Weekend Vacation
Apple and I just returned from our weekend vacation, which we spent at Disney’s Vero Beach Resort in Vero Beach, FL. Actually, we’re still there as I write this — it’s Saturday night, our final evening here, and I felt like writing an update to post when I get home. It’s mostly been a pretty smooth trip, and we’ve done all the stuff we wanted to — gone shopping; seen a movie; walked on the beach; ate dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant here on the east coast.
We left home on Friday and stopped at the Sawgrass Mills Mall in Sunrise, FL. This is supposedly the biggest outlet mall in the state (and given the sprawling size of the place, I’m not going to argue), absolutely chock full of stores. In some cases, there are actually more than one of certain stores — FYE, for example. There’s a small FYE at one end of the mall, and at the other end, another, much bigger FYE. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because they figure the mall is so huge, some people aren’t going to make it from one end to the other. They might collapse somewhere in between like a dehydrated traveler lost in some desert.
Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t able to find anything she liked at the mall’s various stores. The fact that these were mainly all outlet stores probably contributed to the selection. I picked up the fourth season boxed set of Knight Rider DVDs as well as a book to read. I also spent a fair amount of time dodging really pushy folks who would chase after you with surveys or some such thing, trying to relieve you of your money, time or both.
We had dinner at the Grand Lux Café. The last time we were there, this restaurant had been a Cheesecake Factory. I’m not actually fond of the Cheesecake Factory…they built a new one in our hometown a year or so ago, and we’ve been there three or four times, but not once have we really enjoyed it. I doubt we’ll go back. The Grand Lux Café is owned by the same company, and its food, in my opinion, couldn’t be more dissimilar to the Cheesecake Factory. And I mean that in a good way. The meal was excellent. After dinner I ordered a piece of key lime pie for the road, and the thing was so huge I’m only just finishing it off tonight.
Blown Away…or Just Out of Proportion?
Well, the first tropical depression of the season has formed just southwest of Florida, and of course the media has siezed upon this event as A) the first sign of the apocalypse, B) an excuse to once again bring up the global warming debate, C) the perfect reason to show us pictures of New Orleans being laid waste for the umpteenth time. And we Florida residents just roll our eyes at the gibbering of the uninformed masses at CNN and MSNBC who think they’re all regular Max Mayfields.
In reality, this TD is expected to become nothing more serious than a tropical storm, bringing moderate winds and heavy rains to an area of the country that is badly in need of the latter (if not the former). You’d never know that from listening to the weather wonks on your typical national news channel, though, whose every sentence roils with thick peals of “I told you so” and “Look, it’s happening again” as they try, in vain, to report the facts without spreading on thick gobs of their own uninformed taint. Seriously, have you ever seen Wolf Blitzer interview a National Hurricane Center spokesman? I think kindergarteners could come up with more informed questions just from reading the NHC’s website.
Frankly, the typical hooting and hollering of the know-nothing talking heads is the last thing I need in my life right now. With my typical day looking something like “work, eat, work, sleep, work” for the last several months and for the forseeable future, plus the usual chores and chasing people around on the phone to try to get things done, the absolute, proof-positive, totally last thing I want to hear is the media telling us all to run for the hills because there’s a storm cloud in the sky. I absolutely cannot take any more of the mainstream’s media’s rush to instill fear and loathing in all of us because they say that’s how we should feel.
Anyway, I shouldn’t even be here wasting the ten minutes it’s taken me to write this. I have two projects for two different clients to work on during my limited hours today. One of whom wants weekly updates from me, so I better have something done to tell the guy about come Monday, because I didn’t last weekend since my day job boss gave me an emergency project that filled up my Saturday. The other client is running short on his budget (thanks to his inability to give me complete instructions up front, I spent additional hours and am therefore charging him more than his original expectations, whatever those were because he didn’t communicate them, either) and wants me to implement revision #4 in as little time as possible, with a prototype available for review by Monday.
Have a great weekend, folks.
How the HOA Stole Christmas
Decorated their houses with holiday favors.
But woe to all of these unsuspecting old fools
For their homeowners’ assessments were about to come due.
In the mail comes an invoice, one each quarter exactly
For five hundred and change, it says matter-of-factly.
But this month the neighbors were shocked to discover
A bill of a size that would slay your dear mother.
“We regret to inform you” was not to be found!
(These HOA goons love to throw weight around.)
With nary a “why,” in fact no reason at all,
they want nearly a thousand, and that is not all!
“A necessary change, though undesirable it be
Requires us to collect, yes, down to each last penny
A full 60 percent of your 2006 dues
In the first bloody quarter. Daddy needs some new shoes!”
Oh the nerve! Oh the gall! Said this resident,
Who, after reading the letter, felt particularly spent.
