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Help Yourself Restaurant and Laundromat.

Someone Has to Do It

Last Saturday during the weekend of the second lowest ever recorded temperature in Key West (42), we had laundry to do.

Our little apartment has no washer and dryer, so we have to make a run to the laundromat every week or so. We used to go to the Hilltop Laundromat which is just a couple blocks away, but the rising ratio of busted to working washing machines and dryers forced us to try a new place, and by virtue of being the next closest laundromat to us, Help Yourself Foods was the place! Hey, food and laundry! What a combination! The only way that situation could any get better is if there were a place that had a bar attached to the Laundromat. Hmmm.. I think I may be onto something…

Anyways, saturday morning Christina and I sat shivering in the living room, bundled up in whatever we could find, each waiting for the other to give the signal that we were ready to go out into the 50 degree tundra to the open air building that housed the Laundromat next to Help Yourself Foods. After a bit of grumbling and a stiff shot of Jameson’s, we headed out.

Yeah, it was cold. Like all the other structures in Key West, this one was built to keep you cool, not warm. We stood near the running dryers trying to soak up any ambient heat we could. At least 90 percent of the washers and dryers were in working order.. always a good thing. A much better ratio than our old laundromat. The clientele, however different from the steno bums in the last place, still manage to excite amusement; it seems we had traded wharf rats for hippies!

Help Yourself Foods serves grazing foods (read grasses and nuts), organic veggie wraps, salads, and smoothies and the ubiquitous granola-cruncher staple Chai Latte. (Menu Here) And like any good hippy-organic-food-restaurant/laundromat should, they had a singing, guitar-playing love child on a stool out front, perhaps to help somnabulize the patrons into denial over the cold weather. You couldn’t see her.. she was bundled up in so many puffy jackets and scarves she could hardly hold her guitar, let alone a tune in that cold weather. I truly felt sorry for her, but then realized she was probably a vegan, and deserved it. Hehehe.

Ok, I’m not going to vegan-bash here. Some of my best friends are health-food nuts. I just haven’t broadened my horizons to spending that much time and money on eating food that inherently tastes bad. Hey, if it doesn’t have steak in it, I aint eatin’ it! If we weren’t meant to eat animals, they wouldn’t be made out of meat! But enough about that. I did have one of their smoothies, the ‘Happy monkey’ with bananas and peanut butter … it was damned tasty, and I can’t lie.. the menu has a lot of interesting stuff on it. I’m going to have to try some more of it next time.

I don’t know if they always have live entertainment, or if it’s just a weekend thing, or just a cold weather thing for that matter.. there wasn’t anyone singing the first time we went, but that was during the week. I think we’ll go back a few more times before trying another place. The washers and dryers work well, but quite honestly the people freak me out a little bit. I guess I’d rather hang with wharf-rats than health-food nuts.

All in all two thumbs up.. working laundry machines and good (for you) food… but I reserve the right to keep looking for the perfect laundry situation.. I know.. a pipe dream to be sure, but hey, that’s what got us to Key West in the first place!

Oh, and if you were wondering, that photo there of the sandals and the one above it are from our first trip there.. two weeks earlier when it was warm! The head in the dryer photo is me trying to re-cycle left over dryer heat last weekend.. see I’m green!

Graze on!
Mike

Oh, My Tropical Paradise.. Where Have You Gone?

When we sold and gave away most of our junk to move to Key West, I remember distinctly looking at a pile of long pants and wool socks, thinking to myself that I’d never need those again. We were moving to the tropics after all, and the average low temperature in Key West even in January is only 65 degrees. I was ready for the life of shorts and flip flops!

Of course, we were only moving from Orlando, but even Orlando freezes.. Key West has never seen frost; the lowest temperature ever recorded being 41 degrees, and that was way back in 1981. The only other time it had ever reached that low was back in 1886! I was safe from freezing. Or so I thought..

This last week down here we’ve seen the second lowest recorded temperature in Key West ever.. 42 degrees. Now I’m not one to complain, I mean it is KEY WEST after all, but like most of the old homes down here, ours was built to keep you cool in the summer.. scant provisions were made to keep you WARM. Few homes have central air, let alone central heat, and most homes have window AC units.. which typically have no heat cycle.

