See you on the flip side

No roof guy, no HVAC, but Denny and Steve were toiling away inside, wiring the master bedroom and bath.

Ref, Brantley and Nathaniel, holding the ladder, had set up the laser-spinner in the right rear corner of the yard, getting ready to shoot control lines for the siding on the south and east walls.

Notice the shiny patch just this side of Ref: It's a dummy window out of sheet metal, to be covered by shutters that are permanently closed.

Keeping the old window there would have screwed up the layout of the little guest room and bath, but the historic architecture commission makes you keep all the "openings" on the original part of the house -- even if they're faked with closed shutters.

Just blame Robert

"The ghost is in the attic," one girl said to the other outside my bedroom doors, her voice shaking. "I heard it."

Actually, they were in the yard next door -- the Artist House guesthouse adjoins one side of our rental, and only a fence separates our little sitting area from their garden -- but voices do carry at 2 a.m. (Our big sitting area is adjacent to another guesthouse -- the Pilot House. Living wedged between them is a mixed blessing. On the minus side, you never quite know what your neighbors are going to be like from night to night; on the plus side, they're likely to flee the island in the morning.)

At any rate, it was late, but I am amused by the gullible, so I eavesdropped. The girl and her friend were high-schoolers -- visiting Key West on their own (hello? parents?) -- and had noticed the Ghost Tour stopping in front of the guesthouse the night before. So this night they had taken the tour, and taken the bait.

Before it was a guesthouse, it was the Otto Mansion. . . . And here the legend begins.

". . . One serving girl who had been badly mistreated and was apparently versed in the arts of voodoo gave their son, Robert Eugene Otto (called Gene by his friends), a straw doll that stood about 3 feet tall. It was to be his companion and friend for the entirety of his childhood.

"Gene gave the doll his first name, Robert, and took him with him everywhere. It is said that his parents often heard him upstairs talking to the doll, [with answers] in an entirely different voice. Strange things began to occur as misfortunes began to befall the family, and always Gene would appear, holding Robert in his crisp white sailor suit and proclaiming, 'Robert did it.' Close friends of the family agreed that it was in fact the doll who was somehow to blame. Many claimed to hear giggling coming from the doll or to have caught a glimpse of him running up the steps or staring out the turret-room window at them. . . .

"When his parents died and Gene inherited the house, Robert was rediscovered in the attic. . . . Visitors in the house could hear something walking back and forth in the attic, though no one was up there, and several times demonic giggling interrupted the quiet evenings. More than once it was reported that the doll watched people and mocked schoolchildren from the window of the turret room. Gene, who insisted that Robert was in the attic, was quite surprised to find him in the rocking chair by the turret room window. He seized the doll and took it back to the attic, only to find it again in the rocking chair when he came back down.

"When Gene Otto died in 1972, many thought it to be the end of Robert. Evil, however, never dies. Robert waited patiently until another family bought the house. When their little girl, who was only 10 at the time, found Robert in the attic, she claimed him for her own. She unleashed a chilling hell on herself, claiming that the doll tortured her. Now, more than 30 years later, she steadfastly claims that the doll was alive and wanted to kill her. She is still deeply traumatized. . . .

"But Robert is not the only restless soul associated with the Artist House. When Robert was finally removed [he's now on Ghost Tour T-shirts, and on display at the city's East Martello Museum, clutching his stuffed lion, and curators swear he shifts position], it is said that Anne, the wife of Gene Otto, took up residence in the turret room to guard against the little monster's return. . . ."

- - - -

Their chatter was increasingly breathless, and at a pause -- just the right moment -- from my side of the fence came a small, crinkled, evil voice, cackling louder and louder.

Small screams, fast footsteps, slammed door, locked bolt.

It was Robert.

High gear

"I am ready to get this into high gear now," Ref said bright and early Monday. "This is, what? The 17th? So we've got 10, 12 days. . . ."

Maybe that's why Ken had the nail gun in one hand and a hammer in the other -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ref's target is to have the trades wrapped up by the end of the month, so he can get into the finish work, which is why he was cracking the whip. Roof man Dan should be on the case tomorrow. Ditto Kenny and George for the HVAC. Then Denny and Steve can finish the electrical, and the subfloors can go in like they should have in the first place, and the insulation can go up, and paneling, and drywall, and. . . .

It's a long list. But Ref had seen Ken working another job in town -- he's from up near Arcadia -- and spotted him on the road out of town even earlier Monday, hailed him, and persuaded him to sign on.

