Appetized, satisfied

I don't like to go out for dinner much by myself, so I sometimes splurge at Fausto's and eat well at home.

Today I got some cheese and crackers, and then a nice chicken entree from the hot case.

I got home and 8 o'clock or so I got the crackers out -- Margaret's Artisan Flatbread, garlic and herbs, about the size and thickness of a 10-EE insole and about a buck a cracker, for heaven's sake -- and a schmear from a nice wedge of smoked Rambol cheese, easy to spread at room temperature. I poured a tod of rainwater Madeira.

A bite. A chew. A taste of much smoke, much garlic. Bathe it all with a sip of the sweet raisin Madeira, m'dear. Oh, my. Best tastes I've had in a long time, even counting the confit at 915, which says a lot.

Another appetizer sounded just right, so I redid the cracker, cheese and wine.

All right, one more.

And the chicken went into the fridge for the night.

Baptized on Palm . . . Tuesday

There was a frond in the pool when I got back to our rental this afternoon, and when I bent down to fish it out, I remembered that I should finally go after the Pilot House palm frond all brown and ugly hanging over our "living room."

It's the kind that needs to be trimmed off the trunk, not a self-cleaning palm like the ones over the rental pool and we're putting in at the house. So I'd have to cut as much of the frond as I could, considering the tree itself is three or four stories tall.

I got the heavy shears, grabbed the end of the dead, brown frond, pulled it as far down as I could, cut as far up as I could reach. I was using all my weight to pull on it.

I neglected to consider that I was angled over the pool, and that as I cut there would be a quick loss of support from the frond.

As I tumbled into the pool, I had a slow-motion thought: I was baptized at Trinity Church on Palm Sunday, 58 years ago. Thus on Palm Tuesday, 58 years plus 2 days, I did the total immersion route, a block from St. Paul's.

Moons and tides

My friend Lou is making a Moon Song book for her Rebbe's daughter, and asked for a shot of tonight's full Passover moon rising over the sea for the cover.

(If you click on the little "Heavens" label below, you'll see a few of my older moon pictures.)

Wouldn't you know: Full clouds, which meant a lovely silver sky but no big, beautiful disc.

Just in case, I'd sent her this, which I found on the web.

In a digital age, moons and tides and rise and ebb at will -- which, I think, makes it even more important to stay in touch with their natural pull.

Happy Passover, everyone.

Opening doors to windows

I've been chary to post anything substantive about our window problem, but . . .

Clayton Lopez, our city Commissioner, set up a working meeting with me later this week, and as luck would have it the Historic Architecture Review Commission has a community-input meeting set up for April 16.

He was not shy about my problem: "I am behind you all the way on this," he told me after I sent him my letter pleading for sanity on building codes in Old Town. "There is no reason in the world you have to tear those things out.

"And by the way, what kind are they? I want to put them in my house."

Clayton had walked by our house -- prompted by his assistant, Virginia, whom I'd buttonholed after one of our neighborhood-watch meetings.

"I went up to the gate and took a good look at them," he said. "I can't understand how anyone would find them offensive at all," the Commissioner said. "They're so beautiful."

I gave him my boilerplate line about not wanting to change the character of Old Town, and being willing to switch to wood ones -- though they'll cost us $3,000 a year in added wind-insurance premiums. . . .

"Don't even think about changing those windows," he said. "We're going to make this all right."

All right!

Handled

Greg, the sweet guy who cleans for our friend Sullins, came by Sunday to start getting the grit out for our move.

Well, that was the plan, anyway. He said we weren't quite ready for him, but he helped me clean out the air-handler filters, which were full of mahogany dust. (How could that have happened?)

He's planning to be back Wednesday, since his seasonal clients are migrating north and he has more free time. He'll get going after Deco and Dave finish the light-well floor, move out their heavy woodworking stuff and consolidate the leftover flooring.

When I bid Greg adios, I thought I might as well get after the handles on the six den doors. Flooring materials, at long last part of the floor, weren't blocking them anymore, and I could actually get to them. So there I was with my trusty DeWalt, a template, a level, a pencil, a tape measure and an improvised screwdriver.

I think Ref may have wrapped me a little too tightly: Three sets of doors, six handles, twelve holes . . . 90 minutes? Priceless.

Seen along Petronia Street

For some people, every day is April Fool's.

Buds on the beach

"Hello, John? Mr. Garber would like to talk with you."

"We're going stir-crazy in Miami," Sidney said, "so we're coming down."

I told him how sorry Robert would be to miss him, since he's in Tennessee for taxes and bridge and insurance appraisals and . . . .

