Elgin Lane Musings

I have decided I want geraniums. I saw these lovely red potted plants and remembered growing up with a mother who loved geraniums. She also liked them because on hot Italian summer afternoons she liked to leave windows and doors open and she believed they keep snakes away.I wasn't expecting to see geraniums on Elgin Lane but there they were. I also was not expecting to see a poster calling for an end to new oil wells in the US. It's a nice idea but what do we replace oil with? I guess we feel the same about nukes right now but there again, where else do we get electricity? At the moment renewables don't seem ready to step up and take the place of what we have. As witnessed by the vehicle parked in the driveway of the home with the poster.I don't think of a V-8 Toyota Tundra pick up as being a fuel efficient vehicle.I keep hoping solar and wind will do more but apparently it's tough to run a grid with power sources that fluctuate wildly in their output. using corn to replace oil for gasoline is horribly inefficient and is driving up the cost of food causing Third World starvation. The choices seem neither easy nor obvious to me. This next sign always brings a chuckle to my gay buddy Noel."They got that right!" he said with a chortle when I showed him a photo of a crocheted doily with the same message I found in a country store in Georgia. I noticed a net carefully placed over a pool under construction. It would never have occurred to me but no doubt someone somewhere would take the opportunity to fall in were it not properly covered.And a little further on from the pool, around the corner I passed this splendid tub, headed to it's mew home in the back of a pick up.This goes a long way to explaining why I prefer showers to tubs. Modern tubs have none of the style or inherent comfort of a hip bath like this. Nostalgia extends to more than just vehicles.

Mudhole Simplicity

Cheyenne has given up the struggle to stay clean and when the outdoor temperature hit 90 degrees this week the search for outdoor refrigeration was on.I wonder how we would live in the Florida Keys without modern conveniences, for instance suppose we abandon nuclear energy and power went out for long periods every day. How would we cope? Like Cheyenne probably who was subjected to a twenty minute outdoor shower to remove the crusty gray mud from her fur. She seemed to enjoy, for a change, the stream of cold cistern water as I rubbed the mud out of her fur followed by a vigorous towelling and a systematic brushing.So let's suppose we have to make do without cheap abundant energy, the air conditioning only works some of the time and supermarket shelves have only a quarter the choices they groan under today...would we all go nuts or would we be
capable of appreciating the new simplicity? Would a brisk cool shower chill us enough that we'd not miss the a/c? Could we learn to stand in line for the bus instead of leaping in our cars on a whim?I know Cheyenne appreciates the chill of the house but she makes do when we are out stumping along under the baking Florida sun and plunks herself down in the shade.

I figure in the drive to simplify we can learn a lot from the patience and good will of our dogs.

Dey Street

I never noticed the back of that large white lump on Caroline Street, until they opened up the space that was Jabours Trailer Park. I wonder how tall that building is? Viewed from Dey Street at Elizabeth.It's been a while since I heard the joke about the sailor sick of the sea who takes off marching inland with an oar over his shoulder. "What's that for?" asks his buddy as they make their good-byes. "I'm going to carry it inland until I meet someone who asks me what it is. That's where I'm going to settle down," replies the sailor. The oar pictured below didn't travel far from tidal waters, about one and a half blocks.I've noticed a few elderly VWs around town this week and here is another one, roof down chugging happily along. For one brief fleeting moment I rather thought that looked good enough to be desirable.There are some really lovely homes in Key West and I'm glad they are preserved for posterity.I read a comment in the Citizen's Voice this week, part of the ongoing rabble rousing about "low quality" tourism in Key West. One indignant comment came from a visitor who said they liked to come to Key West not for the music the drinking or the stuff to do, but simply to ride around on bicycles and look at the beauty. From time to time one gets to remember the value of doing just that.

Not So Hurricane Season

The news from states across the South is uniformly appalling. Dozens are reported dead thanks to tornadoes across several states most notably Alabama. Tuscaloosa has suffered major damage and the tornadoes don't seem to be appeased.I find it astonishing that last night severe tornado watch remained in effect across Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia. It is inconceivable to me that so many people have died and so much destruction has taken place. The descriptions of these storms is apocalyptic with reports of huge thunderous black clouds obliterating the horizon even as they spawn deadly twisters. It's all the language of excess, hundreds injured etc... and yet words seem inadequate. It is appalling.We keep following reports of drought or foul weather, rain and floods, slides and forest fires (every county in Texas had a wild fire at one point) and it all seems too much to simply prove a point. We were talking at work last night about the weirdness of living in Key West, a place outsiders automatically associate with hurricanes - "You live in Key West? How do you deal with hurricanes?" is always how the conversation starts out- and yet it is worth noting that in 2004 and 2005, both terrible years for storms, not one person died in the Lower Keys thanks to the weather. Not one.
It is hugely ironic methinks that people like to dismiss the Keys as a secure place to live because of hurricane season, which starts in June and ends in November, even as the rest of the country suffers one natural misfortune after another. Tornadoes may be ripping Alabama apart but down here the weather is lovely. And not only that but the Key West Songwriter's festival is underway through this weekend at assorted venues around town. http://www.kwswf.com/ I get tired of a lot of the events dreamed up to keep tourism alive, but this one, were I not working, I would like. If in town it's worth checking out. In that vein the Conch Republic Independence celebrations are lumbering on this week with a parade on Duval tonight and the famous sea battle tomorrow and the drinking good cheer and other stuff through the weekend. Much better to be here in good company than Up North getting the crap beaten out of you by that nasty unpredictable weather. What a paradox.

