At first glance it looks like we were invited to a pre-dawn meal with Wayne and Chuck.
Their Sugarloaf Key home looked inviting for dinner.
And, by way of insult we had to walk past their Earthboxes, the ones we bought for them in Key Largo at the RV store. Their plants, the ones they bought with my wife at the Big Pine Key flea market are flourishing. Ours have been eaten down to tiny nubs by iguanas all over my Earthboxes. Grrr.
"You okay with breakfast for dinner?" Chuck (the one with glasses) asked. Wayne had told Chuck that yesterday was the night he wanted pancakes and sausage for dinner. When they invited us my only query was whether one was allowed to have wine with breakfast."In this case yes, " Chuck said. "There are no rules." That's nice; I was in.
Cheyenne got her dinner, a bowl of sizzling rice sprinkled with cooked chicken. "She does like her food, " Wayne remarked as Cheyenne threw herself into the bowl headfirst. He then disappeared outside on a mission which saw him return with a carefully wrapped bottle of red plonk to accompany dinner. 
Apparently thanks are due to a mysterious sprite who lives up the road who calls herself church or chapel or possibly abbey according to Chuck who was not very forthcoming. She apparently learned of my taste in tippling and sent along a note with the bottle. It was very reassuring.
Thank you Abbey. The surprise and astonishment were complete.
So we sat and tippled and Wayne and Chuck navigated their way around the dogs and produced breakfast for dinner. 
Zuzu and Tootie, shy as they are, were not about to be left out. From living as fearful rescue Vizlas they are learning to be out and about among people, just like their trainer Cheyenne. 
The pancakes were safe from their depredations behind bullet proof glass, the sausage patties were sizzling and Wayne's fluffy muffins were getting a coat of sugar sauce. This was not a meal for the faint of heart. 
I make no claim to be a people person and pointing the camera at Wayne produced a look Lucifer might have been proud of. He's quite nice really but my camera bring's out the eccentric in people. 
Cheyenne likes this place and not just for the rice and chicken, or the fussing she gets from the boys but also because their floor is cool and comfortable. She immediately adopted the alligator position. 
We loaded our plates in the kitchen and Wayne was hungry enough he moved like greased lightning with his food out to the terrace. Well, he looked like greased lightning through a slow shutter speed.
We ate and drank and talked, on a delightfully cool fall evening, 71 degrees and no humidity. 
Full of wine and breakfast I slouched and admired the black view out over the water. 
My colleagues at work have been telling me about this new TV series which they think is fascinating- English unarmed cops and the Crown Prosecution Service. We watched an episode about child abuse which was as heavy a meal to digest as pancakes and sausage, but Top Gear had me laughing soon enough. Wayne and Chuck have the cable TV system that lets you record stuff to watch later. If we had cable or satellite I'd loose the ability to move off the couch there is so much to see. 
Netflix and an absurdly small TV screen are enough for me. I am weak and television is strong.
We made our goodbyes and took off for home. Pancakes and wine. It really does work for me.
Their Sugarloaf Key home looked inviting for dinner.
And, by way of insult we had to walk past their Earthboxes, the ones we bought for them in Key Largo at the RV store. Their plants, the ones they bought with my wife at the Big Pine Key flea market are flourishing. Ours have been eaten down to tiny nubs by iguanas all over my Earthboxes. Grrr."You okay with breakfast for dinner?" Chuck (the one with glasses) asked. Wayne had told Chuck that yesterday was the night he wanted pancakes and sausage for dinner. When they invited us my only query was whether one was allowed to have wine with breakfast."In this case yes, " Chuck said. "There are no rules." That's nice; I was in.Cheyenne got her dinner, a bowl of sizzling rice sprinkled with cooked chicken. "She does like her food, " Wayne remarked as Cheyenne threw herself into the bowl headfirst. He then disappeared outside on a mission which saw him return with a carefully wrapped bottle of red plonk to accompany dinner. 