"I'll miss him too," Sidney said. "We'll see you tomorrow."

The big Lexus pulled up late the next afternoon. We walked through the house, and Sidney was tired so we adjourned to Mangoes for drinks. A few hours later there, after several more drinks and dinner, they checked into the Hyatt at the seaport. Friday we met at the beach for lunch, at Salute, delicious as ever.

They dropped me at Truman and Simonton, turned right and headed back to the mainland.

If I make it to 88, I want to have have that much fun.

Parting gifts

The last time Ref was in his backyard, sitting in a chair in his robe, sick to death, he was directing Arnold and Nate through the welter in his storage shed. He pointed out the concrete pineapple.

He'd gotten it in Miami, he told Arnold, because he knew Robert and I liked pineapples as a symbol of hospitality. He warned Arnold against dropping it, nicking it or putting it among the hundred other things to cull. Ref wanted it to be a housewarming surprise for us.

So the day before Arnold left, he brought it over.

Right now it's at home on the porch -- and at more weight than I can carry, it's probably pretty safe there for a bit. (For all its lawlessness, Key West is pretty low in petty crime: I stupidly left a bag of drill bits in plain sight on the porch overnight, and nobody nicked it.)

But eventually, I think the pineapple from Ref and Arnold is going to have a fine home at the most private part of the house, at the far edge of the pool. As with everything else around the place, we'll think of both of them at every glimpse.

Finishing touches

Arnold spent Wednesday and Thursday finishing up some things he wanted to handle himself -- locks on the gate doors, ball catches on the closets. And then packed his tools.

"They're calling me up North," he said, and he's leaving Friday.

I told him I couldn't say goodbye, so we didn't. I also told him I could never thank him enough. And then I went inside to dry my eyes.

Upward and onward

Dave's working on the landing here Wednesday afternoon. Deco's been shaving the treads and risers below him to fit ever so tightly and beautifully -- and we're all loving the way it looks untrimmed.

We already have cove molding in hand to cover the screws that will secure the backs and sides of the treads.

Nobody wants to use that trim. We love the clean lines. So: Do we go only with liquid nails -- which are engineered to be just as strong as nails or screws after all?

I'm inclined to see how that works for a month or two. We can always add screws and trim; it's awfully hard to subtract 'em.

■ ■ ■

Oh, you wondered about my little time with the judge.

HARC appeals are the last on his agenda (he deals with Code Enforcement first -- zoning violations, bad permits -- and I'm not going to be at the back of the crowd at a certain Duval Street restaurant during a concert soon; I'm just saying); so I sat for 90 minutes or so waiting my turn.

I'd watched him lose his temper a bit, so I wasn't optimistic when I wished him a good afternoon and asked for a continuance. He asked me why. I told him that my problem seemed not to be with HARC, but with its guidelines, and said in my most confident and optimistic tone that I planned to change them. I smiled.

He adopted a bit of the manner you might use with a benevolent madman, and told me gently it would be an uphill battle, but one worth fighting if I had the energy.

He gave me 60 days to show whether the energy was moving anyone on the Commission. At that point I can abandon the appeal, argue my case or seek another continuance. Worse things happen.

The wheel squeaks

Decko and Dave were busy flooring closets in the den Tuesday. Roy was back painting shoe moldings -- little strips of wood to be placed along the regular moldings between the floor and the walls, to hide the joints. I was busy sweating:

Wednesday's my date for an appeal before the city's special magistrate, and I'm going to ask him to defer his decision while the legislative process works to change the HARC guideline that requires us to tear out seven of our windows.

Three possibilities:

-- He'll defer his judgment.

-- He'll rule against the windows for the record.

-- He'll be so dazzled by the original argument I submitted to HARC that he will rule that the windows can stay.

No. 3 is about as likely as him sprouting wings and flying from the courtroom in Old City Hall -- but it's Key West, and stranger things have happened.

Right out the door to the pool

Dave and Declan had planned to work the weekend.

Still, after being there for me on Saturday during the appliance delivery they told me they were planning to go to the Big Pine flea market on Sunday.

Then they took the day off again Monday.

I was there early Monday for the garden guys, to put deposits down on plantings and the irrigation system, and was of course a bit put off that the floors were getting zero attention.

Then, walking back to the apartment, I ran into Skip and Zach from Duval House. Both asked about the progress on our place, and each commented on how delighted I looked when I talked about it.

It occurred to me: It's not about what didn't go right today. It's about what's gone so right so far.

Turning air to gold

Robert left for Tennessee Saturday morning -- taxes, a bridge tournament, his usual stuff.

