Well bugger. Its official, all leave is cancelled and we get locked down Sunday at work. The good news for me is I am ordered in at midnight Sunday (overtime!) which gives me time to get the house sorted. In the spirit of this emergency I have postponed my planned essays around town and the Keys and will be writing storm related essays as long as the Internet is up, about what I'm doing and what is happening. I apologize to those that come here for rest and relaxation and a few nice pictures but the storm is sort of uppermost in my mind even though it can't seem to make up its mind about how strong it should be nor which direction it should take. And for those of you dreaming or planning a life in the Keys, this is just the Serpent in Paradise that one has to deal with every summer...
And yes I have cut down my coconuts, not because I could get sued, as ownership is hard to prove but because they become cannonballs in 100 mile-per-hour winds. Coconuts are non native trees and are prolific so it takes work to keep them trimmed and I harvest hundreds of coconuts from the dozen mature trees I inherited around my home. My house is a stilt home and we use the downstairs for storage, as a workshop as an outdoor laundry and we hang our clothes to dry down here too.
Stilt homes are handy not only for flood avoidance purposes but because all wiring and plumbing is easily visible overhead if anything breaks. Plus you get tons of shade to keep cars and motorcycles out of the sun which is the real ruin down here, not necessarily fresh clean rain that washes everything off.
The barbeque grill (which will get strapped down to the deck) sits on the cement chamber that would store 12,000 gallons did it not suffer from periodic leaks...be that as it may we haven't run out of rainwater in the past 18 months and we only use the piped aqueduct water to run our washing machine mostly. My home was built in 1987 among the first in the subdivision before electricity and water were supplied to the street.
Furniture should fold or collapse, be comfortable lightweight and stack able. These are not the normal criteria but when we buy stuff we try to picture ourselves in this very position: storm coming!
I have a small (2400watt) gasoline generator by Yamaha. It can power the fridge (800 watts) lights fans and TV/DVD player (we don't have satellite or cable reception) and of course Sirius Satellite Radio- all the essentials except a/c. We decided to go with small and portable in our generator for simplicity and ease of maintenance and it is also very quiet; you can talk while standing right next to it. I might have gone for the Honda 1000 but I like the Yamaha dealers at Garrison Bight much more than Victor the Honda dealer on Simonton Street...
I have a skiff at our dock,a 14 foot Dusky which is self bailing (very important for those sudden summer squalls that drop four inches of water while you are at work!) and it rode out all the storms of 2005 at the dock...but I decided I need to get it together to put it on the trailer and stop pushing my luck:
And then I take an hour and secure my hurricane shutters to the windows of which I have 10 of various sizes around the home. I am lucky in that I enjoy wide side decks all round and that makes the job very simple compared to some people who have to climb ladders holding onto these sheets of corrugated aluminum:
They slide into the upper frame on the window and are screwed in using butterfly nuts at the bottom, overlapping as you go:
This type are laborious and awkward to use especially if you don't have decks to walk on, but I think they are the most secure and my insurance company agrees. Modern sliding shutters are very easy to use and are very good also while plywood sheets are a pain in the ass t nail up, labor intensive and awakward to store.
My house looks like a turtle when the shutters are in place and they make the interior dark and bunker like and a little creepy. Plus any slight breeze rattles them and they sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse closing in. That was hard to take when I spent four lonely days waiting for Wilma to hit in 2005...my wife was safe Up North while I chewed my fingernails while sitting on the deck watching a cloudless sky, day after day.
So, I've got to get busy putting stuff away this hot Saturday afternoon and somehow, no matter how careful and obsessive we are about not being pack rats the crap accumulates!
The nasty part about Hurricanes (as opposed to California Earthquakes with which I am very familiar) is that you know its coming and you have a good idea when. The details may be fuzzy but there is that empty space in the put of your stomach hoping everything will still be here when you get back from being locked down at the Police Station...Meanwhile skies are blue and its a great day to be in the Keys:
That's looking south towards Cuba whence cometh Fay. I hope its"only" a Category One, or pehaps a modest near miss.
