cathleen's place: Florida

We really did do it. We really did leave Florida. And we're never going back.

(all the pictures get huge if you click on them)

On Monday the truck showed up, two guys loaded all our stuff and the truck went away. On Tuesday, we finished the house sale, cleaned the house for the new owners, turned in our cable box and made one last stop at the Betty Lane Thrift Store.

We thought that it would take us all day to do that stuff but we breezed through it and hit the road. This is the main road/bridge out of Clearwater -- over to Tampa and the major freeway.

There are 30 pages in our handy little TripTik. On Tuesday we flew through 3 of them.

Our only desire was to drive and drive and drive until we were out of the state.

And that's exactly what we did. I wanted to stop the car and kiss the red Georgia clay. Instead, we quietly left Florida behind.

The moving truck comes tomorrow morning. This is our last night in this house. I actually remember our first night. I hated it. That pink color in the master bedroom was so loud, it kept me up all night.
I may or may not post while we're on the road. I will be taking lots of pictures and I will have the cable for downloading and I will have access to the internets and Kim's laptop, so I'll have to see how I feel. I might like to have a vacation -- from everything, but not from you, gentle reader.

I guess it makes sense that as we're about to leave Florida forever that I would think of things that I like about it. I'm also thinking of reasons to be glad we came here. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that moving to Florida was a good thing, but good things have come out of being here:

We completely and totally removed ourselves from $cientology, not as a result of moving here, but nevertheless, while we were here. And I think it helped being here when the decision was made. This is, after all, the "mecca of the Church of $cientology." That made it much easier to witness the wrongness of this "church."

We learned a great deal about home renovation, building trades, permits (or not), building codes and how to ensure that people doing work for you do it right. We have lots of new skills and we've picked up some really nice tools (yes, we could have acquired them anywhere, but oh well).

We met Stephanie. And, believe me, Stephanie has pretty much saved my life. I won't bore you with the gruesome stories of all the injuries I've had, but suffice it to say, I was in some pain. That pain is gone and I feel better than I have for many years.

We learned to laugh again.

We went to the Kennedy Space Center.

I got to live in another place (like San Diego) that has beautiful flowers all year 'round.

click to see great big version of the picture, you can see every raindrop

I've always been crazy about lizards, I love to watch them run all over the place. They're really fascinating to me. San Diego, California had lots of them. Clearwater, Florida has lots of them. I have it on good authority that Portland, Oregon has none of them. Oh, my heart is breaking.

I can sit in my office (which I will have for four and a half more days) and look out the window and see lizards climbing, jumping, fucking, eating and running. They never bore me. Never. I've been watching them closely the three years we've been here. I can now estimate the age and I can tell the gender. I forgot one of the other fun things to watch: battles! Whew, those guys really go at it. I saw one strapping, little contender lose his tail, wise up and quickly leave.

I love lizards so much, I've started putting them in my house. You know that old lady with the collection of goose-themed decorations, i.e., salt & pepper shakers, napkin holder, cookie jar, etc.? Well, I'm turning into a slightly (only very slightly) hipper version of her.

Maybe I could find a lizard-themed bedroom suite.

A recurring theme on this blog has been the renovation of this house. When we made the bubble-headed decision to move here, we thought we'd better have a house to move to. So we flew in and spent one day looking at property, picked two houses, made offers that were accepted and went back to San Diego. We did the rest of the process remotely. Silly us. We trusted the real estate agent in Clearwater, a $cientologist who was recommended by another $cientologist.

We knew that the house had some problems. We knew we were going to be doing some "remodeling." That was okay, we'd done plenty of that in San Diego. The inspection that was done didn't cause us any particular alarm, so we thought, "It's fine, just some paint, a little tile, no sweat." Well, we'd been in too much of a hurry and hadn't registered a lot of what was wrong. For instance, I'd completely forgotten that three rooms had been coated with thick plaster that had been "pulled" with a wet sponge, so the end result looked surprisingly like meringue (think of a lemon meringue pie, just like that). All that plaster had to be scraped off and the walls resurfaced. That was a lot of work.

We knew the colors weren't quite right and that we'd be painting, but we'd forgotten how weird the house really was -- low ceilings, odd spaces with no right angles, dark rooms, bizarre solutions to add-ons. So when we arrived and started living in this house, we were worried, to say the least. I can't possibly tell you or show you all that we did -- it's simply too much. But here are a few photos that will give you an idea:

So this is the house that we made beautiful and aesthetic and easy to care for and easy to live in. And this is the house we finally sold so that we can get out of Florida and go live in Oregon, where sane, intelligent, good people live (I know that all my friends who don't live in Oregon at the present, will certainly move there as soon as they possibly can).

Next stop, Portland. ROOOOOAD TRIIIIIIIIP!

Well, we're coming to the end of Florida stories. It won't be long and there'll be no more from this part of the country. But hey! You're going to love Oregon stories.

There are so many things that seem peculiar to me about Clearwater. High on the list is the Department of Sanitation and that would include the "recycling" program, of course. Hah! What recycling? Ok, yes, we're given yellow bins to put out paper, aluminum, tin and that's about it. No cardboard, no glass. Some plastic. Oh well. And then there's what we started calling Tuesday pick-up. That's when you can put anything out on the curb and the city will cart it away. No kidding. It's a fantastic service. Needless to say, with two houses needing major renovations, we took full advantage.

But today we're talking about mailboxes. Some of the Florida stories could have taken place anywhere. But I never saw mailboxes like this anyplace else. Certainly not in San Diego. They're almost cute.