Apparently thanks are due to a mysterious sprite who lives up the road who calls herself church or chapel or possibly abbey according to Chuck who was not very forthcoming. She apparently learned of my taste in tippling and sent along a note with the bottle. It was very reassuring.Thank you Abbey. The surprise and astonishment were complete.So we sat and tippled and Wayne and Chuck navigated their way around the dogs and produced breakfast for dinner. 
Zuzu and Tootie, shy as they are, were not about to be left out. From living as fearful rescue Vizlas they are learning to be out and about among people, just like their trainer Cheyenne. 
The pancakes were safe from their depredations behind bullet proof glass, the sausage patties were sizzling and Wayne's fluffy muffins were getting a coat of sugar sauce. This was not a meal for the faint of heart. 
I make no claim to be a people person and pointing the camera at Wayne produced a look Lucifer might have been proud of. He's quite nice really but my camera bring's out the eccentric in people. 
Cheyenne likes this place and not just for the rice and chicken, or the fussing she gets from the boys but also because their floor is cool and comfortable. She immediately adopted the alligator position. 
We loaded our plates in the kitchen and Wayne was hungry enough he moved like greased lightning with his food out to the terrace. Well, he looked like greased lightning through a slow shutter speed.
We ate and drank and talked, on a delightfully cool fall evening, 71 degrees and no humidity. 
Full of wine and breakfast I slouched and admired the black view out over the water. 
My colleagues at work have been telling me about this new TV series which they think is fascinating- English unarmed cops and the Crown Prosecution Service. We watched an episode about child abuse which was as heavy a meal to digest as pancakes and sausage, but Top Gear had me laughing soon enough. Wayne and Chuck have the cable TV system that lets you record stuff to watch later. If we had cable or satellite I'd loose the ability to move off the couch there is so much to see. Netflix and an absurdly small TV screen are enough for me. I am weak and television is strong.
We made our goodbyes and took off for home. Pancakes and wine. It really does work for me. 
Or under it.
Mangroves turn salt water to fresh and then drink it.
But the views remain the same.
Electricity in old time key West was a rough affair, coming and going pretty much at will. I remember outages used to be much more frequent, but in those days electrons mattered less, I had no computer and land line phones worked independent of electricity. Nowadays Keys Energy has installed big power poles made of cement and things seem much more reliable. I photographed this scooter ridden by a man who saved walking five feet by occupying one of two handicapped spots. The other one was available but it seemed rather chintzy of him, especially as his scooter has no placard.
I do not have the imagination to take some old colored glasses and turn them into garden ornaments, but I do like them when I see them.
My accountant doesn't have a bird cage in his window and he certainly doesn't have one with a dead fish inside. I'm guessing CPAs in Kansas don't either. But in Key West this one does.
Old Key West is cute. That's why there are so many visitors filling the city coffers.
More old Key West. This is not the first time i have photographed this divine shed on Lopez Lane but I really like the way it looks. This would be a perfect man hut with naked women calendars and a fridge filled with Boddington's and Yuengling and Smithwick's and a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir. You could sit in here sweating and listen to the rain dripping down of a summer's afternoon. 
And the figurehead appears once again on my blog. About as much nudity as that crass old toad riepe will ever see here. The more he grumbles the more I dig my heels in.
We were having a great walk and Cheyenne wanted more and I was happy to oblige, but those pictures will have to wait till Monday.
One more picture, I liked this one. "Active member" means get out of speeding ticket free, perhaps?
Cheyenne and I spent a happy hour around here a few afternoons ago, helping me get though a long weekend at work, a weekend that more closely resembled winter than summer in the Police Communications Center. Someone called in a woman sleeping on the sidewalk, she wasn't sleeping she was dead. So often people call in dead people on the sidewalk "...not breathing , " they whisper urgently and they are just sleeping it off in a town where the bars close at 4am. I have never understood how someone can get so drunk they lose track of where they are and simply lay down to sleep on the sidewalk. Around here people do it all the time, yet sometimes, just sometimes they aren't sleeping, they are dead. The good news is we never presume to know what is urgent and what isn't so we always send someone out as quickly as possible to investigate. No call is ever written off, no request for help is ever ignored by us.
