Key West This Morning

I don't know what it is but every damned time the temperature drops to sixty I get a head cold. This time around it hasn't been too bad but for a couple of days I was snuffling and hacking and wandering around gloomily like the ghost of Hamlet's father. But all bad things come to an end especially after your attentive wife doses you with Chinese pill called Yin Chiao, along with modern American remedies Theraflu and Allegra which is Italian for "happy woman" oddly enough, and whose brand name sent my over active brain into a spin when I found I was swallowing a Happy Pill. The only true source of happiness comes in a hundred pound bundle of fur, not in a bottle of pills.

You should have seen Cheyenne when I parked the car in Key West in the early dawn grayness and she stood looking at me with a giant shit-eating grin, her tail circling like a slow motion propellor. She loves her Key West walks and when she got out of the car she knew where she was. We set out from James Street she with her nose down me with my phone/camera firmly in my pocket. I thought I wasn't in the mood for picture taking but it didn't take long for Key West to wake me up. A lot of people love the Half Shell Raw Bar, not surprising as it's a funky dive right on the water and what visitor doesn't dream of seafood on the water in a place like this? Just as well really as I ate here once with some friends after a day on the water and I seem to recall it was okay.

I saw this sign outside and out came my Android once again. It's a first for me: No Geocaching! The cemetery has a sign forbidding letter boxing which I believe is the same thing, but I suppose Key West Bait and Tackle has had enough of people using them as a landmark. Strange obsession, geocaching, stranger still to forbid it.

Then I found this sign and I spent a good part of the three-hour walk asking myself what a Gay and Lesbian Bed and Breakfast might be, never mind an award winning one. There was a time when many of these places were ready to take only gay clientele but that was a long time ago. The rest of the country is slowly catching up to Key West and a few other select gay-friendly cities so the whole exclusive gay thing is fading. Not only that, but there are also a lot more gay friendly hubs that are a lot cheaper than Key West or Provincetown or West Hollywood...but those awards keep coming! Award winning indeed, though more importantly I have heard this is a good place to stay. Not that I know, I live here and I'm straight. Strike two. Oh well.

That other symbol of Key West is the hammock. I had lunch Sunday with an out of town visitor and while she lamented the state of my sinuses she suggested an afternoon lounging in a hammock under the warm February sun. Maybe it's time I bought myself a hammock? There's even a store on Duval that does nothing but sell hammocks...on the other hand they are a bit of a pain to deal with, requiring you to bend double and balance to get in them, and then I am an obsessive rocker so it's probably not that great for me as I would be focusing on going back and forth and not on relaxing.

Then we were on Fleming and at the Eden House, an all-comers welcome guest house, I saw a picture of a penny farthing used to represent all bicycles which I thought was rather cute. Most as you can see have two wheels of similar size:

As we wandered down Eaton Street it dawned on me slowly that this might be garbage collection day, as I'm pretty perceptive. The sidewalk was a real slalom of cans and it struck me how much waste we as a society generate. Look at them all...

Cheyenne does her part to clean up where she can. No wonder she loves walking Old Town Key West.

The blue cans are the new recycling bins, replacing the yellow topped cans which were deemed too ugly. And no matter what the color, recycling is a work in progress in this town. The rules of recycling seem to still be a mystery to most people.

Welcome to Key West, now pay! If you overstay your welcome in a parking lot they love to leave their mark on your car. Booted until you pay the overage, and believe me when the visitors find this the first thing they do is dial 911 to get an officer to explain the charges. I like that my job ends when I send them the cops. I'd go nuts trying yo mediate between angry people. I love my job luckily, but not many people seem to think much of dispatching.

This dude found a clever little spot to pass out in, behind a fence under a bush. I laughed when I nearly stuck my face in his cap as I looked got my errant dog on the end of her taut leash. He never noticed a thing!

This extraordinary sign advertises what exactly? Turds or cigars? Some people might argue there's no difference but I actually don't mind cigar smoke. I loathe cigarettes and all their chemical additives but even though I don't smoke anything I don't mind cigars. I like to think its because they are just dried leaves, not adulterated like cigarettes. The flying turd shop.

This bicycle outside the Chamber of Commerce at Old City Hall made me smile. All the no parking signs in the world don't mean a thing to people even when there's an empty bike rack ten feet away. Who knows, maybe it's an employee's or perhaps the rack was full, who knows.

It's like this No Parking sign and the covered box parked in apparent defiance of it. Signs in Key West aren't meant for people that know what's actually going on, so just because you see a weird parking situation don't imitate them.

I am not fond of the stupid t-shirts and signs sold downtown but then I saw this one. It speaks to the misanthrope in all of us, especially me. I wish I could put one on the office door at work.

Early morning Key West looks so different from the lunch time, afternoon and evening crowded streets. I like it like this, no doubt because I'm not a businessman.

This was a good walk, confirmed by the fact that when I got her home she slept off the effects of the three hour walk for the rest of the day.

