Free At Last

I know many of you may have thought that I fell off the face of the earth, but I'm here and free at last! I have given notice to my job from hell and I am counting down the days. I had finally had enough and life is too short to be so miserable at your job.

While I don't have anything lined up, nor do I really feel like looking for a job right now, I feel pretty good. Hubby and I may be moving really soon (we are hoping by the end of January). We are looking at either North or South Carolina, Virginia, or Mass. It depends on what we find job wise. Hubby is actively looking and I will probably start actively looking when I am finally free (which is december 17th - yes, I was responsible enough to give 1 months notice).

Neither of us are very happy in South Florida, the weather is great and all, especially now (75 degrees and sunny), but the people here suck. Most of the time I feel like I am in another country with everyone speaking either Spanish, Creole or some European dialect. I mean, people actually come up to me speaking Spanish and seem pissed off when I say "No habla espanol". People are just mean and crabby down here too, we miss "Southern Hospitality", which is why we will most likely move to one of the Carolinas.

My older brother wants us to move up to Orlando, but I'm not sure about that. Orlando kind of seems "cheesey" to me.

Comment on Wilma's Aftermath

I was just reading Autumn's blog and she made mention about how people have come to expect more from the government etc. I commented on the blog, but I thought I would go ahead and post my response here as well.

I agree with Autumn about people's expectations after the storm. Its like people have come to expect handouts. It pisses me off. You have no idea how many employees from our hotel expected our hotel to give them a place to sleep and eat (not that we won't feed our help, but they used the excuse that they couldn't show up for their shift because of reason xyz, yet they made it to the hotel for the cafeteria hours, meanwhile me and a small handful of staff worked around the fricken clock keeping the restaurant running). A lot of these people looking for a place to stay did not have their homes destroyed, they just didn't want to be staying at home with the inconvenience of no power and/or water. I had a good-for-nothing bartender call me at 3am on Sunday night (just before the brunt of Wilma hit) after he had lost power asking for a room at our hotel. This dude won't come in and help me out if I'm short a bartender, but he wants me to authorize him and his wife to come and stay in one of our guestrooms (that rent for $319 a night - at the cheapest) FOR FREE? Give me a fucking break! I told him to go to a shelter. Some staff had the audacity to show up on the day after the storm with coolers and thought I would give away what little ice we had and food for them. They got angry with me when I denied them! Most of my staff are self-righteous, self-centered twenty somethings that won't lift a finger for you, EVEN WHEN YOU ARE PAYING THEM, and expect the world from you. I was ready to tell the whole lot of them to kiss my fat white ass.

As for the lack of preparedness for Wilma, I think a lot of people had become numb to these storms in South Florida. This was like our 5th or 6th storm of the season and the ones that we have gotten this season weren't too bad so people just stopped paying attention to it or just heard that it "might" be a Cat 1 when it hit and did not expect the winds that we got. When Katrina hit us, it was a Cat 1 and we lost a few trees and some people lost power. People are always losing power down here. Hell, I was one of those people who thought the storm was going to be no big deal. Luckily, Jon and I still had our supplies from the other storms and we both work for hotels where we had access to food and water while we were working (which was all of last week).

Howl-O-Scream

Busch Gardens was so much fun! They had about 5 awesome haunted houses and 2 shows and just walking through the park at night was cool with all the ghouls and stuff that jumped out at you. The park was open at 10am - 5pm as the regular park and then we came back (and shelled out the extra $$$) after 7:30pm for the Halloween stuff. It wasn't lame at all but it wore us out. We were walking all day (about 12 hours) but I love amusement parks. It gave us a chance to get away from the hurricane crap and work. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, 75 degrees during the day and about 60 at night. It was nice to be back to "normal" and not have to see hurricane coverage on TV or fight for a spot in line at the gas station.

Driving back home was a long drive, usually it takes us 3 1/2 to 4 hours but it took us closer to 5 hours. It rained the entire time and as we got closer to home you can still see the buildings and signs all tore up. A lot of the highway signs were down, but luckily we knew are way back (hell, we have season passes to the damn place!). You can still see where there is no power and I just heard that school in our county is cancelled until at least the beginning of next week because of power and safety issues.

I'm not looking forward to going back to work. I have to be in to open the restaurant tomorrow morning (bright and early at 6am). I need a new job. Jon has gotten a couple of calls from posting his resume. We'll see what happens....