Today I found the local boarding kennel. I say the as there is only one that is, what I would call, nearby. It’s in a small village (about the same size as Ivinghoe Aston) called Horton. Every time we drive through it I think or say, “Horton hears a what!!!?!?!“. It’s an illness, I really can’t help it. I am however really glad to have found a reasonably priced place that seems nicer than some hotels I’ve stayed in in the past. One in Washington DC stands out in particular. It was a Days Inn and the carpets were sticky! Sticky carpets! And that was just the beginning, but I’m not going to go into it. I wouldn’t make my dogs stay in a place like that hotel room. Anyway, this kennel is great and I hope that the girls are as pleased being there as I am to have found it.
Today we also had a visit from the electrician. He fixed a few small issues that we had quickly and in a professional manner. However, the curiosity in the house was not the dogs trying to nip at his ankles rather, well, me. He had never met an American and had several questions for me. One of them was, “Are you really scared of gun violence like they say on the TV?” It was sort of a hard question to answer honestly. Here you so very seldom hear of people getting shot that it is a big, huge deal when someone does. I had to answer him with a qualified, “Sometimes.” I mean, there are areas of the little town of Apopka that I wouldn’t drive down after dark if I could avoid it. There are parts of Orlando that I was nervous traveling through even at noon on a Tuesday. He then asked if guns were as common as they seemed and I had to answer yes once again. Here, most farmers have a gun for killing varmints and possibly livestock if they are needing to be put down. There are some people that have guns for hunting but there are very few guns that fall into the “self security” or “people hunting” guns. It is so non-gun here that they are actually trying to make it so that no-one under 18 can buy a knife (as that is how thugs here try to kill each other). Coming from a place where 12 year-olds have guns, the idea that knives were restricted sort of blew my mind.
I’m really starting to look forward to coming back to Florida. The list of things that I want to pick-up is both long and eccentric. Just a sampling of the list: Magic Erasers, Squeegee from Target, Fabric from JoAnn’s, Chocolate Chip (seriously, there aren’t fraking chocolate chips here!), Good Ice Cube trays, a pounder bag of M&M’s (they only sell them in little bags here), snack sized plastic baggies (the plastic baggy culture is about as developed as their yarn store culture) and cardboard cat scratchers from IKEA for the cats (as the IKEA here doesn’t carry them!). Another thing that I would add to that list if it wasn’t so damn heavy is Tidy Cats cat litter for multiple cats. I would never have imagined the dearth of affordable cat litter options here. Had I, the whole damn back-end of that container would’ve been a big yellow wall of cat litter buckets!
Sarah Jane Humke 