NEW FLORIDA RESIDENT BLOG

Boom!

Welcome to Paradise. I remember being in college and thinking I had to come up with a plan to to live somewhere warm and tropical or, subtropical.  My friend Andy thought that thanks to our Army scholarships we could probably tour Nicaragua for free and each find a nice place there that would be much better than the Northeastern part of the United States. Turns out it took me more than 10 years to move to Sarasota and to be honest I have no idea what ever became of Andy - I hope he made it out of New England though.  That's the funny part of getting older, new things come along, even if you are not planning on them and sometimes they are lots of fun. As I write this our son is coming back from his first day of preschool and I wonder what adventures await him in life.  I pray they are exciting and also, close to where his mother and I live.  I also hope he doesn't spend his college days plotting a move outside of Florida, mostly because we would follow him and I love it ri

Welcome to Paradise. Where I grew up the tide was extremely predictable, the six foot tides came and went with moon rotations and every first grader that lived anywhere near the beach could tell you when the tide was going to be high.  At least that was the case by the beach I grew up by because swimming was bad at low tide so we only wanted to go to the beach when it was high tide. Then I moved to the West Coast of Florida and realized that the tide is measured in inches and sometimes there is only one tide per day.  I was also confused by the sideways street lights and told a friend of mine that I thought the water rotated the opposite direction in the toilet bowl when flushed.  The last observation is apparently incorrect but, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed at the time. Things on the East Coast of Florida are more like New England in terms of tides and street lights and there are a bunch of New Yorkers and Bostonians there because, Interstate 95 is on the Eastern side of Flor