A Burned Out Home

It has been a while since my neighbor' house burned down across the canal. I figured the passage of time makes it easier to write about this fiasco.

There isn't much to say, except that to look at the pictures of the writhing wreck of a home is a reminder of the power of flames. The home owner is elderly, she was at home at the time and escaped thanks to an alert neighbor with a ladder who helped her down over the deck away from the flames. The cause apparently seems to have been electrical in nature.Cheyenne woke my wife up, I wasn't home at the time, and when she went out to see why the dog was agitated she saw flames across the water and burning embers floating onto our home. She took our garden hose and watered down our decks and the dock (our roof is made of metal).It was, she says, spectacular and the smell of incinerated home lingered over the canal for days.I have been finding pieces of charred paper all round our house tucked away in the bushes and trees.Apparently there was no insurance on the home.The burned out shell lingers on in limbo. A stark reminder how fast our fortunes can change.

align="justify">

It isn't just hurricanes that tear things down around here.

Nostalgia Machines

On a weather note, winter appears to be over for the time being and Fall has returned once more. Yesterday we had a delightful day of warm sun, very little breeze and zero humidity. My wife and I took Cheyenne on a walk around Old Town and the weather was about perfect. My apologies to the dog walker who correctly identified me as the blogger with the pink Crocs (even though I was wearing black shoes on my way to work) and who very kindly said hello to Cheyenne. I never quite know what to say in these encounters, but I hope I wasn't as big a dolt as I felt I was. I am looking forward to more of these warmer days to compensate us for more of those cold weather surprises in the New Year.

=======================================================

I stopped off at the First State Bank on Simonton Street and as I walked back to the car from the automated teller machine I saw this interesting arrangement on a Kymco scooter. I expect the owner needs to use a floor mounted basket but it seems very odd to me. One of the big advantages of scooters is that the floor space is open which makes for easy access and a comfortable space to put your feet. And now there's a basket strapped down there. Whatever works.

Chuck has lined up his three classic motorcycles in front of his house, one looking better than the next. It's obviously a BSA and I think it's an A65 single carb 650cc from the early 60's and Chuck got in exchange for a favor. Right now that looks like a deal but at the time it was running and I think it qualified as a "barn find" as motorcycle enthusiasts call them. I think it's fabulous.This is the kind of bike I think about when I sit astride my own 2007 Bonneville and to see Chuck's looking so original gives me goosebumps. Birmingham Small Arms was a company that grew out of making weapons (as the name implies!) and it went through a number of hands until close to the end when it became part of the Triumph group which subsequently incorporated Norton as well- Norton Villiers Triumph, or NVT. Production at BSA peaked in the 1950s with 75,000 machines built each year.It's all arguable, and people do argue about these bikes even though the last BSA was built in 1973, but BSAs were frequently regarded as better machines than the sportier Triumphs. BSAs were solid and dependable which is funny because by the end Triumphs and BSAs were essetnially using the same engines with different names.
The front of Chuck's house is starting to look like a corner of the Barber Museum with it's line up of old bikes. This Sportster started the parade and Chuck says it is his highway ride for those out of town trips that refresh the soul. The engineer in him never stops making thing s just so but apparently the Sportster is now a reliable daily rider. But this? This Puch 250 twin is a gem.Another of those crazy barn finds, everything is original and perfect and frankly, beyond belief. This speedometer has the original break in recommended limits. The key is made in Italy, of the straight nail type so popular in my youth.
This is another of those strange American anomalies when big US department stores (!) would sell European bikes under their own brand names. Technically this is a Sears. However it has peculiar technology all made by Puch, the Austrian motorcycle innovators. Sears sold the SGS 250 as the "Twingle" and odd name for a unique engine type pioneered in Europe. The two stroke cylinder fed by an offset carburettor is actually a sort of single with two pistons and two spark plugs in this configuration, diagram courtesy of Wikipedia.
The twingle was supposed to be relatively economical on gas and dead reliable. This one has a carburettor feeding the side of the crankcase:
The details on these bikes is amazing, a little wind deflector for the carburettor, tank knee pads... ...a fully enclosed chain... ...and not one logo...

...but two:

The cylinder is a work of art with the fins drawn back in a sort of elegant semi oval shape.

These are the shapes of motorcycles that appeal to me, curves and not angles.

Everything is on display.Two kicks and the twingle putters to life with a perfect idle.And off he goes down the street. The perfect around town ride Chuck says.

The Puch/Sears is good for 70 mph but apparently that's not a happy speed for a motorcycle almost as old as I am. No wonder really. 35 to 40 miles per hour is the comfort zone. Then there is the big bad BSA, no gentle puttering of the two stroke, no slight puff of white smoke here.However this one too starts on the second kick. A well tuned bike as it takes but a pair of......sandals.That big bad twin used to have straight pipes when Chuck got it. The lightly baffled mufflers sounded excellent, far louder than my Bonneville, but Mrs Chuck wasn't as excited as the boys...Look at that exhaust note!

I hope Chuck doesn't let his offspring loose on these wonders the way he did on his bike. Nice paint job.

Not suitable though for a proper Beezer.

