September has been a month of changes including:

• We moved from Tennessee to Florida
• Our house in Tennessee suffered a catastrophic flood due to a broken pipe
• Hurricane Irma also moved to Florida
• I moved this blog to a new host and a new platform and
• Summer left and Fall arrived

We arrived in Sarasota at the end of August after loading a POD and preparing the house in Tennessee for the next owners.  We arrived just in time for the Thursday Pedaling class and Saturday tennis matches and were already starting to get in the groove again.  Then we received a call from our realtor saying our home in Tennessee was flooded due to a broken pipe!

So we quickly made plans to return to Tennessee to assess the damage, leaving a few days before Hurricane Irma was due, but not early enough to beat the traffic on I-75 North where we spent 9+ hours to go our usual 5-6 hour trip the first day and almost the same for the second day.  We found the house to be almost a complete remodel with water damage through out both floors.  We are now in between the dry out and removal of damaged walls, ceilings, etc. and getting the estimate for repair/rebuild approved by the insurance company.  I have to say that our insurance company (USAA) was quick to get someone out to the home to start the demolition and dry out process and to find a contractor for the rebuild, so hopefully, everything progresses as smoothly.

While we were in Tennessee, Hurricane Irma swung by Sarasota preventing us from returning until the roads were open and gasoline was available.  Our rental here survived Irma with no problems and some friends that had to evacuate their home were able to ride out the storm in our unit while making sure our hurricane shutters were up and everything that might fly around was in the garage.

Since our return we are back to trying to get in to the exercise routine, pedaling twice a week, tennis at least twice a week, yoga and dance once a week and try to squeeze in a walk most days too.  As I noted in the previous post, we saw a definite decline in my mobility and stiffness during the summer without enough exercise and I am glad to be able to up the level a bit.

Also, since we returned, I moved this blog to a new hosting site and a new blogging platform (WordPress).   As a result I am slowly working through the site looking for broken links and missing photos in older posts, so don’t be surprised if a link doesn’t work or a post refers to a photo that doesn’t exist.  I will keep at it and all should be functional soon.

In the meantime, if you subscribed to the posts by email or RSS, you may have gotten a repeat email of the previous posts which occurred when I updated the web address.  I think this was a one time event and future emails will only be sent when I have a new post.  If you aren’t subscribed but want to be, you can click on the subscribe by RSS link to the right and one of the options is to subscribe by email instead of RSS feed.  Also, if you have the old address of tomspdblog.blogspot.com bookmarked, please update your bookmark to tomspdblog.com.

And the final change was Summer is now Fall, which in Florida means that the humidity will start dropping and the temperatures will be perfect for tennis and other outdoor events instead of falling leaves and snow.  Sounds OK to me!