I have been reading Don't Stop The Carnival, a novel by Herman Wouk of the trials and tribulations of owning a Caribbean guest house and a passage about Norman Paperman seeing the famous green flash caught my mental recollector. 
Several guests left their tables and joined the watching crowd. It was a remarkably clear evening. The sun, it's lower edge already sliding below the purple horizon, was bright as gold. The shiny disk sank to half it's size, reddening and dimming. It went lower turning orange-red, shrinking moment by moment. Soon there was only a glistening orange fragment poked above the ocean- and at that moment Paperman saw it. In the instant of it's vanishing, the last bit of sun turned green. There was a wave of chatter along the rail. Some had seen it, some hadn't, and everyone was talking at once.
I spent years looking out to see hoping for a green flash. In California such a thing isn't possible owing to the fog obstructing the horizon. When I traveled to more benign climates I looked for the mythical green flash. When we sailed south along the coast of Mexico and Central America we looked for the green flash all the way to the Panama Canal and failed to see it. In the Caribbean sailing to Key West, I failed to spot anything remotely resembling a green flash. I despaired.
Then I took a job as a boat captain taking visitors sailing almost every single day around the Key West harbor. Every evening on the water we told clients to look for the green flash as the sun set and sometimes they claimed to see it and tipped me handily for the experience. Then one day I finally saw it; I knew I had seen it and had no doubt. Later that week I saw it again. I have seen the green flash twice. Nowadays I look for it half heartedly because I have seen it and I am satisfied. Only in Key West did I ever see the damned thing, and after thousands of miles of open water sailing and never once. And then twice in one week in Key West. Weird.
Several guests left their tables and joined the watching crowd. It was a remarkably clear evening. The sun, it's lower edge already sliding below the purple horizon, was bright as gold. The shiny disk sank to half it's size, reddening and dimming. It went lower turning orange-red, shrinking moment by moment. Soon there was only a glistening orange fragment poked above the ocean- and at that moment Paperman saw it. In the instant of it's vanishing, the last bit of sun turned green. There was a wave of chatter along the rail. Some had seen it, some hadn't, and everyone was talking at once.
I spent years looking out to see hoping for a green flash. In California such a thing isn't possible owing to the fog obstructing the horizon. When I traveled to more benign climates I looked for the mythical green flash. When we sailed south along the coast of Mexico and Central America we looked for the green flash all the way to the Panama Canal and failed to see it. In the Caribbean sailing to Key West, I failed to spot anything remotely resembling a green flash. I despaired.Then I took a job as a boat captain taking visitors sailing almost every single day around the Key West harbor. Every evening on the water we told clients to look for the green flash as the sun set and sometimes they claimed to see it and tipped me handily for the experience. Then one day I finally saw it; I knew I had seen it and had no doubt. Later that week I saw it again. I have seen the green flash twice. Nowadays I look for it half heartedly because I have seen it and I am satisfied. Only in Key West did I ever see the damned thing, and after thousands of miles of open water sailing and never once. And then twice in one week in Key West. Weird.(all photos Wikipedia)
I was the only member of our party who has never actually been to Argentina though their taste for meat, slow grilled and largely not spiced is legendary. Graziano's didn't offer the prix fixe lunch on Sundays so we ended up eating rather more extravagantly. I had the $35 prix fixe dinner menu and the others ordered a plate of meat and a side each. The wine list was fabulous with nothing less than $40 a bottle which seemed rather a lot for lunch so we ordered quarter liter carafes which was a nice touch- at $18 apiece they made for doable individual glasses of wine. 
My steak came with a side of mashed potatoes and a beaker of salt which I dutifully sprinkled on as instructed, while the meat was sizzling to melt the salt into the meat. I do not usually add salt to my food but when in Argentina one does as the Argentines do and it was excellent. Argentina from everything I have read is a robust country with powerful weather and wide open spaces filled with cowboys and cows and strong winds. I did once harbor the desire to one day sail up the Rio Plata (Silver River) to Buenos Aires (Good Breezes) but having read about the equally robust sailing conditions I rather think I will end up visiting some other way. We ordered two puddings and got three through some clerical error. Another error led us to pass the plates around and taste the delicious cakes and flans until they were empty, whereupon I remembered to take a picture. 
