"Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. . . . "-- Thomas Mann- - -Well, that's what I posted before I went to bed. Waking up, I learn the trumpet was playing taps: the list of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has now rolled past the 3,000 mark.
Heaven help us all.
This was the scene on Duval this afternoon -- and thank you very much, but I won't be around at midnight to see Sushi ride the big red pump down.
Gives a certain vibrancy to the phrase "drag and drop." Still, been there, done that, been stepped on and jostled enough, thank you very much again.
And that was when people still had standards and the shoe was spangled.
Nor will I be on Lower Duval, watching the giant conch shell drop at Sloppy Joe's. Too . . . sloppy, in every awful sense.
I am tempted, briefly, to watch the Wench Drop at the Schooner Wharf. It's fairly close to the apartment, and though it sounds horribly non-PC, it's -- horribly non-PC, but at least consensual.
Evalena Worthington, who owns the wharf bar, dresses up as her own vision of pirate wenchitude and has herself lowered about 80 feet down the mast of the Schooner Liberty, at anchor off the bar. Then cannons go off, doves are released and -- with the drag queen and the conch also dropped elsewhere on the Rock -- our little island has again done all in its power to stave off the forces of normalcy.
I plan to stave them off at home. Asleep.
But happy 2007, however you ring it in. Just don't wring yourself out.
It's 78, and the sea breeze is caressing the palms. Dance to the moon, says the breeze. They sway.
I spent a few hours on the porch Saturday morning -- a great place to sit and watch the world go by, giving directions to passing tourists, saying hey to neighbors, enduring the beeps from scooter renters discovering their horn buttons.
I can't imagine how many happy hours I've spent there already, on an old slatted folding chair that I'm going to hang onto once the project is finished. That chair is even better acquainted with the porch than I am. Besides, its faded wood already matches the decking.
Roy had said he might drop by Saturday to work on the stairwell ceiling without others around, but he didn't show up. Neither did Hank, who'd said he might grout. Nor did Kenny, who said he was going to hook up the AC. (But who ever expects Kenny when he says he'll be there?)
What I didn't expect -- and what a pleasant surprise! -- was Arnold coming around the corner just as I was locking up. With him were his son and daughter-in-law, visiting for New Year's: a wonderful couple, who were either quite taken with the house or so charming that they never let me suspect otherwise.
They really seemed to like the wrapped beams in the den and bedroom. I like 'em, too -- and finished just as they are, though Roy and I had flirted with making them just a few shades darker, so they'd match the old collar ties in the big ceiling.
At any rate, once I get a kitchen, all of the Shermans have to come back for dinner.
We have a new worker on the project. Major tasks include dancing with paws in the air, volunteer- ing for ear scratches and consuming the occasional treat.
Meet Candy, Arnold's pup. He brought her down when he came back from Christmas, and she's a cutie.
There's miniature poodle in there somewhere, and she's a little shy.
But take the time to earn a little trust, and she's perpetually at your ankles -- waiting to do her job as the subject for yet another ear scratch, of course.
Our front porch has been railing-free for almost a year now, first just a slab and then just a slab covered in deck planks, but it has a surprise waiting on the back deck.
Arnold has begun making sections to be primed and then set into place -- plus a top rail, of course -- and they're looking good.
Like the fence, they're indicators that we're on the home stretch.
I almost stumbled into them Friday morning; I was focusing upward, because Darren was finishing up the ceiling in the kitchen and living room. Hank was finishing up the tile in the upstairs bath, and was getting ready to grout. Roy was up on a scaffold in the den, staining the planks and then the collar ties.
Now just the staircase ceiling and the big half of the gable vault are left. "I'll finish them sometime next year," Roy said with a big smile.
I won't go into the reasons, but I desperately needed a few blossoms today. Just around the corner on Olivia, there they were.
At one point Thursday, Roy and Darren, his helper (seen here sanding the living room ceiling), asked Arnold about where he was setting up his saws.
They didn't want to be in his way -- or have him in theirs -- and they were going to start staining in the kitchen and living room if he planned to be elsewhere.
He would set up outside, he assured them, so "Carry on."
He'd picked up the Briticisms just as I had. Roy's from Zimbabwe, Darren from Bristol in the U.K.
Of course my Wayback Machine flashed to my demented youth, when I had way too much fun with "Carry On, Nurse," a Brit sex farce that played inexplicably as part of a Saturday double feature at the Sterling Theater and used a mallet to teach me the meaning of double-entendre. (Nobody can be as delightfully dirty as the English; just look at Joan Greenwood in "Kind Hearts and Coronets.")