Of course I wondered if Ken knew what he'd gotten into, but it sure looked as if he'd used a saw and hammer before. Here he and Mr. B are finishing up the north wall with HardiPlank.

Up on the porch, Nathaniel was scraping ceiling planks, then sanding off the old layers of gummy exterior latex. Sure enough, one of the underlayers was sky blue -- the very color Ref and the painter had suggested for that ceiling and the soffits to trick bees and birds out of nesting there.

I looked at those paint patches -- listened to nail guns and compressors, saws and sanders -- and heard Ella over my shoulder:

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see . . .

Location, location, location

Back in the days when every hippie had a houseplant -- some of them even legal -- my fave was a Dracaena marginata. It was perfectly happy next to the radiator in my steam-heated apartment in Evanston -- enough humidity and warmth to stay snug through the bitter winter and drought-tolerant enough to survive my spells of seasonal ennui.

But that was Zone 5, by the USDA's reckoning, and this is Zone 11 -- where the plant doesn't need the house, and the environment is a radiator. It likee!

This one was growing wild in the old yard but got smashed to bits during demolition back in February. In March and April, its remnants were covered by old piling stones. Then it got staked through the roots when we got temporary electrical service. And now: voila, again finding its place in the sun -- along with offspring from its broken bits, for heaven's sake.

The tropics are a different world. A lecture up the Keys this weekend by a senior curator at Fairchild Gardens would surely face a Zone 5 chill in Evanston: "Tough Love for Better Mangos."

Tangy and tough at 98

Ref was cutting up some of the old siding for patches (soon to undergo invisible reweaving), and I closed my eyes and inhaled as his toughest table saw worked through them. "Good saw," Ref said. "When the blade's sharp, you can cut to a sixteenth."

You can't savor the tang through the picture -- planks packed with aroma after all these years, still full of the resins and oils that made old Dade pine so resistant to both termites and weather.

And because I didn't want to interrupt his work to "set up" the right light, you can't see the polished glow of the sawn edges. They were so dense they looked and felt varnished.

Ref saw my fascination with those pieces and broke off to walk over to a stack of freshly delivered 2-by-4's. "This is what they sell for No. 1 wood these days," he said, pointing at the knots and making a sour face. He found a piece of new scrap and made a quick cut through a section. It looked like styrofoam by comparison, bleached and character-free. "They dry this stuff out too much," he said.

"Now look at these," as he went back to the old planks. "This is No. 1 wood." Tight-grained, unblemished and beautiful behind peeling paint. Tougher than nails -- he'd had to buy a new gun to cope with the old degree of hardness.

Lord, I thought, if I ever approach their age, may I be half as sturdy and smell half as fresh.

Bumper crop

The extra mile

"I gotta get this done," Ref said, gesturing in disgust over his shoulder at the windows over the porch. "When I came by yesterday I said, 'I just can't stand looking at that ugly front anymore.' "

So he and Nathaniel were up there Friday, getting ready to fine-tune the windows with a gentle application of circular saw and Sawzall.

As soon as those blades hit the old wood, the pungent scent spread down and around -- Dade pine, zesty as the day it was put in.

But he wasn't the only one at the "gotta get this done" stage. All week, we'd been expecting the plumber and the electrician to resolve the question of instant hot-water heaters: how many, how effective, where, and how much power. The plumber had told me there would be two big units; the electrician was worried about that word, "big."

Now, these two guys have offices maybe a block from each other, about a half-mile from the house, and all week I had a little film loop playing in my head: Strother Martin's classic cracker line from Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here . . . is failure to communicate."

So on Friday, I let Ref know how frustrated I was -- if there's any fixing to do, it needs to be done now, while the floors are torn up. Ref hopped in his truck. A few minutes later, he came back, pointing out that some requests are conveyed far more clearly in person, and announcing that the meeting was scheduled for 10:30.

We were singing perfect harmony on the classic hymn, "Come to Jesus."

Denny arrived first. Then Duane, the honcho for the plumbers. Smiles and handshakes, then Duane turned the spec sheet over to Denny: two heaters, 47 amps of 220 current each -- nothing like the 100 amps each Denny was thinking of as "big," but according to Duane each about twice the capacity required. No sweat. No more questions. End of transaction. Thanks. See ya.

It took less than a minute.

Make that "was a failure to communicate."

