This is Darren taping off some trim Friday afternoon, but I hope you'll excuse the lack of focus.
The object is the light, not the detail, so I turned off the flash, which resulted in the blurs.
The light you see burning in the stairwell is just the afternoon sun coming in through the southern front dormer and reflecting down. The yellow is our wall color, washed on wood.
And the bigger glow is my happiness with it all.
So, the picket fence is in, and some of the railing on the porch -- doesn't it look great? -- and by this afternoon, the fence across the left addition, screening the AC and pool equipment, was up, too.
I got a great deal of satisfaction out of being part of the picket-making process: cutting a little, but mostly feeding boards to the cut man and taking off the finished pieces. "A lean, mean sawing machine," I said to Mr. B as we mass-produced slats.
(The highest praise I've heard in a long time came from Arnold today. He said, "I was going to tell you what to do with the factory edges when you were cutting yesterday, but then I looked over and saw you were doing it right already, so I just moved on.")
I stepped back to admire everybody else's job when . . . well, I won't go into gory details, but a huge man emerged from a huge van that had parked in front of our space after I'd asked him not to block our loading access. He was loud, vulgar and menacing. Apparently Darren, Nate, Arnold and Brantley thought so, too -- even Zachary from down the street -- because they spilled into the street to provide moral and muscular support.
The mildest thing the guy said was that he hadn't seen any "no parking" signs. . . .
Well, I can take a hint. And apparently so can he. The van was gone by the time I got back from Strunk's with the big, shiny signs -- Arnold had apparently mentioned something about towing -- and after I got the signs up we all decided to invite him to park there anyway once the workday was done, in a spirit of fellowship.
Then he came out onto his porch and shouted a few more things, and we rethought our plan. Arnold flipped out his cell and told Brantley to hitch up the work trailer, and put it in the best possible place.
Hank is almost done with grouting, and it's been a slog. Some surfaces needed extra prep. The black grout was a type he wasn't used to. And then the green grout varied in shade from bag to bag.
We ended up mixing sanded and unsanded versions to even the whole project out, and I think it worked pretty well.
Mike, Arnold's son, made me feel good about it all during his visit last weekend. He looked at the green tiles and said, "The colors of the sea."
That's what I was going for -- the blue-green glow of Keys waters, with the sparkle of sun on the spray.
The first of these pictures is from Tuesday, and the rest from Wednesday as the day progressed.
Arthur, the neighborhood guy who goes about with a walking stick, probably put it best: "Man, when I looked here yesterday, there were just holes in the ground."
These shots should give you a good idea of what we're trying to achieve -- not necessarily in terms of the actual tint, which is distorted a bit by the camera (and the flash), but in the grain that emerges with the wash of paint and wipe of rag.
The wood wall in the den -- which will be sitting in an intensely Chinese Red room -- actually looks a little like the side of a barn without the louver doors that will give it some sophistication, the flat-screen that will break up the central panel, etc., etc.
"Right now, I almost expect bluegrass music out of it," Roy said Wednesday morning.
Not quite. But I'm going to hold off topcoating it with polyurethane until the side walls go in, in case it needs to get a little darker to match its surroundings.
I felt no doubts at all when he started on the little guest room after lunch. The yellow brings out every tiger stripe in the wood -- knots and all -- and reminds me that every board in that wall was a piece of a living tree.
At the end of the afternoon, it was like cloud-watching: We were all standing there studying it, picking out our favorite boards.
New Year's Eve, I was in bed early with a tall, gorgeous glass of orange juice. My nose was scratchy, so I popped some pills, upped my fluids . . . and woke up cloggy but feeling pretty good Monday.
Late in the day, things went south and then southernmost, so I was at the house only briefly Tuesday.
Roy wanted me to come over and look at his paint tests, and then see the start of the wash on the wood wall in the den.
I looked but kept my distance -- as I did with Arnold, Mr. B and Nate staking out the yard, and with Hank and Ray grouting the upstairs bath.
I saw, smiled, sneezed and went home to bed.
By the time I got to the house to see what a difference a year made, Arnold and Mr. B were already attacking our postage-stamp yard with a Bobcat, shovels and rakes.
They'd hauled off a big load of boulders from just under the surface (looked like a sandstone and coral mix) and were grading the leftovers down to a nice, gentle slope to the street. Arnold wants to get the picket fence started ASAP, and the holiday meant he got a few free days with the Bobcat.
As he was pulling a mound of dirt back with the blade, Brantley said, yet again, "You just gotta stop showing off like that." Both of them laughed.
They'd spent New Year's Eve at St. James, with Mr. B in the choir and Arnold in the pews, and then danced the year in at the Elks.
Arnold's dog, Candy, watched the goings-on with me from the porch -- and I told you she stayed close once she got to know you. As we held the porch down while the guys broke for lunch, I rediscovered what a great ice-breaker a dog is. One after another, passers-by paused to admire her cuteness.
But Key West has always been a great dog town. Just Saturday, dachshund owners had their annual just-for-the-heck-of-it parade down Duval. By the time I caught up with them, the pack stretched from Angela to Southard all the way to Fleming.
There must have been a hundred tails wagging, and more smiles on humans than you could count.
"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.
