>
>
>I'm sorry but, I must ask. What made you decide to chuck it all and move to
>Tampa?????
>
Aside from this guy's personal situation, Florida has become the new
"end of the world" part of the U.S. -- the place you go when you are
tired of wherever you are and want to try something new.
California once held that mantle. Not any more. Cost of living there is
insane; there is no room to experiment. You can't get a crummy job to
live on while you write novels or paint or work on The Next Big
Computing Thing. Or whatever. You need to have a pair of "good"' jobs to
barely make it, and money dropped on you from heaven if you want to buy
a house.
The Tampa area offers, overall, a pretty good balance between salaries
and expenses. I mean, our little trailer in Bradenton cost $32,000, and
the association fees are $70/month. Once Debbie and I sell our Maryland
house -- she's there, packing our last belongings -- our living expenses
will be so low that we'll be able to make it with her in a retail job
and me driving a cab or reporting for a local newspaper or some such. I
suppose I'll keep my OSDN job, but I won't *have* to keep it, if you
know what I mean. And as long as I keep it, Debbie doesn't need to work
at all. She can work on her art full-time. Heck, even if I go to a
local paper, she won't really be forced to work.
You can't think like this in Silly Valley or the Wash DC area or Boston
or NYC.
Tina Gasperson quit NewsForge to be full-time mom/houswife. It's not for
me to reveal her and husband Darin's personal finances, but I suspect
their decent-but-not-fancy Tampa house has about the same market value
as a 10X20 toolshed in San Jose, CA. If they lived there, Tina would
not have had the option of saying, "I don't want to work full-time any
more."
Maybe IT jobs are hard to find here, and most of them don't pay much,
but it doesn't take a lot to live here. You don't need to be sane to fit
in, either. People who would be considered total looney-tunes in Kansas
or Seattle are "normal" here, because the definition of "normal" is much
broader locally.
Florida in general, and the Tampa Bay area in particular, are actually
pretty good places to come to with no prospects. If nothing else, the
Chris-Craft factory in Bradenton is hiring again...
- Robin
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