Tornado Images from Huffington Post.

Moths And Rust

I admire a man out on the street in his topee keeping up with the maintenance. This climate has a pretty deleterious effect on wood and paint and pretty much anything left outdoors.The sun burns stuff up, the salt air rusts anything and everything, especially during summer's humid months, and mold grows anywhere and everywhere. Some people say that not using air conditioning allows mold to grow inside a house during the summer an d that may be true. Personally I have found, living on a boat without air conditioning, that the trick is not to crowd your stuff. Books or clothes packed tight allow humidity to develop and there's nothing quite so delicious as musty smelling clothes or books with little black spores on the pages.The good part about the sub tropical climate is that the flora is pretty interesting even to a dunderhead like me who can barely recognize a pink hibiscus. I saw this couple sitting on a bench just off Duval, and I loved how they each had a dog, a mirror image almost of each other.For me the heat and humidity right now is excellent and entirely tolerable. For visitors it frequently gets to be too much. heat exhaustion can be a real problem in Key West for people not used to it. The slow speed limits can be difficult for people visiting from the land of Freeways Up North. Apparently my colleagues in the Traffic Division have been busy.The speed limit, the sign also noted, is 30 miles per hour on Eaton Street. That should be enough for anyone streaming to Duval Street to buy a beer and a filthy t-shirt. Or to listen to some music if they have higher aspirations, now that the Songwriter's Festival is underway.

Escape From The City

I pulled up to the Key Haven Shell on my wife's 150cc ET4 Vespa and lifted the seat to fill the tank with $4.30 premium. "That thing moves," said an off duty UPS employee who pulled up alongside to fill his silver VW Golf. "I was thinking of passing back there and you blew by." He looked at the diminutive cream colored "moped" and added that he was doing 60 miles per hour at the time. Yup, I replied and it gets 70 miles per gallon, as I finished loading one and a half gallons into the tank. "Good for a hundred miles," I said as I pulled out of the gas station.

Asking my wife to drive us home in her convertible was my way of putting the cap on an evening that had not gone exactly as planned. I brought the Vespa to her workplace for her to ride around town and we had talked of having dinner out and going to see Win Win at the Tropic. Paul Giamatti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Giamatti ) plays a sleazy small town lawyer surrounded by adult losers who pin their hopes of validation on a young wrestler new to town. Great good fun. Dinner however went all wrong. How is it possible I ask myself, that every single sodding restaurant is closed on a Monday? Is it a Bittburger conspiracy? Do the restaurateurs gather on a Monday night in someone's living room and have a giant bitch fest about the past week's most annoying customer? We stuffed a meter with coin on Virginia Street (oh Bonneville I miss you and free motorcycle parking) and walked to Sweet Tea, my wife's new favorite. It may be a new venture of the local arch capitalist Chris Belland, man of the people in the Key West Citizen, but it isn't open on Mondays apparently. Nor is my favorite Badboy Burrito on Simonton http://badboyburrito.com/ , nor is Banana Café (La Poivree, a burger with cream peppercorn sauce in a crepe) so we ended up wasting the quarters in the meter and moved the Sebring to park it for free at the courthouse and from there walked to a dinner of Stella Artois and popcorn at the movie theater. It could have been worse. It was fun being the passenger for once in the car putting the camera above the windshield and playing with the settings. My wife puts the roof down at every opportunity, prompting me to wonder why people pay more to buy or rent convertibles and then they never seem to convert them. Myself, I am not much of a fan of convertibles preferring the cool shady quiet of an enclosed car with strong air conditioning and a dead German composer in the music box. Even the Lime Tree Food Store on Flagler Avenue managed to look alluring in the dark warm evening. But my wife wanted to get home and I did too so we didn't stop. As part of my job I get to ride along with officers from time to time and I've seen the inside of the Stock Island Hilton (hint: it's not a hotel, it's a jail) and I prefer sleeping in my own bed so drinking and driving is always out of the question.. Highway One, closing in on Sugarloaf School. Fifteen minutes from home at wife warp speed, ten minutes by Bonneville hyper drive. There to uncork the Black Strap Molasses Rum and reflect on the meaning of life and value of sleep.