WHAT’S NEW IN FLORIDA?

Here’s the latest. The former Secretary of State, also former Supervisor of Elections for Pasco County has announced his decision to run for superintendent of our school system in this year’s election.

As I wrote before, the present woman holding the position now has problems. Both are Republicans, but he has an in with our Tea Party Governor as well as the rest of the idiotic elected officials in our state capital. So we’ll look for the smear campaign to begin against her. Therefore, she has reason to be concerned when they attack her for not being qualified for the job that they had twice elected her to.

The current Superintendent of Schools had attended a local community college and graduated from a state school with a BA degree in education. This qualified her to be head of our school system. Her rival is also uniquely qualified to become superintendent because he graduated from the same community college and also a state college with a degree but not in education. I think I read he also has another degree, but it’s also not in education.

For more political shenanigans read up on JD Alexander for this week’s news on other political nonsense regarding our state school system. Even members of the state GOP are fighting him, but are there enough of them to stop him? There are only three or four of them, but they’re very vocal. We’ll see.

MAYBE I’M STILL OK

Yesterday I decided to prepare some scones to deliver to a neighbor that I hadn’t kept in touch with since Christmas. I already had some other things to deliver to them, just little things. I was shocked to discover that she had just returned from the hospital because a cold developed into pneumonia.

In my own defense, we don’t really keep in touch, so when something happens they don’t really let us know. The reason I take things to them is because she has been ill the past year and her husband doesn’t cook. We seldom see them except for some social events when she is well enough to attend.

Well, I made a double recipe of scones which looked beautiful when they came out of the oven, but on my first taste I discovered I had neglected to add sugar. Fortunately I had some homemade strawberry jam to put on them and topped them with lite whipped topping which made a delightful repast.

I’m not bragging about my innovations just telling you that I’m starting to make some mistakes, which can be rectified by me now. However, I’m at the point when things could get away from me before I know it and I have to brace myself for that fact. I hope I don’t cry when that happens but can just shrug it off as an old age thing and throw those mistakes in the garbage. I constantly tell myself that if I recognize my faults I’m still OK.

WOW!

Just went to an estate sale up our street. The house went on the market on a Wednesday and sold the next day after being previewed by group of real estate salespeople. It was listed at the low price of $48,000 dollars. While I looked for lost treasures at the sale, I was able to go through every room and the one-car garage and still couldn’t find anything I wanted to buy.

However, here’s what you can get for 48 G’s in our community, a carpeted living room, a dining room, kitchen with appliances, two bedrooms, two complete baths, a family room, screened porch and garage.

Every room was filled with the accumulations of a couple in their 90’s who had either died or gone into a nursing home. Once the clutter is disposed of, and there was a lot of that, someone will have gotten themselves a very nice piece of property with an equally nice back yard.

Don’t know whether it was bought by an investor or someone looking for a good starter home. Either way, it makes our costlier and larger home decline in value, which is what’s happening throughout our community.

I hope when our heirs sell our property that market prices will have grown. One thing though, ours has been thoroughly renovated and won’t be filled with junk.

WHAT’S UP WITH FLORIDA?

OK!  HERE’S THE POOP

We live in Florida which has one of the most corrupt state governments in the USA. The majority of the incumbents focus in the past few years has been how much money can come into their pockets as a result of shady deals they make with companies doing business with the state. One instance is the new Taj Mahal Court House built with the backing of officials, another is notably the new Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio. He won’t run for VP this year, but in a few years people will forget his involvement along with some other things having to do with the Florida GOP revenues.

Can you really imagine a local school district talking about saving money by going from five day a week classes to four days?  Most school districts hire their superintendents because of qualifications not their political affiliations, not ours though. Ours is an elected official with the backing of the Republican Party who had little educational background, and she now has competition from another Republican. Guess his educational background. He was our former superintendent of elections who got appointed to a job in Tallahassee where he helped cut the number of early voting hours. After getting a lot of flak for that, he decided to return to our county where he will be touted over the current Republican for his “now” expertise in education. Our county is also so backward that the candidate with the most votes here in the national primary was Newt Gringrich.