Glaze under pressure

The storm system that dropped 2-plus inches on us in the last few days -- a big, slow trough of rain, but not much wind, and not enough intensity to be a (capital-T) Tropical (capital-S) Storm -- was supposed to peter out as the day went by.

So when I rounded the corner at Fleming and saw a crew putting up the big aluminum rails for heavy hurricane covers on the windows at Banana Republic, I wondered if I'd missed something in the morning weather briefing.

But no. They were just getting the framework in place for the next time they need to put up their big, new armor. That's happening all over town.

Our armor -- and we won't have to put it up and take it down -- comes in the form of impact-resistant windows and doors now mandated by the building code. Here's a label from one of the panes. (And you have to keep the labels on the windows till your final inspection, by the way.)

What the numbers tell you is that the pane is about half an inch thick, a sandwich of glass and plastic designed to meet the tough Monroe County requirements for resistance in winds up to 155 m.p.h.

To certify the design, first they fire a 9-pound 2-by-4 at the window at 50 feet per second. Then they fire it again, and then the fun begins. Different sizes of openings have to pass different load tests, but in this case, they subject the impacted window to air and water pressure of 75 pounds per square inch from the outside, and then 75 from the inside (hurricane pressures can be like that). Then they repeat that pressure test -- for 8,999 more plus-and-minus cycles. If the maximum crack after 9,000 cycles is 1/16th of an inch or less, the system passes. They tape the whole shebang for the certification process.

A second test fires 10 ball bearings at 80 feet per second at a fresh window a few times, and then goes through the pressure stuff. If the window system passes both tests, it's good to go.

All of this, of course, is meant to give us a great sense of security while justifying the immense cost, and I do mean immense.

There are some savings, though. Because the windows are so tough, I'll get to subtract the $9.95 "breaking glass" burglar sensor that I'd been planning for the alarm system.

Wave THAT worry good-bye

One reason I might have been a little twitchy this morning was that Mom was having a stress test -- not the sort of thing I take lightly when she's 86 years old and 1,000 miles away.

Robert, bless him, was there with her, and called me as soon as the green lights were finished flashing.

So her heart isn't the culprit for her shortness-of-breath complaints. Next, we all get to learn how to spell "pulmonologist." At least lungs are easier and less invasive to treat.

Down and dirty

The original title of Kafka's great novella, "The Metamorphosis," translates as "Notes from Under the Floorboards."

Steve, on the electrical crew, could have written some of those notes on his own Wednesday. This is about his greatest point of visibility, and probably his closest access to fresh air, such as it was: no breath of a breeze, just heat, over the floor, under it or outside.

He reported that the most notable scents under there were cat poo and plastic-conduit solvent. I don't know how he did it.

Since the plumber was a no-show, and we couldn't resolve the heater question, but the day was hotter than you could believe, when we broke for lunch I told the guys to call me if they needed me.

The only kind of Ungeziefer I wanted to be was a water bug, in the pool back at the apartment.

Mangoes goes . . . to Rev. Joe

Amy and Giorgio have been running the place -- and making a mark not just on Duval Street, but on the whole island -- for the last 16 years.

Great, award-winning food, and a terrific place to eat it.

And then. . . .

I don't think it was just me. The place seemed to lose the fun (and the awards stopped coming, for whatever reason).

But this morning's paper had big news: They'd sold to the Fogarty's group, and Joe Walsh pledges to retain the staff -- and give it a bit of a jolt. (He's always the Rev. Joe to me, by the way, because the burger by that name at Caroline's is always a religious experience).

I'm looking forward to trying it out after their re-inspection, mandatory when a restaurant changes hands. And I'm going to be among the first to request a table on the rail for Fantasy Fest. Caroline's has been our perch there for the last three or four years, and this will bring us that many blocks farther from the, uh, delights of Lower Duval, and closer to home.

Boxing match

True to his (revised) plan, Denny is running the big, honking conduit wherever he can under the house, and installed the breaker box where I hope it can be disguised by an Audubon or something.

He wants a powwow tomorrow with the plumber so they can come to some sort of agreement on our instant hot-water heaters.

The plumber has advised moving from the one large and two small in the architecht's plan toward two large -- basically, one for each side of the house. Denny thinks the two will draw a giant current on max demand, which has to be how he calculates the whole-house load, and compensates in wiring. He'd rather do one large and two small -- or even three small.

This ought to be interesting.

On the beam

As long as the front section of the beam was getting fixed. . . .

