This American Life

Birthday

Because it’s my birthday and it’s the first time I’m around for it and it’s also visit day, Alan had planned many things to treat me. But it’s prison, things never go the way you’d like them to.

We took a couple of pictures first, but the sergeant decided we had to retake the good one because I was behind him… He is not allowed to be behind me, and we take the same picture almost every week, whatever. Disappointed because I look good on like 1 picture on 55 there, I still take it with a smile, and we pose again, being careful to stay next to each other. Alan loves the new pic, we don’t lose.

He wants to cook for me and to make me a cake. Canteen is out of almost everything, he can’t make a cake but what he cooks is big for two and I don’t need a cake 😊. He is just too adorable and I’m happy.

He smiles at me because “you look so cute” and says he wants to take me home. “I am home ☺”. He is home.

He has a few gifts he made and I received a portrait of me this week. He really doesn’t have to try that hard but I love the messages he puts in everything. I feel spoiled.

We talk about my favorite movie and he listens to my stories about Gus Van Sant for a long time and he is genuinely interested and I want to marry that man again.

We talk about trypophobia 🤢 and he keeps taking the skin 😱 as an example and I think marrying him once was enough.

We get up to warm some water and he kisses me. He gets in trouble. Being yelled at is not nice but he is more upset because the officer says something like “you’ve been doing stuff all day” when we literally only have been looking at each other and talking, up to now. I see Alan is very frustrated and I see the anger coming up. He is not saying anything but his eyes become red and I know he’ll cry in a minute. I hold his hand and ask him what is bothering him that much. He doesn’t want/can’t reply, I’d like to know so I could ease the pain before it bursts out… Too late, he whispers “because that’s our life” and he breaks down. I want to get closer and put my hand on his face or my arm around it – as I usually do when that happens, but I feel the officer watching and I don’t want us to get in more trouble so I have to painfully watch him cry 💔. I try to wipe his tears, while fighting my own. He says he is supposed to be the strong one, I call bullshit on that, everybody knows I’m the strong one 😆. He calms down but the tears won’t stop, we laugh about it. He says “I wish you had a better birthday”. I’d spend my day crying with him, it would still be better than any other day.

We move on to another subject, I get one more gift, and it’s already time to say goodbye. I can hug him, finally.

I go home and look at my phone, see many birthday messages from my friends overseas, a cute video of my niece (whom I miss a lot), and a message from one of my ex pen pals (out and free now) that says “Happy birthday to a friend who was always there for me”… and now I’m the one crying.

My in-laws then take me out for dinner, I’m full for a week and birthday girl gets a free cheesecake. Not the dessert I wish I could bring back to the house though 😉.

I’m simply happy I could see Alan after 3 weeks. I wish I didn’t make his life harder but I feel very loved and it’s amazing ❤.

Categories: This American Life

Hurricane Irma

Unfortunately, in Florida, there is a hurricane season. It lasts from June 1 to November 30, and everyone here is used to it. So used to it that Floridians do not take threats too seriously unless one speaks at least of a category 4 hurricane.

Florida and Jacksonville were hit by Hurricane Matthew last year, and while some are barely getting to the end of their reconstruction, Irma arrives. Hurricane category 5 when in the islands, Irma falls back to a category 4 hurricane before hitting the south of Florida, but being 500 km wide, impossible to escape it.

We are lucky not to be in an evacuation zone, so we are mainly preparing for days without power and/or stuck home.

The watchword: get prepared and stock up.

Flashlights, batteries, cans of food (and a manual can opener), snacks, plenty of water and drinks.
Fill the tub with water to continue flushing the toilet. Have enough toilet paper, as well as wipes and dry shampoo (life saver).
Charge tablets, laptops, e-readers, portable game consoles, mp3 or anything else that will keep you busy a little bit, and especially mobile phones. Get a radio that works with batteries to keep abreast of events.
Renew your prescriptions/check that you have enough medicines to go through a week.
Scan important documents and send them to yourself by email.
Take pictures of all the rooms of the house and valuable possessions.
Cut the sick trees on your property because they will not resist, and insurance will not pay for the damage they will do on your house!
Fill up your car with gas in advance (because the pumps are quickly empty!), in case of a last-minute evacuation order.
With a bag ready for the same reason.
Write a love letter, BECAUSE WE NEVER KNOW.