One "Carry On" reference led to another, and it turns out that Darren's brother, whom he came to visit briefly a year ago, recently got a boxed set of the "Carry On" series.
My first thought: astonishment that there was a boxed set. My second: He'd obviously bought in a drunken moment.
It was in 1975, and I'd recently been promoted to the editorial board of the Sun-Times, in Chicago.
One thing I'd learned in my earlier years there is that if Ann Landers -- Eppie Lederer in real life -- wanted a favor from you, you gave it to her. Quickly. She brought millions of dollars to the paper every year, and her whim of iron was not to be dismissed.
So when she showed up at my office door around lunchtime one day and said in her strange side-of-mouth way, "Get your coat -- quick," I didn't ask questions. I knew she always demanded a "walker" for public appearances, though she usually drafted her guys from senior management. At 26, I was definitely junior.
Her hand on my wrist like a vise, she pulled me downstairs, into her limo ("AL 1955" -- the year she started the advice column). "Palmer House, Bill," she said to her driver of all that time.
Bill swung the big Fleetwood around and down Wabash, through increasingly thick traffic. The street was closed past Randolph, but Bill pressed on around the barricade, through pedestrians wandering in the streets. Up to the packed curb, and then the vise on the wrist again as Eppie pulled me through doors and hallways and past large men with earpieces who nodded at her and looked me up and down and then we went through a plain door behind the Grand Ballroom.
In the little room was a man in shirt and tie starting his lunch of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese by himself. "Hello, Eppie," he said, rising and coming over to hug her. "Who's your date?"
She turned and said, "John . . . umm?" I was new, after all. I introduced myself.
"Really nice to meet you," President Ford said with a great handshake and smile, and then he pulled out the chair to seat Eppie -- and then did the same for me. "What would you like for lunch, John?"
During the whole meal he was paying court to a woman who had 50 million readers a day, but he made a point of including me in every topic, every minute. Smart and charming.
I would have stayed for his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, but I'd heard the interesting stuff already -- besides, Eppie had to get back to the office to work on her column, and she needed company on her ride back.
If you went just inside the front door Tuesday and looked up, this is what the stain looks like on half of the big gable vault.
If you looked around, well . . .
There were Arnold (back from Georgia), Mr. B, Nate, Roy the painter and and his assistant Darren, Hank and Ray the tile guys, Joel the floor guy to talk about a bid and even Kenny the air-conditioning guy, finally putting the coils and fans into the units where they belong.
I'm thinking of that one as a Christmas miracle.
Whatever, it was certainly a crowd scene. So I had a good strategy session with Arnold, noted Hank's desperate call for mastic (the baths are using more than he'd thought) and my own need for a new phone (the lightning had fried the ringers on our old ones) and left for errands -- and to give everyone room to work.
But not before taking another look at the upstairs guest-room ceiling. The stain glows, and I like it like that.
We had a massive thunder- storm just before sunset Christmas Day, 45-knot winds blowing away the 84-degree afternoon, and in the middle of it a lightning bolt roared down so close that the terrifying explosion and flash were simultaneous.
Now my phones don't ring and the DSL modem is dead -- which makes blogging about as speedy as running a marathon through mud.
It'll take me a bit to adjust to the glacial pace of dial-up. Suffice it to say work continues on ceilings and baths.
Save your figgy pudding. If you must roast a boar, pray that Sandy's, the White Street laundromat that serves sandwiches, will slice it up for a Cuban mix. Step lively then across said White to to Fausto's for birch beer, thence down White to the pier and Higgs Beach.
Stake out a palapa (no extra charge for the pelicans' air show).
Take plenty of napkins. The feast is juicy.
We were heading back from Marathon today -- we'd gone up to get a patio table -- and we were in the middle of the big arch on the Seven-Mile bridge. Ella was singing Cole Porter on the CD, the sun was doing its thing and the birds were having fun in the 84-degree breeze (as they did in this picture from Higgs Beach on Wednesday).
I turned to Robert and said, "I'm the luckiest person I know."
We spent most of Thursday going back and forth to the paint store, sometimes with scraps of pine in hand.
We did at least a half-dozen tests, and I think the mileage was worth it: When Roy started on the upstairs ceilings Friday, I finally saw the warm tone -- somewhere between amber and honey -- that we'd been looking for.