So over the weekend we broke down and hit up a few stores looking for a space heater.. of course, so did everyone else in Key West.. suffice it to say we came away empty handed. Now, I’d watched a lot of MacGyver back in the day, so I knew all I needed was a little duct tape, a lighter, and a small furry cat, and I could build a space heater, so I sat down with an irish coffee and put my mind to work. The more irish coffee I drank, the more I liked the cat idea, but Christina was against it, so I settled for the next best thing.. I turned on the oven and left the door open. Not as spectacular and cool as a flaming cat, but it did the trick.

Of course I wouldn’t recommend trying this at night while sleeping, but left on for 10 minute increments every half hour or so, it worked quite well in taking at least the coldest chill from the air. AND you can bake at the same time!

I look forward to some more warm weather, I’ve had enough of these ‘mainland’ temperatures!

Key West during the holidays… who knew?

Woah.

It’s the week between Christmas and New Years Eve here in lovely Key West, and all I can say is WOW.. I have NEVER seen so many people here. Fantasy Fest was pretty crazy, but the vast majority of those people came out at night to crowd the streets and bump nakedly against one another with the relative anonymity of darkness.

The Christmas holiday travelers are swarming the streets in broad daylight; mothers dragging slack-eyed, Nintendo gazing  children around by the arms, huffing and puffing to get down the street to that next big tourist destination on their travel map, while the fathers lag a few yards behind, beer in hand wishing to themselves drunkenly as they stagger through the crowd that they were here without the family.

Duval Street is packed!

It looks like a Disney theme park out there. But I do have to admit that I find it pretty cool that 90% of the people I walk by aren’t speaking english, or even spanish.. the foreign folks are here in droves man, and they aren’t leaving without their T-shirt! It’s funny to me, and probably just because it’s new to me, but the family vacation dynamic seems to be the same for every culture; Dad just wants to plant it somewhere with a hot waitress and drink. Mom wants to see the lighthouse, Hemingway’s house, the little White House, the aquarium, the shipwreck museum, the secret garden, etc, etc, etc, and all before dinner at that Italian restaurant Frommer’s said was so good. And the kids just want to play video games in the hotel room. You gotta love it! The Key West motto is One Human Family, and this holiday season I’m seeing it in person, we truly are all the same.

Even my street a block over from Duval (which is typically pretty quiet during all the festivals and such) is clogged with more scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians than usual. Finding a parking space on the street is near impossible this week as thousands of rental cars driven by people who are most likely not only a bit tipsy, but more accustomed to driving on the other side of the road vie for open spots as close to Duval as they can get.

I lie in bed at night and hear raucous groups of drunks yelling and whooping it up as they walk from the bars back to their hotels and B&B’s at 4 A.M… something that even during Fantasy Fest and the Poker Run I didn’t hear much of. Sirens are wailing until all hours of the night; they seem to go on forever.. how is that possible? The island’s only a couple miles wide! Are they driving in circles??

Is it possible that Christmas holiday travelers are more unruly than Fantasy Fest goers? That certainly seems to be the case, although I never would have guessed in a million years. I can only assume that it will get worse as we creep closer to New Years Eve.

Christina’s brother Josh is coming Wednesday to stay through the weekend, so we’ll be doing our part to help crowd the streets Thursday night. Schooner Wharf Bar is having it’s ‘Wench Drop” at midnight. They drop a wench (A live one) from the mast of the schooner Wolf which is moored right next to the bar. I think we’ve decided that’s our midnight destination this year. There are other ‘drop ‘ celebrations happening at various bars on Duval, like the drag queen in the big red shoe, but I think we’re going to try to avoid some of the crazy tourists and stay close to the local’s haunt.

I’ll be sure and post some photos!

Mike

Eggnog of the GODS

Hey, it’s christmas…. and I’m feeling generous (or drunk)

This recipe was given to me by a co-worker at my last job. She grew up in Okeechobee, and the pastor at her church made this every year. It became a hard and fast tradition at our office, and when she left to go work somewhere else, she passed the recipe to me so the tradition would live on. I made it for christmas every year after that, but then I got laid off, and then that company got bought out by a big corporation, children screamed and dogs and cats were living together, so no more eggnog for them!

Learn from their mistakes…. drink the NOG

Father Luc’s Eggnog of the Saints as interpreted by theMike

Makes about a gallon and a half

12 eggs, separated

3 quarts heavy cream

2 cups Rum & 2 cups Brandy mixed together (I use Mount Gay rum and E&J brandy)

1.5 cups of cane sugar (you can use regular sugar if you’re a wanker)

whole nutmeg

I have a big kitchenaid mixer and it makes all this much easier, but you can do it with a hand mixer if you must, just drink more rum, it’ll make the time go by faster.

