A Day Out

One part of going to Miami is to try something we don't usually eat on the Rock. The Asian place my wife was craving was closed, Vietno-Nipponese-Korean fusion I think it was but as usual she had a back up. I don't how she does it but she knew there was a French Café nearby.


The bread was crisp and the contents excellent. A Mediterranean Croque Monsieur with smoked ham and cheese warmed and half melted put us in France. I ordered a Salade Niçoise which came on lettuce which surprised me. I expected boiled eggs, asparagus and mayo. Luckily I'm always up for an adventure.


The pastries looked superb but my American wife wanted a peanut butter cookie from next door...I yielded with good grace and got a white chocolate cookie to assuage my battered Euro sensibilities.


No Babas and no Napoleons for me. Target was the usual. My wife and her friends are hoping Target comes to Rockland Key's planned new development. I could do without the blank stares and television worship these places induce.


It was cold yesterday. I soldiered on in shorts and sandals but some people found 75 degrees hard to take without protection.


We were a long way from the end of Highway One but we were connected somehow to home away from the chaos of the real world.


Besides, when you go to the Big City you never know what weird shit you may get stuck behind. This guy may know how to drive helicopters, but he was terrible at getting the truck round a corner.


"...and more!" I love that advertising slogan. So vague and all encompassing as to mean nothing. "Aerial support and kosher dogs!"


The drive home sucked oddly enough. There was tons of traffic in all directions. Half of them drove ten under the limit and drove the other half mad such that I got passed on any and all sides by some very angry people. One van took the biscuit, with a personalized tag AMANDA P which passed me on the median at Bahia Honda such that the car which was mad at Amanda tailgated me wildly until I found a spot to pull over and they went head to tail all through Big Pine. You almost wish the economy would keep getting worse (it will) just to see how crazy your neighbors will eventually get (they will-brrr!).


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Walk A Mile In Miami

With a temperature well below eighty degrees and no humidity it was easy walking even for my hairy yellow Labrador. I'm not sure what Cheyenne thinks of the big city, if she thinks of it at all, but she lumbers along much as she does in a Big Pine neighborhood or in Old Town's local intimacy.


I keep a tight leash, relatively, on her here as cars come from all directions and if I have to ponder how to cross the street I'm not sure how she would cope alone.


I was talking with a colleague last week, about his girlfriend's business aspirations which she thinks can only be satisfied by a move to a Big City. I can see the draw for young people if they have any ambition at all. Key West is not a town that can satisfy the needs of the ambitious. I frequently field questions about moving to Key West and my standard answer is to leave your ambition at home. The good jobs are taken, the ones that pay real money. Even doctors have to work like dogs to make it in Key West, unless they have a private income.


Despite the Republican mantra that "if you're poor blame yourself," I am glad I was at the back of then line when desire and ambition were being handed out. It let's me live where I want, as I want, a form of Consumer-Zen self abnegation. Not Miami, never Miami for anything more than a shopping expedition or two, consumer style.


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Mile Marker 87.9

Were you to find yourself out and about on what appeared to be a beautiful Spring morning, fresh crisp air, sunshine and white puffy clouds scudding overhead you might forget you were in the Fabulous Florida Keys.


However checking the address on the imposing and severe gate facing the old Overseas Highway you might be reminded of your actual surroundings. The street number is the giveaway.


89701 is how Mile Markers are expressed as addresses in the Keys. MM Zero is of course at Whitehead and Fleming Streets in front of the County Courthouse, which is one end of the Keys. Mile Marker 112 is in the Eighteen Mile Stretch and marks the boundary between Monroe and Dade Counties. These things are quite punctilious it turns out, as is the renter of this magnificent property, duly noted as licensed, no doubt a sensible way to keep mosey neighbors quiet.


Anyway this is Mile Marker 89.7 with each mile subdivide into hundredths. Thus the Summerland Key post office at overseas Highway 25,100 is at mile marker twenty five and so forth. It is a brilliantly simple and easy way to find one's destination along the Highway.


And having made that point, as an aside I was quite surprised to see how many trash cans of yard waste it takes to keep a McMansion looking tidy around here.

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Florida Pill Mills

My wife's rheumatologist is a badly overworked man, apparently it's not a field that attracts enough doctors and there are plenty of patients with auto-immune diseases. As a result making an appointment at Dr Ritter's is a hit and miss affair. We show up for the appointment on time and he struggles to keep ahead of the flood of patients. And fails. Which gives a curious patient a chance to read the notices in the office. It seems the State of Florida has tightened up the rules for the dispensing of pills. Get this, it's so complicated Dr Ritter has given up. If his patients need oxy-thingy pills they have to go to pain centers and stand in line with all the drug addicts begging for these desirable pills. I am told these drugs are not just for Rush Limbaugh anymore, he has competition as half South Florida is trading them and they are amazingly expensive and totally illegal without a complex prescription logged in quadruplicate.