At this point Monday, Ref and Brantley were putting new blades in the planer, having encountered a few leftover nailheads in the beam beyond the staircase. Those little episodes of metal on metal made pretty sparks but ugly planing.

"I figure this is going to cost us a week -- meaning five days," Ref said. But, he didn't have to add, if you're going to make sure one part gets done right, you might as well go whole hog.

"This floor has 99 crowns," he griped at one point. A good carpenter checks every long board for a crown -- a natural bow in the wood -- and makes sure they line up, up. Failing that, get the plane out. Then check your work with the long level, scooting it and looking for a smooth slide. As Ref says, "The straightedge doesn't lie."

● ● ●

In the plus column, at this point: When Denny walked in this morning, he knew he had a golden shot at some under-house conduit, so he rearranged his schedule to get that going -- and called the HVAC guy to let him know he had the same opportunity for coolant lines.

Chaos theory

You won't be able to find the kitchen sink in here, but only because the truck belongs to the electricians, not the plumbers.

The first time Denny pulled up in their big, old box truck, I looked in throught he driver's door and immediately resolved to gig him about the pieces of duct-taped 4-inch foam that serve as a seat cushion.

I forgot that resolve in a welter of switch and outlet decisions, but when the truck backed up to the porch today, rear doors ajar . . . .

I flashed back to the hard stop I'd had to make on my last trip down here -- the quick foot on the brake at the toll plaza north of Orlando. My two freshly potted plumerias, along with a couple cubic feet of soil, bark and gravel, went airborne.

Considering that I hadn't been driving this thing, I got off lucky.

Straight ahead

Ref and the crew were taking the morning off Sunday -- about time! -- but it's obvious they were busy late Saturday.

Those joists are now as straight as -- well, yeah, a string, to coin a phrase.

The far boards had to move up an inch or so, with the distance shrinking along the wall. But rather than specifying a measurement for every board, let the string do the work. Stretch it tight and level, and then make sure every joist comes up just enough to touch.

Voila.

Those shavings in the second picture show the good work done on the beam running from the front door to the staircase, now smooth as can be.

Think of it as floorthodontia.

Sudden storms

In the rainy season, some days just glower all the time the sun is supposed to be out. It's sultry and thick, and the sun is still hot somewhere behind that wall of oxidized tin in the sky. At night, you can taste seaweed in the heavy air, pungent and warm.

Any time, out of nowhere, the wind comes up. The humidity falls. The hot wet blanket blows off your body and you know the big, warm drops will fall in the cooler air.

They do fall. They pelt. It's amazing. And 20 minutes later, it's as if the grouchy old man in the corner of the sauna has tossed his scoop of water on the coals again. Just try to take a breath.

Between those times, the air is. . .

Green.

For a while it's RIP -- rest in pieces

Yep, that's Gregory, back from a quick cruise to Cozumel (welcome home!), and Brantley. You'd think a crowbar and that big blue pry bar would make short work of it, but this sheet alone took 15 minutes or so of hot, sweaty work.

Take a look at the joists behind the guys -- detached on the left, to be pulled up to the level of the farthest board you can see. Ref also plans to plane the big beam under Brantley's right foot.

What a needless expenditure of time and money -- all because Pop and the Weasels felt just fine about being paid well for a job poorly done. There is some irony in it: Their shortcuts included failing to glue the plywood, so at least it's that much easier to correct their other mistakes.

Points of view

From a moderate distance, they're bunches of roofing nails.
Come closer in the same frame. Think about bunches of grapes.

Giant steps

I'm usually on the phone each morning between 8 and 9 with Robert, going over the decisions of the day before and the opportunities of the day to come, comparing notes by way of the pictures here.

The blog is a great tool on a project like this, so when he said the pool steps looked as if they might be too small. . . . Well, snap. Thanks to the net, all he needs to do now is check out my worn-out Croc for an idea of scale.

Before I left for Tennessee, full of trepidation about the pool, I'd been told that they'd shoot just the shell, not the steps.

So much for that.

Now I need to make sure that the Mayan bench edges get a bigger radius -- but getting in touch with the pool guy is about as predictable as storms these days, so I'm flying on faith here.

Not that any of this is a problem, in the sense that people have real problems. It's awfully easy to magnify little things into fetishes, until you stop and think about them.

