Good-bye again, Paradise

 Well. I've been talking to my sister again. She still lives in Miami. She was still with the same guy as she'd been with when I left in 1999, and they'd gotten married a few years ago. She seemed to have turned her life around somewhat--she had stopped drinking and doing drugs, was taking care of her health, etc. She wasn't working, they live in a cruddy studio in a cruddy apartment building in a cruddy area near Little Havana, which considering their income (apparently the husband works as a security guard and does the same as a second job, she seems to think he has lots of money but I doubt it) they are lucky to have. Unlike as it turns out the rest of the people in their building they were paying their rent, so they weren't thrown out in the recent eviction frenzy. 

But, that situation seems to have caused her to fall off the wagon. One of her sleazy neighbors plied her with wine and beer, she was inviting these losers into their tiny home "because they had nowhere to go!" She is still a pushover for a sob story despite all her talk of being afraid to get on a bus because "I'll get mugged!" (For what? She doesn't exactly look like she carries around wads of cash) and all the spy cameras she and her husband have set up to assuage their paranoia, which probably comes mostly from her. 

So now she's drinking and her husband got pissed off at her and stomped off to his mother's, and hearing her on the phone go on and on the way she always used to do just made the life drain out of me. Also it made my desire to move back to Florida just go away. I can't even think about it right now, not even moving to Jacksonville or Orlando. I'm not sure I want to even go there on vacation. 

But I still want to get out of this town and this valley. I need to live in a city, I need to have lots of neighborhoods around me, not just farms and forests. I need a mall that isn't dead or half dead. I just need things. So I'm thinking of moving to Richmond. It's of a size, yet apparently the cost of living there is way less than bigger, fancier towns like DC (or Miami). It's not as hilly there, closer to the ocean, more centrally located. There seem to be some affordable apartments. I need to find a job, if this current employer won't transfer me (I highly doubt it, in fact I'm not sure I want to keep working for them, I've been kept on nights forever and now that the days are getting shorter they've switched me to days which means I'll be driving up and back in the dark. I'm not happy). 

So anyway, that's how things are.