Old Summerland Bridge

My wife and I took the skiff out the other day and even though it got us out to our swimming hole in Newfound Harbor there was barely enough power to get the boat up on a plane. I rather think the new cables are too long and don't allow the carburettors to open fully to take advantage of the twenty five whole horsepower of our finicky Yamaha outboard. we shall see. Meanwhile the salt waters around here are warming up enough that even a local will find them warm enough to swim in. So it is with a spot of frustration I find myself wandering the mangroves on hot sunny afternoon.Cheyenne enjoyed herself as always, most particularly because this little trail at the top of Niles Road on Summerland Key is short and sweet and apparently full of good things to smell.I looked out across the waters wondering if I might soon dare to ride the high seas. I am getting antsy about going swimming.Cheyenne likes low tide at the old bridge. While I'm looking longingly out at the water wondering where my formerly-20-mile-per-hour skiff is......she sits in the shade under the bridge and thinks dog thoughts.

Home And Garden

A teacher's life can be quite hectic between Monday and Friday and some days i get a little guilty as I enjoy one more day off or my usual afternoon at home before I go in for my night shift. Layne spent a good part of Saturday afternoon napping, her precious iPhone never too far away..She is counting down the days to summer vacation which starts in mid June in Monroe County, and then there will be weeks of free time, time to allow kids to be at home to bring in the harvest(!). Very 19th century, I'm sure. Cheyenne joined in the favorite family pastime.It takes a fair amount of time to keep watering the plants this drought season. It's hot (95 degrees) and dry out there.Our tomatoes are still producing a fair bit of fruit and I have had mixed success keeping the iguana away. They have torn up my eggplants and bell peppers most annoyingly despite my best efforts with Neem oil and garlic powder repellent.

The plants Therese bought, on her visit from Paris, are flourishing. The jasmine flowered and faded but the vines are strong.Heavy rain drowned the bougainvillea but I am notorious for killing off those hardy plants. I could never grow them in California where habitually they flourish.The iguanas seem to have made a bed out of the flowers. I am patrolling with my pellet gun but they are the very devil to catch napping. This lot are doing quite nicely. I have fresh head of lettuce growing in the Earthbox and so far I have kept it iguana-free.

I hope Therese comes back next year for some more plantings.

City Views

I remember the vocal debate power companies had about the dangers of PCBs in their equipment. It seems odd now to imagine that anyone could oppose getting rid of that nasty kind of chemical.Even as our leaders today maneuver to defang the Environmental Protection Agency. What a banana republic they want to make of us! I don't think a return to the pollution of the Great Lakes, the rivers catching fire and so on and so forth would be to the people's benefit. These days fracking is the big pollution concern and the more I read about that the less I like it. Key West homes look tiny from up in the air.Looking across the roof of the Grinnell Street Parking Garage I could see the Steam Plant condos in the former electrical power station. Penthouse views for 1.6 million dollars I believe.And there is that flight path, right over the middle of the city with a plane load of visitors coming to town.You can see why they'd be coming too.Palm trees, turquoise waters, breezes and eternal sunshine.

May Day

It has occurred to me that the end of the Cold War has brought about some changes that may not have been so good for us workers on the winning side. I am not a suitable candidate for citizenship in a totalitarian country, I have this unfortunate tendency to think for myself and say what I think. That sort of behavior would get me into trouble immediately with a Cuban block monitor or a Soviet Commissar. Yet there are days I miss the Cold War and today might be one of them. Today is the International Day of the Worker, which in the US is magically made into Labor Day in the Fall in an effort to avoid a communist taint.We have so many wars we are fighting these days, bombing Libya, killing Afghans and trying to stop Iraqis from throwing us out, stopping our citizens from using drugs while also carrying out lawless wiretaps in an effort to prevent the spread of "terror." You'd think the elimination of one other War would be a good thing but the Cold War, with its fights by proxy around the world, it's doctrine of mutually assured destruction and the subjugation of freedom of thought and travel and behavior of millions of people did have one big benefit for us in the West. It made our leaders care about us.I grew up in the shadow of the nuclear age and the era of space travel and the development of hideous weapons of war and yet what I am most drawn to about the era was the Soviet propaganda that told the world with less accuracy than one might like, about the shortcomings of the free market on our side of the Iron Curtain. It was an era when our leaders were forced to acknowledge the benefits of welfare, the notion of no human being ever so poor, or ever so rich being an island. We were a team in the West, composed of volunteers much more so than our working counterparts in the east and they knew they were playing catch up. We had jobs, cars TVs, reliable electricity, choices, colors, travel and leisure. When I traveled to the Soviet Union the few people brave enough to speak to me were always asking me to compare their world to the USA, a thing I was reluctant to do as their guest. They were so clearly inferior to us in every measure of a good quality of life.We won the Cold War, just as we rolled back the Cuban Missile Crisis from the shores of Smathers Beach (above) and we showed them who could build and sell a better mousetrap. And then our leaders lost the plot. Globalization came, profits soared along with the stock market as jobs were exported and true poverty has come to ravage the land in a way and of a pervasiveness the Soviet propaganda machine could not have imagined.

