[cotero@pasco.k12.fl.us]

I moved here in Aug of 89... and still love it. My main reason was the weather... seriously... I love it. I know some disagree with me... but to each their own... I am a happy camper and I intend to stay. (Born and raised in Wisconsin.... I climbed over way too many snow mounds to get to my college classes.) I love all the sunshine.... and I will pack up and travel if a hurricane comes too close... at least we have lots of technology and news to keep us informed.

[Tinabell]

Disney Land is in California, not Florida.

[StephBone]

LM1- I couldn't have said it ANY better myself. I live near THE VILLAGES- the biggest water-consuming, golf-cart driving community in the world.

[Tinabell]

DisneyLand is in California, Walt Disney World is in Florida

Originally Posted by LM1

As a native who is fleeing this state with glee due to what it's become, I feel like I ought to give a little advice to those of you who plan on moving here...

DisneyLand is in California, not Florida.

[Adream]

If I could just add my .02 - when I was a kid we lived in Satellite Beach. (We're talkin' the early 1960's here).

My parents loved it so much, that when dad retired in PA, they made a bee-line (no pun intended) right back to the area. That was almost ten years ago. To this day they tell me that everyday feels like vacation, and they love, love, love where they live. They will deal with the hurricanes when they have to. (They had the best hurricane shutters they could afford put on the house, they hang in there, then clean up and get back to their busy lives.)

[Choctaw]

Originally Posted by StephBone

LM1- I couldn't have said it ANY better myself.

StephBone .. I agree, too. And it appears that many do not have a sense of humor about it.

I really do laugh when I see those white legs. And it doesn't take long to find the raccoon eyes either.

[Muggy]

My white legs look great next to your wrinkly, leathery skin!

Oooh, ohh, oh, no he didn't!!

[daedalo]

There is more than a thread of truth here. Many of us have very mixed feelings about this state. It is still endlessly "being made over" , as it were. I was born in California but moved to FL at age 2. I was confirmed in a little carpenter Gothic Episcopal Church. Later they deconsecrated the church and it became a meeting hall for my scout troop with all the ordinary accompanying indignities. Later they floated the church down the river on a barge and put it in a huge concrete park next to an immense fountain with colored lights. Then they removed the little church yet again and put it in a small green park in San Marco a few miles away where it became the offices for the local histerical association.

That is Florida. Not only is it growing, but it is stripping away its memory. I now live in Nassau County. My grandpa was a country doctor and settled in Callahan (west Nassau) in 1906. A hundred years later there is now a public library in leased space in a strip mall in Callahan. It has taken a century for that town to figure out that a public library might be a necessary component of life in the human community. Instead of building real places with memories Florida builds roads that go to nowhere--until they come along and build a "no place" at the "no where". I remember driving through the state and seeing the remnants of highways and overpasses that were built right before the stock-market crash of 1929. Out in the middle of the scrub there would be an overpass just sitting there as a fragmented folly to human speculation. But even these are now gone. Look at the old maps of Florida during the 1920's and 30's. There are hundreds of tiny places. All gone. Occasionally, a subdivision will usurp the old place-name.

It is also not such an odd occurence that the local religion of choice seems most intense and prosperous where the ground itself has the least intrinsic value. Where we see the earth in flux religion abounds. Man taking dominion over the earth, and doing what he **** well pleases. That is the Florida I know.

[phoenixxphyre]

While there were things in the OP that I didn't agree with (the white legs comment--I don't need any more cancer than I've already had, and deliberately trying to tan is to deliberately ask for a reprise), some of it did make me chuckle like:

Do not pet any of the wildlife, or else you will die.

I'd kind of like to see that posted at one of the parks.

[hiknapster]

The OP hit the nail right on the head. Absolutely brilliant!

Interesting to see that there is someone in this thread that was "talking up" Florida. That person, at the time, was trying to sell her home. Once she did, she beat feet out of Florida.