How to live a life

We just got back from a trip south. We went to Tampa to pick up Karwen's new braces. She had totally outgrown the old ones (the ones with butterflies). We were so excited. She picked ones that have kitty cats (so now we have kitty-cat shoes). They are taking a bit more to get used to which is a bit of a bummer. I think this might be something that we will have to get used to - new things require a bit of adjustment. She is a trooper though and there are definitely some things that will be better this time around.

After Tampa, we went south to see our good friends the O'Briens who moved to Naples a while ago. As we went further south and it got steadily warmer, Keely and I talked a lot about the many, many ways there are to live a life. Naples is an incredibly different way of living than we grew up knowing about. Most of what you see is very new, very expensive, and designed primarily for people who live half the year there and the other half in the north. We saw a car dealership with 14 DeLoreans and more BMW's than we could count.

For the most part, people were quite friendly although it is good to remember that what is polite changes a lot depending on the area of the country! My Texas background felt that people tended to be pretty rude in general. But, it is an interesting place to ponder living in. It is warm, there are so many, many beaches nearby. You can grow almost anything (except apples I suppose). So we talked about how we would do it. It would change my work a lot. Then Kriste also has been struggling finding as supportive a homeschool group as we have in Tally. Could we afford to do all the fun things? Probably not. So what about Tampa? It is interesting. Warmer. Bigger. Some cool parts of town. Maybe we should look even further south and move to Miami? Go back to the mountains? Texas?

As we drove home it was interesting to think about how much life changes. Keely and I have lived in Texas, Montana, New Orleans, and Florida. I could see being back in all of the places. It would just mean changing how we live from day to day. In our house, not much seems different. Maybe some different foods come and go. Different gardens. But our home does not seem to change all that much. Okay, the number of people in the home has changed a lot! But in retrospect, it seems like we had a place for all of them already picked out.