First Impressions

Question #1: Why is a 23 year old graduate student living in a 55+ retirement community?
Excellent question. I'm still not sure of the answer myself, but I hope that if nothing else, living in Leisuretowne (or L-Towne, the hip nickname my sister and I have given it) will give me some good stories. In any case, here's some background:

My mom and dad, who are a nurse and teacher respectively, decided that they wanted to move out of our house in Tabernacle, NJ after my sister and I went to college. Taxes there are too high, etc. etc. They want to move to... Virginia, or West Virginia, or any number of other states depending on the day. After our house was on the market for a year, someone finally bought it (hooray!). But since my parents still don't know where they want to move, they decided to rent a house in the area for a year so they could stay at their current jobs while looking at houses. Fortunately, they were able to find a year-long rental that's less than 10 minutes from our house in Tabernacle that was pretty affordable and allows pets. And said rental house is in, you guessed it, Leisuretowne! L-towne is a sort-of gated community in Southampton, NJ. By sort-of gated, I mean that they have guards at the front entrance but the roads in it are still township roads. And there's no actual gate. At least one person in each residence has to be over 55, and I'm pretty sure that the rule is you can have a child living with you if he/she is over 18. That's where I come in!

I'm in an English MA/PhD program at Indiana University right now, but I decided that since is probably the only free summer I'll have for...ever, possibly, I wanted to spend one last summer in Jersey. Even if it is in a retirement community.

After the very first day that I went over to the rental house with my mom to start moving stuff in (their lease started June 1 and they don't have to be out of our house until this coming Thursday), I knew that I would probably get some hilarious stories over the course of the next two months. I quickly learned that the majority of residents stay inside during the day in the summer; apparently the streets are crowded from 3-6am, though. Awesome. Even though L-towne allows pets, there are "NO DOG" signs around basically any area that a dog would want to walk or play in. There are rules about how many lawn ornaments you can have, where you can park, where you can walk, etc. etc. It seems like a lot of the residents enjoy looking for rule-breakers. I found the community's website and was very excited to see that they post the Leisuretowne Association meeting minutes online here. They're a pretty funny read if you're bored. Particularly the "Statements from the Audience for the Good of the Association" section. LOTS of people complaining about ridiculous stuff.

So I don't really have any good stories yet, but I know they're coming! Once we're done moving in there I won't have much to do except check out the L-towne scene. My plan is to immerse myself in the lifestyle as much as possible - I'm considering participating in Water Aerobics, if they'll let me! You're jealous, I know. I would be too. Bottom line - I'll probably update this a lot with more than you'll ever want to / need to know about Leisuretowne and its characters.