Even better, though we started with wipe-off stain that would eventually have to be sealed, we ended up with a brush-on polyurethane.
Even so, Roy wants to give it one extra coat of clear poly, because the wood is taking the coating at different rates, and he says one last coat will even the sheen out beautifully.
It's funny how people adapt traditions for their own locations.
Here, for example, a scuba Santa swam out from page one of the Citizen and Conch Color this week.
And then there's the seasonal program at United Methodist, just around the corner from our rental.
Tonight and tomorrow they're doing their live nativity, with carols in the background and church kids playing angels, shepherds and the like. The animals around the manger include a chicken, of course.
I saw the packing for some air-conditioning equipment downstairs Thursday morning -- cardboard cartons and such that Kenny had obviously brought downstairs late Wednesday.
Great, I thought. The guts of the air handlers, which were sitting out in the big guest room, have finally been installed. I'm not comfortable having the coils, fans and such out on the floor, instead of safely inside their units.
So upstairs I went. Sure enough, I turned the corner and bingo. Out of sight. Then I looked in the air-handler closets and scratched my head. Then I looked in the big storage closet.
At this rate they should be in by April or May.
The other night, after the show upstairs in the Crystal Room at La Te Da, Debra and Patrick were making such wonderful music downstairs that we had to stop and listen.
We learned, too -- with a wonderful reminder why every day can be a cause to rejoice.
Next to us were a terrific couple from Colorado, Laurie and Brant. Married less than two years, they were in Key West for a celebration. Laurie's breast cancer, treated and apparently eradicated eight years before, had recurred early this year. When the chemo cost Laurie her hair, Brant shaved his head in solidarity.
But finally -- finally! -- the new rounds of radiation and chemo were over, and it was time to give three cheers in the sun.
A critical care nurse, Laurie appreciates more than most what she's been through and may yet face. But face it she and Brant do, with grace, humor, and a zest for the sweetness of life that follows a very sour patch indeed.
Here's to you -- and come back soon.
Every so often, the house surprises me more than I can say. Beyond the angles I've expected, there are those entirely new.
Thus the other day, when I was coming down the stairs, about three steps from the bottom, I looked across at the ceiling and saw patterns I'd never expected.
The lens distorts things a bit, but so does life.
- ■ -
The flash distorts the color a bit, but it sure gives you an idea of the reflectivity of the glass strip.
Apparently the opalescence comes from tiny amounts of iridium, selenium and cadmium in the glass -- but whatever causes it, I like it.
Hank and Ray had all but a few tiles done in the little guest bath Wednesday, and they started in on the master bath.
Their plan -- besides taking a welcome vacation to cobalt -- is to have the two bathrooms' tile finished by Thursday night, so they can grout Friday.
Hank, who's particular about color, sent us out to research new grout this week. Our original plan for the green tile was a pewter -- off-white, veering toward gray. He wanted us to take a look at a bit more tone, and we ended up with a slight gray-green: "seafoam," a nice color, though Robert had to overcome his horror of the '60s name.
The blue bath will take black grout -- which we all think will set off the billion colors in the glass strips quite well indeed. "I can't wait to see this room when the ceiling lights go on," Hank said.
Here's the crown of one of the big plumerias by the library, down to its winter basics. Quite a change from the mass of fragrant yellow blossoms that form by the thousands in spring, summer and fall.
Robert has never liked their seasonal leaf-drop. He thinks they look too bare, and a little desolate.
I think they look sculptural, armatures I can hang my spring hopes on. That's a rare thought in a place where the four seasons are warm, bake, broil and hurricane.
But even now, you can find a few hangers-on around town -- our equivalent of the last rose of summer. A sweet farewell.
Row on row the little guest bathroom grew Monday and Tuesday, with Hank setting, spacing, tapping, adjusting and readjusting the tile, and Ray making cuts as required with the wet saw on the porch.
One exception: When the cuts are rounded, as around the shower control, Hank gets out the hand grinder and trims as required. If I tried that trick, I don't think I'd have a finger left.
But he's steady as you go, rank after rank, with occasional asides about what fun it is to make three shades of tile (two of which are almost identical) look randomly chosen.
Hank's a meticulous guy, but he rises well to the challenge of randomness.
Photos don't do justice to the glass strips (about even with his left elbow in the bottom photo). Yesterday FedEx delivered the light fixtures, which look as if they were custom made to match the glass, and are merely fantastic. I put them upstairs to keep them out of harm's way.
