Celebration Life

The baby is coming. Soon. We’re 26 days from the anticipated due date. And since she can go pretty much whenever from 37 weeks onward, we’re close.

A friendly and helpful lady from the county, Barbara, met us today over at the Celebration fire station on Celebration Pl and helped us make sure our child seat could be properly secured in our car. Our last Childbirth 101 class is at Celebration Health tomorrow night. We obtained great baby stuff — including a change table, an awesome crib, and a terrific car seat — from our neighbors here in Celebration either through the Front Porch forum or Craigslist.

I guess the reason this is on this blog instead of my personal one is that so far we’ve been able to accomplish everything we need through the Celebration community. (Well… except for pediatricians… but that’s a topic for later.) It’s a validation of the decision we made to move here, a decision that was first made on November 3 of last year and finally realized May 18. Feelings of uncertainty and doubt about moving down are being replaced by optimism and acceptance. We had a good thing going in PA, but we felt the grass was greener down here (figuratively, this time of year)… so we split a pair of 10′s (which you should never do) and it paid off.

These are the feelings as of July 27, anyway. Once the baby is born, I sincerely hope we can find parents with children about the same age, who have similar ideas about how to raise children, that we can bond/socialize/drink with. We see some babies in strollers but we see more dogs on leashes… let’s just hope that’s because dogs need to be walked more than babies, and those parents are out there somewhere.

Why is it, in this electronic age, when I put a hold on a book in the Osceola County Library system, the only way they have to inform me that it’s available is to have a person hand-carry a piece of paper stating the same, to the tune of $.44?

This is an interesting article on Celebration from the Washington Post.

I’ve avoided real estate discussions here for several reasons:

1. We don’t yet own real estate here. In that regard we still have something of an outsider’s perspective in that we don’t have a stake in the owners association.
2. It might be a sore subject for people who have been through the boom and bust of real estate prices here.
3. While Celebration real estate discussions interest me personally, it may have been beat to death.

So while we’re not Celebration owners yet, we are actively shopping. We’ve been following MLS listings and comps of sold properties diligently since the beginning of the year when we decided to move here, so I feel we have a better-than-the-average-person perspective on the low end of the market here. Our timing, coming from Pennsylvania when we did, looks like it will benefit us, but we’re conscious of what effect the pricing drop has beyond our own wallet, and how it can tear at the fabric of the community.

There are many houses that are obviously vacant (lock box, and the yard is trashed) or subtly vacant (property kept up, but lock box and extra newspapers and fliers around). The list of homes with short sale contingencies is large. And there are even postings on the internal Celebration message boards about alleged squatters and expensive vandalism. All of these are clearly negative to the community. The question is how the community will adapt to these conditions until they improve (and yes, they will improve because, face it, Celebration satisfies many of the criteria used when looking for a place to settle).

On a personal note, obviously we’d like it if real estate prices were at their bottom the day we made our offer, and only go up from there. Will that happen? Probably not. But we try to be aware of the impact — positive and negative — that lower prices will have on the community that we’re buying in to. We’re committed to Celebration for the foreseeable future, either as renters or owners, so we want to understand what the challenges are and how we can help the community overcome them.

Any additional insight in the comments area is welcome.

Who can fill me in on the details of the Town Tavern beer club? I think there’s 99 beers? And out of curiosity, what would the final tab be (cost + tax + tip) to drink all 99 beers?

I thank you for the details, though my liver may not.

Evidently this has turned into a wildlife blog! Not my intention, necessarily, but it just happens to be what I’m photographing these days. Don’t worry, eventually I’ll run out of unique animals and end up talking about pool rules, four way stop signs (when will people learn!!!), suspicious helicopters, or Internet provider quality.

The Celebration Front Porch forum was buzzing about this for a day or two prior. We went out for our nightly walk around Aquila Loop, and happen to catch the dispatchment (is that a word?) ceremony.

It’s too bad they couldn’t do a Steve Irwin on it — catch it with ropes and duct tape, ship it to the ‘Glades, let it go — but from what I understand, once it’s used to being around humans it’s sorta ruined. It’s a shame… it was just doing what gators do. That said, we walk around that lake nightly and wouldn’t want to tussle with this sucker.

Update 7/15/09:
Some more photos. Click in to each of them for the option to view the original size. I only had my iPhone with me, unfortunately.

The continuing tales of wildlife in Celebration that Brian finds interesting. Remember you can click on any of these for the full-size versoni.

A posting on the Celebration-only forum last night said that Celebration Hardware had its doors and windows covered with paper, signs are down, and the place is looking deserted.

Looks like it’s closed?

I’d be disappointed but unsurprised if that ends of being the case. We’ve been in there a few times for small things like a bike lock, have keys cut, nails… items that don’t make much of an impact at the register. (Since we’re renting, our hardware needs have dropped considerably.) Each time the staff has been overly friendly and helpful, but the store is huge for the amount of product offered and always devoid of people, so I imagine the financials can’t be terrific.

It was suggested they may be moving around the corner to a more appropriately-sized location. As someone who tries to support the local businesses as much as possible and is currently under contract to buy a house, I hope this is the case.

Update (7/11/09 7:16p): Well, wife Sherri and friend Leah took a drive over today and it looks like they’ve downsized around the corner and renamed themselves. Appears there will continue to be a hardware store in Celebration!

I love the trails here. I don’t know their names, so I’ve been calling them things like:

• Trail-From-Back-Of-Artisan-To-I4-You-Know-The-Swampy-One
• That-Path-With-The-Hyperaggressive-Squirrels
• Dead-End-Trail-Sorta-Behind-Sienna
• Pondview-To-New-Church
• … etc …

I tried to look up the names, even going as far as emailing the Parks & Rec people, but according to them the paths don’t even have names. Seems odd, right? There must be some sort of master plan that has names or numbers on it. How did the construction folks know which path they were building each day? They must’ve called them something.

So before I start self-naming the trails after friends or beers or ski resorts, what do you call them?

Want to know a guaranteed way of seeing a plethora of wildlife here in Celebration? Easy. Set out for a walk and leave your good camera at home. It works for me.

A recent walk from East Village to Downtown turned into Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom for us. We spotted a nice size snake (and when I say “spotted”, I mean that it was pretty big and lying right next to the path and scared the bejeezus out of us):

… which the iPhone failed to capture adequately. Further down, on the wooden pathway between Lake Evalyn and downtown, we saw otters (!?) in the swampiness. Add the alligator and armadillo seen along the way and it makes for a decent outing. Again, none of it properly documented as I left the good camera at home.

Still haven’t seen the wild boars yet, though we’re in no rush to do so.