Across Town Walk

 It looks like  a Lower Keys home set in a wide open field. Its not actually, its a home on a rather expansive lot not far from the cemetery.

I saw a palm frond poking through a typical picket fence and I saw the signs of impatient painting all over it. That put me in mind of my own skill level. At least the fence got a fresh coat, always important in this salt air, overly sunny damp climate. 





 This sign was a relief for me as Cheyenne and I strolled Olivia. Iguanas are the bane of my life. They swim like submarines, fly like flying bats, climb vertical surfaces, survive temperature variations that should kill them and they eat every living plant known to human kind. They have even sunbathed in my inedible (to them) rosemary bush, thus killing off several branches. I hate iguanas, and apparently I am not alone. Good.

 Dead  leaves put me in mind of winter and their colors are bright even in death.

Cheyenne and I crossed Truman Avenue and I went to check out this rather nice looking modern large frame Vespa. There are quite a few of these expensive scooters around town but I was however interested to note that this GT200 was quite possibly the ride of an employee at the porn shop. I guess wages are good in this trade even for clerks. Hmm...

 This scooter probably belonging to some snowbird gone for the summer, put me in mid of a woman in a burqa, for whatever reason. There were no eye holes however.

 A few pictures to follow here, typical street scenes in Key West, my dog always interested in the urban scene.

 Key West, hot sunny and eminently walkable. What a great little town.

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Bye Bye Baby's

So I ask myself, is there another change planned for Mile Marker 15? Change is endemic, change is good but it would be disappointing for a lot of people were Baby's Coffee to beat a further retreat. For Sale? Huh?

They say one should leave a sleeping dog alone but as cute as she was enjoying the morning on the porch I roused Cheyenne and we set off looking for a suitable walk. I had my eye on Mile Marker 15 yesterday morning to answer that question and though Bay Point is twelve miles from my house I knew Cheyenne likes the walk so off we went, and drove for 15 minutes because I wanted to stop by Baby's Coffee.

I like Bay Point, a triangular strip of land that points due south from the Overseas Highway, with a grassy triangle of parkland dotted with picnic tables, ball courts and a kid's playground. Bay Point is far enough from Boca Chica there isn't much jet noise but it's close enough to Key West to put you twenty minutes from the city door to door, roughly.

The Keys shuttle service goes by obviously so you are on a bus line out here and aside from Baby's there is one fancy restaurant Kaya Island Eats and...

...a little store. It's a handy spot one way and another and the bicycle path attracts the spandex crowd too.

The weather has been perfect lately, a fresh southeast breeze blowing away the humidity but allowing he heat to permeate the air. I find it invigorating. I was concentrating on the camera so the picture came out as what I call the grumpy Rasputin look.

The heat was a lot for the hairy Yellow Labrador who prefers her walks early in the morning or very late at night but she was a good sport and we ambled and stopped and ambled a little more. It was very companionable, as usual.

Which was just as well as my wife took the weekend out of town to see a friend in Central Florida and I was home for three days which I had been rather looking forward to spending alone. Except with Cheyenne around one is never really alone. She's a funny girl, she wants to be with me but always a few feet away, always ready to get up and trot after me, but never too close. Sometimes I get down and scratch her and she enjoys it for a while but then she shakes me off and moves away to lay down by herself. A weekend with my best bud.

They've been around for decades and started in Key West downtown taking over a business space that was labeled Baby's Place. I guess for want of a better name that became the name of the coffee roasting company. It didn't last downtown for ever and roasting was first moved as I recall to Homestead. Then the retail store moved to Mile Marker 15. I thought that was an odd choice and I wondered how they would do, but of course I have no instinct for business, though luckily for me I know it, so of course they flourished out in the boondocks!

Nowadays the coffee is roasted in Louisiana it seems and the store in the Keys is for sale. I spoke with an employee who said it could sell anytime as it is on the market and available. I'd like to think someone is out there who wants to roast and sell coffee under the eternal summer sun. I can't imagine what kind of a crazy life it would be operating an iconic business like this and I'm certain there's someone out there who will thrive on it.

I have discovered that they offer some fairly decent tea at Baby's so sometimes I'll choose that over the coffee. China green unadorned hit the spot. Along with some disgustingly delicious crumb cake. When the wife's away the food choices go straight to hell.

They sell sandwiches and pastries and mugs and candies and t-shirts and all that stuff alongside the actual business of selling hot liquid in styrofoam cups.

From there it was back to the car and my dog and we shared a few crumbs of blueberry cake and we went home and got on with the weekend.

She makes an excellent companion on an open ended weekend. We'll split tonight when I go back to work before my wife gets home but until then we will be inseparable.

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Cheyenne And Key Deer

My dog enjoying a early morning walk at Ramrod Pool. The heat is getting to Cheyenne these days and she doesn't much like to get out of the house after the sun gets high in the sky. She lounges around on the porch and wanders in and out through her dog door to alternatively cool off and sunbathe as the mood takes her, but walking is reserved for the earliest of early mornings when it is relatively cool.

One morning we came across a couple of Key deer on Big Pine behind the post office. This happens a lot as the deer population seem to be doing quite well. Well enough that we've seen a family of them on Ramrod Key where they aren't supposed to live but the population seems to be spreading. Anyway it happened on this particular morning on Big Pine and I had my camera ready to record the encounter.

Cheyenne was stumping down the street and a deer popped out of the bushes. It kept a wary eye on my dog, but got no reaction.