They sure won't fit into our locker at Old Town Self Storage, which is already tight at the seams. Today we went over to rearrange it a bit, to get ready for the two big chairs for the den being delivered Thursday. We opened the door, looked around, moved one small box, shook our heads and locked it back up.
One lifts, one measures and one screws it tight:
Another section of fence goes in Monday, and you can tell from the light that it was the prettiest day in a long time. Temperatures were in the 80s by midafternoon.
The guys are marching down the north edge of the lot -- and without some horrible hitch, they'll have that whole side done by the time Arnold leaves Wednesday for Christmas at home.
Footnote, from Monday morning's Citizen:
. . . More than three inches of rain fell between Friday and Sunday, the most rain in a three-day period in the Keys since Hurricane Katrina dumped 10 inches in August 2005, said Jim Lee, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Key West. Sunday's rainfall totaled one inch, setting a new record for the date, he said.The average rainfall in Key West for the entire month of December is 2.14 inches. . . .
The rain started Friday night, so we holed up and ate from the pantry.
It was still coming Saturday morning -- bad news if you wanted to set fence sections in place. So Arnold and Mr. B worked on baseboards and door trim in the den and master bedroom.
More drizzle Saturday afternoon, so we did laundry and the dryer promptly stopped working. Think bungee cords as laundry lines, and then think how well clothes dry in rainstorms. Thus the necessity of naps.
Still more rain Saturday night.
We dropped our plans to go to the old city harbor for the lighted boat parade ("Deck the Hulls," "The Bight before Christmas" and other festive nicknames -- here's a Rob O'Neal picture from last year's fun). Carryout from Fausto's and DVD's? How festive.
About 5 this morning, it was down to a trickle, and the laundry was merely . . . damp. We learned that they'd canceled Saturday's parade and rescheduled it for tonight -- but we have reservations to burn off those tickets from La Te Da. Alas. Avast.
I've been looking at plain wood and drywall for so long that I'd almost forgotten what color looks like.
And then today, when I hauled out the guest-bath tiles for Hank and his assistant, and Hank said, "Wow!," I remembered what a great mood I was in when we put these three shades of tile together with the stone and two kinds of glass. Hank and his assistant, Ray, are starting Monday.
Our deck -- indeed, the whole rear of our house, including the big glass doors to the living room and kitchen -- have been wide open to the world since our project began at the first of the year.
Here's the way our deck looks to the rear neighbors now, as of this week.
We're not trying to be un-neighborly. We just want some privacy, security -- and the reassurance that no one is going to wander in and fall into the pool.
Arnold, Mr. B and Nate (ripping louvers in the second picture) labored all week to round the corner, fill the back and then start back toward the front along the north side of our lot.
The more we look at the panels, the more inclined we are to paint the columns brown (they've already been primed) and let the pressure-treated louvers and their frames weather down to a nice, unobtrusive gray.
We might give them a quick coat of water sealant, but after that . . . no more maintenance. We hope they'll be camouflaged pretty well from our side by plantings anyway.
This is the lull between Fantasy Fest (and the the end of hurri- cane season) and the top of the post- Christmas tourist boom. The old city harbor, from our seats at Conch Republic Seafood, is quiet.
After a few cool days, we're back to t-shirt weather.
And it's time to say good-bye for a while to royal red shrimp.
Big and meaty, from 2,400 feet down a bit west of the Dry Tortugas, they're remarkably sweet. Key West pinks -- our everyday local catch -- are always really good. These are always remarkable, worth waiting for every year.
They say the biggest ones are 3 years old. With drawn butter (sinful) or cocktail sauce (merely decadent), they last about 3 minutes after the lemon goes on.
"Isn't that nice," said Hank, the guy Bobby D sent over Thursday morning about perhaps finishing the tile job. "That great old symbol of welcome, smiling down over the front door."
I looked again at the pineapples Arnold had cut (this one is just tentatively set in, so don't look too closely at the spacing). And I thought about the difference between the original design and our newly created reality.
All of a sudden I thought back to one morning in our motel room on Duval last January. We were down to meet Ref and discuss his bid for the project, and we'd worked over the plans with the architect and the city for more than a year, so it's safe to say I was familiar with them.
But as I woke that morning, I remembered the last dream that flickered in my about-to-wake head: I was standing in the house's front door, I looked around and saw the plan clearly rendered in 3-D for the first time. I was overwhelmed and woke up beaming.