Frigid December

I haven't stopped commuting to work by Bonneville just because the temperature has dropped and stayed down below 60 degrees.I wear my mesh jacket liner and a sweatshirt and my heavy winter elk skin roper gloves and a balaclava under my helmet, all because the sun, though bright, carries no heat. And the morning ride home in the cold damp air feels like an outdoor meat locker at six in the morning.The colors are washed out at dusk when you look away from the golden sunsets. This was Highway One behind me when I stopped on my way to work Sunday night.Dispatching has been relatively quiet as the cold weather tends to keep people indoors. Alcohol fueled stupidity continues of course, and as one officer put it, the numbers of domestic disturbances go up as the frozen southernmost residents huddle indoors sharing their socks and wishing for heating in this Dickensian spell of discomfort. What else is there to do but drink and allow your relationship's resentments to ride to the surface? This was the view from my desk at work as the latest infernal cold front rolled over Key West. The Bonneville is the speck at the bottom of the picture. Yes I did ride to work despite the promise of 40 mile per hour winds, rain and lows around 47 degrees: It was a promise maintained first thing Tuesday morning when I got in the car to take Cheyenne to the mangroves for her early morning walk.

I can read metric on my Fusion's display. This is for Jack riepe, man of the world:

We got a call at work from a freaked out woman on a boat. She could hear screaming and noises outside on the docks. She felt the need to whisper for she was terrified someone outside was ready to do her harm. At first Noel thought she was alone on her boat but she said her boyfriend was peering out a porthole to see what was going on. She was, it turns out, a visitor from North Dakota of all places (home of the country's only state owned bank, and the only state in the Lower Forty Eight that has a balanced state budget-statism works!). However she had no idea which marina she was in, what slip she was at or the name of her boat. Noel took the call and with the patience of a saint elicited which marina but not which dock: only that they parked their red Ford Mustang (rental car!) at the end of the dock. The man was still screaming for help, she said. I sent four officers to find out what was happening because as luck would have it we were going through a quiet moment, as the bars had closed. They paired up and started walking the docks at four o'clock in the morning. The woman was too scared to hang up the phone and too scared to talk in a voice Noel could hear. Keith and I sat like statues while Noel tried to decipher what she was saying. God knows what she thought would happen if she spoke in a normal voice, buried as she was in the bowels of her boat. But in the end all was well. Sergeant Blasberg advised me laconically over the radio a man was plucked from the water and returned to his boat safely. That was all I knew but as a former long time live aboard let me suggest that coming home drunk is probably not a great idea as people have drowned falling off the docks which are too high out of the water for a fully dressed intoxicated unfit man to climb back onto. It may be ridiculously not cold around here for some people but if the freaked out tourist from North Dakota hadn't called he would have died most probably. Even the herons don't much seem to like the weather. Perhaps I'm anthropomorphizing but he didn't look happy:I am glad Cheyenne is the excuse that I have to drive the car in the cold during the day:Keys Energy has been working on the bases of the cement power poles that live in the waters adjacent to the highway. I guess they are off work for a bit, perhaps for the holidays, perhaps for the cold.My imagination may be working overtime but I thought this rocky foreshore at low tide looked like a frozen snowfield. I have tried to stay out of the frigid north wind and when I find shelter from the breeze the sun is pleasantly warm. But the wind chill is the killer factor these days.

Cheyenne has been quite frisky in the cool temperatures but I have a hard time keeping up. My wife got her a new soft blanket and now she doesn't want to get off it, so I have to drape it on her bed to keep her happy. I'd like to think she's fed up with the cold too.

I was walking in the piled up seaweed along the beach and I realized how pleasant and warm it is now that the cold crisp air has dried it all out. Usually it's a stinking soggy mess, mouldering away on the beach, washed up by the currents and wind storms.In this weather the soft warm seaweed felt great. I am too lazy for cold weather. I forgot to dig out my second pair of jeans and I took to the road in shorts. "I'll be fine," I told my impatient dog, who wanted to get out of the house. I wasn't. The temperatures by the weekend are supposed to be back up to 70 (20C) by day and 65 (17C) by night and that will much better. Some people seem to take the cold in stride and even with a strong north wind blowing there were some eccentrics taking to the water in a not terribly seaworthy craft:I was sitting on the ground with my back to the car in the sun reading Motorcyclist magazine and Cheyenne was sitting next me having completed her check of the area when a car parked across the way drove up alongside me. I thought they wanted directions- left to Key West, right to marathon seemed easy enough. No they were begging. No money no gas and no prospects, down from Alabama for some reason. I don't typically carry money when I go walking Cheyenne so I wished them luck and wondered what they thought they were doing. If you don't have a job Up North, coming down here to look for work is crazy. There is none, even though we have openings always for dispatchers, it takes six months to get hired, a further year to train and even then you have to able to sit still for 12 hours at a stretch all while getting yelled at by drunk tourists down the phone. It's not a job for everybody. The easier trades in the bars are all full up from what I've heard.I don't think the economy is recovering. I am surprised there are as many visitors as there are in the Keys.

I hope they keep coming and bringing money with them. And they can take the cold Arctic air back wherever it came from, thank you.