On Sunday evening, a little before 9 pm, we lost power at home. Since I have a fair fear of wind that goes back to childhood, I really had to reason and above all to occupy myself, to think about something else. In the light of my MacBook, I finished what I was doing when the power break occurred, and I went to bed. I managed to fall asleep but the violence of the wind woke me up at around 3 am, and I could not go back to sleep. I remained lying down in bed, but with my headphones on and music loud and cheerful enough to cover the noise to a maximum. It was more effective than I thought, and I stayed calm. I even ended up sleeping an hour or two around 6 am.

The next day – and the following days, we checked out the damages. Mainly fallen trees in our neighborhood, and power and cables lines on the ground. A few streets away, the houses were flooded. Apart from a bump on the roof of the patio due to a big fallen branch, we had no damage to be deplored! We stayed for 5 days without electricity, while the city was trying to resume its normal course. Schools and government buildings, as well as a lot of restaurants, shops etc. stayed closed. Many companies have had to wait several days to recover power as well. There was however a good organization regarding the re-stock of food stores, completely cleaned out before the hurricane. Some areas of the city, on the other hand, will need more time to rise up.

Photo/WOKV

Photo/NBC News

Photo/Dede Smith / The Florida Times-Union

Photo/CBS News

And this impressive picture of St. Johns County:

Photo/St. Johns County Fire Rescue

Add NewCard Alan painted and sent me right before the hurricane 😅

Categories: Florida, This American Life, Travels

Florida 2016

I found an undergoing editing with rushes from my April-June 2016 stay in Florida on my computer.
I decided to make it a souvenir of the 4 key locations of my stay:

San Marco, where I rented a (great) airBnB apartment.
Jacksonville Downtown, the Main St bridge (the blue bridge, that I used to cross all the time during my first stays because my hotel was on the other side of the river).
Micanopy, where I “visited” River Phoenix.
Raiford, where Alan’s prison is located (that you can see from far if you have good eyes on the last shots, otherwise you can at least see the parking lot.).

Categories: This American Life

August 2017

After all these technical posts (and there are a few more to come), it’s time for me to give you some news.

After a somewhat chaotic journey, I FINALLY joined my husband! Security has increased at the prison for visits and it is wasting a lot of time. Before, after the registration, the search and the passage to the metal detector, we could walk to death row by ourselves. But as some general population prisoners spoke to us (shouting), they first put a black cover all along the fence, and according to their moods and/or the visitor, they made us wait for an escort. I found myself several times waiting alone on a bench 15 or 20 minutes for a guard to deign to walk me there while other people had been able to walk there directly.
In short now, no more discrimination according to age or size of breasts, everyone must wait for an escort. But now they wait until we all have passed security to take us as a group, and there is a group that leaves only every 30 minutes. From the outside, you probably don’t see too much of a problem, but this is how it goes:

Doors normally open at 8:15 am (often 8:30 am), but to be sure to get in visitors arrive as early as 7 am at the prison. For death row, there is never a crowd, so now I arrive a little before 8am and that is enough, I’m almost every time the 4th one (at the same time there are always the same people every week, with their habits). Visits begin at 9am.
Unfortunately, at this time, they don’t open before 8:45 or 9:00 am.
We all pass security and we wait for the escort…
People who don’t come until 9 am start to go through security… so now we wait for them too.
As a result, we find ourselves in the park at 10 am, we still have to wait until the inmates arrive, we lose a good hour of visit.

