Mild March

We are having some wonderfully mild weather right now, sunshine, mid-50s--just a little more than a week ago we had a monster of a snowstorm. I was out with a friend, walking thru the park which still had a few piles of snow which haven't quite melted away. It is supposed to be this way for the next couple of days. Nice! Of course winter isn't over with, we could easily get more snow and most likely will go back to colder weather at some point.

So, of course, my trip to Florida is coming up on Friday. :) A trip I planned back in January when the winds were howling and the snow was blowing and I was wearing my sweatsuit to bed. However, right now it seems my respite from the winter weather won't be as big of a deal as it could be, unless the weather changes radically before I leave. I am visiting family, not doing the surf/sun thing or the golf thing, or even the Disney thing (other side of the state) and this is the more important reason for my trip. My sister lives down there half the year and I will be staying with her. At some point we will drive further south to see my aunt and uncle.

I am actually not that fond of Florida. But it will be nice to get away for a week. And it will nice to see my sister, because I just don't see my family that often. They don't like NYC, they are comfortable suburbanites who never quite understood why I'd want to live in such a big, crowded, dirty (to them) city. And so the onus of traveling tends to be on me. Which for the most part is fine but it does tend to mean I see my family only a couple times a year, sometimes more but usually not. And this will be the first time I will be visiting her in her new Florida home so it will be fun to watch her show it off, talk about changes they've made, changes she wants to make, etc. My sister lives for this kind of stuff, it is all Greek to me frankly and probably always will be. I am a renter, I don't make significant changes to my apartment and don't even have anything up on my walls (they painted my apt. two years ago, I haven't bothered to put back the few things that were up). My sister would be appalled, but she hasn't been here in more than a decade and I don't expect her to visit anytime soon.

I remember when I first said to one of my brothers that I would like to live in Asia someday. He was more supportive than I expected but then said something to the effect that they'd most likely never go visit me if I did. And before I could ask how would this be different from now, my sister-in-law asked the question first. We all laughed. I have made a radically different life style choice from my siblings. We have all gotten to the age where we can accept it for what it is, I don't expect to change nor do they expect me to. They have stopped asking me when I am moving back 'home,' which is good but ironically I sometimes miss.