It has already been ten months since we loaded up all of our junk (including the ten boxes of christmas decorations) and road-tripped down here to Clearwater. I think we have adjusted fairly well coming from a place like Ann Arbor. We still don't think that the Tampa Bay area is the place we would like to spend the rest of our lives, but we are learning to make the mos
t of our time here. We both have the weekends off and try to get out as much as we can to see the sites. It's been a while since we've updated so I'll just post some quick stories on some happenings/places we've been and try to update a little more frequently from now on.
My New Job
I don't think I've mentioned it on the blog yet, but I now have a new part time job as an exercise physiologist at two pulmonary rehab facilities owned by BayCare. I'm still working at the gym, but my hours are now split between traveling down to St. Pete for the wellness center and up to Palm Harbor or Downtown Clearwater for to work at the rehabilitation centers. I enjoy not being in the same place all the time and the relatively unstressful environment at the rehab centers. Here is the view from the parking lot at the rehab center in Clearwater. Doesn't really do it justice, but it's an amazing view in person.
Due to an error with the tenants living in the apartment that we signed for; we ended up getting a free upgrade to an 854 square foot, one bedroom place for the same rate. Here is the floorplan of the new place.
Just to give you an idea of the awesomeness of the area we currently live in. During the past two weeks we have had a someone who did a drive by shooting speed through our neighborhood and crash his car just north of us, leading the police on a massive man hunt. A women was killed one Saturday night in front of our apartment when the scooter she was riding was struck by a car. A few days later our downstairs neighbor AKA DJ Ginger Thug (He has red hair, likes to play his music too loudly and is also quite the thug) had his apartment robbed. I actually saw the guy going into his apartment but didn't really think anything of it since there are usually a few shady people hanging around from time to time because of him.
I was walking down our back stairway and this stocky black male with a shaved head, ran around the corner of the building and straight into the neighbors apartment. I even said hello to him. We found out later that the downstairs neighbor had lost his key and had been leaving his door unlocked. Interestingly, the guy who robbed him didn't check any of the other apartments, he ran around the corner and straight into the neighbors place as if he knew that the door was going to be unlocked. I'm almost positive that it was his drug dealer since the other neighbor had said that people were knocking on his door asking him to keep an eye on DJ Ginger Thug since he owed them money and we saw him buying drugs in the back parking lot before. Thug Life!
We also found out that our current apartment is infested with termites. We had been seeing these little flying ants all over the window sills and I just thought the recent change in weather had brought out the ant swarms. Our windows have small gaps that bugs can easily get into so although annoyed, I thought that they would most likely be gone in a few days and sucked them up with the vacuum only to keep finding more the next day. After a few days we had a note posted on our door that said our apartment complex had termites and I made the connection after googling images of termites and matching them to the flying "ants". The bug people came and did something to our apartment, not quite sure what, but we still seem to have these little wings scattered all over the place and will occasionally see a few termites banging on our curtains. The nerve! Needless to say, our move date of June 25th can't come soon enough.