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Now that we have no enemy to compete with our leaders can drop their pretence of giving a toss about us the workers as we join with them in tearing down unions, denying ourselves health care and lay down our pensions in the service of tax breaks for the very rich. During the Cold War they would not have dared to do such cruel things, they had to prove our way was best for the people as well as for themselves.

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Now, paradoxically our critics in the East are making out like bandits, trading among themselves, hoarding natural resources, selling gas and oil and watching our unemployment rise along with our crushing national debt. It is a fact that when there are no referees to see foul play the people in charge take advantage and as I wait for my fellow citizens to wake up and remember the benefits of collective action in the defense of jobs and benefits and America's home grown industry I lament the loss of the protections afforded us by the oversight of our critics on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.

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What a weird thought. Happy May Day I guess and perhaps one day Hallmark will issue a card to celebrate it.

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And then they tell us Osama Bin Laden is dead. Adding he was no longer directly involved in the field operations of Al Quaeda, as though to soften the blow. I just have to ask myself why it took so long. They should have had him in Tora Bora a decade ago, but better late than never.

The Blue Hole

I wanted to see an alligator so I went where the alligator resides in the Lower Keys, at the Blue Hole on Big Pine Key.Key Deer Boulevard ploughs due north from the lone traffic light on the Overseas Highway in Big Pine and a couple of miles up the road is this new and nice looking sign. Incidentally the boring 30mph speed limit is closely monitored so speeding is generally a bad idea around here. The Blue Hole has lots of information on billboards though what use they were to the crop of foreigners visiting I'm not sure. We in Amurika don't put tourist signs up in foreign languages.The Blue Hole is actually a murky shade of green but it is a catchment for rainwater so it is fresh and not salty. It used to be that a large and well known alligator lived here, and came to be known as Bacardi. That alligator, the fearsome creature, ate a child's plastic toy dropped i the water. The toy stuffed it's digestive system and the alligator starved to death. As usual the wildlife has more to fear from us, than us from them.There is a replacement now floating around in the Blue Hole. It was a quiet and placid afternoon in Big Pine last Thursday afternoon. I saw a turtle head pop out of the water in the middle of the hole and a couple of large fish tempted fate swimming past the alligator's snout.

However boredom seemed to be the agenda.

The alligator rose and sank every few minutes, taking a breath and then sinking out of sight. It was all very peaceful and not at all threatening.

I wrote more previously on the Blue Hole here:
http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2008/12/blue-hole-revisited.html

ABCD Centerline

A rather odd idea was bruited about asking people to take pictures of the centerline of a road and a portion of themselves this May Day. This picture does not qualify as I am not in it.Putting a portion of myself in the shot at 60 miles per hour created a good deal more wobble but this picture would qualify.

I chose to take the pictures this morning on my way home from work, and as the clock shows in the stationary picture below it was around 6:30am on the Overseas Highway around Mile Marker 26.Summer clouds are forming over the Florida Keys though rain has yet to fall in any measurable quantity but they did preclude the bright orange sunrise that frequently greets me on my way home from a night of dispatching in Key West. I chose to take the picture on the top of the Niles Channel Bridge because this is the high point, literally, of my commute in a county that rises no more than 16 feet above sea level, at least without human intervention. Back at ground level on my home island of Ramrod Key I got another shot of people rushing I'm not sure where at this sleepy hour:There; it's done and so to bed, to sleep perchance to dream. Before turning around tonight and putting another 50 odd miles on the clock of my well worn Triumph Bonneville.The blog responsible for this act of photography may be found here:

http://garysusatour.blogspot.com/2011/04/abcd-will-you-take-part.html

In the end apparently the pictures weren't worth it as he chose to ignore them entirely!