Maybe that's why the meeting this morning with Ken and George, the HVAC guys, went so well. We took every question one flip-flop at at time -- some solutions were maybes, some nevers, and lots of yes -- and found interesting compromises. As I said in an email to cousin Nita, it was "seeing where we had to make architectural lemonade out of the lemons called ductwork."

I think it will be particularly refreshing lemonade, because Ref, who'd been working at the streetside face-lift with Brantley, broke off that project to walk though with us with his mind clicking to find several brilliant answers to our little puzzles of design, construction and aesthetics.

Very late in the day, long after the HVAC guys and the electricians and Tommy had left, Brantley was working to fix the floor that Pop and the Weasels had screwed up, and Ref and I were doing a walk-through to confirm the day's decisions.

We need a soffit here, we need to change a door a bit, we need to build this wall out. . . .

"The good thing now is that we have a plan," Ref said to sum it up. "Now we just do it."

Mr. B looked at me with a grin and said, "Who's the man?

I grinned back and said, "Say amen!"

A code in the head

That's Dennis putting in a gang-switch box -- it turns out the electricians were at the house on Tuesday, but late, and only to deliver some supplies -- and on Wednesday Dennis, his Dad, Matt, and the helper, Steve, were all hard at work.

Brantley, back from Savannah and his daughter's wedding, was sweatin' with Ref on the front of the house, straightening boards and such to get ready for the painters. Ref had given his sore shoulder the holiday off -- for which hooray; you can lift a nail gun only so many times before you feel the fireworks.

But on matters electric, in a few frantic hours, we resolved where the breaker box was going (I'm surprised the building code doesn't require that it be on a free-standing pedestal in an otherwise empty 9-by-12 space), where the code said the outlets had to go on the kitchen counter, what the code mandates for the kitchen island, where the code wants outlets to be on walls, and a few other issues. So they started stringing conduit, cursing the plumbers (gently) for hogging in-wall space in the kitchen and determining that yes, indeed, we could have recessed lighting just about anywhere we wanted it (despite other new codes).

Thursday, there's an early meeting with the HVAC guys, and we get to move from conduits to plenums and ducts and grates and even more . . . codes.

Small world

I went into Glass Reunions to talk about impact glass -- they just put in their huge new windows, and we're putting in our small ones -- and found myself in the middle of . . . a glass reunion.

Of course, Kim Sprague (on the right) was there; she owns the gallery. But so was Heather Clark, the stained-glass artist. She was picking up two pieces of exquisite gold-opalescent glass, on the counter in the foreground, that had been one of Kim's bowls until UPS cast them asunder.

The last time I'd run into Heather, she had her marvelous window of Peter and Wendy's night flight in the back of her pickup, showing it to friends around town. Later that day, to avoid running into someone else, she hit the brakes, hard, and the window went a bit asunder itself.

Today Heather was thinking about grinding the bowl pieces down a bit to use for parts in a flat piece, or using the whole pieces as big fish tails because they're so wonderfully wavy and fan-shaped, or using smaller chunks in something else -- the sort of free-form thought you'd expect.

She went on to describe several potholes on what Ira Gershwin called the bumpy road to love, and I wondered whether ground glass might be appropriate for the date who stuck her with a sizeable tab at Virgilio's: Slip that into your espresso martini.

But glass is great for other statements, too. I think I sent my friend Lou a pair of dichroic-glass earrings from Kim for her birthday a few years ago. This year I sent her a little stained-glass world by Heather that I'd found at Kindred Spirit (now shuttered, alas).

Heather remembered that Lou sent her a note about the small world: "I was having a really awful day, and I got the sweetest message from her. It reminded me why I do what I do. A kind word really makes the difference sometimes."

She and Kim are planning to make a difference with the mosaic Alfa by giving it some badly needed TLC. That car is right up their alley.

Snappy salute

Both Ref and Matt, the electrician, had said they'd be working on the holiday.

Not between 10 and noon, they weren't, so I marched down to the big flag on Truman, snapping smartly in the sea breeze.

I gave a little salute and then went Fourth.

Do the right thing

Our friend Joe Williams (the international aid guru, not the international jazz singer, though we met that one, too) sent this great thought out of the blue, and it's worth consideration in matters large and small.

Jaap Penraat, who died this week, referring to his efforts to save Jews in occupied Netherlands during World War II:

"You do these things because in your mind there is no other way of doing it."

Royal splendor, revisited

Here's the big poinciana tree on Southard I mentioned a while back, spreading majestically over the Keysmobile.