So yes it annoys me, on top of having to walk barefoot so that they pass my heels through the new X-ray machine every week. Before, if your bra was setting the detector off, they would scan you in an airport way and that was it. Now, if your bra is setting it off, you must go back to the search room and remove it so that they can observe it, and they scan your chest (which is likely to be fun with piercings the day that it happens to me). And yet, I didn’t know, but I was told that at FSP (the neighboring prison, death row prisoners go from one to another) a few years ago, when you had your period, you had to show it!! I thought I was misunderstanding but the women confirmed that yes, they had to lower their panties to show their dirty pads (I suppose to be allowed to take changes with them). Fortunately, it’s not like that anymore, because (TMI) I always have my period on the weekend and it’s still a step in humiliation that I don’t feel ready to cross.

BUT WE ARE TOGETHER! Finally, and without this limit of a precise number of visits before saying goodbye for months. It changes everything, even if I get annoyed still for the slightest minute stolen. We have so much lost time to catch up!

Alan lost a lot of weight, again, because he was saving for me to have a little bit more money when I arrived (as the immigration and so on ruined me). I hope that I will find a job quickly to be able to fill him up a little.

Unfortunately, his prison (all Florida state prisons actually) ended up on lockdown last week and the visits were canceled. Exceptional measure (since in general it is the only thing left in case of lockdown), the mail was also stopped 😑. On the other hand they were given a 5-minute phone call to warn us so it was pretty cool. Ironically, this lockdown took place during (in response to) a march for the rights and human treatment of prisoners, in Washington DC. The lockdown was lifted Monday and I started to receive his letters again, so I’ll see him on Sunday. 🙂

Since I’ve arrived, I’ve been busy dealing with my paperwork problems. But I also started looking for a job. I will make a post on their way of proceeding here… that I do not like at all! Especially when you don’t fit the boxes when you are an immigrant! I applied to 10 jobs and I had no feedback, not even to say no, well on this point I’m not disoriented, it’s like France! My resume is also circulating in a company possibly creating new positions, and they are interested in my profile. I do not know if it will lead somewhere but it reassured me a bit on my US version resume.

The opening of my bank account allowed me to reopen my Etsy shop – I will make a small post right after to announce it.

And the question everyone asks… “how is the weather, not too hot? “. The answer is yes, it’s way too hot! I can’t stay 5 minutes outside without getting sweaty (while I’m usually lucky on that side). It is only vaguely bearable at the beach, feet in the water .

But it also rains a LOT, not for a long time, but a lot, at least once a day. And when I visit Alan it is often the deluge, and it takes me forever to go back home because I have to drive so slow.

For those who worry, I was driving at 16 mph and I was just holding the phone, I was properly watching the road 😉

The sky was so covered that there was nothing to see during the “Great American Eclipse” on Monday and that I had to watch it on TV.

Yes, I do weather updates on Snapchat (because my life is not really thrilling yet) @SweetUndertone, I post only in story (and rarely) and it is accessible to anyone (at least for now) if you want to follow me.
😊

Categories: This American Life

Baseball Game

A week after my arrival I had the opportunity to go see a baseball game. I am neither a great sportsman (alas) nor even very interested, but since it is not something that I would do by myself, it was an opportunity to seize.

You can already see that we had rather good places (and as a bonus before the game we had access to a “all you can eat” buffet, and then, the atmosphere is frankly nice! It would almost make you want to to return, in fact I am not against it at all!

The view of the stadium being filled from the top of the bleachers
(from the buffet ^^)

On the other hand there is almost more action in the public than on the field, baseball is a bit “soft” in a way… They may be pro but they do not often touch the ball lol, there is the most suspense when the ball goes out in the public or lands on the roofs and/or in the nets and everyone follows it to see where it falls.
But the atmosphere is maintained, there are announcements, small games, and even tributes (to the military or nurses present for example) at each break. I had a very good evening and maybe next time I will see a football game, although I’m a little afraid that the atmosphere will be a little less relaxed ^^

It’s not good quality (especially when I was testing Snapchat oops), but it’s to show you the atmosphere a little bit.

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