So many of those little dreams since, and so many more awakenings. How lucky to have those dreams and how much luckier to see them take even better shape (and color) than they hinted on the page.
Bobby D, the tile man, was ashen when he got to the house Wednesday morning. He said his son was in the hospital -- something heart-related, but as yet undiagnosed.
While the docs were doing their tests, he said, he'd finish the grout on the last shower -- here's the stall before he wiped it down -- but wouldn't be able to do the rest of the job.
His son apparently has some monster project farther up the Keys, and dad's going to take it over for him to take the pressure off.
Such is life, and we certainly wish Bobby and his family well.
By late afternoon, Lori at Island City Tile had come through yet again, and we had another tile guy on site to give us a quote on the rest of the project.
To celebrate Sweet Babs' new website, the view from our lunch table at Saluté Tuesday. Not quite palapa chairs, but close.
The pavilion on Higgs Beach is where Yoga by the Sea meets.
We haven't walked on the shower floors yet -- but they're fun for our eyes to wander across.
Bobby D, the tile guy, put them down in all three bathrooms Tuesday. In the master bath, in the top picture, they're slate squares -- apparently devilish things to cut, because the slate has a tendency to break off in layers.
It's easier sledding in the two guest baths; the tiles are studded with aqua glass dots, and his saw makes short work of it all.
Lining up materials for the rest of the job, Bobby noticed one glitch that had an interesting solution: Our ceramic wall tile is about a quarter-inch thicker than the iridescent glass tiles we'll be using as decorative bands throughout. Arnold and Bobby palavered, then sent me on a quest for backer board they could cut into strips to shim out the glass.
(Bobby had suggested simply doubling up the glass -- but considering its price, I ruled that out pronto, as they say in Murano.)
Home Depot sells 3-by-5-foot HardieBacker sheets for about 9 bucks, but it was on back(er) order. So we went over to Manley deBoer, the local lumberyard, and picked up a sheet -- for 12 and change.
¡Caramba, what a markup!
. . . It's a terrific railing, and there is no other hand, because we decided to install it on one side on purpose.
Arnold scowled at the staircase the first few times he went up and down it. There's a 45-degree segment at the landing, narrow at the pivot, that Ref had been forced to install because the blueprint didn't work as drawn.
Arnold worried about the step width there, and we finally figured out that a handrail along the narrowest part -- left side coming up, right side going down -- would force people away from the wall and onto the widest part of the step.
It's a tricky mix of compound angles, and an elegant solution to a problem we didn't want to trip anyone up.
Yes, that's Robert stage left at the Tropic Saturday night.
Julie Andrews -- OK, it was really Christopher Peterson -- was announcing that his head full of edelweiss had captured a top prize at the evening's sold-out "Sing-Along Sound of Music."
With native edelweiss in short supply on the island, he had to settle for some greenery purloined along Southard, a fistful of baby's breath, a bit of styrofoam, a hair band and some florist's wire.
Partici- pating loons also included a cloister's worth of nuns, several brown paper packages, doorbells and sleigh bells (yours truly) and a well-choreographed front row of Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La and Ti.
Speaking of La and Ti, Robert won tickets for a show and drinks at La Te Da, which has come a long way since José Martí made it his home here, delivering revolutionary rhetoric from the balcony.
Here's how Arnold's pineapples turned out in Frank's loft railing. To give you an idea of scale, each single slat is 5½ inches wide.
We're planning to pickle the slats and paint the posts and rails.
I can't tell you how much we like 'em.
As promised, some explanation of Friday's frantic activity. Earlier in the day, Frank had used the table saw to bevel one edge each of 138 slats, generating that big sawdust pile you saw yesterday.
Then Frank and Kurt set up the laser transit, marked the fence posts (set in concrete months ago) and used a Skilsaw (Frank) and Sawzall (Kurt) to cut them to uniform height:
They attached 2-by-4's to the outside of the posts (to give us maximum planting room between deck and fence), built frames for the slats and attached the slats to the frames:
The beveled edges are toward the inside of the fence -- and a central strip gives them rigidity and prevents sagging:
The guys had left for Macon -- with deep thanks -- by Saturday, when Arnold talked about top treatments with Robert and me. We decided against big horizontal boards and decided on much simpler (and less costly) caps at each post:
By code, the fence can be only 6 feet high from ground level. Our raised deck (to the level of the first floor) means we'll have to plant some fast-growing foliage -- hardly a problem in the tropics.