Our Governor is now for privatizing our prison systems and guess who would take over, friends of the GOP, of course. That means more money in politicians’ pockets by way of contributions to their election campaigns or PAC s. This seems to be the trend for the whole country. There actually is some opposition in our state legislature after some tried to sneak in such as bill in the middle of the night.

In the meantime, people are losing their homes everywhere and we in our county have been hit by an enormous amount of foreclosures, and our homes are not expensive ones. These are now the homes of the new poor.  Mitt Romney’s solution is let the houses go into default, buy  them, then rent them to the same poor people who have just lost them. That allows people like him to make more money. What I see in our community are the “for rent” signs which are visible for a long time, meaning there are enormous amount of rentals available.

Let’s hope that this year’s general election can get our country back to the values we hope most people have. Let’s pray that the bigotry in this country goes away soon, our President deserves respect from all our citizens. I hope all those” birthers” disappear and that the NRA is done away with soon.

I know, but I can hope can’t I?

DRIVING IN VERMONT

Last week we took an AARP course in defensive driving in order to receive a discount on our car insurance. When we talked about things which annoyed or frightened us when driving, both my husband and I thought of an incident which happened in Vermont where we were vacation.

It was a Sunday morning in July and we were driving on a two lane valley road when all of a sudden a car came down a mountainside road and without stopping proceeded to drive right in front of us. We were unnerved as it continued weaving on the road like a drunk driver. We slowed down to keep out of its way and followed when it turned left onto a four-lane highway.

We thought it would be funny if the driver was on his way to the church where we headed, and sure enough it pulled into the church parking lot.  We watched as it was parked in a section where there were very few cars and were surprised to see a little old lady get out.

After Mass as she was leaving, we pointed her out to the priest. He said he had been trying to get her to stop driving and had told her someone in the parish would be glad to pick her up, but she would have no part of that.

Knowing the location of the local police department, we stopped to report her for dangerous driving. The dispatcher knew exactly who the woman was, but stated they could not take away her license until she had an accident. That was the state law.

Can you imagine what would have happened if this had occurred in wintertime?

AT A GLANCE

I happened to glance at the headline “Florida’s economy turning around” and thought things must finally be looking up for our state. Then I saw the picture of the person who wrote the article, Governor Rick Scott, saw it was on the Opinion page so I didn’t read it.

I don’t have any confidence in his opinions.

HOW ABOUT THOSE SOUTH CAROLINIONS

As you already know, we spent a few years in South Carolina where we learned lots of things about the Southern mentality.

We had made friends with a gentleman from the North who had just moved there a year before us. He was an executive with a small company based in Columbia. He told me the story of the day he had gone to lunch and an elderly woman who was on the board of directors of his business sat down with him because she was alone and recognized him. During their conversation, she asked where his wife was employed and he told her the name of the school where she taught. The woman said “isn’t that a Catholic School, are you Catholic? He said yes. She told him she had never met a Catholic before and after that day she never spoke to him again.

The oldest country club in the area never allowed a black man to use their front entrance. Only black employees were allowed in it and they used the back door. When the Catholic Church was going to hold an event in their dining room, they were told the black priest from their parish was not allowed in their facility.

A woman we knew from Pennsylvania moved into the area, also before us. Her husband, a doctor, was stationed there with Air Force. The home they purchased was situated on a lake where all the neighbors were longtime residents; all of them part of the local gentry. As the only northerners in the enclave, the neighbors never introduced themselves. She was totally disillusioned having come from the upper class themselves.

We had fortunately moved into an area with many families from other states as well as various southerners who embraced us. Our country club had black members including an NBA star. Also, the theater I was working with was in the University area and many of the professors we met were also members, so we made many friends from the college not seemingly bigoted.

Many of the old time Carolinians cared a lot about family silver, china patterns and ancestral names. New born girls were given their fathers first names, so when meeting someone for the first time, it became a little confusing, but reading about all their debuts was fun. One southern gentleman we knew had two daughters, the oldest refused to become a debutante, which pleased her mother, but the second wanted to be presented to society so the pleased father who took her to New York to have a gown designed for the occasion. Mom actually wanted no part of it.

All this was twenty five years ago, lots of things have changed, but according to what you see on the GOP TV debates there, you see the old prejudices are still a large part of the state residents’ mentality.