Vlad Mazek

The other day I was looking through Facebook that Susanne pulled me onto, looking at pictures of my high school and college buddies. Can’t believe that it’s been 10 years since I graduated from high school, my how time flies.

I have to say I am really happy where my life is at this point. I’m successful, I have a dream job, I love what I do, my job is making me friends all over the planet. Life is good.

So today, as I made a trek upstate to work with Hank Newman on the mobile application for Shockey Monkey (native WM5 app, baby!), I got a chance to look around at what a paradise I live in. I’m less than a mile away from the Disney World, everything around where I live is pretty much… well, tourist paradise. But drive 40 minutes north of Orlando and things change, quickly. As some of you know, we’ve had a severe fire situation this spring, hundreds of fires all over the state. How the heck can the swamp be on fire you ask? Pretty simple. First droughts loosen the grip swamp trees have on the soil. Then the hurricanes roll through and knock them down into the shrubbery that grows out of the swamp. Finally, an extra drought wave makes the whole place vulnerable to a fire and poof.

Normally, when you think “fire” you imagine a flattened and charred forest reduced to a dark pile. Not quite so much. I was driving through Leesburg, Howie in the Hills and few other cities in North Central Florida and its quite unreal to see how this happened. We spray fires from the sky – in hopes of putting them out. The effect is quite impressive. The ground is completely clear of all the shrubs and is completely black. The middle third of the tree has dried up and turned red/grey. Finally, the top of the tree – completely green. Rows and rows and rows of this, incredible.

What really brought me home was the Miami Bass powerplay on the radio. The type of (bad) music I grew up to somehow found its way to the morning drive megamix on the public radio: 69 Boys – Let Me Ride That Donkey, 2 Live Crew – Me So Horny and of course, Uncle Luke. We have loyalty to our local artists, no matter how much the rest of the world may think it sucks.

I love Florida.