August in the Paradise of Palms

So it's been a while since I gave a good update of everything. It's now been just over 6 weeks since I arrived here in beautiful Florida. I'm almost settled in - the only thing left is to get a Florida drivers licence. But that's another story... I have my test this Wednesday so I'll hopefully put a post then.

The weather has been hot and sunny, but many days there's some kind of rain - it's usually very heavy and not too long. The clouds roll in and it just descends! Everyone has to get off the beach and you don't really want to be caught in it at all. I've not made it a lot to the beach (something which I hope to change but I keep being invited to all sorts of things). I suppose getting sunburned one day didn't help. Beach volleyball, and volleyball in general has been really fun. I've played a few times with people at church on the beach, or at institute after the weekly class.

The picture above is our house and our car, "the boneshaker". Apart from a constant ant problem in the kitchen if we leave food out for too long the house has treated us pretty well so far. We try to save money by keeping the air conditioning off during the day when we're at work, and at night when we're asleep. But in both cases when we get back home / when we wake up it's pretty hot in the house and then takes a while to get back down to temperature.

We haven't made any real trips yet. We kind of planned to go on one and then realised that no one had any money, so we ended up just going downtown and checking out Jax. It was a little disappointing - the Jacksonville Landing was mostly empty retail units, probably due to the recession, but the views of downtown across the river were beautiful. We took the Skytrain, a kind of monorail running trains with only two mini carriages, which was a nice way to have a look at the views.

Most of my nights have been hanging out with friends and eating out a few times, with a trip to the cinema (Julie and Julia - I recommend it when it comes out in the UK), a bit of beach volleyball and a couple of dates mixed in. Result: lots of films and icecream, and lack of sleep and tan!

This weekend was pretty amazing though. Friday night I went to a wedding reception for a couple at church. The bride also used to work in the Mayo research labs and was one of the first people to introduce herself to me when I arrived at church the first week. It was cool that all of her lab showed up for the reception - it was like a mix of two worlds.


Yesterday afternoon I went to the temple in Orlando. It was so beautiful there. Everything about it was amazing. I managed to get a little bit of beach in the morning before leaving too. It was a fun drive down to Orlando with some of the other YSA. I'm really glad I went. We finished the evening with the last part of the Jacksonville Suns baseball game, which they won again!

That's probably a good summary of life so far. Work's good too but not much to put about that here other than that I'm really glad that I accepted the position!