A Nice Soother

We had a wonderful time with Von, carrying her to the Bingo Castle--where she won $50--, watching the debate, and taking in TWO football games: Tennessee/Auburn (damn, Auburn won!) and, natch, the Georgia/Bama matchup: yippeee for The Real Deal! E taught Von to play Rummy-O (of course), at which (of course) she excelled. And we watched Chris Rock's Kill The Messenger--LOLLOLLOL. ("I don't want to vote for somebody who was captured: I want to vote for somebody who escaped!") We also introduced her to a show we're intrigued by on the Sundance Channel, Architecture School, wherein Tulane grad students build homes in the post-Katrina 9th ward. Fascinating problems/politics. Polished off the weekend at the Donut Hole for breakfast this morning--getting there just ahead of the big crush.

Weirdly, the Bingo Castle was on the front page of the NW Florida Daily News this morning AND in this cool vid (we recognize all these people):





A few days at the end of last week, we hung about the house and no workers came: it was lovely. As were the days when we could have the doors and windows open, which seemed to facilitate a new sense of adventure/orientation in Squeak: for the first time ever she went into the back yard (with that scary swimming pool) on her own hook--and later showed up on the front porch! This is the first time she's ever squeezed through the fence (wish we'd seen *that* feat) and connected back to front. Baby steps, sure, but we're Very Proud.

Murmurs in Miramar

The most exciting parts of this week were that all of Ronald's tools (Sandy's too) disappeared from the living room and we went to our first beachy Tai Chi class. Plus also: this blog installment is being written from our separate desks in the home office (instead of shoulder to shoulder on the temporary setup we've been making do with heretofore). All told, there's been a lot of drilling and screwing and sawing and pounding and windexing since we last wrote: the joint is starting to take shape.

Tai Chi at the Grayton Fitness Center on Wednesday mornings is led by a bald dude named Henry, with backup instruction provided by the guy who runs the Tuesday night class, Ed. While we were waiting for class to start we made the acquaintance of two other students, Sharon and Jenny, who warned us not to ask questions because Henry loves to explain everything and will go off at any opportunity. The Fitness Center, the site formerly of a restaurant (that's what S remembers anyhow), is, as E says, chock-a-block with fitness equipment, the names of which neither S nor E know--well, okay, there are some treadmills, but otherwise, we're clueless. Almost every machine was in use--clearly this is a hub of local activity. (We even saw the owner of The Smiling Fish Cafe, who came over to thank us again for eating at his resto on Tuesday, Locals' Night.)

Our class is held in a little dance studio/exercise room, just off the main facility. Since Henry was running late (something that seems as if it might be the norm), Ed started class with warmups unlike any we'd ever done before, and when Henry arrived, the strangeness continued: we spent the entire class performing assorted GiGong (breathing) exercises and never did a single Tai Chi form, much less a whole set. This put us in mind of our original teacher, James. We liked the class a lot and plan to make it a regular Wednesday activity.

Monday we hit the Bingo Castle (and hardly won a thing: poo). On the way home, we detoured over to Miramar Beach where there's a post office convenient to the eastbound lanes of Hwy 98. All around the parking lot were huge beautyberry bushes, and just down the road we encountered a little resort called Murmuring Waves. (Sure, S shoulda taken a picture--maybe another time.) Try saying Murmuring Waves in Miramar Beach a few times...

On Tuesday afternoon, we invited our neighbors Sadie and Nancy over for drinks: they were at the beach because of an unbelievable snafu with the development's irrigation system that was impinging mightily on their pocketbook. A measure of our general progress is that we all sat at the kitchen table which had been entirely cleared of picture wire and drywall mollies. Avid football fans (Vandy is their team), they opined that this year, Bama is the Real Deal. Their interests don't stop with football: every year they go to the NCAA Women's Final Four. In short, they remind us of Other Women. They own a big shaggy Golden Retriever which, according to Sadie, had a big ol' throwdown with the metal dog next to our front stoop: apparently our dog won't be pissing in their yard any time soon.