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Argentine lunches weren't as slow and languid as ours was in Miami, longer than two hours and long enough to set back our scheduled return to 9pm. Cheyenne was home alone, guarding the homestead by herself on her longest solo flight ever. I was anxious but she was fine when we did get home, if overly happy to see us. Josh was happy, full of meat and wine.
Lisa? Sure, this place was her choice after all so she deserved to take the credit.
The bill was $126 plus tip which caused some blanching around the table but considering how extravagant we were it wasn't that bad at all. Argentines take their food seriously.
We lurched out past the display of slow grilled meats in the foyer. 
Coral Gables is an upscale community in the middle of Dade county, inland from metro Miami and developed as a a vision of southern Spanish elegance in the wilderness. The street names are marked on elegant tableaux and reflect the Spanish theme, Asturias, Granada, Seville etc... 
It was quite the lunch break in a slow paced shopping day for the small town folk up from Key West. 
My wife says we need to give Miami another chance and plan tours of places to see this winter. What choice do we have in the depressed era of cheap vacations? Looked at that way an expensive lunch was a cheap trip to Buenos Aires!
The modern Overseas Highway built in 1982 is wide and fast and easy to drive, yet I hear of people afraid to drive at night for some reason. This, shown below is the Seven Mile Bridge closest to marathon (which is a city, not a Key).
The road's surface is crumbling in some places like any expensive modern highway that is subjected to daily truck use. Yet it is striped and lined in every way with reflectors, making it easy to use at night even for visitors. It is a far cry from the pre-1982 highway created over the disused rail bed in 1938. That was narrow slow and awkward, and it made the drive to key west a true adventure. Not anymore. 
Marathon around Mile Marker 50 is a town that lacks landscaping and owing to it's rather long narrow layout alongside a four lane stretch of the Highway it has never seemed terribly practical for small scooters, nor attractive to cyclists, yet they exist.(Amazingly enough my opinions are not universal). 
Watching this lot bunch up in the roadway made me wonder if we wouldn't some action pictures of Harleys crashing. "Why do they drive so slowly?" my passengers asked as we were held back for miles by their dawdling. "Because they are car drivers let loose on the world on motorcycles," was my reply. The woman on the right in her yoga posture explains why motorcycling is so often a means of transport not enjoyed by passengers. Imagine forcing a car passenger to contort herself like that. "Honey let's take the Lexus, not that horrible motorcycle..." The comfortable passengers are on the bikes that are ridden like hearses in a funeral.
Eat burgers and shakes in vast quantities, ignore reality and wear tight trousers to more closely resemble your favorite starlet on television. The outside world confuses me. My wife loaned me her iPhone as I had forgotten to bring my book (a reread of Don't Stop The Carnival). 
The seventy percent off signs are still up all over the department store as they were on our last visit. And with unemployment figures steadily rising I doubt they will come down until department stores are driven out of business by the Depression. The clerks were smiling for my wife's array of bargains while admitting to me they have never seen such deals in their thirty years in retail. Then we went off to that hallowed institution of savings.
In my perusal of the Internet I read about famine and rising prices in the face of worldwide drought and raging agricultural fires. Yet, here we are with $800 of food and a three month supply of freezer items and household supplies. In our straitened economic circumstances I watched my wife balancing future savings against current bills and she blanched but pressed on. My overtime hours stretch to the horizon. 
Shopping at Costco is like shopping in Latin America. English speaking whites are the decided minority and I wonder how the anti immigrant wave currently scouring the gutters of America will wash around here in November. Miami has been the safety net for millions of well to do Latin Americans who would as soon pick lettuce for a living as would your average Anglo. If dealing with Latino professionals is beneath you, don't bother moving to Miami where doctors, lawyers and the idle rich as likely to be called Garcia as they are Smith. And they may be from countries as far afield as Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela or Bolivia, and not necessarily Cuba. It used to be that many of them came to Miami for a week of shopping and immediately flew home with their loot. Perhaps they still do. At that level the Depression is just another economic opportunity.