I daresay the irony was not lost on me
Of the holiday timing to this humongous new fee.
As a Christmas surprise, it’s about as rude as it gets.
Though it won’t make a difference, I’ll submit my comments.
While festive decor and “Merry Christmas!” signs hang,
All you’ll hear is your wallet snapping shut with a bang!
So it just goes to show how much control you surrender
When your HOA Kommandants go off on a bender.
“Merry Christmas kind residents, pay your bills you should do.
Oh – and please move your pickup truck out of our view.”
The preceding poem (with apologies to the late Dr. Seuss) was brought to you by our homeowner’s association, who today saw it fit to stick all of us poor saps with a bill, due on January 1st, for almost one thousand dollars — nearly twice as much as our usual quarterly assessment — for reasons unstated, part of an apparently permanent new billing scheme wherein 60% of the yearly dues are assessed during the Christmas season each year. Kudos to more brilliant leadership from the committee in charge of total senility.
Watching From Afar
So here we are, in Detroit, watching on TV as Greta van Susteren stands and delivers from Naples, FL. She is using her trademark maundering style to tell us all that Florida is about to get “punished” and asking weirdly paranoid questions of her weather expert guests about how long she has until Naples becomes ground zero. I noticed this same trait amongst all of the TV reporters today. In the last 24 hours, all of the “embedded” reporters, delivering the news of Hurricane Wilma from the thick of it (Naples, Bonita Springs, Key West, etc.), have begun sounding just like the average Florida resident. When’s it going to hit? How strong will it be? How long do we have before the power goes out down here? The impression you get is that these guys don’t really want to be there, and now they’re starting to regret their assignments.
Us? We’re not regretting our self-imposed assignment, which was to get the hell out of dodge. I have once again become reacquainted with the misery of allergies, through no fault of the rather nice Residence Inn that Apple and I are bunking at. Merely stepping through the door of my parents’ house has yielded the usual nasal drip and tightness in the chest, growing more annoying as the exposure lengthens, to the point where you want to just give up and go to bed. I’m going to try not to spend too much time over there if I can avoid it.
All day Thursday, we put up hurricane shutters. Our day began early, and we immediately went to work — me with my work gloves on, and Apple with the cordless drill in hand. Thanks to her help, we finished both our house and my parents’ vacation home by 4:30 in the afternoon, just in time to pick up some Chinese takeout for dinner. I spent the evening packing items for our trip and making sure all the cars were fueled up, then I took the hard drives out of my computer workstation, sealed them in Ziploc bags and placed them on high shelves in the closet. You never can tell.
We had a pretty uneventful trip up to Orlando on Friday. We left the house at about 5:30 a.m., in case of major traffic snarls due to other evacuees leaving the area. We also left I-75 at our earliest opportunity, taking 80 eastward to 27, and 27 northward to the I-4 corridor just outside of Orlando. It took a little longer than the interstate route, and was a trip peppered by fog, weird cult-like Christian trailer parks and completely lightless roads that created an overwhelming desire to just pull over and go to sleep. Finally, though, we arrived in Orlando, right around 9:30 in the morning. We promptly parked at a McDonald’s and went to sleep in the car for an hour, woken up by the heat of the oncoming afternoon.
On our way up International Drive, one of the more crass tourist districts of O-Town, we spotted a couple of other cars from our own Collier County, probably fellow escapees of the much-despised hurricane. Having more than an hour to kill before our favorite Thai restaurant opened for lunch, we decided to stop by McNamara Pontiac, the very same dealership where I placed my order — by phone — for a 2006 GTO.
McNamara is one of the oldest and most successful Pontiac dealers in Florida, and is recognized for selling more GTOs than any other dealer in the nation. The dealership’s owner, John McNamara, owns a variety of classic and rare Ponchos, including an ’89 Turbo Trans Am pace car and a fourth-gen Firehawk. As soon as we walked in the door — after taking a moment to ogle the beautiful black (and not for sale) Solstice which stood parked outside — we were greeted by none other than the very salesman I’d dealt with during my GTO order, a man named Roger. He remembered me immediately, right down to every last option I’d specified on my order. (“Oh, yeah — black, red interior, 6-speed, 18-inch wheels, right?”)
Escape From Naples
…Not starring Kurt Russell. Well, rather than risk unnecessary damage to ourselves, we’ve decided that we are going to leave the area before Wilma shows up. We were thinking about taking a little week-long trip to Michigan this fall anyway, so we decided to just turn this whole damn thing into a vacation. Might as well have some fun if you’re gonna go somewhere, eh?