Look in front of the car and you'll see the tree's only drawback: The caretaker who has to sweep up a million dropped petals every day. It ain't easy being pretty.

There's another big, old poinciana on Southard -- kitty-corner from Mary Whatshername's house that we rented some years back. It's in a big fenced side yard right across from Five Brothers, but it was never in bloom when we were there.

Hot tin roofers

It was a tossup between the heat and the date, but the headline had to be either the Tennessee Williams reference or something about firecrackers. In either case, the Dan Ace crew started work on the flashing Monday.

Dan Jr. (the "Ace" is for Acevedo) stopped by to check on the squad -- apparently his dad has stepped away from most daily business, except for barking orders by cellphone -- and confirmed they would not be working July 4, which Ref wrote off to slacking.

He and Tommy were siding the big wall of the den/bedroom addition, slowly but surely. By the time the afternoon sun swung around there, they decided Tuesday morning would be a great time to finish it.

Matt, the electrician, came by, too -- he does want to get cracking on the Fourth, since he has to go out of town this weekend to visit his ailing sister in Michigan, and he'd like to get to the point where his son can get going. We talked switches and such, and like either of the Dans, it seems as if he's at about the top of his field.

Ditto Tony the painter, who also came by, taking a final look before submitting a quote. Interesting guy: Turned out he'd trod in Holly Hill's neighborhood during his full transit of the Appalachian Trail in 1995, and I think he was pleasantly surprised that I had Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" on my reading table.

Henry Johnson, an old friend of Ref's and a retired contractor himself, stopped by to tour the project -- and what a fine guy. Turns out he and Marvin, the previous owner of the house, had been great friends and occasional traveling companions to the VA Hospital in Miami.

Somewhere among all the conversations, I had a minute to sit in the pool and wiggle my legs from the sitting bench. Of course the only water in it is about an eight-inch-deep mess of collected rainwater at the deep end, an unfortunate shade of brown and topped by a floating slice of plywood -- but there is a pool, and it's a beaut.

Just add feathers

Going over some of last week's pictures before bed, I found this one and decided that late was better, etc.

The basket hangs on the kitchen wall at Holly Hill. It's by Ken Dalton, collected in museums around the country, chosen to represent American crafts at Euro Disney in 1994 and based at Tennessee's own Coker Creek Gallery before he and his wife, Kathleen, sold it. It's a classic split white oak egg basket, and the handle begs for a hand.

Just as exquisite, the nest -- of pine straw, leaves, twigs, moss -- is from a pot on Holly Hill's breezeway. Once the birds hatched and flew away, I transferred it to the basket.

The tiny eggs are leftovers from barn swallows on the veranda.

The feather is from my friend Lou, who tried to send me a picture of the odd bird it came from, at her new place in California. The picture didn't come through, but the feather was waiting for me in a little envelope, so it became a grace note to the basket, nest and eggs.

Emily Dickinson wrote this:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all

Speaking of shoddy work . . .

Another of those half-steps back I mentioned is this section of torn-up floor in the living room, thanks to an early work crew I increasingly think of as Pop and the Weasels.

Pop was a hard-bitten guy who boasted he could build anything -- he even offered to custom-make our kitchen cabinets -- but whose primary activity whenever Robert and I stopped by the job site seemed to be parking his bony carcass on a stack of plywood and shooting the breeze with the weasels, his two sons.

While I was away, Ref was getting the door opening ready so Monroe Glass could install the big sliders and noticed that something was amiss. One thing led to another, and the plywood came up for a little joist surgery.

The problem could have been corrected with a few cheats when the flooring goes in, but that's not the way Ref works.

And how does Pop work? When last seen, he and the boys had their bony carcasses parked at the laundromat on the corner, shooting little heckles at me as I went by to pick up Gatorades for people actually drawing paychecks at the house. (I distinctly recall the term "errand boy," but no matter). I tried to be pleasant anyway and they told me things were rough, they were outta work and they'd lost their Jag, their only visible asset. Aww.

Car or karma, easy come, easy go.

'Don't go there!"

That's what our neighbor Dennis was shouting at me, hanging out of a second-story window. "He'll draft you! There was a crew working on the siding, and it was off by 4 degrees, and he tore it down. . . ."

So, as Pat Buchanan would say, I ran toward the sound of gunfire.

Turns out there had been several big steps forward and a few little ones back while I was away. Windows did get set in, yes. But a crew Ref trusted with putting up the siding had done a sloppy job, so Ref fired 'em, ripped it off and started over himself.