I drove home as fast as I could to a) cement my reputation as the fastest traveler on Highway One and b) to save everyone's sanity. When I say fast I don't mean crazy speeds, I just mean knowing where I can pass, where I can't and where one can shave a little off the top of the speed limits and when to do that (a holiday weekend is decidedly not the time to push the speed envelope). Mostly I get decent travel times because I am focused on driving not on playing with my phone. It took two hours and fifteen minutes to get back to Mile Marker 27, and that was with hardly any passing at all owing to the overloaded state of the car. To save 7 minutes I took the 18 mile stretch over the more relaxed and scenic Card Sound Road.
The stretch was rebuilt with one lane in each direction instead of two, as a political maneuver to contain development in the Keys. The theory was if there were two lanes in each direction, thus allowing speedsters to let off steam safely, the evacuation times, as false as they are, would have been reduced for planning purposes, allowing more people to be crammed into the Keys under arcane state hurricane evacuation rules. The result is plenty of development and lots of tailgating by angry speedsters unable to pass on the long straight new road. I don't tailgate. 
The views on the way home were spectacular as hinted by these pictures shot in passing. Traffic was moving briskly enough that we had a relaxed drive home. In a few months snowbirds will be clogging the road at all hours dawdling under the illusion that island time is a daily reality for those of us with jobs and deadlines. For now we get to drive like real people. 
In the same way that Mayor McPherson had a bee in his bonnet about building a water park on the Truman Waterfront, Mayor Cates, his chosen successor now has a bee in his bonnet about Glynn Archer for City Hall. This despite a report in the paper that the city has already paid a cool $750,000 for architectural plans on how best to rebuild city hall and Fire Station Number Two at the Angela Street location. Oops.
Including all the rebuilding plus adding a parking garage the rebuild at Angela Street is estimated to cost 18 million dollars. The mayor wants to give the school district one and a half acres of land next to the District's Administrative headquarters on Trumbo Road and spend another 25 million dollars to refurbish Glynn Archer and build the parking garage and fire station on Angela Street. 
Those numbers summarized in Sunday's paper will be enough to get city hall watch dogs a heart attack on their own. Never mind all the numbers so far, now the mayor is trying to hire another architect to give him numbers that look better for the Glynn Archer project. There's another storm brewing over that. 
Getting mad at Mayor Cates for trying to make his circle a square isn't that out of line in a nation where belief trumps facts every single day, in politics, business and social relations. If Florida were sensible gays would be allowed to adopt and teach classes because we all know that children don't grow up gay because of who their parents are (where would gays come from in the first place if that were the case? Not their genes, of course!). Yet Florida, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary forbids both activities to gays on the grounds that children need to be "protected." Which I mention only as a way of saying that yielding to the numbers is not the political way in Key West, Florida, or the USA as a whole, so let's not crucify Mayor Cates for trying to squeeze the numbers into his vision. 
The Citizen thinks that locating city hall at Glynn Archer would cause traffic congestion. Which is a decidedly odd argument to make if you ask me (and no one has). The paper thinks it's time to conduct a traffic pattern study but give me the dollars and I can summarize it here. Everyone should visit city hall on two wheels, motorized or not. Look, there's tons of parking!
All joking aside, Glynn Archer has tons of parking available on the school grounds that stretch alongside United Street which is a major artery out of the south end of Duval Street. 
White Street is the major cross town artery giving easy access to Glynn Archer from Porter Place to the White Street pier. New Town residents approach from Truman, Catherine, White, Flagler and even Atlantic Avenue. Easy Peasy. Naturally there will be neighborhood impacts but a decent sized parking lot will keep street parking to a minimum. If traffic were the only problem, Glynn Archer would a be a shoe-in.
Dealing with the neurotics on the school board will be ghastly. They lost the chance to sell Harris School for ten million during the property boom thanks to a lot of stupid dithering and ended up selling it for half that years later. They will have no idea how to cope if the City approaches them to do a deal. That alone will sink this idea faster than the Titanic. And deeper. This is after all a functioning school and a barely functioning Board. 
Personally I think the two best things about Glynn Archer are the location, which centralizes city hall and puts it close to the national Weather Service (handy in a hurricane, just across the street) and a few blocks from the Police Station and central Fire Station (ditto in a hurricane or other emergency). Also it cannot be denied it looks the part. 