After they split to continue their assorted house-drama projects, we took off ourselves in search of some dinner. Right out the door we were stunned by a hundred or so dragon flies wheeling about overhead. Not puny dragonflies either: you wouldn't want to get crosswise of one of these choppers. It turns out that the first week of October is the peak of the Green Darner Dragonfly migration, and that Florida is both a fly-over and a destination for these beauties. Catty-corner from Sunrise Beach, over at the aforementioned Smiling Fish, where the food is predictably good, there were no dragonflies to be seen. E had her usual, Crispy Duck, and S ate roasted shrimp on a bed of risotto and mushrooms. We had great seats near the corner with a good view of the Gulf and vehicular and pedestrian goings-on. The wait-staff are all sporting shirts that say Be Nice or Leave. We were very nice, but eventually left anyhow.

We're eagerly awaiting Von's visit this weekend: she'll arrive in time for the first presidential debate (assuming it comes off!) and we can't think of anybody we'd rather watch it with.

Thai Thai Again

Monday after bingo, we explored Destin Commons (one of those new [old]-fashioned shopping malls set up as an ersatz neighborhood--which means wherever you park you're a long hike in the glaring sun from everything but your first destination) on the way to the Rave movie theatre, a very cool operation w/digital sound & imaging--and comfortable seats. We saw Burn After Reading, amusing light entertainment with an hystertical performance by Brad Pitt. The film was built around the notion of the "cluster fuck" (a term ultimately used by one of the characters), a concept E considers to aptly characterize the Social Security Administration with whom she had had recent dealings. One of the pleasures/adventures associated with moving, since one must change one's address, are encounters with on-line updating systems ("misspell" your mother's maiden name three times and you're out) followed by telephonic automated systems, equally wrong about the spelling of your mother's maiden name, finally yielding a human being whose only excuse for your mail being addressed to 31 Dark Break Court is that her job is minimum wage. In the film, Frances McDormond, in search of the surgeries she needs to "reinvent" herself, works through similar rungs of telephonic hell, repeating A-Gent, A-GENT! several times. Yesterday, S heard E on the phone saying A-GENT! herself: life/art/etc.

After the movie, we went in search of one of the two local Thai restaurants with good reviews, The Royal Orchid. On the way there, and growing uncertain that we might have missed it, we stopped at The Thai Elephant instead. But it was closed. Having resolved that we would try the newish Italian joint up 393 from Daybreak Court, we happened upon The Royal Orchid and slammed into a parking place, hungry for Pad Thai and Green Curry. Which we ordered, along with a couple of appetizers: spring rolls and shrimp wrapped in wonton skins and fried. The most wonderful thing about the restuarant was that one could, given the right knees, sit on cushions on the floor around square tables. Plus also: darling little fabric sleeves for one's silverware. The food was just okay. Nothing tasted quite as we expected it would, but nothing tasted bad exactly. Not what we were craving, for sure.

Last night we ate in, S preparing a dish she watched Giada De Laurentis whomp up, Eggplant Timbale. What a mess S made! Grilling eggplant, boiling pasta, grating cheese--all before any actual composition of the dish can begin. It looks pretty and tasted fine, but neither so pretty nor so tasty that we're keeping the recipe around... Give us Shepherdess Pie any day!

Saturday Junket

S is still in search of a quick Saturday lunch, so today (bc of the sale at Wine World), we went to Johnny Rockets. This was hours ago, and we're still over-full. E had a hot dog that was too big for its bun (a good thing); S had a hamburger that was too small for its bun (bad). The good or the bad depends on whether you're Sandy or Elizabeth, S discovers as she types this: turns out E would rather her hot dog not exceed her bun. It's all about proportion.

