Full Moon Dawn

A few pictures from the recent full moon. No words needed really.

Youth Hostel And Change

I panicked a moment when I saw this in the Casa Marina district of key West. Hell, I thought, they are going to tear down that bizarre Polynesian roof and replace it with some house in the "Key West style" like every other one cuirrently being built or remodeled.

You don't see this everywhere in Key West:

It turns out I was wrong and they are just remodeling the building but not taking away it's unique silhouette. Which was relief as things are once again changing a lot around here. 

The hospital seems to have been involved in a rather nasty financial scam with the newspaper reporting payoffs:

(01/26/2017

New details revealed about hospital lease)  by the operators who contracted to run the hospital and the Depoo Mental facility on Kennedy.

The Blue Paper is reporting some rather use of building permits for a new hotel on Stock Island. There is limited growth allowed in the Florida Keys so as not to overwhelm the infrastructure or quality of life but the paper reports LINK the developer may have been building capacity without the proper permits and the county didn't bother to notice. That hotel forcibly replaced a working recreational fishing marina along with small businesses catering to boaters. All gone. It's the beginning of the end for affordable working class Stock Island.

 So one tends to get a bit paranoid when spotting a potentially endangered land mark. These days classic bad Florida tatse like a plastic flamingo is hard enough to find in this town:

Yet for some reason there seem to be fewer visitors to Key West this winter. The highway is clogged by commuters forced to live further from their Key West jobs, forced to drive by insane real estate prices in the city. Around town parking seems more available than usual and main streets aren't as clogged as in a normally busy winter season. A friend told me hotel occupancy in the relatively cheaper hotels on North Roosevelt is down in some cases to less than half full.

I'm not sure what all that means though my friend also wondered in the same breath if the general uncertainty surrounding President Trump's diabolically chaotic reign may have people wanting to be cautious with their money. Sounds like a stretch to me but who knows.

This place has been listed ready to be demolished for a couple of years I thin. Yet it's still here offering teh cheapest rate for a fleabag hotel in Key West. I've never stayed but friends who have say it attracts "characters." I will be sorry to see it go.

Places like this are hard to find in Key West.

And this place is a mere fixer upper, ready to be turned into an ideal winter retreat except it doesn't appear to be for sale. Somebody's ace in the hole.

Enjoying Rusty

An early morning walk; a few pictures to share.

My best companion.

Yahman

My wife was quite miffed: she didn't know about the new place with interesting food on Stock Island. So when friends casually suggested a Sunday afternoon rendez vous  at "the Jamaican place," the appointment had an a air of mystery attached.

Except of course for Facebook which will reveal all:

So we went off down Stock Island way on a lovely Sunday afternoon and found a large sign. I rather liked the "Commit No Nuisance" sign which has a flavor of Britain in the 1950s and quite likely Jamaica too. A "nuisance" when I was a youngster could be the act of peeing in public and apparently Wikipedia agrees: In essence, this is a discreet warning against performing improper acts in public, most commonly urination. Incidentally, the use of the term “public nuisance” comes from 12th century legal parlance in England. Back in those days, the Crown had the right to punish these criminal acts. But these signs have little meaning these days.

 A friend I spoke to about the place took umbrage at the sign not understanding the tongue-in-cheek cultural motif...

Yahman opens his food emporium Thursday through Sunday and as he was winding down for the week his menu choices were limited to shrimp and chicken so we got a jerked chicken and a curried chicken and I wouldn't have minded a slice of coconut bread pudding had I been on my own...but my wife was there so restraint was in order. He works miracles in a small kitchen and you can see what I mean by checking his Facebook page. The room in there is not huge.

The kitchen is located inside the art and craft space known as Coast and what they do and what they offer is best left to them to explain on their site. Boat repairs, sail making computer graphics and on and on, not to mention kid camps and so forth.  

I liked looking around with my camera while we waited for the food to pop out of the cupboard Yahman works in.

Be warned this is more or less a to go operation. Yahman offers ginger beer to drink and two stools to perch on (if you qualify!) but other than that it is strictly food to go.

This looked tempting to hang out in but we weren't "crew."

A Thai tuk-tuk taxi lurking in the background half out of sight:

Jerk chicken for ten bucks and would easily feed two. We had lots of left overs.

We took our food to Marina Village by way of the Tom Thumb where we bought drinks and then sat on the grass at the marina and picnic-ed with our Jamaican food.

It was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon before I had to go back to work for the night. I needed a nap after all that jerk and curry and peas and rice and plantains...

Cheyenne One Year On

It's been a year now since Cheyenne laid down on the deck at home and decided to die. She did it in such a natural and peaceful way it made it much easier for me to let her go and not assail myself with all the doubts that follow the decision to put a dog to sleep.

My relationship with Cheyenne was one that made me feel as though my dog was more mature than me. Taking her out for a walk frequently left me feeling as though I was accompanying my elderly grandmother as she chose the direction and the pace of our ambles. At home Cheyenne liked to lay down within sight of me but not too close, my shadow across the room.

One of the special pleasures of adopting dogs is the gratitude you get from them because they have known hardship and I find the relationship much more rewarding because there is the pleasure of offering a tired dog a haven. Cheyenne had been bred and had clearly been kept in her place, afraid to enter the kitchen, afraid of a rolled up newspaper etc...It didn't take long for her to end up closely observing my wife cooking or finding her own place on the furniture as a properly integrated dog should.

She was not the most willing traveler but she kept up, one year on a three week trip to California and back, once to Canada, and frequently to North Carolina and other jaunts that took my fancy. When we first got her she liked to sit all day in the car for fear of being left behind which had apparently been her lot in her previous life. I let her sit in the car with the door open for as long as she liked and pretty soon she figured out that whenever possible she was going to ride with me. Another of her demons put to rest.

She was a Labrador that never swam, a hunting dog that never chased a ball, a walking dog that preferred the city to the country, an expensive pedigree dog abandoned for the crime of being too old at age eight.She was a contradiction on four legs and I couldn't get enough of her.

 It was a good seven years, an honorable retirement for the old girl and I still miss her every day.

She was a big lump imperturbable and not much given to sentiment or cloying gratitude. The time I knew she was happy with me was when we prepared to move houses and as we packed she got agitated and I had to spend a lot of time reassuring her that this time she wasn't getting left behind.

There are no regrets, every day was a gift and we both knew it and made the most of each and every one.  She was the easiest dog in the world to live with always ready to give her all do her best and keep up. When she started to slow toward the inevitable end I asked her to spare me the needle problem and she did, her last gift, kindness itself to the very end. 

I can still smell her, feel her fur around her thick Labrador neck, hear her deep sonorous snores and we only just recently vacuumed the last of her distinctive long white hairs from the car. So now she is gone as we all will be but she lives on in my memory, one of those lucky chances in life that make life with a dog so rewarding.

Rest in peace dear girl.