Tonight I took a long walk down to Higgs Beach and back. It was in the 80s when I left, with big breezes.

Lovely sunset.

If the fridge, fits . . .

Pedro ("Call me Peter") called early Saturday on the road from Miami to tell me he was a half-hour away with my appliances.

I warned him about our narrow street, considering the size of his truck, and gave him an alternate cross-street, and he took the directions . . . .

90 minutes later, he was coming straight up the street, the hell with the cross. "I can get this almost anywhere in the Keys, even in Old Town," he said.

I think he had to grease a few cars to get by, but by heaven he and Esteban pulled up right in front of the house.

Off came the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, the oven for the undercounter mount in the island -- and then the fridge.

He took a skeptical look at the opening, measured it (which we'd measured a dozen times ourselves, but not with the floor in place), shook a finger at me, grinned, and said, "You're a very smart man, or a very lucky one."

He and Enrique wrestled it up the front steps and into place. It was a matter of maybe an inch, wedged into the angle under the steps to the second floor.

"I bet you're going to have a big party once this place is finished," he said. "Don't forget your delivery guys."

Daytime fireworks

It's a challenge finding flowers I haven't taken pictures of already.

. . . But not the other day at Duval Square, where these pink bursts were rising from something that looked like a very unprepossessing agave.

Boys' night in

Small island.

Dennis (at left) was one of our great helps at Island City Tile.

Steve and John (at the head of the table) used to run the Equator guest house here -- but before that, were from Chattanooga -- and are big buds with Dennis and Tom (right).

So when we called Steve and John to ask them out to dinner Wednesday, they said they'd already planned to have Dennis and Tom over . . . .

It was delicious.

Chicken for lunch

We were having lunch at Willie T's on Duval Street today when the chicken crossed the road to join us.

This was not Blue Heaven, on Thomas, where yardbirds scratch in the soil under the table bases. This was Duval, and this magnificent rooster came up to us to see what he could cadge.

Robert threw out a sweet-potato fry, and he made short work of it.

I looked at him, thought of every iridescent coq-feather bit of couture I'd ever seen, assessed the difference, and ordered a ham panini though I'd been planning on smoked chicken.

Handsome devil.

Why it's called hardwood

That's Deco, nailing in a course of mahogany by the front door.

And with the big room three-fourths done, the space certainly takes on a different aspect.

It finally feels 36 feet long, for one thing, and the similarities and differences in tone and texture from the ceilings and doors add a little interest.

But just a few minutes after I took this picture, the nail gun jammed.

"Hardwood," Dave harumphed. "Oak wouldn't bother this gun, but mahogany. . . . Sometimes it's just too tough for the nails."

"Aye," said Deco, "that's the downside. The upside is that it's going to be here for a century or so."

Ain't no justice

No, I haven't been locked up in a jury room all this time, but I might as well have been: Monday I spent at the courthouse, and Tuesday my back went out for some reason -- maybe because of all of Monday's standing around in drafty A/C.

I got to the courthouse for jury call at 8:30 Monday morning, along with 150 or so of my fellow citizens in a courtroom that held about 80. It was SRO.

A judge fluttered in after about 90 minutes, swore us in, led us through some statements en masse, and told us that our good turnout had been so discouraging to some criminal defendants that a few dozen of them had pled out.

My number came up, and I was among the 20 prospective jurors who assembled in a civil courtroom on the fourth floor. The case involved two sisters suing a brother for misappropriating $300,000 of their mother's money via a power of attorney.

The judge had each of us give a short life story, asked if we knew any of the parties to the case and turned us over to the plaintiffs' lawyer for questioning. I raised my hand when he asked if anyone had ever used a power of attorney.

He zeroed in on me for specifics, and when I used words like "fiduciary," "ethical responsibility" and "full accounting" I saw his eyes light up. He probed for details on how we'd handled John Gray's affairs for the last 10 years.

He peppered other prospective jurors on an array of topics, and we broke for lunch.

When we resumed, the defendant's lawyer questioned us for a good, long while. Then all the parties, the judge and the court reporter went into the jury room to make the selection. An hour later, I was the first prospect to be excused, thanked and sent home.

I was half disappointed; it could have been an interesting case.

Robert and I went out to La Trat for dinner -- and there at the next table was the plaintiffs' lawyer with his expert witness CPA.

"You would have made a terrific juror for me," he said, "but the defense wouldn't have you. You did things the right way, and they were afraid of anyone who'd follow the rules that closely."

I took it as a compliment.

Finally, some sun

It's been overcast for the last few days -- drizzly one, windy and chilly the other -- and Robert has been in bed with a cold.

