When Mona (Scott) and I first met, nearly 30 years ago at WKYC-3-NBC in Cleveland, our lives were moving in entirely different directions. She was married, with two small children. I was single, drove a Corvette and wore my hair long. I anchored sports and reported for NBC. She was the very first primetime "weathergirl" in Cleveland history.

We encountered each other many years later, under much different circumstances, and discovered that we shared many of the same goals in life. I had long since left the television business, and she was in the waning years of her long and successful TV career.

As most of you know, or will soon discover, television people have a truly tough time figuring out what they want to do when the studio lights dim for the final time. In 1998, shortly after Mona retired from WBNS-10-CBS in Columbus, Ohio, we started NewsBlues. At first, just to fill time. But it soon became a full-time occupation.

Today, we live on 15 acres of pasture and trees near the tiny town of Reddick, Florida....near I-75, midway between Ocala and Gainesville. We're about 100 miles north of Orlando and Tampa...and about 120 miles southwest of Jacksonville. We live in what Nielsen Media Research calls a "white zone," meaning we are "unserved by commercial television."

We get the Orlando market on DirecTV and a couple of Gainesville stations on rabbit ears...(Market #162). We have three ReplayTVs. One in the "media room" to record entertainment, one in my office for news programming, and one in Mona's office for lady stuff. Personal recording devices are one of mankind's great inventions...freeing us to watch what we want, when we want to watch it (and, yeah, we skip thru the commercials).

Because we live so far "off the beaten path," we've installed a propane-fueled 15,000 watt backup electrical generator, capable of powering the entire house for nearly a week. During the 2004 hurricanes, we survived on a gas-power generator for three weeks.

Our well is more than 200 feet deep and taps directly into the Floridan Aquifer, the great river of pure water that flows beneath this part of the state. We get reliable cell phone coverage from the nearby interstate.

I was reared in Florida (grew up in Winter Haven), and I knew that there was much more to this great state than most visitors generally see. Reddick is worlds away from the metropolitan craziness of Miami and Orlando and Tampa in an area known as "The Horse Capital of the World." 

The countryside is gorgeous, with endless rolling hills of bahia grass and towering live oaks. Our community is rural and oriented toward agriculture and livestock. Most folks drive big diesel powered pickup trucks and tow horse trailers. 

All of our neighbors are black.

Florida politics have always been decidedly Democratic, but George Bush is loved here...and the Fox News Channel is watched avidly. There's a Baptist church on nearly every corner. Locals know us as "the writers." We don't discuss politics or religion, a policy that has served us well.

We used to have Paso Fino horses, but we sold them a few years ago and, frankly, we've reached the ages where we no longer want to risk injury. Horses are lovely...but they're dumber than a box of rocks (Mona disagrees, although she has a nice collection of scars and broken bones that argue otherwise). We now satisfy our equine urgings by feeding treats to the neighbor horses. 

We have a loveable but dense golden retriever, a barn cat (who thinks the dog is his pet), a fancy house cat, three cows in the front pasture, and an Angus steer in the deep freeze.

We cut our own hair which, for some reason, always seems to get the cats agitated. Our neighbor John Travolta, who most definitely does NOT cut his own hair, brings his jet on final approach right over our house at all hours. He has his own 2-mile runway.

Mona volunteers as a tour guide at the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Yearling) in nearby Cross Creek. She also occupies a substantial part of her day keeping in touch with her two grown children, her two grandchildren, her three sisters, her mother, and her friends.

I fill my spare time tending to a sprawling vegetable garden...only a portion of which is shown here. We give almost all of the resulting produce to locals....and bugs. On a daily basis, white tail deer, wild turkey, foxes and raccoons stroll across the property. Eagles, hawks and owls patrol overhead. The morning is rich with singing birds.

I'm a licensed Florida beekeeper, with seven hives and about 400,000 Italian honeybees. Twice a year, I "rob" about 200 pounds of honey from the hives (which I also give away).

I have a John Deere tractor....and I listen to Maroon 5, Nellie McKay, Eric Clapton, Franz Ferdinand and Gemma Hayes on my precious iPod while I mow the pastures. The iPod is yet another of mankind's great inventions. 

All of my music comes via the internet. Local radio isn't really local, and it tends to lean heavily on George Strait, who is a horse owner and is very popular in these parts. Local newspapers in Ocala and Gainesville are both owned by The New York Times and they both suck big time. The New Yorker and Time Magazine arrive by mail and are quickly read from cover to cover. 

When we travel, we continue to produce the daily newsletter via laptop so, in essence, we can do what we do from almost anywhere.

That we can live such a rural lifestyle, yet remain actively involved in the television news business and directly tapped into the national culture, is a ringing endorsement of the internet...and modern technology...and its ability to shrink the world and make all things possible. These days, we truly exist in one technological universe.