Beat egg whites until stiff (like merangue) – set aside

Drink some rum

Beat yolks till mixed well, then add 1 cup of booze mixtue SLOWLY while mixing on high, or the alcohol will cook the eggs – set aside

Drink some rum

Whip the cream 1/2 quart at a time until stiff, then pour in some of the sugar, and some of the rum/brandy. Whip until well mixed. Put this into a container large enough to hold about a gallon and a half, and repeat these steps until all the ingredients are used up. Then mix in the egg whites and yolks.

Drink some rum

Grate some fresh nutmeg on top and get snockered.

Rinse, repeat.

More Power Boats!

Here are a few more photos from the power boat races. We wandered around on Duval Saturday night after the races to take in the up-close-and-personal experience with the boats, and then caught the final race on Sunday. Once again, a street festival on Duval street.. always so much fun.. lots of people, food, and of course beers.

The boats were so loud while they were racing, I could hear them from my front porch and I could smell the nitro from their exhaust wafting on the breeze blowing across the island.. good times!

The Miss Geico boat won the race, and no surprise.. it was very impressive – it’s turbine powered instead of piston-engine powered. It sounded like a jet airplane when it went by, quieter than the other boats, but quite obviously faster.. it was like watching something out of a batman movie.. well except it was bright green! It shot by so fast on the water that I had a hard time snapping a photo before it was out of the frame! The photo up there is the victory pass, even at idle it sounded like a jet.. I get chills just thinking about it now.. it was very cool.

Still, as much as I enjoyed the Miss Geico boat, I think my favorite was the Cintron boat, it was LOUD and painted a very sober grey. Unfortunately I think it must have broken down at some point, because it wasn’t in the race on Sunday. When we saw it on the street Saturday night, I understood why it was so loud.. it had two 1500 HP blown V8 engines in it.. you can see the photos down the page a bit.. makes miss my gearhead days from high school!

MorePowerBoats (12 photos)
13 November 2009

Note: To see the pictures in the original Picasa album, click here

Off Shore Powerboat Racing World Championship

We went down to Fort Zachary Taylor waterfront to catch the last race of the preliminaries on Wednesday. What fun! I’ve never been a big power boat enthusiast, but when you’re sitting right there on the water and the boats are roaring by at close to 200 MPH, one can’t help but be impressed. It’s almost like going to a monster truck rally.. it’s so loud it triggers some primal instinct to stand up and yell!

The next races are running this Friday and Saturday, and I can definitely say that I’ll be going back for some more of that!

We’d seen the boat parade last Sunday down Duval street, and this friday evening there will be another event on Duval where you can go and wander around and see the boats close up.. there really is rarely a dull moment here in Key West, there’s always something going on!

I’ll post some more photos next week.

Check out the official website here: www.superboat.com

Fantasy Fest; it was fun, but now you must go.. Part TWO

OK.. finally, the second part of my Fantasy Fest post!

The Haunted fort is all cleaned up, we had our Wrap Party out on the beach last Sunday night, and my life has returned to something resembling normalcy. What a crazy month! Now back to where I left off….

After Walter got on the ferry back to the mainland, and Christina and I had our night of relative peace and quiet, the next wave of visitors drove into town.. Christina’s brother Josh and his friend Jeff. They arrived Wednesday evening around 8:00. I’d made some paella for the occasion, so we feasted on that and had some drinks at the apartment before heading to Duval street.

We wandered around on Duval for a couple of hours, and after tiring of that madness, we walked over to Schooner Wharf to visit Frank Everhart. Josh hadn’t seen Frank perform before, so I knew that would be big fun!

True to form, Frank blew Josh and Jeff’s mind with some truly amazing magic, and topped it all off by pulling Josh’s phone number out of thin air and laying it out in cards on the table.. by this time it was pretty late, and Christina and I were pretty much ready to crash, she had to work in the morning, and I’m just getting too old to be out past midnight!

We walked back to the apartment and Josh and Jeff went back down to Duval to see some more of the madness. It was after midnight at this point, yet they were bound and determined to get up early and hop a fishing charter at 8 AM. Beer goggles make everything possible! I was doubtful they’d make it…

When I woke up Thursday morning, Christina had already left for work, and Josh and Jeff were snoring loudly in the living room. It was almost 10:00 AM.. I guess no fishing for them! The apartment stunk mightily of stale beer and seafood from the paella I’d cooked, which the two wonder drunks had finished off at 4 AM when they got in. At least I didn’t have to deal with leftovers filling up the fridge. The best part was that there wasn’t any food on the floor or the walls, which was an improvement over Walter’s visit (I’m still finding LoMein noodles in strange places).