Cheyenne has little interest in meeting other dogs and no interest in deer or chickens, though she is curious about cows when she meets them on the mainland. She walked on by, much to the deer's irritation which for some reason actually started to follow Cheyenne until my presence put her off.

Cheyenne likes to eat grass and I have seen her grazing quite companionably alongside Key deer.

A very easy going dog.

 

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The Mystery That Is Fishing

People hate me for, among other things, living in the Keys and not enjoying fishing. This is an angler's paradise, I'm told, but to me the thought of standing around and waiting for a fish to commit suicide on my hook is an even worse thought than sitting around at my desk waiting for someone in agony to call in and ask for help. I make money doing that, as weird as that is, but fishing for fun? I'd rather crush my gentleman vegetables in a vice. At least that would be done in short order. Fishing takes forever at vast expense in dollars and humanity.

If you can imagine it people get in their cars in the suburbs of Miami and drive to these spots and spend their precious weekends camping unsalubriously under bridges and behind sea walls living like Bosnian refugees with their wives and children and all their impedimenta. They fail to bring toilets with them so as a result the bushes and trails suddenly sprout toilet paper flowers in the vicinity. All this to catch fish.

There they stand pitting their wits against the wits of the fish. When they catch them they suffocate them slowly as though the suffering will infuse the fish meat with added adrenaline and agony and they feel proud of themselves. Well, I hate to break it to them but fish have brains the size of... some extremely small object. Pit your wits against a really angry mother grizzly bear and try beating her to death with a bamboo rod. That would even the odds out a bit. I have tried fishing and it is about as interesting as watching a piece of plastic line hanging in the water, fancy that! In my world that rates pretty low on the entertainment scale. When you catch one of these half witted fish who think that there really is such a thing as a free lunch without a hook buried in it, your rod tugs and jerks as the poor bastard fish tries to regain the wild water it came from. Pull it out and it starts to suffocate and looks at you with one desperate eye as life starts to drain out of it and it's wild flashing colors fade to gray in its death agony jerks as it fights to breathe. Why not hit it over the head and kill it mercifully? God knows and perhaps when judgement day comes anglers will be suitably chastised. Until then...fish suffer and fishermen crap in the bushes. Oh well.

Yummy fresh this morning! And almost no effort or expense spared to catch it. Give me Horsemeat or give me Death.

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Cloudy Conch Republic

Conch Republic Days are underway and are supposed to culminate this weekend in a sea battle between the Conch Republic navy and the US Coastguard. The US always loses in the water cannon versus Cuban bread artillery duel a d everyone repairs to drink cheap beer at Schooner Wharf Bar. However it seems this year the mandatory budget cuts in Washington are forcing the Coastguard to bow out of this event as the battle has been sequestered to death. Ironically the war is being won in the budget arena, by default.

I took tHis picture of the summer cloud patterns that tend to form over the islands on Tuesday when I was in Key Largo. Driving along with Cheyenne. Snoring in the back of the car, I noticed the clouds lining up over the narrow strip of land that is the Florida Keys. I believe the heated air over the warmed waters of the Gulf Stream has something to do with it, and the creation of warmer daytime air over the land mass. So you know where the Keys are by following the cloud pattern...

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Key West Ramble

The laundry on the top of the hill, Eaton Street at Elizabeth. The cyclist is outbound on Eaton turning north on Elizabeth.

I liked the sun shining through the grass growing out of control in a front yard. It looked like Spring Up North, nothing tropical to see here

Key West boasts lots of these ornate façades. The most well known of these is on Upper Duval and marks the location of the old Cuban Club, a fond memory for club goers a few decades ago. I like this one quite well.

Sometimes when I walk the streets of Key West I find myself drawn to details but other times I see a portrait of  a life. Here I saw a Conch cottage, a human sized home with the old tin roof and the sky lights propped open for ventilation, a proper Key West palm for proportion and a shiny bike out front. Who needs a car in town? Everything in proportion and compact.

And then there's the start of the dumping, inevitable on an open space like this one. This is where developer Pritam Singh, of Truman Annex fame has a 97 room hotel planned. Until the hotel comes through there is a place to rest...

Key West they say has a high proportion of churches to residents of all Christian sects. Lately I discovered, by Google accident, the location of a mosque, new to me; but I've known about the rather better signposted Reading Room for many years. I used to work for the Christian Science Monitor's defunct radio service. I never forgot the day I phoned my editor to go over my story and he was in bed with a broken leg. They don't believe in medicine and he was praying to heal himself. He thought I was an idiot for being so astonished at his predicament and he was amazingly good natured considering how much pain he must have been in. Give me tranquilizers or give me death, frankly. I would make a crap Christian Scientist.

My kind of yard, potted chaos in a play of shadow and light. I always want a tidy yard but I end up with a certain amount of disorder.

Cheyenne almost never peers out of the window. Everybody else's dog seems to love it.

I spotted this traffic jam in Love Lane off Fleming Street.

We are between seasons right now. The cool dry winter season never really hit this year with just two anaemic cold fronts and one big one, and now summer has arrived early. It's not properly humid yet but day time highs are already in the 80s.

While Cheyenne was dawdling over a particularly succulent smell I overheard two tourists on bicycles stopped to talk to a resident cleaning his car. It was the usual stuff, where are you from, how long have you been here and all that stuff. Thirty seven degrees at home in New York the man on the bicycle said. He was glad to be swearing on Packer Street in the sun.

I have difficulty I imagining life in a place where frost strikes this late in the year. It was fifty degrees in Ocracoke last month with howling winds and I froze. Stuff that.

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