Vignettes XXXIX

Road works at Caroline and William Streets.Flooding is endemic to these streets after heavy rains and supposedly they will be digging deeper wells to take care of the problem. The Central American Indian navvies will, with their shovels. This guy was sitting snug on his bulldozer.The end result of all the roadwork around town is lots of dark strips of asphalt across the streets.
And one hopes, a lot less flooding.The process seems endless. While stopped at Searstown for a movie (The American, which I enjoyed) I spotted a nearly pristine little Honda Elite, purple in color.

It was a nostalgic moment for me. When my wife and I were living on our boat we had a scooter just like this. I used to commute by bicycle but in the summer months after a day out on the water being a boat captain a cycle ride was tough to take.

My wife cut her scooter riding teeth on a Honda just like this one. She used to buzz round town checking on her young probationers on her scooter. At the time she was working her way into being a teacher and she had a job as a Juvenile Probation Officer which involved her riding around town to check on her kids.I remember that scooter very fondly, a tireless workhorse that ran and ran and gave us no problems. We replaced a tired belt and weights and after that it could keep up reasonably easily with traffic on the main streets in Key West. It was small, light, practical and great fun.It cost us $600 and we sold it for nearly as much when my wife conceived a passion for the newer Honda Metropolitan (Jazz in other countries) four stroke scooter. That one ran nicely too, bought almost new and drowned a year later in Hurricane Wilma. Talking about good deals, here's a distressed fixer upper in Key West.$327,000 for a crappy little shed? Amazingly enough some people think it's still 2005 in the housing market. I'd rather live on a boat, though not on a sailboat. I had enough of that in my youth.

I stopped on a whim on the Overseas Highway to let Cheyenne out and to take a moment to look out at the water. I noticed the rain has been giving everything a healthy shade of green. Even the weeds growing on the old Flagler Bridge from 1910 are looking stout.The new bike path is looking good too. These fishermen are camped in a jungle of weeds:

They were at Niles Channel with the arching forty-foot bridge in the background. Further up the road I stopped off at the Salvation Army on Summerland Key to drop off some donations organized by my wife.No more, they told me. They are closing at the end of the month and that leaves a store in Key West and one in Big Pine.Back at work we trudge on much as usual, getting through the doldrums of quiet season in Key West. I worked with Fred for a couple of nights while his regular trainer was away. It's tough to train a new police dispatcher when there are fewer calls than normal. We take 150,000 calls a year in our communications center. To make up for the lack of 911's Fred had his smart phone with him to keep him amused on his breaks.So did Noel, but he's not a trainee so he can text anytime he's not busy. He's going back to days soon and I shall miss him.Keith, seen here checking a driver's license, has spent a great deal of his life working nights in hotels and restaurants. He and I are the only two that like the night shift and wouldn't want to work days. Luckily we have enough seniority we won't have to.To my surprise I have been working at Key West PD for more than six years. We have 15 positions and a few are always waiting to be filled. I guess I'm lucky I have a job, and one that I like in these times of high unemployment. Bring on the night shift, bring on the calls.

Kennedy Café

NOTE: I have been struggling to organize this post but the new blogger system has wrecked my simple, easy to read layout. I spent two hours trying to straighten it out and it just ended up making me crazy. My apologies.

When my California buddy Tim was visiting a few months ago he told me to find someplace exotic for breakfast. "Is Uzbek cuisine exotic enough?" He begged off claiming his traveling companion was a little boggled by the possibility of a Central Asian meal.The Kennedy Café is the place to go for Uzbek cuisine,a style of cookery with which I am not familiar. It seems to incorporate stuff that might be familiar to say, a Turk or possibly a Lebanese gourmand.The Kennedy café used to be the Seven Day Deli, a Cuban restaurant and it's current incarnation bears reminders of it's past. The breakfast menu was a disappointment in that it offers the usual Cuban-American Key West style of meat and egg items and sandwiches. I was curious to know what Uzbeks eat for breakfast...The special board looked promising.

I was alone, seeking lunch, and my wife in California had suggested I try this place. She is full of good and adventurous ideas. I had the lamb shwarma. It looked like the illustration, a large sandwich made with Uzbek bread. the bread looks like a sweet roll with sesame seeds embedded in the glaze, but the bread is not at all sweet and is halfway to being pita bread in consistency in that it doesn't have a thick spongy middle.The sandwich came with chunks of lamb,a spicy red sauce and chunks of garlic onion and cucumber on lettuce. It was delicious. I realized I have to come back with my wife (who has already eaten here previously) and share several dishes at a meal. I resisted the desserts on display at the check out counter.

My sandwich was eight bucks and I should have taken this thing shown below, home...to eat later. I was strong. I resisted. I was stupid. God knows what it is.

The Café is just one in a series of small businesses on Kennedy Boulevard.I wondered if my colleagues can be persuaded to try this at work some hungry night?

I can just imagine Noel throwing a fit if I suggest to to him we eat Uzbek some night at work. He is not an adventurous eater. He threw his last fit when I told him the ban on gays in the military might be repealed. "What?" he cried in panic. "I'm counting on that to keep me out of the Army in the next war!" I'm full of bad news for my young colleague whose news reading extends in the direction of celebrity gossip. "What's the point of being gay if they can draft you?" he asked with impeccable Cuban rhetoric. I don't want to get drafted either (I shall claim age related infirmity when they come for me) but at least I am adventurous enough to enjoy an Uzbek lunch.

Well, imagine my surprise when Noel agreed to try out the Uzbek take out menu I brought to work Thursday night. The Café delivered exactly as promised and Noel eagerly unwrapped the packages for the three of us. I ordered a Lamb Doner sandwich:

Keith enjoyed his shwarma sandwich. With a lifetime in the restaurant and hotel trade Keith knows what he likes and the Uzbek sandwich gote his vote. "Interesting bread" he said, as he dug in.

