{"id":12,"date":"2003-12-16T23:41:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-17T04:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nachzen.net:8080\/?p=12"},"modified":"2003-12-16T23:41:00","modified_gmt":"2003-12-17T04:41:00","slug":"stuck-in-florida-with-the-mobile-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Stuck in Florida with the Mobile Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been whiling away the days here in Florida.  Since my uncle wanted some help with his office computers and offered to pay me nicely, I agreed to come work for two weeks.  I took some time getting down here, so I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s actually going to be two weeks.  Right now I&#8217;m planning on heading back to Mobile on Sunday morning.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t like Florida.<\/p>\n<p>I came out of the office my first day of working to discover that the skies had opened and deposited large amounts of water in my car.  It was a beautiful day when I walked in, and the large amounts of water were the only thing around to indicate that it had rained.  No clouds when I looked up.  That&#8217;s annoying.<\/p>\n<p>My car took all of the next day to dry out.<\/p>\n<p>It wouldn&#8217;t have been so bad if I hadn&#8217;t been woken up two mornings later by Mom saying, &#8220;Berck&#8230; Berck&#8230;  Thought you might like to know it&#8217;s raining.&#8221; Sure enough, it was raining.  Car was soaked again.  This time it took two days to dry out.<\/p>\n<p>This morning when I got to the office, I thought, &#8220;You know, I should probably put my top up.  But it&#8217;s a beautiful day, there&#8217;s NO CLOUDS AT ALL.  Surely it won&#8217;t rain.&#8221;  Fortunately when I came outside an hour later and noticed that it looked like a storm was on the way.  Sure enough it started raining shortly thereafter, but fortunately the top was up this time.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gotten too used to living in Dallas.  You can tell when you go to bed if it&#8217;s going to rain.  It doesn&#8217;t rain much.<\/p>\n<p>Now my car is smelling mildewey.  I need to find some Febreeze.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m excited about the wedding.  If she goes and plants potatoes without me I&#8217;m not going to be happy.  It&#8217;s not that <i>I<\/i> wanted the wedding so much as <i>they<\/i> wanted the wedding.  It&#8217;s true, I wanted a wedding, but mostly I felt that it was important for us to respect our families enough to give them one.  Or let them have one.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been much easier for me.  I think I did a pretty good job from the outset of letting everybody know the basics of what I wanted and explaining that the details just aren&#8217;t important to me.  I really don&#8217;t care what colour the napkins are.  For the most part, everyone&#8217;s been good about not asking me.  Whether they&#8217;re uninterested in what I have to say, or they realize that I&#8217;m uninterested in details is unclear.  The end result is that I haven&#8217;t had to worry about things and that&#8217;s good.  The other result is that Joanna is feeling stressed and pressured which is not-good.  I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s a lot I can do about that, especially since I really do think that much of the things she&#8217;s got to do are in fact things that a bride needs to do.  But she&#8217;s also taken on all sorts of tasks she really didn&#8217;t need to: like baking her own wedding cake.  She could probably leave more of the decisions up to her mother, thought I think we&#8217;ll probably both be happier with the end product if she provides input.<\/p>\n<p>At first I thought she simply didn&#8217;t care about the details and was nearly as willing as I am to let others make decisions.  And then I heard her tell her mother in response to a question about punch, &#8220;I think punch fountains are stupid.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I should back up.  Joanna and her mother both asked me on multiple occasions what  thought of a punch that was being served for one of Joanna&#8217;s showers.  &#8220;I don&#8217;t like punch,&#8221; I tell them.  &#8220;Yes, but for punch, does it taste good or bad?&#8221;  &#8220;It tastes like punch!&#8221;  Later that day Joanna&#8217;s mother was outlaying the various options for punch serving.  It went on and on.  After she was done, I said, &#8220;Uhm, can&#8217;t there just be a bowl and people help themselves?  Or better yet, do we have to have punch at all?&#8221;  This earned me a look.  Shortly after which Joanna expressed her thoughts on punch fountains, which I still don&#8217;t understand at all.<\/p>\n<p>But for the most part, I&#8217;ve been left blissfully ignorant of the preparations.  Guests have from time to time asked me questions about what&#8217;s going to happen.  I&#8217;m forced to shrug and tell them to ask someone else.   I&#8217;ve outlined what I want, roughly, and I&#8217;m convinced that Cliff is going to do an acceptable job with the important part.  I plan on showing up.  I sure hope I&#8217;m not the only one:)<\/p>\n<p>My mother is apparently making some sort of a vest to go with my outfit.  This means she has to tell me every day about how she has to measure me.  I&#8217;m not sure why she doesn&#8217;t just measure me.  Or why if I can buy something that fits off the shelf in a store that I can&#8217;t give her my size?  I&#8217;m thinking she&#8217;ll probably show up at the beach with a tape measure and tell me she&#8217;s got to measure me.  I&#8217;m a bit more interested in getting her to sew the buttons back on my BDUs, but she says she has to, &#8220;go to the button store,&#8221; first.  But she buys me Harp.  Harp goes a long.<\/p>\n<p>See, people always say that I should know how to sew on a button.  It&#8217;s not that I <i>can&#8217;t<\/i>, it&#8217;s just that whenever I do it, the button is firmly implanted in the fabric, and this makes it hard to use.  Or it falls off.  And when I&#8217;ve got two wonderful women in my life who can sew buttons on for me, why should I learn?  And for some odd reason, Jonah seems to like mending.  I wonder if it&#8217;s related to the fact that I like mowing the lawn.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d hoped Joanna would  be able to visit me for a few days here in Florida, but her mother vetoed this idea saying that Joanna still had to pick out napkins.  When confronted with the silliness of this statement, she responded, &#8220;There&#8217;s much more.&#8221;  I don&#8217;t doubt that there is.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m probably going to be leaving on Sunday morning.  And boy am I ready to leave.  I miss Joanna, even though it&#8217;s only been a week, and Florida is taking its usual toll.  I deal with things like Florida much, much better when Joanna&#8217;s around.  I&#8217;m not sure why that is.  It&#8217;s a good thing she&#8217;ll be around a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been whiling away the days here in Florida. Since my uncle wanted some help with his office computers and offered to pay me nicely, I agreed to come work for two weeks. I took some time getting down here, so I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s actually going to be two weeks. Right now I&#8217;m planning&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonclassified-nonsense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}