fact that I'd brought two puppies with me (who were supposed to be delivered to their new homes in the Tampa area on Sunday). She somehow wedged herself in behind the dishwasher and then couldn't figure out how to get out. I have baby gates to keep the dogs from going where they're not supposed to, and had set one up to keep them from bothering me while I lay on the floor attempting to coax the kitty out from behind the dishwasher. Loki, of course, has been climbing baby gates like a pro since the day I brought him home. My mom had even joked that if he wasn't careful, he was going to break a leg. In his hurry to try and get to me (and I feel guilty because he was trying to get to me and I was yelling at him not to climb the gate) he fell... and somehow managed to fracture the hell out of one of his back legs. He spent all day at the vet, had surgery, had a pin installed, and is now in a crate whining pathetically. (I ended up having to unscrew the dishwasher from the counter and haul it out from under the counter in order to free the cat. She is fine.)

I didn't want to man-handle his leg, but you can kind of see the sutures.

Rocky Horror! Halloween! Grammar! The Inhumane Society!

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here, mainly because it was Halloween season - which, in my opinion, is the best time of the year. This year I was able to rock three different costumes, which made me incredibly happy. I do love a good opportunity to dress up.

On Friday, October 25th, a group of us went to go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show film and interactive performance put on by The Rich Weirdoes. 

Security made M. take off his "FBI" jacket, because "someone might think he was a real agent." Um, OK. The show itself was pretty fantastic though. I've seen RHPS put on in smaller venues, but this was definitely the largest and most interactive version I've ever been to.

Saturday one of my classmates threw a kickass Halloween party.

I went as a flapper.

Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet from Clue, if you were wondering.

And then of course, I taught class on Thursday dressed as a Dalek. As you do. I'd say about half of my students knew what I was immediately. The others were like, "What's a Dalek?"

ED-U-CATE!

Thursday I also finished up my fifth and final lesson to my students on teaching English grammar to EFL/ESL students. Yes, we spent five days on grammar. You want someone to talk for six and a half hours (thirteen if you consider that I teach two sections) on English grammar, I am apparently your girl. The PowerPoint by itself isn't quite as great. For one thing, SlideShare has mucked up my formatting, and you can't see my animations. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I do NOT write every word I say on my slides - I hate it when teachers do that. As a result, reading the slides won't give you as much information as sitting through my class would have. However, if you're an EFL/ESL teacher new to teaching grammar, it should give you some useful pointers.

And lastly, due to the combination of some really horrific animal-shelter related news that I read on Facebook and all these people posting about NaNoWriMo, I've become inspired to get back to work on The Inhumane Society. I started by editing the existing 140 pages - you can read the edited first part here - and by finally picking up where I left off. Once you're all caught up, you can read the latest installment of The Inhumane Society here.

Oh, and you know I'm still posting about my summer's adventures over at Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan, right?

In which I see a dead body

My roommate got home around 10pm. As she was pulling in to our road, she noticed an obviously intoxicated (drunk/high/something) individual wandering down the middle of our road. He was so out of it that he didn’t even react to her car. This happens a lot. Unfortunately, our neighborhood is close to a bridge, under which quite a few homeless people live. There’s also a fenced-off area at the end of our road, which is the property of the local electric company; a lot of homeless people live there, too. While I understand that homeless folks must live somewhere, it is definitely disconcerting when people who seem obviously intoxicated or obviously not-quite-right in the head regularly walk through your neighborhood. I have no problem with the non-crazy, sober homeless folks. Anyway, my roommate had basically come inside then gone right back out to her car when our neighbor, who had been outside talking on the phone, said she thought someone had just been hit by a car, but she wasn’t sure and was too afraid to go look. The neighbor called 911, and my roommate came and got me, and we went to check it out. It was the guy my roommate had seen staggering down our road, and he had obviously been run over. It wasn’t the first dead human body I’d seen in real life, but it was definitely the first that hadn’t died of natural causes. We were out there before the cops, before the EMS folks. The guy who hit him, as well as the woman who had been driving in the next lane over and had witnessed the accident, were there, frantically calling for help. The cops arrived less than a minute after we did, and the ambulance pulled up a couple of minutes after that. Apparently the guy had been standing on the edge of the road, and had staggered into the street directly in front of an oncoming truck. The driver had no chance of stopping or swerving. The medics attempted to revive the guy, but with no luck.

Because we essentially live on the corner where this happened, we stuck around. The cops got my roommate’s contact info, in case they needed to verify the way the guy was acting prior to the accident. The main road was closed for the entire block on our side of the road, and no one was allowed in or out of our street (which was inconvenient for some folks who needed to get out to go to work, or who were returning home late). We waited with the driver while he waited to be told if he could go or not, during which time several homeless people came by to find out what was going on, wanting to know what the guy had looked like, and if he was going to make it. White, shaved head, light grey or white shirt. And no, he wasn’t going to make it. 

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.

Family, Birds, and Party Time!

The spring semester has ended, and the countdown is on for Kyrgyzstan! As I write it is 12:30 in the morning on Monday, May 6th. I will be leaving on May 9th. Yeah. That's really, very soon. I've written two posts about my upcoming trip over on my Kyrgyzstan blog (here and here), so please check them out! Meanwhile, with the end of the semester and the upcoming country-leaving, I've had rather a whirlwind of graduation parties, end of semester parties, and last-visits-before-I-leave.

I went up to Georgia for a week to visit my mom. We found a nearly full grown juvenile wren that couldn't fly and was demanding to be fed (and attempting to commit suicide by throwing itself to the nearest cat). We took it in and tried to take care of it, but unfortunately it didn't make it through the night :-(

Mom and wren
On a more positive note, we found an adorable, sweet, lovable stray dog - and we were able to reunite him with his family. Here he is with me:
And here's my mom, having a chicken quesadilla at the best Mexican place in town:
Then it was back to Orlando for two nights of parties. Party #1 was Korean-style karaoke (noraebang/노래방) at an externally sketchy looking joint located down even more sketchy looking Orange Blossom Trail. (I counted at least five definite hookers on my drive home - yay OBT.) Inside this place was actually quite nice, and EXACTLY like any 노래방 back in Korea. They definitely cater to the Korean ex-pat and Korean-American crowd, and the staff were probably wondering how the hell they ended up with a group of obnoxious 미국 사람 (Americans) packed into one of their rooms.


The next night was the Party Train. My friends M, H, and I hit three parties in six hours or something along those lines. The first stop was a graduation party for one of our classmates in the MA TESOL program:

Then it was on to another classmate's end of the semester bash. This isn't the best photo, but Left-Right-Center isn't the most photogenic of games. I think the house might've had it rigged, as the hostess won ;)

And lastly, an end of the semester /slash/ birthday party:


Then Sunday: off to Tampa to visit my dad. Here he is with his second rescued duck: (Duck #1 is now full grown and lives outside. They've had Duck #2 about two weeks.)
And then there's me with the duck - it's super friendly.
My brother just got a brand new drum kit, which he totally rocks.
Three days until I leave the country! I still have some work-related stuff and some research-related stuff to wrap up, but I'm pretty much done :-) I'll post once more before I head out!