The Great Fort Myers House Decorating Adventure
October 2005
PREAMBLE
Ok, so where were we? A lot has happened since July!
I waited the rest of the summer for the builders to call, or send a contract, or send up smoke signals, Morse code, something, ANYTHING. I’d been on their list to get the plain vanilla starter model on a lake view lot with a pool, a spec house. Was supposed to be among the next 20 homes built on the site. Well, that didn’t happen. To make a long story short, the prices of everything increased, and the builder’s design center ended up throwing so many upgrades into the house, they priced it right out of my ballpark. I dunno, maybe they did it on purpose, thinking that the “rich chick from Wall Street” (not!) would swallow that, but then again, they don’t know me, do they?
At any rate, if I was going to pay that kind of money, it certainly would NOT be on upgrades that I personally did not select and love. To make matters worse, while I was waiting all that time, the price of the lot went up, the price of the house went up, and the price of the pool went up. I mean, the pool went up like 200%. By time they finished jacking up the price of everything and putting in the upgrades, the house was a full $74K more than it had been two months ago when I saw the model.
I told them “no deal”, hung up the phone, and was very depressed. I had Baskin-Robbins for dinner that night, so you KNOW I was depressed! I mean, as I sit here typing on this cold, rainy November evening, it has been nearly two years since I’ve seen my piano. I’m despairing of ever seeing it again. I’d visit it in storage and play it some, but there’s a bunch of crap piled all around it.
A few hours later, a woman called from the builder’s office to say that she had a Plan B, and would I like to hear it? Another potential customer had backed out, so there was a lot targeted for a Huntington model available – a bit bigger, with a slightly more interesting floor plan, and if I scrapped the pool, I could still have nice upgrades of my choice, and still come in within my ballpark price. I decided that, if I really wanted to, I could add a pool afterward for MUCH less money than the builder wanted, and so I accepted that offer, signed the contract, and dumped some money out of my savings account for the minimum “good faith” deposit to get things going.
The contract stated that I had thirty days from signing to visit the builder’s design center and pick my upgrades. Floor tile, carpet, bathroom tile and fixtures, cabinets, countertops, lighting, placement of electrical outlets, cable TV and internet hook-ups, etc. are included in all of that – a daunting prospect for the quintessential domestically challenged single woman! I mean, I could give a crap about all that stuff (so I thought). Gimme a bed, a coffee maker, my iPod, my laptop, and a desk with broadband, and I’m all set. Nevertheless, I started looking at the calendar to see when I could get down there – it’s not hard to convince me to visit a town that is a short hop, skip, and jump over the bay to my favorite place in the sun!
While all of this stuff was going on over the summer, two separate Disney forums that I frequent decided to have their annual meets at Walt Disney World in October. The dates of the two meets overlapped by about three days. I was fretting about being able to afford that trip on top of the design center trip, when a friend informed me of a technology symposium that would be occurring that very same week leading up to the meets! So I lobbied my manager to attend the symposium, and he said yes – WOO HOO!
Now, that meant that I needed to coordinate the trip to Fort Myers for the builder/design center stuff with the trip to Orlando for the symposium/Disney freak meets. As it turned out, the only appointment the design center could give me was the morning of Friday 14 October, and the symposium started on Sunday 16 October, running through Friday 21 October. The Disney freaks would start arriving in Orlando on Thursday 20 October. WOO HOO – harmonic convergence!
It was pretty obvious that I would just stay over on Saturday the 15th, and drive my rental car from Fort Myers to Orlando come Sunday morning. I mean, there was no point in coming home to Long Island, and then turning right around to fly down again the next day for the symposium. I was sort of looking forward to this part, as it would give me an idea of how often I would want to put up with that drive in the future in order to visit my second favorite place in the sun. When the symposium ended, I would stay in the room, but swap out the credit card so that the Firm would not be paying for the weekend of playing in the parks with all manner of pirates and mooses (yes, there’s an explanation for that).
The other thing that was happening during all of this (yeah, can you believe it, another thing! I’m tellin’ ya, the days are just packed…) was that sometime at the end of the summer, I came to the horrifying conclusion that I was tearing through more than two packs a day. I know, I know. My father died of lung cancer, and I’m still struggling with the evil tabbacky. What am I, an idiot? No, I’m an addict. A junkie. The thing is, I work from home most of the time now, and comparing notes with other telecommuters who smoke shows that when you work from home, you tend to smoke more, because you can. None of this stealing off for five minutes to run downstairs and out back of the building to stand in the warm spot and smoke. You’re in your own home, there are no restrictions, the cigarettes and the ashtray are there, and you just reach for them.
I decided something HAD to be done about it, but found myself unable to just flush the cigarettes and walk away. The first thing I did was get them off the desk. I put them far away in another room, the ashtray too. Out of sight, out of mind was responsible for the initial reduction. I also started writing them down. I was analyzing my habit. How often, under what conditions, how soon after I got up in the morning, etc.
Physics has Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, which is based upon his shocking discovery that observation changes the observed. Industrial and Organizational Psychology has The Hawthorne Effect, which states that worker productivity changes when the worker knows s/he is being observed. Well, after one week of watching and recording my own smoking behavior, my consumption was cut in half – HALF! All by itself. I didn’t do anything to reduce it, it just reduced itself simply because someone was watching – and that someone was me.
That dramatic plunge also told me something else. It wasn’t entirely a chemical addiction. In fact, that was only half of it. I think I would have been seriously affected by missing fully half of my intake of nicotine, don’t you? But I wasn’t! I think what was happening was that I would light one, and it would burn in the ashtray for a while – I wasn’t smoking the whole thing, and it would just burn out, so I’d reach for another, and another, and another…I have to tell you, I was VERY relieved to figure this out! I was not smoking two packs a day, but I sure as hell was consuming them, and it was twice as expensive as it should have been to take in the amount of nicotine that I was actually taking in.
After a couple of weeks of this observing thing, I started using a timer. I figured out an easy interval between cigarettes, and gradually upped the ante. I also started increasing the time between getting out of bed in the morning, and lighting the first cigarette.
I’m telling you all of this because if you didn’t know this information, you would think the trip report was very weird. Everything is recorded according to the cigarette of the moment. See, normally I carry a small notepad with me on trips, so I can jot stuff down for the trip report. I was also carrying a small notepad around with me to write down the cigarettes, and make sure that I was leaving the proper interval in between when I went about without the timer (no, I don’t carry the kitchen timer around with me!). Rather than carry two notepads, I just carried one, and both the trip notes AND the cigarettes made it into the same notepad.
Ok, I think this is long enough, and it’s certainly all the context anyone would need to embark upon this trip of epic proportions with me. So, without further delay, I end the Longest Preamble I’ve Ever Written (So Far), and begin the actual trip report.
Let the Great Fort Myers House Decorating Adventure begin!