CATHY HAS 4 KNEE SURGERIES & SELLS HER CONDO (#44): After we were married on December 29, 2002, Cathy needed to keep working at her job with the Eileen Fisher shop on Sanibel for three more months to collect her five year bonus. That also gave her time to sell her condo and me time to completely finish the butterfly garden.
Looking backing back, Cathy selling her condo was a big deal. When Cathy met her ex-husband Tim, she was living in a Craftsman Bungalow on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle (see photo). Cathy loved that house. It was a wreck when she bought it, and she had restored it herself. She sold the house and moved to Redmond, Washington to be with Tim.
Tim was a restaurateur with a severe vision impairment. Both of them loved fly fishing, but eventually decided they wanted sunshine. They sold Tim’s house and his two restaurants and moved to Sanibel, Florida where they bought a condo and opened the Sanibel Island Chowder Company. Cathy discovered that designing a restaurant and developing the menu was a lot more fun than actually running a restaurant, especially one that is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week.
Eventually Cathy had enough. She left Tim, leaving him with the restaurant and condo. Tim is great guy. We are all friends and he visited us in St. Pete Beach and SMA. Cathy marrying me after she had only known me for three months and selling the condo she had worked hard to buy, was a big leap of faith.
Cathy might wish she hadn’t stayed with Eileen Fisher for her five year bonus. She fell off a ladder in the stock room and tore the meniscus in her right knee. A top surgeon in Ft. Myers tried three times to fix it. Finally a carefully researched surgeon in St. Petersburg got it right. Cathy is not the best patient and throughout all of this there were thrown crutches and curses.
Once Cathy was full time at our Pass-a-grille beach home we did a lot more traveling and I undertook some big projects at the house. More tomorrow.