We showered, fiddled about for a while, then left the apartment to find some food at around 1:00 in the afternoon. We walked down to the marina and wound up bellying up to the bar at Conch Republic Seafood… apparently it was time for a Bloody Mary!

We ordered some of the always fantastically yummy food there. I nursed my bloody mary while waiting for the food and prayed for my head to stop swimming. When the food did arrive, I switched up to a Blue Moon, and launched into my chicken fingers. When lunch was finished we all looked at each other and wondered what to do next. Eventually we settled on a swim in the pool at Dante’s.

Dante’s is another favorite place of mine to go, it’s essentially a big swimming pool with a tiki bar on each corner of the large pool deck; there’s a waterfall, a fish fountain in the middle of the pool, and it overlooks the marina.. what more could you want from a place? Food? YES, they they have good food too! I have yet to write a review here on ConchTales about Dante’s.. I guess I should get on that now that the October madness is over.

Dante’s or Bust!

We walked back to the apartment and picked up some towels, changed into swim trunks and headed back down to the marina. A quiet float in the pool was the only thing on my mind right then.. to let it wash the cobwebs from my head and get me ready to face yet another night of excessive insanity!

I knew we were in trouble when we walked up to the front… there was a live band playing.. so much for a quiet float. Luckily they were good so we continued on, but the real shocker was yet to come… the pool was FULL of naked women.

Well Men too, and luckily they weren’t naked, but still, I tried to not register the dudes . In all honesty, I tried to block out the vast majority of the women as well.. but you have to take the good with the bad I suppose.. after all it is Fantasy Fest, and we can’t start discriminating now.. that would run contrary to the entire premise of the event. The pool deck itself was wall to wall with more naked and half-naked women. I guess my quiet float in the pool was just not meant to be! The sacrifices we make… I tell you.

Well, we ordered up a couple of beers and sat back to take in the spectacle. We were looking over the throng of people trying to take it all in, when I noticed Josh’s eyes get large… I followed his gaze…they had built a wooden platform in the center of the pool with some outdoor carpet on the top, and a stripper pole sticking out of it. Oh boy.. this was gonna get good. I’m guessing it was precisely at this moment that Josh decided the trip down from Orlando had been worth it.. haha.

Josh’s friend Jeff had wandered off by the time we finished our first beers, and josh and I decided he was a big boy and could take care of himself, so we acquired a couple more beers and headed for the pool. I gave the camera to Josh knowing that he’s far less shy when it comes to taking photos of naked girls than I… besides, I was bound and determined to have my float in the pool unencumbered by technology.

We finally made it into the water through the wall of people surrounding the pool, and waded out into the deeper end of the pool where the crowd was thinner. I’ve never in my life seen such a spectacle, and I have to say that it was completely surreal. The music was pounding, the women were dancing, people were laughing and drinking and just having the best time. I remember thinking how great it was that something like this can happen, and no one was fighting or getting all agro.. it really was cool. Only in Key West I suppose… I know if they tried anything like that in Orlando, the police would be tazering and pepper-spraying everyone within a 2 mile radius just for being there.

Well, I floated and drank my beer, and Josh took about 200 pictures. I’ve picked out a couple for the hi-lights gallery I’m posting here, the rest of them along with all my other FF photos can be found on my picasa page here. There’s a lot of them, and most are dull, but I’m not one to edit, so they’re all there.

The stripper contest started soon enough and I though Josh would pass out from the excitement. I got out of the pool right before it started, not wanting to be trapped by the crowd, made my way to the bar for another beer, and ran into Moose.. a friend from the Haunted Fort. We chit-chatted for a bit, and I noticed that it was getting pretty close to 5:00.. Christina would be off work soon and we were scheduled to be on a sunset cruise leaving at 6:00.. yikes.. better get Josh out of the pool! And quick!

The mad dash

I pushed my way back through the crowd trying to see Josh in the swirling madness of the pool.. he was way in the back shooting photos of the strippers like he was Austin Powers. I couldn’t make eye contact with him.. I guess I was going to have to go in and get him.

