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Sunset Key for lunch.

For Heidi

Hemingway's cat. (One of them) I didn't count his toes.

A daiquiri in the old man's honor.

More island sights

This morning I stumbled on a yard sale during my walk. Look what I found, for $8!

More Key West sights below, taken in the neighborhood away from Duval Street.

Island paradise

I am sitting on the breeze-cooled porch of a guest house in Key West, while the private jets roar overhead and the palm fronds sway.

Below, at the pool deck, people lounge by the water.

We are just a couple blocks off Duval Street, that easy, sleazy thoroughfare. This morning I took a walk through the neighborhood, past the art galleries, antique stores, t-shirt shops and adult entertainment parlors.

Here are some pictures.

We're going out to explore now - see you later!

Working my butt off!

Train grafitti. Click any image to "embiggen."

I have two final papers due - I have to submit the drafts on Monday, and then revise them over the Thanksgiving holiday.

So that's why I have been neglecting my blog. Hope you all don't mind. I've shared some photos of my neighborhood.

Single shotgun house with an incredible blooming senna shrub

Creole cottage on Dauphine Street

Beautiful old rose growing on a Bywater fence - Reve d'Or, maybe?

Jack, hanging out on the gallery outside of Vaughan's Lounge

Enjoy.

Press Street tracks

Click to "embiggen"

Press Street at St. Claude Avenue. Here is the unofficial boundary between the Marigny, uptown of the tracks, and the Bywater, downtown.

It was an afternoon with thunderstorms in the air. The locomotive was bearing down on the crossing.

Residents of the Bywater have to negotiate the trains everyday. It has become an interesting exercise. There are no gates over the tracks, only red flashing lights. Sometimes, people take a gamble - the engine is slow or even stopped; they drive over the tracks.

Other drivers decide to take an alternate route - they cut through the neutral ground - sometimes at an intersection, sometimes driving right over the grass - and make a U-turn. I've done that - cutting a quick right turn down Press Street toward the Mississippi River, racing the slow-crawling engine to Chartres and crossing the tracks clean. Or else they go lakeward through the St. Claude neighborhood to Claiborne Avenue, which has an overpass spanning the tracks.

Whatever you chose, the trains are a part of your life. Deal with them.

Paris, 11/13/2015

So sad, so terrible.

"You need to stop this"

I once lived in an apartment house where the resident manager, turns out, was beating his wife. All of the tenants gradually figured out what was happening by sharing information about our encounters with them.

He was doing it so quietly; we would never have known otherwise.

Here, this year in New Orleans, we are living in a rental house with a studio apartment sharing the same wall. Our neighbors are a young couple. Their apartment is too small for two people, and she is pregnant. He is recently unemployed. We sympathize with them, and have been as supportive as we can be.

On Piety

Click to "embiggen"

On Piety Street here in the Bywater, this shrine is here, in front of a neighborhood house. Who does it commemorate? Does it commemorate anyone at all, or is it just an expression?

You decide.

Then, go into Frady's One Stop Food Store and get yourself a po' boy.