On the way home, we toured our neighborhood, traveling north on 393, instead of south toward the beach. Voila! Choctawhatchee Bay--or it turns out, CB's Hogtown Bayou. Here's a bit of blah blah from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in case you're wondering (as we did--and sort of still do) what is Wetland Mitigation:

A wetland enhancement, restoration, creation and/or preservation project that serves to offset unavoidable wetland impacts is known as wetland mitigation or compensatory mitigation. The ecological benefits of a mitigation project should compensate for the functional loss resulting from the permitted wetland impact. Compensatory mitigation activities may include, but are not limited to, onsite mitigation, offsite mitigation, offsite regional mitigation, and the purchase of mitigation credits from permitted mitigation banks.

Google maps will give you a great view of Hogtown Bayou and the myriad of stinky sloughs that have been cut into it--toward, we suppose, future development. Perhaps it's worth noting that while we saw no hogs this trip, we did see a pair of snowy egrets and a couple of hunting hounds.

E says "the best things were those pots," by which she means the cool galvanized ones we espied at an ultra-moderne shopping development off of north 393. Where, it turns out, a fab Designer Accessories store, craft, has relocated. As has the local weekly rag, The Sun. Not much else there yet, and nothing was open. Can this joint make a go of it?

We also drove past the Mosquito Control of SoWal County and the Walton County Business Center (not busy at all). On the way home we stopped briefly in the parking lot of Gulf Place and while E dashed into Patchouli's (moving to upper-scale Rosemary Beach and having a closeout sale), S took a few pix of the Wine Tasting Festival, thinking all the while that she wished she had bought stock in the company that makes those collapsible tent-like objects long since.

Hurricane Season

We spent much of the last week watching Ike, either virtually, with Jim Cantore and that cute Stephanie as our guides, or from a safe distance in the real world. In terms of hurricane preparedness, we are still a bit lacking, having gotten MOST of our documents together for the evacuation kit--but not having aquired a cute waterproof container like Petra's. For a while we had a couple hundred bux of cash on hand to spend on whatever one spends cash on while stuck in traffic, but we're busily exhausting that. (Fortunately, the bingo bag is in good shape bc E hit "the big one" last week at Bingo Castle in Fort Walton Beach.) No MRE's on hand, but plenty of booze (Wine World had a sale this weekend!). We know you're supposed to close off the venting of one's attic spaces before leaving town, but have absolutely no idea how to do so. Let's hope the hurricanes keep passing us by....

Shades of Shades

Wednesday night we started out intending to eat at the Grecian Garden, "open from 11--????" Apparently not until 6:30 pm. We were going there bc Sandy's cousin's husband Mark and his golfing crew had gone there (the only people we'd ever heard of who had) and said it was pretty good. Plus also, since eggplant is in season, it seemed like the perfect choice. We now return to our original assumption that the resto is a front for some other more lucrative business. Opa!

So we got back into the car and trundled down the road to the square at Seaside to The Great Southern Cafe, once known as Shades. In that former incarnation, it was pretty good for lunch, with excellent crab cakes, burgers & iceberg wedges with Maytag dressing. In both incarnations, it has a nice beachy atmosphere, with a brand new building structured as if it were a shack to which other shacks had one-by-one been attached, butcher paper atop white cloths, baskets of silverware in the center of the table, etc. As Shades, the joint displayed fake "outsider art," seemingly composed by the owners' kids; as Great Southern, the art is pseudo Klee. In both cases, that is, the art was exactly the same.

Our waiter was sort of a bubba, who tried to sell us ginormous steaks, and sounded like other bubba's E has known. He brought us nice big glasses of Tanqueray with olives, which we enjoyed very much (celebrating Al's good news from the transplant docs). We ate green salads (fine), fried crab claws (quite good), and the house specialty, Grits A Ya Ya--cheese (gouda) grits topped with shrooms, shrimp, and a thicket of fried yam straw (all a bit gummy and finally not too interesting). E topped the meal off with a few bites of a very nasty key lime pie. We haven't written the place off entirely, but we won't hurry back.

