Urp

No, this isn't our house -- just a shot I found on the web and found . . . well, "appropriate" probably isn't the right word.

But considering our recent guests for Fantasy Fest and just after, and the present Halloween, and the various levels of overindulgence always associated with everything on our little island. . . .

At any rate, Jerry and Gene staying for a few days, and then my cousins Rob and Kathleen for a few after, and the Obamacalls, and life in general have had me hopping sufficiently to keep me from writing anything for longer than I'd hoped. My apologies.

But that doesn't mean I haven't been taking pictures, some of which I hope to have up after Tuesday.

Thanks for your patience.

The blues, in a good way

Dan, who runs the campaign office here, has a great policy: Sure, you can pay for a sign or a sticker (stickers are in short supply); but better, you should earn it. Make 200 calls, and you get a yard sign.

I rocketed past that last week, and we have only so many linear feet of frontage, so I have to content myself with one little sign that I've earned a dozen times over. I'm thrilled that it's not just the plumbago context that brings so many thumbs-ups from the constant stream of traffic on our street.

The ground-war scripts change every day -- today, it was to urge supporters to vote early, by mail or at the Supervisor of Elections' office -- but the message is unwavering: This is the time for change, and you can be the change.

Please do vote early. If you do, I can take you off my call list, sit back, and eat the cookies I took into the office.

Three weeks and counting.

At 9, 10, 11 and 12

Sailor's delight

"I went to buy a toaster today," I said in my best deadpan voice, "and they gave me a bank, free." He laughed.

Robert and I were sitting on the front porch as the hot day bowed out with a little tropical shower -- the pats on the roof always call us out -- and talking about how the markets had melted, yet again, and our portfolio had shrunk, yet again. We've worked through all the balance sheets -- what expenses to cut as our income falls -- and I always have to remind him that forbearance of hand-milled soap does not fall under the category of "grim."

And then the storm moved on, and the clouds lit up. Which, I thought, is a decent metaphor for what will get us through this mess. Though not that the end of this day.

Spadework

You prune and tend and fertilize, and you go on with your life.

You toddle on over to campaign headquarters, sling a 12-pack of Diet Coke into the fridge for everyone, get the orders of the day and sit down and dial.

You might be looking for volunteers, or for undecided voters, and you dial and talk and encourage and persuade the very best you can, because you truly believe that if things go wrong in 26 days, you will never forgive yourself if you didn't do everything you could.

On your several lists, this being the place it is, are an English-born writer with 11 novels (an avid supporter, you quickly and gladly learn, who volunteers to knock on doors for the first shift of the Saturday canvass -- click this, click that, and the system schedules her), a legend of a pollster, an old Conch politician facing jail time for a horrid drunk-driving accident who won't let you off the phone, a state rep, an incredibly supportive restaurant owner you know. . . .

You make a few hundred calls and go home. Where you discover that the mussaenda you pruned those few days ago has gone about its own vital mission and generated a new bloom finally big enough for you to get a picture of, maybe an inch across.

It's only the dawn

Just as the sun's coming up, I'm out front picking sapodilla leaves out of the rosemary and the plumbagos (is it just me, or are there more leaves this year?), fiddling with little trims on the jasmine, checking on the new plantings.

I'd gladly be deadheading the hibiscus, but they are still having terrible trouble with mealybugs.

At any rate, sometimes when I look up, the dawn has turned our tin roof the most delicious shades of sky-blue pink. . . .

The night the lotus fell

Maybe it just wanted to break out for some fresh air. Maybe it wanted to end it all. Maybe it thought it was an Asian stock index, crashing at 4 a.m. our time.

Whatever the reason (I suspect it was a misrated "75-pound" picture hanger), Alicia's big pasteled lotus came down with one hell of a bang-and-shatter in the hours before dawn.

You can't imagine the shards, hundreds of them, and countless bits of glass grit. I took care -- only two cuts! -- but the cleanup still took most of the morning. Pick up big pieces, vacuum up the sparkly dust, damp-wipe the floor -- and even after three passes, the cloth was covered with minuscule sequins, or tiny stars glinted in the carpet.