After about 10 minutes of working my way through the crowd, I finally saw an opportunity to jump in the pool.. I went for it.. dove over some naked women and landed in about 3 feet of water scraping my elbow on the bottom as I went. I was thinking as I stood up and stated working my way to Josh that there had better be enough chlorine in the pool to kill whatever stray bacteria there was.. some of the people in the pool were relatively scary looking.

Finally I made it to him.. I told him we had 40 minutes to get out and make it half way round the marina to the sunset cruise.. he shut off the camera, and we hi-tailed it out of there.

We collected our towels and shoes and such where we left them at the table by the bar, and looking around realized that Jeff hadn’t made it back.. I called Christina to check on her progress and found that Jeff had made it back to the apartment, and was coming with her.. we were to meet them at the dock.

Well, we made it just in the nick of time.. hopped on the catamaran, and we were off for a couple of hours, sailing into the sunset with an unlimited supply of beer and wine.. god help us! And I had to be up to drive to Orlando in the morning!

The sunset sail was fantastic as usual, we drank our fill of beer, and stumbled off the boat around 8:00 and made our way to Schooner Wharf to see Frank again. Once again, Christina and I were too wiped out to stay out too late, and we left pretty early, leaving Josh and Jeff to wander about for a bit before coming home late.

In the morning I packed up my suit and toiletries, and headed out to Orlando… a lovely 7 hour drive. Made even better by the grueling week I’d had, and the small hangover from the night before. The boys were still snoring on the couch when I left around 10, and I made it all the way to Marathon before I just had to stop for Coffee…

Thus ends my Fantasy Fest tale. Christina, Josh, and Jeff of course continued that pace for 3 more days, and the photos of the parades and people they saw are in the gallery.. I can’t decide if I’m glad I missed all of that, or I wish I’d been there to see it all.. I guess only living through it next year will tell..

All I can say for now is.. I’m glad it’s over with.. and I look forward to doing it all again next year!

Check out the full galleries here.

Here’s some of the better shots for those of you who don’t want to weed through 500 photos..

FF2009Hilites (32 photos)
23 October 2009

Note: To see the pictures in the original Picasa album, click here

Fantasy Fest; it was fun, but now you must go.. Part ONE

Well, I survived it. There were times I thought I wouldn’t. And I wasn’t even HERE for the last big hurrah on Halloween night.

The weekend before Halloween my friend Walter came into town for his ‘bachelor party’. It was just he and I, so I figured how bad could it be.. well we pretty much completely wore ourselves out that weekend..

I never made it to Goombay festival like I wanted to, but I had a great time anyway. I think Walter may have had a bit more fun than I did however because when Monday rolled up and it was time for him to get on the ferry back to Ft Myers at 6:00, he was no where to be found.

He did eventually show up, but far too late in the day to make it to the ferry, so the missus and I didn’t get to have that lull in the action before the next wave of revelers came in Tuesday.

He had so much fun in fact, that we had to call a Doctor who makes house calls (I love Key West) to check him out on Tuesday, turns out he had smoked and drank so much that he was on the verge of pneumonia.. well a few steroid shots, and some antibiotics later, I shoveled him onto the boat and promptly sighed a very heavy sigh of relief. It was all up to his fiance at that point, haha.

For those of you who know Walter, you feel my pain I’m sure. At least the next wave of friends were relatively tame and responsible by comparison.

The real kicker to that story is I had to leave that coming Friday morning to drive to Orlando to be in his wedding, so at best I was in the eye of the hurricane, AND I was going to miss my first Fantasy Fest Parade. Remind me to never agree to be in another wedding….

As it turns out, our Tuesday guests became Wednesday guests so we wound up having our night to lay like broccoli on the couch.. a VERY much needed respite. We eventually couldn’t resist, and decided to leave the couch for a couple of hours and make one pass down Duval, just to get a feel for our first Fantasy Fest.

By this time the night-time crowds on Duval were getting increasingly large and more naked. We wandered about sipping a couple of Coronas trying to take in all the madness. We were too wiped out to really spend too much time out, or to really register how many sets of boobs or male genitalia wrapped in sparkle wrap we’d seen. We snapped a few photos and headed back to the apartment to crash. It was all very surreal, and we were beginning to understand just how insane this was going to be…

I’ll get to the real meat of the adventures in my next post. Right now I have to run out to Fort Zach and start tearing down the haunted fort. When that’s done in a week, life will finally be back to something resembling normal. Next adventure is to find a job!

P.S…. no that is NOT Christina in that photo up there..