Home Sweet Home

First off, I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to be living in Florida. For those of you who aren't familiar with the geography of Florida, I have included this fun map. The red arrow shows where Gainesville is located. I think it is just about perfect. It's right in between the Gulf and Atlantic coasts so it's only about an hour and a half to a beach on either side. It's 1hr and 40min from our door to Disney World. Surrounding us are several state parks and forests that offer fun camping and day trips. You can't find anywhere better, in my humble opinion. We are starting into summer and it's true what they say...Florida is hot and humid. But I have not found it to be unbearable yet. I am looking forward to our mild winters. No more waiting for the plows to come so we can leave the house.

 

While on his interview in Gainesville, the residency program put him in contact with several current anesthesiology residents, and after talking with them, we came to the conclusion that the Mentone neighborhood was were we HAD to live. It's on the outer edge of Gainesville but is still an easy drive to the hospital. Besides the fact that it's a great neighborhood, there was something else that attracted us to the area...it is FULL of medical residents and members of our church! Click here to see some pics of the fun things in our neighborhood.

 

 

Here is our home, sweet home! Since we still own a house in Wisconsin, we have to rent in Florida. We had been searching the internet forever, looking for places to rent in Mentone and there was not much available. At 1:00 am one morning, Ed woke me up and said, "Stef, I think I found our house." I looked at the listing and it did look perfect. I called the rental company first thing in the morning and found out that it had just been listed the day before. We expressed great interest in renting it, but they didn't want to rent it to us without someone looking at it first. I immediately called Maria, the wife of an anesthesiology resident, who I had been emailing earlier about the area, and asked her to go look at it for us. Thanks Maria! With her help, we were able rent our place by the end of the next day. It was a good thing, too, because people were already starting to line up behind us to rent the place, in case our application fell through. Click here to take a photo tour of our house. Sorry there are no pics of Ben's room and the bathroom. He was sleeping and I didn't want to disturb him. The house is not perfect.  The carpet could use replacing, the bathroom fixtures aren't great, etc, etc, but it's a rental and it will do.  We can't just go making changes because it's not ours, and it's probably better for our budget that we don't! Oh well...all in all we are really enjoying our Florida home!