But the front has moved through, and the sun finally broke through today.

As I took a look at the house, I got a lesson in color values. Sure, it's yellow -- but not as bright as the yellow elder creeping in at the right of the picture. Once it's properly trimmed, it ought to be stunning.

- - -

My posts may be a little spotty in the next few days. Jury duty starts at 8:30 in the morning. Considering how seriously big buildings take air-conditioning here, I'll pack a sweater.

Ruffled feathers at lunch

Almost nobody turned a head the other day, on the beach at Salute, when a fairly exotic looking woman walked into the restaurant with her pet cockatoo.

The table of four -- three human, one avian -- had a relatively uneventful lunch. It's a pet-friendly town, after all.

That's one thing we love about the place. Dogs go everywhere. Schooner Wharf Bar, which has music and food as well as terrific drinks, is "where the big dogs hang out" in more ways than one. Big and small, retrievers to Yorkies, pets are always welcome.

Just the other day, eating fish nuggets on the water out at Hurricane Joe's, we had fun watching two human toddlers from one table playing with a big Golden at the next.

Which was why we were surprised Friday at the Hogfish, on the stylish Isle of Stock. It's conchier even than the norm, but when a guy walked in with his little dachshund . . . he was asked to please take the dog dockside. (The lunch crowd booed in support of the dog.) Seems a health inspector got his nose out of joint last week and threatened to write the place up if dogs were allowed.

What's this world coming to?

Just for reference

Sometimes I find a new image of my island that just takes my breath away. This one is from EarthBrowser, a program I've supported for a few years. It just keeps getting better: It does all sorts of geeky things, in remarkable detail, about weather, cloud movement, earthquakes, sea-surface temperatures, hurricane tracking.

The green dot is about where our house is. The big leg up north of our 2-by-4 island is Fleming Key, named for the guy who dredged it up to build a place to manage Flagler's rail cars a century ago (the Navy took it over after the collapse of the Overseas Railroad).

The first island to the right is Stock Island. The second big one, with the crisscrossed runways, is Boca Chica, home of Naval Air Station Key West. It's always fun sitting outside this time of the year, because Navy fly boys from all over the country come down here to practice their maneuvers, and you get to see them coming home, loudly, in formation.

The thread you see roughly going left from the top right is US 1. We're a short block and a half north of it, just the tiniest bit from the end of the road. Just so far, and far enough.

Beyond the door

Here's where the floor stood -- or lay, I suppose -- as of noon.

By the end of the day, Dave and Deco had finished the guest room and were going off sideways into closets.

One reason it's a bit slow around the edges is that the nailer -- that device at the end of the blue pneumatic line -- doesn't work close to walls. To avoid nailing through the face of the wood (which apparently lesser floor guys do), they angle countersunk screws.

Takes longer, looks better: just fine with us.

The little things

When last you met our twig door pulls, I was flipping out over various little setbacks, all set up in a row to hit me like rail cars braking quickly.

Today, armed with a new drill, proper bolts and a manual screwdriver, I managed to get two of them actually installed. (I'm delaying the ones in the den until I can get the doors open; right now they're blocked by stacks of flooring.)

Robert's happy with them -- he thinks they look like bronzed coral, and I'm so happy he's happy that I'm not going to argue strongly for twigs. And I'm happy with the color, which is close enough to the various versions of oil-rubbed bronze that dot the place.

Including the doorbell -- which our audio-video consultant, Paul, twisted and rang in earnest for the first time today.

He was delighted with it, which I found ironic: The guy advising us on the highest-tech parts of the house having fun with a manual bell.

I think it is the little things that count.

It's a start!

"Ah, my old friend mahogany," Deco said a few weeks ago, caressing a board, when we showed him and Dave a sample of the Santos we were ordering. This morning the two of them started getting reacquainted with their friend.

The upstairs, they said, would be trickiest -- the transitions from the guest room to the hall to the loft especially, with all the closets joining along the way -- so that's where they started.

They found a few issues they hadn't anticipated -- jamb heights, one short course of tongue-and-groove that will require a little padding just above the little guest room -- but nothing insurmountable.

"If you look at this hour by hour, you'll go crazy," Deco said late in the day, more to Robert than to me, I think. "Give it a day, and we'll knock your eyes out."

Just add water, eventually

Our plumber, DeWitt, is a great guy, but he certainly lives in his own time zone.

The bathroom faucets and shower controls went in last week. Then nothing for a few days. Now the kitchen faucets and garbage disposal.