Deep content snores, make the walk even more worthwhile. I like strolling Old Town anyway but making her happy makes it even better.

 

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A Day Off

I have spent the entire week working so I am rather run down. Today my wife and I will celebrate Valentine's Day with Cheyenne and a bottle of wine and I hope a not too cool breeze on the porch. Oh, and sleep, musn't forget sleep to make up the deficit!

Have a good Sunday.

Cheers, Michael.

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Hanging With My Bud

Cheyenne and I have spent the past couple of afternoons at West Summerland Key. The area near the water is slightly protected from the north winds of the cold front by the ridge where the Overseas Highway runs down the middle of the island. It's most conspicuous landmark is the old Bahia Homda Flagler railroad bridge just to the north.

We come here often especially on days when I work as it's ten minutes from home, far enough to get us out of the house but not so far as to make getting home and ready for work a problem. In fact we come here so often I am reluctant to add any more pictures of this over-photographed island on the blog. So I decided to play with the camera settings while Cheyenne and I explored familiar ground.

When out of the wind the cold front with temperatures in the mid 60s isn't too cold at all but the slate gray clouds and flat water give it an ominous appeal, almost as though snow is about to fall.

Actually even on a gray day the transparency of the waters shine through:

The brown decaying seaweed pushed up onto the land makes for an impressive swath of cold wet dead vegetation. Crocs don't mind getting wet which is one reason I wear the strange rubber shoes.

I can even risk dunking my feet in seawater when I'm wearing Crocs to look for anemones left behind by the low, full moon, tide.

A few people came and went but this is no one's idea of a fabulous Florida beach, all rocky and covered in vegetation, precious few coconut palms and no sand at all.

I carry a folding beach chair in the trunk of the car and it comes in useful.

Cheyenne liked the old cement platform to lie on so I put down my Kindle and laid down alongside her and felt the warmth of her fur on my leg as we hung out together trying to ignore the strengthening cool breeze. She watched the world while I did my favorite thing...

I looked through the tree branches overhead, the play of leaves and light fluttering in the breeze.

Then home to dinner for Cheyenne and a shower, a uniform and work for me.

She gets on the couch and looks at me accusingly as I get ready to leave. I think she envies the motorcycle as it's with the Bonneville that I am unfaithful to my dog as I chase off on my commute to Key West.

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The Wild West Burger by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway and Pauline Kael caught in a happy moment in Key West, a suitable image to celebrate the day, forced upon us by the good people at Hallmark. Yes, it's Valentine's day today and I shall spare you the story of St Valentine of Terni (my fair city) whose holiday was never noticed when I was a kid until people everywhere realized there was money to be made from a minor religious holiday and in 1996 my homies started celebrating the Christian Bishop of a Terni who married a Roman soldier and a Christian woman. So now we are all out buying flowers etc etc.. Anyway I saw the BBC story BBC News - Hemingway's favourite burger recipe and I thought that thanks to the fact the man is inextricably linked to the Southernmost City we should probably not let this historic (really? Pardon my skepticism) recipe get away from us. Here's the story with added pictures pulled from the Web. Happy Valentine's Day !

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other" wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. Could it have been a wholesome burger that made them sleep so well, asks Tanvi Misra, of the BBC?

According to Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, Papa's favourite hamburger recipe - made available in digital form by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library on Tuesday - reveals quite a bit about the author and his fourth wife, Mary. It's no surprise that he liked his burger "pink and juicy in the middle" but what about the soy sauce, and the half-teaspoon of Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder? "One of Hemingway's favourite restaurants was in Havana's Chinatown," says Spanier. He loved Chinese food.

Also notable is the sheer range of items thrown into the mix - India relish, capers, wine, parsley... This captures a "gusto that's very characteristic" of Hemingway, Spanier says. "It's indicative of his enjoyment of the pleasures of life," and also the range of his tastes, from low-brow to high-brow. He was as comfortable on a boat with Cuban fisherman, Spanier says, as he was dining at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

As burgers go, this is quite ritzy.Hemingway's passion for food and drink is often reflected in his writing. Whole paragraphs describe the frothy bubbling of pancake batter in a skillet, and the sip from a tin of apricots in one of his earliest short stories, Big Two-Hearted River, Spanier notes. A Moveable feast, published after his death, contains a loving description of eating oysters with cold white wine. Mary wrote that they ate the hamburgers to fortify them for "tramping through the sagebrush after pheasant, partridge or ducks" in Idaho or Wyoming, which they visited every autumn. She typed the recipe out for the Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery while Hemingway was still alive, Spanier says.

This recently published version with the added "Wild West" tag, was for a later edition. After Hemingway's death in 1961, as relations between the US and Cuba deteriorated, Mary needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim documents and memorabilia. President Kennedy and Fidel Castro intervened to make it possible - which explains the JFK library's interest in Hemingway's papers.