Note: S is probably going to give up trying to blog pix of our meals: even when she does have the camera, she forgets to shoot until half the course is over and the plates just look like hell. And when she gets off a clean shot, the focus or exposure is for shit. If you want to see food staged properly, check out Pepper's blog.

Lee's Famous Recipe

In answer to the question, where might a girl stop to pick up a quick lunch, E said: maybe that chicken joint in Redfish Village we saw the other day? So as an experiment, we made a pitstop after doing a raft of errands last Saturday. Not a do-over except in case of an emergency. The chicken on the bone was okay (just), but the "tenders" that were substituted for actual wings in Elizabeth's box were next to inedible. Which meant, of course, that Sandy ate them and suffered for several hours afterwards. The biscuits couldn't stand up to sandwiching w/either form of meat and the sweet tea had a grim after-taste. The quick lunch question remains open.

The folks at Krispy Kreme are not amused.

Over-engineering...

According to the clerk, the sandbags "are left over from Fay and now just decoration."

Ugh.

Seaside Farmer's Market

This morning on the beach we watched hundreds of glinting little fish leaping--and 50 or so pelicans hanging about to take advantage. Big surf by Gulf standards: perhaps Ike's churning things up?

A couple of weekends ago, while the poker crew was still here, we visited the last Seaside Farmer's Market of the season, E chomping at the bit to get there the minute it opened, having in mind the early bird/worm. But it's not really a surprise that a FM at the beach might be run by a certain kind of laissez-faire slacker, so our early start gave us the opportunity to watch folks set up. Instead of the pickup trucks and Good Country People we would have seen just 5 hours to the north in Toosa, we observed middle-aged women in SUV's unloading their wares. Not much here at the ditch end of summer, but one kind of produce we'd never heard of before: organic meat muffins! (Of course we should have tried one, but we didn't: adventure-challenged sometimes.)

Altho the produce was very expensive at Off the Vine (having been shipped in most instances from far far away), the Winesaps were dee-lish.

Know your neighborhood

It's strange moving to B-A-R because we've already lived at B-A-R: it reminds Elizabeth a little of Claudia Johnson who moved next door to herself not once, but twice. Once, however, is enough for Elizabeth. It's also strange to merge two familiar households: what's from where? We hope we do better about learning our neighborhood than we did at the lake where we learned the most in the last three weeks when we were evicted from our house by assorted real estate agents for showings to prospective buyers.

To remedy this in our new setting, we decided to eat at a new restaurant every week--and to explore untraveled roads of all sorts. There have been some failures. The sea turtle watch doesn't seem to want volunteers; the South Walton (SoWal) Ecology Group hasn't set up their next meeting yet; A Girl Named Toni, the legendary vegetable grower, doesn't really have any local vegetables right now; it costs almost 60 bux to get a small box of organic fruits and vegetables, enought for two people for one week, delivered from Off The Vine, a regional organization based in Atlanta. Plus Also: we discovered it costs $65 EACH to attend the wine tasting across the corner at Gulf Place next weekend. Not even Sandy can drink this much wine.

Okay, our first resto was P.F. Chang's. We ate vegetable and pork dumplings, honey chicken, dan dan noodles and stir-fried eggplant (and Sandy drank a dramatically overpriced glass of elsewhere cheap Pinot Grigio). We were underwhelmed. [The evening started off badly with Sandy's camera announcing an exhausted battery, so pix had to be taken w/a phone--and now who knows where the cable is to download those images?] Everything seemed unnecessarily sticky and the chunky plastic chopstix impossible to drive. Plus Also: there were many children. Nothing was outrageously awful, but nothing was stunningly great. Perhaps the best part of the evening was talking with our waitress in training, a former real estate agent from Las Vegas who's fallen on hardish times--AND putting her son through law school. We said, at least soon he will be able to support you. And she said, but his girlfriend hates me!

Company

Fortunately, some of our poker pals visited and took our minds off the weather channel.

Just in time for Gustav

Just what you want when you move to the Gulf Coast: Jim Cantore squawking!