After 3 years, I was reminded by my long (LONG) time friend that I haven't made any blog entries in forever.  She's right.  So, Kathy, dearest bluebird, this is for you!

Where to begin?  Since 2022, we've been hanging  here in Central Florida.  Tim has been driving a bus for Disney for over 3 years and enjoying it (for the most part..........the entitled guests are a definite negative here, but fortunately, they are far and few between).  He periodically comes home with little trinkets, notes, or candy from appreciative guests on his bus.  He especially loves it when the little kiddos step onto his bus, filled with enthusiasm, and bursting at the seams to tell him about their day with Mickey and Friends.

Speaking of Central Florida, it's officially become a nightmare.  The pandemic created a scenario where people who were able to work from home decided to move to Florida to enjoy year-round fresh air and sunshine.  Existing properties were snatched up, asking prices skyrocketed, and developers descended on vacant parcels of land to tear down orange groves, wooded areas, grasslands, and any other piece of property they could pillage and destroy.  Build baby, build!  The amount of construction that has taken place in the last 3+ years is heart breaking.  And, much like the debacle of the sub-prime loan crash in 2008, we are absolutely heading down that same road here.  The building continues unabated, completed construction has seen asking prices slashed, to no avail, as nothing is selling.  Within a 1-mile radius of our development, there are at least 5 "luxury" apartment complexes built or under construction.  The completed complexes might have 1/4 to 1/3 of the units occupied.  This part of Florida, home to Disney, Universal, and Sea World, not to mention untold other businesses highly dependent on tourism, has very little in the way of affordable housing for employees.  They are forced to live an hour or more, one way, from their place of employment.  But, none of the new construction is geared toward providing them with a home they can actually afford.  (Oh, and I won't even go into how tourism has tanked here.)

And, let's talk about the traffic, because it's absolutely insane.  Having lived in so many different places over the decades, we've grown accustomed to the local municipalities and zoning boards requiring traffic and environmental impact studies before approving building permits.  While there might be some cursory environmental studies, not so for the traffic.  Build baby, build.  If there are traffic issues (like high rates of accidents/fatalities) due to lack of traffic patterns being analyzed, projected, etc., the powers that be are content to kick the can down the road (LITERALLY!)  and let the state/city/town deal with cleaning up the mess. Eventually. The traffic tie ups due to accidents create hazardous situations on their own, as there are no alternate routes/bypass roads to detour the traffic jam.  Just one highway in a particular direction (i.e., North-South) with no way to move.  Drivers are stuck, sometimes for 3 or more hours.  All this happened in a short span of 3 years.  

Needless to say, the bloom is off the rose, so to speak.  While we love our little house, and our neighbors/friends here in our development are wonderful, we are looking to get out of Florida as soon as conceivably possible, most likely looking at the mid-Atlantic states.  Yes, even New Jersey is on the plate (yea, yea, I know.  Never say never!).  Ideally, we would have liked to have been out of here this fall.  The housing market, being as over-saturated with homes for sale as previously mentioned, is not conducive to that plan.  (Currently, we have 39 homes for sale in our development of 500 homes.  And nothing is moving.)  We're hoping, nay praying, that 2026 will be the year things turn around.  However, the more I read about the real estate market collapse throughout Florida, I'm not overly optimistic that we can plan on that either.  It's kind of demoralizing, if I'm honest.  With all the moves we've made over the years, we always made a plan, executed said plan in a timely fashion (with the exception of selling our house in Etna, NH back in 1996), and settled into a new home and life.  With both of us now in our 70s, the reality that we're living on borrowed time has become glaringly obvious.  When you live in a 55+ community and regularly see neighbors leaving for good either to move into assisted living, or worse, in an ambulance, that definitely is a reality check.  So, to whoever reads this, please offer up a prayer, positive thoughts to the Universe, or just plain good juju that we'll be able to leave here next year to enjoy whatever remaining years we will be blessed with in good health and abundant happiness.

To whoever does read this (since I have abandoned Facebook for good, so I've lost my outlet to post the link), thanks for your interest in my crazy rantings.  Life, no matter what, is still good to us, and we are blessed to be able to still enjoy it in relatively good health.  Turning 70 was definitely a milestone for me, but I'd be lying if I said it bothered me to be this old.  I'm ok with it, embrace it, and am grateful for the gift of being alive.  I outlived my father, so I'm ok with getting old.  I'm much happier picking daisies than pushing them up from 6 feet under!

Peace out!

Karen