Since those early days the new homeowners have repainted them of course, various shades of this and that:
As well as the larger, and straighter, thoroughfare called Eagle Avenue:
These are all streets with fairly abundant greenery which adds to the charm, and homeowners in Smurf Village enjoy duplexes with yards large enough to grow a bush or two:
I haven't heard the term Smurf Village used in a while so perhaps it has faded from the lips of newer arrivals, perhaps the Smurfs are no longer the craze they once were and perhaps too, people who paid half a million or more for their duplex may not want to think of themselves as living in a cartoon character's toadstool. Even though they do boast those pronounced overhangs and easily identified silhouettes:
Make no mistake these are duplexes:
I know a couple of people who live in Smurf 
And like everywhere else in Key West, when it comes to real estate, if you wait long enough it will come on the market:
This sign looked pretty weathered so a cute Smurf home with pool may or may not still be looking for a happy new owner...
These papier mache things are everywhere around there, posed and staring fixedly into a future that will never come. It is bizarre, but at least some of the visitors think they are great fun:
And this guy isn't a statue at all, he just looks a bit like one owing to a slight lull in the flow of customers:
This next one looks like a New England purveyor of tinned seafood more than a rugged Key West Conch hunter. I don't suppose the punters really care one way or the other, it's just me being fussy:
And this one with his idiot's grin plastered forever on his vacuous face has overtones that dare not speak their name:
I am probably just too sensitive for this sort of thing. I needed something pure and innocent and traditional but the best I could come up with was this, though what the hell this little tableau is all about I have no idea:
And though it is decidedly traditional some critics argue the Pez Garden is not Art. It all defies definition if you ask me. The Pez Garden is the local name for the Sculpture Garden wherein some notable heads from Key West history are on display:
This is Commodore Porter who vanquished pirates and buccaneers from around Key West and set such a high moral tone locals petitioned the Department of the Navy to get him out of there:
He ended up a mercenary on the Barbary Coast helping North African governments deal with their own piracy problems. Which goes to show virtue is definitely not its own reward. I need to be invited to write school history textbooks, the little dears would get quite an eye opener.
And across Mallory Square, a young man was busy impressing a young woman:
Hemingway had his movable feast; I have my movable statue. Home James, and don't spare the horsepower! 
Or this one, walking in circles and frantically trying to get his point across:
I expect I can be forgiven for a being a phone curmudgeon bearing in mind my line of work, but I am generally slow to take up technology of the sake of it. Besides, I hate myself when I answer my home phone inadvertently by saying "Key West Police..." that's when I know work is interfering with my peace of mind. This dude takes indifference to a whole new level:
Part of me admires his indifference to societal disapproval but I guess everything gets blunted by the gut warmth of alcohol. This next guy I snapped on the fly. Street performers play to tourists in Key West and they are always looking around for someone to interact with, and that most definitely would not be me. I don't mind dropping a buck in the hat if they play well but I don't like interactive theater, thanks, so I hurry along:
On the subject of indifference I must confess I feel nothing about the Olympics in China. I am one of those who, lacking television reception finds it easy to block out the running around and discus hurling. Until I come across a small reminder, this one a trunk sticker on a statue outside the Museum of Art and History:
Ho hum says I, spotting something much more interesting up ahead. A crane, large and industrial no less:
It seems the Westin Hotel (nee Hilton) is expanding its garage. Either that or they are demolishing it, which is too much to hope for:
Across the street there used to be employee parking on a large gravelled lot. I used to leave my scooter there when the covered scooter parking was full. I was working as a boat captain in the Hilton marina and there was more space, now we have more housing bless us everyone, but it doesn't look like workforce housing to cynical old me:
My blood sugar was back to more or less normal by now and my headache was quite gone. That left me able to appreciate beauty once again and here is another of those weird fan palms I last saw on James Street. Now I notice them they are appearing everywhere:
And in closing, on the subject of parking, the lady and all her dogs was absent from her post on the street corner I usually see her at.
Perhaps she was having her blood drawn and hadn't quite recovered.