Noel plucked the hated tomato disks from his sandwich.

I ordered a side of somsas, samosas of spinach to try them out. Noel liked the pastry and said had they been of potato rather than spinach and feta he might have enjoyed his taste. They worked for me...

All in all my colleagues surprised me, especially Noel with his willingness to try something new. The Café Kennedy came up to expectations which was no surprise.

Blogspot Does It Again

Blogspot has done it again unhappily. They have made sudden unannounced changes to their blogging system and I fear my posts may look a little odd for a while until I can somehow master their changes. Photos are now faster to download supposedly though they are integrated into the text HTML so they have a habit of sliding across the page disconcertingly. I have also not found out how to set my own defaults in typescript and font so...it will be a learning curve for tired old me. (Indeed upon publishing the foregoing paragraph appears in the wrong typescript and I am unable to change it! Good job Blogger people!)

(I saw this motorcycle with a bizarre flashing white light on the back and took a picture for the hell of it. Keeping pictures centered in the text has become next to impossible with this new system. Very frustrating).

I have tried to keep my layout consistent and simple to read, not least because I like it that way. I find it hard on my eyes to read blogs that use white print on a black or dark blue background. Masthead photos that change all the time confuse the eye as well. Ask yourself why the New York Times, the paper of record hasn't changed it's venerable masthead in living memory...so I have found a color combination that is restful to my eyes, and a simple layout which is easy to read with larger pictures centered in the middle of the text.

If this layout changes believe me, it will be an error and not my wish as  I am conservative in all things, except the political as it were, and prefer they stay the same on my small corner of the web. Fonts keep reverting to default,  as does text style and centering is impossible to maintain consistently and pictures slide around the page at will. I am very unhappy.  If all else fails I will continue to keep this page pop-up free, ad free, and commercial free as much as I am able.

Taking pictures and writing my daily diary, a place for me to reflect and store my memories is supposed to be a daily meditation, a relaxation as it were. Blogger always does find new and annoying ways of making it harder. But I shall soldier on, with apologies in advance for screw ups to come.

Lower Duval

This is tourist mecca in Key West, the area known simply as "The One Hundred Block."Stores sell crap to visitors, be they off cruise ships, docked a short walk away, or people who come to Key West under the strange delusion that this is the heart of a community, that in fact some of the community suffers Lower Duval rather than embraces it. When you consider the rent on one of these stores can be as much as thirty thousand dollars a month and they are selling everything for five dollars you have to ask yourself, what precisely is it they are really laundering here? It used to be that t-shirt shops offered to "customize" their wares and then charged the victim, surreptitiously something crazy like $300 on their credit cards for a logo printed on a cheap t-shirt. That scam got stomped but how they justify their ghastly stores these days I don't know. Nor do I care to.But the visitors, they come and they keep coming. I saw a new crop of nuanced t-shirts with messages vaguely pornographic but mostly puerile in their humor. Perhaps it's time for me do another essay highlighting their literary efforts, and Key West's shame.The absurd rental charges go a long way to explaining the diminutive sizes of some of the stores. The world's smallest bar justifies itself as a cute place to squeeze in and get a drink. The rent for the space has to be reasonable, surely?The tourists and the touts aren't the only people on Lower Duval. Apart from yours truly, who is truly uncomfortable in this place there are the usual crop of bums. To call these people "homeless" is a disservice to the working poor and dispossessed on this island. These vagrants are proving that the First Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court rulings are alive and well in Key West, even if they seem to be under attack elsewhere in the Republic.To be a bona fide palm weaver on Duval Street you need an actual Key West city permit. Buskers have them too, as does the guy featured recently in the paper who makes he says an average $150 a night telling "dirty jokes" to passers-by. When I get tired of taking 9-1-1 calls I know what my next job will be. Buy tickets, take an excursion, everything you want is available on Duval Street.And even if you don't want it, touts will lunge out and collar you as you stroll by.Art for commerce's sake.Yup, I thought to myself, four drinks for the price of two, then I'll be ready to ride the scooter home...There are chickens and pigeons on the street and sidewalks are crumbling. I miss First World America.The idea of sitting on the crumbling sidewalk drinking in the sun sounds like a first class way to waste an afternoon, but perhaps that is the point.She gave me the two-for-one tickets on my way down and I slid by on my way back up. It seems a ghastly way to earn a living to me. Of course in winter she will probably make more than I do working for the city in my "proper" job."Oh look! Sloppy Joe's!" Yup, our Norwegian friends here probably think that's exactly how it was when Hemingway drank in Key West. Never mind; they enjoy the delusion, we enjoy their money. Crass isn't it?
This is not a tourist wobbling on a bike for the first time in decades. this is a dedicated professional scurrying between his second and third jobs hauling lunch as he goes, smoothly and efficiently around town.UPS even serves the Conch Republic in 90 degree heat.This guy missed the trash can on his first toss. I was ready to get silently snarky but, good man! he went forward and caught his hoop on the second try.A weird facade.Get a photo with a parrot. If you guessed he needs an official city permit to do this you'd be a gold star student.My wife says she wants her scooter back next week. I got the 150cc ET4 up to 73mph indicated on a downhill slope on US One this week with the wind at my back. That's a hot shit little Vespa, and it makes cool cat motorists mad when I sneak up and pass them on the open road...On the other end of the speed drama conch trains are still plodding around town at 5 miles per hour. Mostly empty.Roll on winter with it's bustle and it's crowds. That will make the One Hundred Block truly unbearable for one of my refinement and delicate sensibilities.