Dr Ritter, who himself suffers from arthritis (physician heal thyself, I crowed at him) says his patients suffer agonies and actually need these damned pills but he can no longer prescribe them. The ironies pile up because our Governor, who in private life led a medical insurance company fined 1.7 billion dollars for Medicare fraud (no, really!), at first wanted to stop investigation of the so called pill mills...and now has signed off on a law that is as usual draconian and misdirected. Pill mills get all the business. Weird but true and if you are in agony tough titties.


I think we've lost the national plot, so the Lord might as well be with us for all the good that's going to do, after all mixing religion and politics was what the Founders intended wasn't it? No longer are laws made by a mixture of debate and common sense and more debate. Now it's blatant, whoever pays the most gets the law they prefer and the Devil take the hindmost. A letter writer in the paper today grouped together the Wall Street Occupiers, the President of Iran, American Nazis, the Democrat Party and the Black Man in the White Man's House, and blamed our economic collapse on the Democrats in Power (whoever they are). That sort of debating style, they are Evil we are God's Chosen, will lead to Civil War. Do we want that? Without oxycodone to keep us stoned civil war could really hurt.


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Miami Signs

Life in the Keys is dependent on The big cities of the mainland one way or another. Many people refuse to drive Up North, preferring the isolation of the Keys peninsula. Fortunately my wife agrees with me that the occasional blast up Highway One is a nice way to remind ourselves why we enjoy living outside the Big City.


Nevertheless, walking my dog while my wife was busy gave me an opportunity to do what I do in Key West; look for silly signs. Even as I pondered the likelihood of Innovative Cancer and it's ramifications I crossed paths with one of my favorites, a misspelled sign. Oh joy!


This sign must have been cleaned up by one crew and was to be filled in by another crew who forgot, apparently, and left us all to guess it's new meaning...


In case the bright yellow high visibility sign and arrow were insufficient there was a notice above explaining their purpose. People really are zombies.


In Miami this next is a rarity and thus worth sign posting. Most people are extremely impatient.


This next sign cracked me up completely. As someone who earns a living answering 9-1-1 calls my feelings about encouraging more people to do that seemed irresponsible, to put it politely. You have no idea how many 9-1-1 calls I answer where the first thing the person on the line says says is "I know this isn't an emergency, but..." Sigh. If you hear the bell...oh all right pull their chestnuts from the fire for them.


People in plastic bonnets aren't weirdos around here practicing for Fantasy Fest. This part of Miami is dedicated to the only trade in the US which continues to enjoy burgeoning profits (banks don't count as they are surviving by the socialist nipple).


How much money can there be in insomnia? There must be a ton considering the size of the palazzo they built to "treat" it.


Doubtless this anxiety inducing vacancy will be filled by people in white coats very soon. If one phone number doesn't work the other one is standing by. Anxiously.


Athena Water wants you to look at their Facebook and follow them on Twitter. Can you imagine how riveting that must be?


If you have nothing better to do with your time he's another one. Do you remember when Freemasonry was a secret society dedicated to who knows what. In the past free and accepted masons fomented rebellion against dictators and were thus excommunicated by the tightest dictator in Europe. They still are too. But the Papacy is notoriously slow to move with the times.


Not the Freemasons. This branch of the secret society of men has a website! No shit, I checked it. It's not that interesting unless you want to look at class pictures of mostly older white men standing around in aprons. I saw no signs of fomenting rebellion or making secret plots or standing around on one leg with a blindfold or anything wild. Very boring in fact.


The City of South Miami has an old fashioned sign presiding over city hall and a very nice thing it is too. A proper public clock which keeps time and chimes exactly on the hour.


Very nice, city of pleasant living indeed. Apart from the traffic and the crowds and the never ending sense of hurrying.



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In The Woods

My wife had business to transact at Coral Shores High School which left her chauffeur with time on his hands.


It was a three minute drive to find a parking spot close by in an intriguing wooded area off the Old Overseas Highway around Mile Marker 79.


The side street was more like a woodland lane than a suburban street with houses down one side only.


The homes themselves were shrouded in greenery too.


I was quote surprised to see them not set on stilts but one isn't particularly close to tidal water here and flood plains vary.


Older homes were built before stilts were required, and my house built in 1987, ancient by some standards conforms to requirements at eight feet above sea level here newer homes have to be fifteen feet or something equally absurd. Fifteen foot of floodwater and there will be nothing left of anything.


We had a very pleasant stroll Cheyenne and I on a cool, slightly breezy morning of the first real cold front of the winter.


High Street struck me as an odd sort of name for this little backwater. In England where I went to school "the High Street" was the equivalent of Main Street in the US. Apropos of nothing in particular.


Whatever else this quiet leafy lane was it was no one's idea of a main drag, thank goodness.


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