He'd marked control lines for them, provided blocks to standardize spacing, all to no avail. The planks -- most of them, anyway -- were cut OK, so they were saved to be put up right.

It didn't surprise me. I'd heard him telling the story about the long-ago mason who insisted his wall was set right, despite Ref's protests -- at which point Ref kicked the bricks down and said, "It isn't set right NOW. This time do it my way."

And on this sultry Sunday, with Brantley in Savannah for his daughter's wedding, Ref had rousted his friend Tommy from bed and dragooned him for work he wanted done before I got back.

Too late for that, and too late for me to dodge the draft. By the end of the day, the den wall was perfectly faced with HardiPlank, a fiber-and-concrete composite that gives off an amazing amount of noise and dust when sawed.

I usually stroll up Duval on my way home, but today I thought I'd scare too many people with the sweat, dust, grime and sunburn, so I took Simonton and kept my eyes down. How refreshing it would be, I thought, to be working over a nice, hot stove.

Quite a stretch

Off to the left, over Barnes Sound, it was calm and lovely. In front and behind it was solid sheet metal: The 18-mile stretch took 86 minutes on Saturday. A truck and boat had veered deep into the sawgrass on the left about Mile Marker 125 -- following too closely, I'll bet, and had to swerve hard to avoid rear-ending the car in front. There was a car off to the right a few miles further. And so on.

After an hour of the slow-mo conga line, in the construction zone for the Jewfish Creek bridge project, I looked into my rear-view mirror in horror: A shiny black VW convertible was passing southbound despite the double yellow lines, despite the total inability to predict when the semis, boat rigs, motorcycles and occasional van-filled families going north would start whizzing by again.

I swerved into the gravel to let the fool squeeze in behind me, then calmly turned down the salsa music and dialed *FHP. The dispatcher was efficient, polite -- and interested in details. After all, there are a dozen or so (sometimes much more so) fatalities every year on the stretch, and unfortunately for the gene pool, the moron driver and his progeny aren't the only ones killed. The dispatcher said I hadn't been the only call about that car.

During one particularly long full stop, the driver in front of me put his SUV in park and sauntered back to muse about the insanity he'd seen in his rear-view mirror, to tell me how his blood had run cold when he thought about what might happen to him, his wife and kids -- and to ask if I had a cell phone he could use to call the cops. Not to worry, I told him.

Sure enough, there was a black-and-tan cruiser in the pulloff on the other side of the old bridge, lights flashing, with the trooper giving me a smile and thumbs-up as I crept past, and looking much sterner as she waved over the Beetle behind me.

One upside to the big delay: The lunch crowd had mostly cleared out by the time I got to Mrs. Mac's, bayside at MM 99.4, so when my patty melt and onion rings arrived, only six fellow diners in the back room craned to jokingly ask for samples.

Clouds moved in and it started to mist by the time I got to Long Key. It always amused me that Zane Grey whiled away so many hours at Flagler's fish camp there, riding far from the purple sage.

By the Seven-Mile Bridge (you can see the hump of the Moser Channel span waay ahead in the picture), the storm was really getting pretty. As far as I was concerned, that long finger of a cloud was pointing toward home.

Well, THAT was intense

Let's see: In 10(essee) days or so,

• Chores for Mom -- fix TV system, hang pictures, install emergency-alert system, supervise deck tear-down to get ready for her new sunroom, plus much love and kisses.
• Pick out den chairs and pool fountain.
• Dinner for Paul, the world's greatest houseguest.
• Lunch for the out-of-town bridge tournament guys.
• Lunch and dinner for the after-tournament diehards.
• Certificates for the bridge match.
  
• Cure the pool gradoo.
• Overnight emergency roof permit to Ref.
• Cope with the farm's water-system failure.
  
• Repot plumeria fragments found in Key West trash.
• Lunches and dimes to John Gray (in the picture, it's Robert, Mom, JG and me at the ever-lovely Golden Corral).
• Dinner with Jerry and Joe.
• Dinner with Ken and Ben.
• Dinner with Shirley, Ray, Scott and Marie.

. . . And lots of other events from the sublime (discovering Wilma's produce farm next to the Hiwassee River) to the ridiculous (Wal-Mart and its everyday low prices, which are a six-hour round-trip, minimum, in Key West).

Sigh. It was all too quick.