All of the flights out of our local airport were gone by the time I decided to buy plane tickets as a contingency plan. In fact, I had to book tickets out of Orlando instead, which means we’ll have to drive 250 miles up to O-Town before we can leave. The flight takes off from there around 6:40 p.m. on Friday, and we’re taking our two carry-on size suitcases in the hopes that we won’t have to check any bags. The trip between here and Orlando is normally an approximately 3-hour affair, but who knows what the condition of the roads will be. So we’re leaving early Friday morning — like way early, at 5 a.m. Hopefully that’ll get us out early enough to avoid the real headaches, when people wake up, have their morning coffee and decide they’re gonna bolt. Even if not, it gives us plenty of time to get where we’re going.
Finding gasoline this evening took a little doing. The town center fuel pumps were bone dry. So was the nearest Mobil station. I headed down to Pine Ridge to check out the RaceTrac station, a place which I never shop at, but it’s the biggest gas station in town with a ridiculous amount of pumps, so I figured they’d have fuel. They did. There was an FHP officer with a black Camaro Z28 sitting there, just to make sure nobody got into fisticuffs over gasoline supplies or anything ridiculous like that. Took a few swipes for the credit card to go through because the network was overloaded. Finally got the Mazda filled up with regular unleaded. I mean really filled up. It’s got a big tank, and gets decent mileage, so it should be good for quite a while at highway speeds.
Lastly, I e-mailed my boss. We’re kinda in crunch time at work, so I was wondering how he’d take the news that I was planning to book. I sweetened it up by relaying the (true) story that I was leaving partly because I wanted to be sure I was stationed somewhere with electricity and Internet access, because my work requires both services and we can’t afford to deviate from our schedule. Not only was my boss accomodating, he himself was taking his wife and jetting out on a plane from Miami tomorrow. They couldn’t find any flights to anywhere they wanted to go in the continental U.S., so one of our other co-workers, who is from the Dominican Republic, suggested they take a vacation to his country — and that’s what they did. Funny thing is, my boss didn’t even know there was a hurricane coming until this morning. His colleague from the Kansas office had to tell him that the mayor of Naples was on CNN!
The really cool part is, my boss said if I wanted to make my trip up north a vacation too, to go ahead and not worry about it. He said that’s what he and his wife are doing — in fact, he wasn’t even sure he would have Internet access or cell service down there — but that he didn’t care, and that in his opinion we were in good shape with the progress of our work. I’m not gonna blow off working the whole week I’m up north, but it’s good to know I won’t have to work the whole time through, and that I can chill out.
So it’s almost 1 a.m., and we’re packing up our stuff to take along on the trip. This includes homeowner’s documents, insurance papers, car titles, and other irreplaceables. It also includes the notebook computer, DVD-ROMs of my work stuff and software, cell phone charger, some books to read and the usual clothes and stuff. Tomorrow I’m gonna have my hands full with installing the damnable hurricane shutters on two houses, so there’s no time for screwing around — especially if we’re gonna get up around 4 a.m. on Friday morning. The next 24-48 hours are gonna be real interesting.
If traffic doesn’t suck donkey balls and we actually get to Orlando around 9 a.m. or something, that’ll give us a heck of a lot of spare time. I figure we’ll have lunch at our favorite Thai place on I-Drive, and then if time permits, maybe I’ll drop in over at McNamara Pontiac just off I-4 on Colonial and see about maybe taking a Goat for a little drive around town, just for shits and giggles. After all, I put a deposit down on an ’06 at their dealer, Nantana’s never ridden in one, and I already drove all the GTOs at the local dealers and they know I ain’t gonna buy one from them. 
And even if Hurricane Wilma misses Naples (or the state of Florida) entirely, the fact that we’re turning this little jaunt into a vacation will mean that at least we won’t feel stupid, like we did that time last year when we flew into Chicago, dragged my parents all the way out there to pick us up, and then the damn hurricane missed SWFL. We went home the next day. Bastages.
Anyway, guess that’s it for tonight. Maybe I’ll post tomorrow. But I’ll probably be too dead tired.
Hurricane Charley
Wow. I’ve just been through a hurricane!
Thankfully, we live far enough southward on the Gulf Coast of Florida to have been spared major damage from Hurricane Charley as it roared overhead. We actually made out really well compared to the city just 40 minutes north of us. And just a bit beyond that, in Punta Gorda, there’s total devastation. Homes destroyed, people killed. We’re talking about a Hurricane Andrew-style aftermath here. (Andrew was the infamous Category 5 storm that cut through the state in 1992, killing dozens and destroying many billions of dollars worth of property.)
This whole thing came up incredibly fast, didn’t even look like it was going to severely impact Florida until two days before, and left no one with any clue it was going to hit Punta Gorda until about three hours before the fact. Originally, Charley was forecast to make landfall in Tampa, but it didn’t happen. Instead, it veered east and took out southwest Florida directly. Tampa felt next to nothing.