Also I can hardly believe that the last twelve months have seen two people killed in our fair city. Neither of them left unsolved which is a nice statistic but if you think like I do you have to wonder if the stresses of our imploding economy are going to push more nasty people into being extra nasty. I hope 2010 is just a statistical anomaly, an aberration in a town that rarely sees two murders in three years. Then there were the kids just up the street from my house who found a skeleton at what appeared to be a homeless refuge in the bushes of Little Torch Key. The paper says the body was mostly a skeleton dressed in clothes, gnawed by wild animals, a forgotten human who died alone in the shrubbery just off the road. 
I was reading the diary of a Finnish woman who joined this website,whatever that means exactly (
Of all the people who live on my street four wave as I ride by of whom two stop to talk when they meet me out gardening. None of them would be concerned were I to die upstairs at home. Only Cheyenne howling might prompt an investigation. The odd thing is I don't mind that notion, not nearly as Zella, who lives alone, seems to dread it. Lying on your back staring at the ceiling waiting for the grim reaper seems like a much worse way to die than simply keeling over with a sudden heart attack. I got a call from a caregiver who found her elderly charge in just such a position after waiting three hours for someone to hear her cries for help. The young woman on the phone was lackadaisical to say the least, almost chatty with me. We were short staffed and I was struggling to run the main police channel while Belen answered the phones, ran warrants and dispatched Fire and Rescue so I was rather curt with the caller. I had the information I needed, I had calls on hold and officers needing attention and I needed her to hang up. She almost refused to hang up until she got the message (I'm not allowed to hang up 9-1-1's by protocol) in my tone. Finally she paused and then said tartly: "You're very rude!" Click. Grrr. Belen was sending an ambulance already, I could hear her across the room as I thought to myself, what's the matter with a caregiver who doesn't care? And will she ever learn the difference between being curt and being rude? 
"The good thing about working nights is that you get to deal with lots of hot calls," Belen said as we paused between mayhem for a while. The radio tends to go quiet while the officers are investigating. Then the power went out. Blam. All across the city it went black outside the circle of lights powered by the huge generator at the police department. Belen came to nights for a few weeks to help out our short staffed situation and it's hard to adapt to sitting up when you are used to being asleep. She was jolted to complete consciousness by the string of calls that came pouring into our dispatch center. 
One of the reasons I enjoy working nights is that I get up around lunchtime and have the afternoon to myself, and my dog, before I have to ride into work by 6pm. It's a time when I can get out into the fresh air and clear my head and wandering the backwoods and neighborhoods of the Lower Keys is good for me. It's good for Cheyenne too.
It could be worse. The City Commission decided Tuesday to change ambulance companies in Key West next April. They paid some people to study the issue and the result was they went with the low bid and it's all change. The employees at American Medical Response are pretty gloomy expecting a pay cut in a town that doesn't cost any the less to live in. I wish the city had amalgamated the ambulance service with the city Fire Department and cut the profit motive out altogether. I don't think any patient facing an $800 ride in an ambulance is better served knowing there are profit hungry share holders to feed. But that's just my proclivity for looking at the larger picture and right now the city chooses to pay less for ambulance service, which isn't all bad as I depend on the city to keep it's budget balanced, as much as anyone does. . 
I guess while I'm at work I'm helping to clean up after people, and God knows they need help. While I'm out walking Cheyenne I'm out helping clean up after dogs. 
Dispatching is an odd job, stressful and satisfying, awake when everyone else is asleep dealing with the odd situations in life, such that it's important to take the time to remember that not everyone is an emotional wreck, not everyone is wasting their lives drinking and fighting and creating drama. Some people go through their entire lives without calling 9-1-1. Most of us aren't victims of the assholes who suck the living out of life. Most of us are lucky to be living ordinary lives of no great and sudden moment. Walking Cheyenne reminds me how privileged that status is. 
Another walk successfully concluded.
