It was a year of changes for Steve and Pam: Pam got a new job in Naples, Florida, they sold their old house, bought a new house in Naples, then Steve got a new job. This was all by March first.

Pam had gotten the job offer in mid-December, 2021. Since Amway was still paying Steve to not work, it was really the best time to move cross-country. She started the new job on January 10.

Steve stayed back in Michigan to organize selling and packing up the house. He wouldn’t’ve been able to do that without the help of their good friends, the Lillibridges.

After a couple of weeks, the house was mostly packed into U-Haul pods and Steve started driving down to Naples. Since then, Steve has been telling anyone who’ll listen, and some who won’t, that it had been 8°F on the morning that he left.

As he started driving to Naples, they didn’t actually have a house to move into. Shortly after lunch, Pam made an offer on a house. By 9:00pm, the offer was accepted. They moved into the house in mid-February.

Since November, 2021, Steve had been seriously looking for a new job. Unlike Pam, who got and accepted a job offer on her second interview, Steve’s fish weren’t biting as enthusiastically. He interviewed with Ferguson in early February. It seemed to go well but after not hearing anything from them for a couple of weeks, he figured that it hadn’t worked out. Then they called him back, offered him a job, and he started on March first.

In the summer, Corwin moved back to Michigan. He bought some land and seems happy with it.

In late July, Pam and Steve flew up to Toronto to visit Steve’s folks and his brothers. The flights up to Toronto were marred by flight delays and cancellations. When the staff were asked for the reasons for this, you could hear the air-quotes around the phrase “mechanical difficulties”. Getting back to Florida was more difficult because Toronto’s international airport, Pearson, was the most crowded and badly organized that Steve and Pam had ever dealt with. They said “we’ll never fly from here again” a lot.

To revive a tradition that they’d missed because of Covid-19, they went on a Caribbean cruise with their usual gang of friends. They visited Half Moon Cay, Grand Turk, and Dominican Republic. Most of them did a lot of sunbathing, eating, drinking, and gambling in varying combinations.

After avoiding the plague for 18 months, Pam came down with Covid-19 on the day after they got back from the cruise. She didn’t enjoy it but with the government mandated shots and Paxlovid treatment, she was back to work after 5 days.

Despite locking Pam in the guest room with a sign saying “unclean”, Steve also came down with Covid-19 on Pam’s 3^rd day with it. Steve also didn’t enjoy it, but was OK after 5 days.

The main point of moving to the Free State of Florida was to see more of the grandkids. With several holiday visits and overnight stays, they managed to get in a few years worth of visits in one year. Mission accomplished.