This recipe, above reproduced below, was among those left behind at Finca Vigia outside Havana, shown with Hemingway's own notations.

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves minced garlic

2 little green onions, finely chopped

1 heaped teaspoon India relish

2 tablespoons capers

1 heaped teaspoon of Spice Islands sage,

Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning – ½ teaspoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder – ½ teaspoon

1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork

About one third of a cup dry red or white wine.

1 tablespoon of cooking oil

Spice Islands discontinued Mei Yen Powder three years ago, but you can recreate it with 9 parts salt, 9 parts sugar, 2 parts MSG. If a recipe calls for 1 tsp Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 tsp of this recipe mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.

What to do:

Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.

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The Weather

To discuss the weather in the Florida Keys is not typically a very fruitful occupation as of variation there is not usually much. Indeed people Up North treat weather here as a positive bore as it rarely ever changes, they say. I notice heat and humidity in summer along with rain and thunderstorms while winter is usually cooler and drier with just a little rain preceding cold fronts. This winter has been almost as mild as last winter and perhaps even more delightful thanks to occasional cool spells, and one such is upon us now.

However when I say "cold front" it barely merits the title. Years ago February saw a constant round of temperatures plummeting to below sixty, then slowly climbing up over eighty degrees in an endless cycle as the winter progressed. Nowadays everything seems to have evened out and we get less low temperatures but summer last year took months to kick in. Usually it's hot and humid again by April or May but last year it seemed like July was still not up to the usual inferno levels of summers past. I suspect climate change will continue to increase the weird variations in local weather but I'd like to hope that the closer to the equator one is, perhaps less variation there will be. Who knows?

Certainly I have not been alone in enjoying winter, but as I've been working a lot of overtime most of my outdoor walks are spent with my dog in neighborhoods preferred by her and thus possibly less scenic than one might like in the Fabulous a Florida Keys. I've encountered lots of winter residents who seem to enjoy rather more energetic and social forms of exercise than my dog and I, as we amble the lanes and woods by ourselves. I thought I was getting run down by Daleks when I crossed paths with a platoon of nattering elderly tricyclists on Big Pine. They waved cheerfully and pedaled on sweating slightly in summer clothing suitable to the early morning temperatures hovering around seventy degrees (20C).

I have been feeling pangs of guilt as I read about the devastation of drought in California, Montana buried under a giant snowdrift, end endless dreary rain in the Padific Northwest while in Europe epic floods are drowning homes right and left. What about hurricanes? People ask, their first thought about Life in Key West. After a hurricane at least when power goes out you won't die of hypothermia. Far from it, mosquito bites perhaps and a surfeit if warm beer, but hypothermia is not a problem. Even riding a motorcycle home in the rain from work requires nothing more than a light Frogg Togg rain suit.

Unlike our neighbors slightly to the north who are now getting clobbered by snow, ice storms, power outages, snarled traffic, school closures, canceled flights and gruesome widespread misery I am reveling in a weak man's idea of winter weather. These fearsome pictures I found online from Associated Press photographers in the Carolinas and they gave me pause for thought.

Thirteen people have died in conditions that would make Richard in Fairbanks yawn. He rides his sidecar combination in far worse weather than this. Richard's Page frequently talks in winter about temperatures that make my teeth curl just to read about them. Try three hours of sunlight and minus thirty degrees on for size. Not me. Snow tires on a motorcycle? A joke surely, and very funny in my opinion. Yet sadly it's all true.

Some people enjoy this stuff but I am not one of them. I have no idea why we are too far south for much of anything to reach us, but I am pretty sure Cheyenne would welcome temperatures around freezing. Too bad for her I am the driver in the family and we have no snowy road trips planned. No chance.

I might not mind a vacation in a well stocked location set in a snowfield with heat and nowhere to be, but the idea of working in these conditions is beyond anything I can imagine doing with a smile. I am none too keen on being out and about in a strong cold front, while is take pleasure in being out in summers heat, though I do like my air conditioning very much!

Our forecast for the next few days is absurdly out of synch with what's happening elsewhere. Yes it's true there is a cold front sweeping the Keys with some rain and thunder while North Carolina and Virginia get raked with ice and snow. Nothing severe enough here to keep me off the Triumph Bonneville for my commute, not even Friday night with a low of 62F/16C. Temperatures will hover below seventy all day Friday but by Sunday it should be back up to 80F/27C during the day.

I wonder how the poor and the homeless and all those dogs and cats and outdoor animals will cope across the Deep South as reporters call our neighbors, rather inanely I think. I would not do well at all in an ice storm. And I'd bitch endlessly and in a boring monotone fashion. I am a weather coward and I would be the first kicked out of the igloo just to restore peace and quiet in the tribe. Now I'd better go and hunt down a pair of socks to confront this wave of cold weather heading our way, as I'll still have to walk the dog in it no matter how cold it gets in the Keys.

 

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