There are fish mailboxes. They look like a kit you put together and then paint.

Other aquatic creatures.

A couple of hand-painted beach scenes and a few with just ordinary contact paper stuck on.

Some appropriately tropical birds.

And finally, a fishing lure, a school bus and...a yellow submarine.

We moved into a house, here in Florida, that badly needed renovation. We gutted almost every room in this house and started over, ceiling to floor. We did an incredible job and now this house is gorgeous. As I've said many times before (and of course you're really tired of hearing it), we moved here to do bigger and better things in our "church." So, naturally, our first contacts were other $cientologists. Kim and I needed massive numbers of recommendations for people to help us with contracting, electrical, masonry, plumbing, etc. We had so much work to do and we only trusted $cnists to tell us who to hire. Interestingly, some of the recommendations were for non-$cientologist tradesmen. Okay. We'll take a chance. We'll try them.

To be perfectly honest, some of the worst work was done by $cnists and some of the most irresponsible tradesmen were $cnists. One electrician (who was a $cnist) started the work we contracted for and then disappeared without a trace for about 2 months. Then he just showed up one day and asked if we were too mad at him to have him finish the work. Right. That's a good way to do business.

Of all the people we met through this process, the most marvelous one is Eddie. He is a first-rate plumber and a glorious human being. He's in his 70s and can still do the work of a much younger man. Yes, he is slowing down now. We called him this week to take care of a few things that came up on the inspection and he said he couldn't crawl under the house. He also wasn't going to let me pay him for the two things he did fix because of our long term relationship. Eddie told us a few stories of his dealings with $cnists -- they weren't happy stories.

I cried when Eddie left the other day. I know I won't see him again. Even though we weren't "friends," I feel a loss and I will miss him.

To answer that question, I must explain how we came to be here in the first place. Since Clearwater, Florida is definitely not a place we would have chosen to live, what in the world would make us move here? Well, brainwashing is the simplest answer. We were "good" members of $cientology and we did what was expected of us -- and we didn't think about it. We sold our house in San Diego and moved to Florida. We didn't like it much at first and we hoped that it would get better. It didn't.

Here's what we didn't like:
The heat.
The humidity.
The bugs.
The mold and mildew.
The humidity combined with the heat.
The rats.
The really stupid people.
The ugliness of the town of Clearwater.
The deadness of the town.
The humidity.
There are no freeways.
There's nothing pretty or beautiful to look at (okay, there must be something.)

Once we woke up and knew that we were not $cientologists any more, all that was left was selling this house and getting out of here. The waking up was in the summer of 2006; the selling of the house was last week.

So, of course, one of the reasons we want to leave is that Clearwater is buried in $cientology. The biggest of their organizations is here and attracts people from all over the world. They've bought and renovated several of the historical buildings in Clearwater. And of course, there's the Super Power Building, which they've been working on for ten years. They hit up $cientologists for the money to build this monstrosity to the tune of $142 million. The building is not finished and the thing that it was built for isn't finished and the city of Clearwater has been fining them for being so overdue on finishing, but they don't care. They can't finish the building because they have nothing and no one to put in it.

There are also many businesses owned by $cientologists -- I worked for one until we were declared "suppressive persons," at which time I was fired. Our tax preparer was a $cieno and now she won't do our taxes. The contractor who did all the major projects on our house is a $cieno. I ran into him at the market, he wouldn't look at me. The $cieno friends we had likewise won't acknowledge that they know us. They are very weird.

$cientology casts a pall over this part of Florida. Clearwater is a dying town and many long-time residents believe it is directly because of the presence of $cientology. You can look up all the awful things this "church" did when they arrived here. Just Google Gabe Cazeres.

But the really good news is $cientology itself is dying. There have been outspoken critics for years and they've chipped away at the cult while being targets of harassment and worse. Now comes Anonymous. I'm so happy they're here. They're like the calvary arriving in the old westerns. They've put together an excellent video. It's only 14 minutes but will show you why they're involved. We didn't join in the protest on February 10, but we will tomorrow.

We haven't enjoyed living in Florida, and it's possible that we came here just so we could wake up from our nightmare. We are so happy to be out of the cult of greed and power. We are so happy to be moving on.

But they're all in cages. It's very hard to see beautiful wild animals cooped up. It's so wrong, every bit of me cries for them and the injustice that brought them to this point.

I have always admired people who work for important causes like Big Cat Rescue (BCR), who give selflessly of their time and energy to help. The woman standing in front of the cage is Jennifer, the volunteer staff member who gave us our tour. She knows her stuff and she made our visit really wonderful.

This is Shaquille, a male leopard who has been at BCR for 12 years. He came from a Vegas circus act where he was brutally beaten. His partner in the act didn't survive the cruel treatment.

Caracels can perform unbelievable acrobatics -- jumping high enough to swat birds out of the sky. There are two at BCR, both born there.

There are several leopards at BCR: the black Shaquille, some spotted leopards and an amazing snow leopard (we'll get to her, don't worry). They've been rescued from breeders, the entertainment industry or private owners who figured out that they weren't pets.

"At Big Cat Rescue our philosophy is that NO wild animal should be bred for life in a cage." Bred for life in a cage is how Hercules started life, but because there was a "surplus" of his blood line, he had to be taken out of the mix of animals used for breeding. He now spends his days at BCR with Cloe, a female who was purchased as a gift and then abandoned.

Here ends part one of our adventures at Big Cat Rescue. More later.