So, a quick call to Alicia and then out to Art Mart on Stock Island, where they remembered framing it -- and later seeing it with our red "sold" sticker on the wall at Mangia Mangia. They're going to check with her to see if plexiglas will be safe (its static can pull pastel off paper, but she should know whether that's still a danger after a few years' curing). They asked me if I wanted the nicks fixed, but . . . nix. A few scars show character.

Whether plexi or glass, it should be hanging on a very secure nail by week's end: I found a burly header for the pocket door behind the failure point.

Barging in for repairs

Time was, we'd have multiple power cuts a day, and it just didn't make sense to reset all the digital displays, so 12:00 became the metronome of island life (though it's always 5 o'clock somewhere).

But City Electric -- oops, now it's gone all 20th Century and become Keys Energy Services -- still blinks out pretty regularly. Sometimes it's a car hitting a pole way up the road. Sometimes it's just an old transformer giving up the ghost. But they're usually fixed in minutes.

And then there was the four-hour gap the other night. Everything died, and the city was quiet except for motorcycles -- no hum of air-conditioners, no running pumps, no nada. We had candles on the front porch, and Robert rambled out to reconnoiter, coming back to announce that the 801 had generators and a festive crowd.

But I was puzzled: four hours? I understood better a few days later, when the Citizen published a picture of the bucket-truck-on-a-barge chimera that had to be assembled to patch the overwater line behind Hilton Haven.

Indigenous

Three quick sights from the walk on Saturday showing that (a) Islanders are crazy about signs and (b) egrets will indeed eat big clumps of wet weeds.

Earned it

I stopped into the Obama office at about Mile 2 the other day to see if I could buy a sign, and Dan, the guy who's running the county campaign, said he'd rather give me one if I did some volunteer work.

What they needed most, he said, was some basic feet-on-the-street canvassing to clear up a voter list. ("Crocsplastic" will never replace "shoeleather" as a term of art, but the basic idea never changes.)

So there I was today, quickly briefed and sent out to knock on doors and ask some questions. I was paired off with Bob, a strategic planner from Chicago who'd been laid off and came down to volunteer because he and his wife had bought a house here last year.

We spent four hours going up and down streets on the eastern edge of Casa Marina, gaining data and blisters and having a great time. Turns out we had some friends in common back in Chicago (he actually worked for the Trib at one point while I was there, in info tech management), and he was rapidly inputting data when I limped home to nurse my tired toes.

And hobble across the porch to put the sign up.

Fire and water

Our continuing torrents -- Octobers always rack up the most rainfall, by far -- have put everything around the house on steroids (the MiracleGro probably didn't hurt, either).

The Bahama firebush at the head of the parking space has decided to celebrate with a few dozen blossoms.

They're only about an inch long, but I think they're pretty hot.

The crib sheet

Cleanup time

It's amazing how things grow here -- and while we were away, they had a riot.

There were five of these seed stalks on the palms out front, for example. And though they're pretty on a rainy evening, glistening in the mist, they soon get messy, dropping dozens of tiny flowers from each of their hundreds of knobby little pods.

So down they came . . . and then we called Jon, our landscape guy, to bring his crew over to do the serious trimming.

So now the yellow elder is back to manageable size, primed to send out blossoms. The aralias are tied up, the buttonwood buzzed, the leaves raked and the thryallis that dropped their little yellow flowers into the pool pulled up and tossed out. The result: 25 huge bags of yard trash.

And then it rained. So we got wet getting new materials and putting them in, including a huge peace lily for a hole in the corner behind the pool, and some Tahitian gardenias for the gaps left by our sickly ground orchids, and some extra ferns. . . .

It seems that in his zealousness to keep everything fertilized, Robert burnt some of our stuff to a crisp. So I fired him and hired Jon to come back every month to fertilize and prune and make the jungle bloom.