The main line still isn't hooked up, and I'm still waiting for DeWitt's office to fax over his estimate on the "deduct meter," which will count our garden and pool water so the city doesn't charge us sewerage fees on it.

The next delay I can't blame on him: We're still trying to unscrew enough of the deck boards at the outdoor shower so DeWitt's guy can get under there and plumb it.

I've been through several screwdriver bits (finally broke down and bought a drill), and got zero traction from a tapping bit. Those deck screws are just too darned stubborn.

Finally

The shutters are up, and aside from a few problems with hooks and eyes and lying flat . . . there they are.

The folded ones are held together with hooks and eyes that the installer, Troy, screwed up when he screwed 'em in. So at this point they stick out from the plane of the house.

That turns out to be a good thing in the short term: They're painted in latex, which takes about a jillion times longer to dry here than it does in the real world because of our humidity; so if they laid flat on each other they'd stick and pull for the next 60 days or so.

That's when we'll install special clips to hold 'em flat to the house.

Barefoot boy with cheek

Pardon my silence, but we've been on the road. Back the same day in each case, but tired enough that I can claim fatigue (though I think it was actually a rare light dusting of writer's block).

Saturday Robert was determined to get our closet organizers nailed down (figuratively; they'll actually take screwing together), but the Home Depot here didn't have the pieces we needed.

The HD up the Overseas Highway in Marathon had just what we wanted, so we logged the 100-mile round trip, loaded up the 400 pounds or so and threw in dinner at Bobalu's, on the way home on Big Coppitt, as a deal sweetener.

Sunday we went all the way to the mainland, to the Four Seasons Miami, to visit our old friend Sidney, down from Chicago for the winter. We thought his wife, Deanna, was going to be there (and brought her roses from Publix in Key Largo), but she'd flown north for a bat mitzvah or two. Still, Sidney was incredibly well attended by his Filipino assistant, John.

Sidney, who's 88, met us poolside, stretched out like Meyer Lansky on a hot day in Havana. We caught up on old times, and then John pulled the cabana sides closed so Sidney could dress for lunch. We poured ourselves into his s spanking new Lexus (long version, quite spiffy) and motored off to the southest part of South Beach: La Piaggia, on its very tony bottom.

Turns out they don't mind if guests at their tables in the sand take their shoes off, and Sidney loves to wiggle his toeses while he eats. He also loves to ogle the flesh, which was as common at Piaggia as his hamburger was rare. Thanks to various marvels of plastic surgery, there were some very tony bottoms as well as some incredible vistas up high, too.

It was a great lunch. An apparently youngish woman came up to Sidney at one point, trailing clouds of expensive perfume, and gushed at him for a while. He feigned deafness. After she left, he said, "Brooke [his daughter and great protector] knows her from New York. Brooke said, 'Daaaaaddy, that one will be really expensive.' "

He'd rather spend it on the Lexus.

On our way home, the sunset blazed directly into my westbound eyes for the second day in a row. The backlight on Flagler's old rail bridge at Bahia Honda made up for it:

Southern(most) fried

Onelia's lunch counter fed several generations of conchs at Dennis Pharmacy, down on United Street, so there was great lamentation when the place closed (soon to be a fancy bank).

I always thought it was brilliant for the food -- hearty breakfasts and lunches -- to be so close to a wide, deep array of antacids. Delicious, yes, but the sort of stuff to make a nutrition nanny faint.

So mouths started watering all around when they announced the lunch counter would reopen just down Petronia from our house, in the Village, inside Henrietta's the Art of Baking.

Henrietta, you see, has baking down pat (especially coconut strips and coconut cake) but has had trouble with the Art of Breakfasting, Souping and Sandwiching, which Onelia can do blindfolded.

So we stopped in at the reborn Dennis for cholesterol's sake and I had to order a mollete (mo-yay-tay). Imagine: Slice a piece of Cuban bread lengthwise; fill with picadillo (spiced ground beef); close up and roll in egg and crumbs; deep-fry till crisp; serve with hot sauce.

Robert had trouble with the idea of fried bread, but I reminded him it's in the solid tradition of things like Cornish pasties that can be cooked, wrapped up in newspaper, pocketed and pulled out for joyous sustenance during a busy workday.

You could take it out on a boat while fishing -- but it was just as good to eat it with a group of Creole ladies at the next formica table, Cubans just beyond them, cops getting bag after bag of carryout and an old guy in a guayabera in the back of the dining room, patiently using a hammer and table-mounted vise to bust open an endless pile of coconuts for their sweet milk and meat. Todo sabroso.

Higgs Beach, 10 minutes to sunset