There are many reasons why I detest time changes.
In today’s world, with modern lighting and the ability to transport power anywhere by generator, there is absolutely no reason to continue this archaic practice.
I’m completely convinced it’s done solely to mess with my sleep and make me stress about the time for the first two months.
Monroe County School Board Chairman John Dick plans to be in front of the Monroe Board of County Commissioners next week should they take issue with the school board’s plan to extend a tax.
The school district levies a mandated one mill property tax rate that goes toward capital improvement projects such as new schools, renovations, and accessory uses for the students.
Now that Fantasy Fest is over and I’m not spending all my free time helping build a mobile water park to tool down Duval Street in Key West for a few hours, I have to again face my nemesis The Yard.
And The Yard knows I’m coming for it.
In just the last two weeks, while the final details were being put in place for Fantasy Fest, The Yard has dropped four large palm fronds into the driveway and two into the road.
The coconut palms have grown another 300 or so pounds of silly green ovoids, all out of my reach with my tallest step ladder, and the intermittent patches of grass I had beaten back with killer have begun to sprout again.
The incessant rains we had for a couple of weeks watered The Yard better than I could ever hope to when I had delusions of keeping the grass alive and manicured, and it’s now shooting up about knee high in certain places, and coming back out in areas where I have long had it dead.
We don’t have an understanding, The Yard and I.
Unfortunately for the American people, including the folk right here at home, governments at all levels are getting more and more regressive in terms of a free flow of information.
In response to the orders from their corporate overlords, politicians everywhere are trying to rush through legislation aimed at restricting the public’s access to public records.
As many of you read this, we will be putting the final touches on our Fantasy Fest float in preparation to roll down Duval Street Saturday night for the annual parade.
Not being one of the sponsor teams that simply purchases a float from someone else, we started construction early this year to ensure we were done on time. After all, we were attempting to build a mobile, functioning water park, not a small feat of engineering for a bunch of folks who would rather drink and throw beads than runs saws and swing hammers.
The rough build work was done relatively easily. Then we got rained out one day. No big deal. We had time.
Then we got rained out again. And again. And things began to get a little critical.
But we persevered and got the major stuff done, the water park fired up and operational, leaving the little things like painting and decorations to be done in the final few days.
After a successful trial run of the water park apparatus on Sunday, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Then came Monday morning.
Battle lines between unfunded state mandates and diminishing discretionary spending power for the county government will soon be drawn.
Monroe County faces a 2015 deadline for the implementation of advanced wastewater treatment in the Keys imposed by the state following a series of poor near-shore water quality reports in the 1980s and 1990s.
The latest five days of nearly non-stop rain have brought back memories of storm seasons past for many of us.
Who can forget the routinely flooded roads seemingly every other weekend during the 2004 storm season.
And following that was the 2005, otherwise known as the Year of Wilma the Witch, when rising water did a lot more damage than the winds, and much of that damage was done to vehicles that were parked in low-lying areas as the rising salt water inundated engines.
The news coming from the state on the funding for wastewater systems in Monroe County hasn’t been exactly refreshing.
County officials announced this week that the general feeling at the state level is that Monroe County shouldn’t count on outside money to be able to finish its last large wastewater system, the Cudjoe Regional.
As we feverishly prepare for the 2011 Fantasy Fest parade (can it truly be in just two weeks) tomorrow will be the culmination of a year of planning, designing, building, arguing, painting, and most of all, drinking.
Now much of that year was spent doing absolutely nothing, but we came up with a float concept early on when the new theme of Aquatic Afrolic was announced.
It was after much deep thought, and many beers, that we decided we wanted to do a working water park. And, because of the beer, probably, we decided that a water park had to have water slides. Functioning water slides.
Maybe a little less beer would have been advantageous to the planning process, but once the decision had been made, we forged ahead.
Plans are afoot to begin studying ways to increase water flow in may of the Florida Keys canals, particularly those where water degradation is either worst or best, the first to improve the bad, the second to enhance the good.
This won’t be the first study done of what it would take to enhance water quality in the Keys’ hundreds of miles of residential canals, but it is the first time that funding has been defined that might result in actual work.
Serving all the Communities of the Lower Keys
Recent articles
Past Issues
Recent Comments
Supplements
