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It’s a study. Not a decision. Fact-finding for future choices. Come October, Key West voters will decide if they want the city to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to do a feasibility study on the potential widening of the channel that connects Key West to the Atlantic Ocean — and its cruise ships. Problem [...]
Fair warning: Not for the iguana lovers. If you get all muggly-snuggly over your resident iguanas, go read something else. Right now. Because … Smashed. Dead. I am not sharing my Key West bathroom with an iguana. Challenging enough to share it with four cats, a husband and the brown anoles with no shame about [...]
Y’all come now, ya hear. You know how polite people invite house guests to come stay a while? And, how polite people smile and say “sure” and never show up? That’s not Key West. Nope, invite house guests to Key West and they actually come. As I told my husband, “finally, we live in a [...]
January and February were demolition and construction months. In addition to the outside work, interior walls came down, floors were removed and the makeshift kitchen was installed in the living room — minus any water. We used the shower for dishes. But, day by day, we could see the architect’s drawings coming alive in three [...]
Watching the dream in three dimensions Built in 1953, 1310 Olivia was a simple, clean-lined concrete block structure. Essentially a rectangle with a double gabled, pitched metal roof, side porch as the main entrance and a small front extension that was the living room, the house was typical of mid-century houses built in The Meadows [...]
With age, wisdom: Ditch the two-wheeler. Here’s the deal: If one be post-40 (I could argue for post-30) and were last on a bicycle at 10, then one ought not be riding one in Key West — or anywhere else for that matter. Key West brings out wobblers and weavers. Those “how-hard-could-it-be” folks who believe [...]
Gotta love those Key West chickens If Disney did chickens, they’d be Key West chickens. Arrogant, independent, decidedly territorial, and, OK, cocky, Key West’s 2,000 or so chickens — though who’s counting I can’t imagine — rank up there with the six-toed Hemingway cats as tourist magnets and the scourge of locals wanting to sleep [...]
Trading privacy for an open, approachable fence Key West and the Historic Architecture Review Committee (HARC) are hardliners on fences. Keep them short, white and picketed. No bricks, stucco or stockades in the Old Town historic areas. There was one loophole if we’d wanted to keep the tall, stockade privacy fence: We could repair it. [...]
Key West Renovation: The beginning The house had the seven things on the top of our home buyers’ wish list: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a pool, central air, off-street parking, enough outdoor space to buffer the neighbors and a great location in The Meadows. We bought bank-owned 1310 Olivia St., Key West, in August 2008, [...]
Gotta love your Key West neighbors; they’re only six inches away Ker-flush. Gurgle. Clunk. Ah, the sound of the neighbor’s toilet. Or, how about skritch-scratch-purrrrr? The neighbor’s cat snuggles into the outside cubbyhole beside your bedroom door — and taunts your kitties into hissing killers in the middle of the night. If one doesn’t want [...]
Key West’s love-hate affair with its tourists A goodly portion of Key West’s 2.6 million tourists stops to primp in my office window on Whitehead Street. They don’t realize the mirror effect for them means they’re just inches from my to-them-invisible desk. I learn about their families, listen to their enthusiastic reviews of architecture, the [...]
Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni indicted with his pal, Trenton, N.J. mayor, Tony Mack JoJo, the infamous Trenton, N.J., “quarter ton rapist,” loved his cigars back in the day. The cigar-puffing, 565-pound, poker playing sex offender loved Atlantic City, too. So there he was enjoying himself in the spring of 1982 at the Sands Hotel and Casino [...]
Time for Rubio to “get right” on immigration, Creationism — or his Cuban surname won’t help The national Republican Party, casting about for ways to mend its abysmal track record with Americans of Hispanic descent, ought not pin its hopes quite so naively on Florida’s U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. There’s no such thing as a [...]
Holden Beach, N.C. I grew up a Sunday afternoon’s drive from the towering sand dunes of Holden Beach. We’d park the car — mom, dad and five siblings under 10 — check both ways, sprint across the soft, sun-hot, barely-two-lane asphalt beach road with its non-existent traffic, then hike miles up and over the [...]
Obama can “do the right thing” if he chooses. I met Barack Obama shortly after his 2004 landslide election to Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat. He was standing in the parking lot of the Rockford (IL) Register Star’s News Tower, alone. He’d just come down — likely to sneak a smoke — from his meeting with [...]
Key West. Manhattan without the skyscrapers. It’s a comparison helpful in explaining why Key West isn’t Florida. The cheek-by-jowl closeness of houses whose neighbors share their breakfast flavors and domestic squabbles – and hear their toilets flush at bedtime. The dissonance of a dozen different languages and a hundred regional accents competing down Duval Street [...]
Fantasy Fest’s family night for locals No place does Halloween quite like Key West. For 10 days in late October, Fantasy Fest takes over the town, bringing tens of thousands of visitors to this tiny island community. Most of the events are “adult-only” fare, but the Friday night Masquerade Parade is all about the locals. [...]
Never been to Key West? Here’s a fun — if a little long — 15-minute driving tour video up Duval to the Seaport. Enjoy.
Most frequently heard question: Do you have a minute? Actually, no, I don’t have a minute. Neither do you. But what do we say? “Sure.” The response is automatic. We’re being polite. We really do want to help and we’re convinced (even if secretly) that we’ve got the right answers. But all the while, we’re [...]
Develop your umbrella brand. Start with a strong image. Key West Realtor Brenda Donnelly owns two business brands: Island Homes Key West and Historic Key West Vacation Rentals. They serve different target markets, but the information needs of both clients often overlap. Donnelly sells homes, inns, bed-and-breakfasts and guesthouses. She also markets and manages high-end [...]
Fall starts in Key West Folks up north are pulling out the fleece and getting the rakes ready for the annual Fall dump. Not so here, but it’s easy to tell when Fall begins in Key West. The thermometer reads 10 degrees cooler than the week before and the humidity drops 20 percentage points. And, [...]
[View the story "Harleys, Poker Run, Key West: Three great things in one" on Storify] Harleys, Poker Run, Key West: Three great things in one The annual Key West Poker Run brings thousands of bikers — heavy on the Harleys — from the mainland to Duval Street. For three days, the rumble of bikes and [...]
Six tips to grow, not kill, your business You opened your business to make money and serve your customers. You’re not in business to “do” social media. But…. These days no business does business without a significant commitment to social media connections. So, you “get” a website. You “get” a blog. You “get” accounts for [...]
Isaac swapped tropical storm for hurricane over Key West over night. So, up early this morning to finish the preparations. Outdoor furniture tossed in the pool and covered. Bikes wheeled into the bedroom. (Amazing how much stuff fits in a teensy space.) Shutters are up. Snug inside. Now I’m off to the airport to pick [...]
Ed and I have lived in many places over the years — Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey. We always extend the invitation: Y’all come and visit now, ya’ hear. Everyone says “sure,” though few take us up on the offer. Now that we have a Key West address, we’re keeping a separate calendar just [...]
Architect. Check. Lunch at El Siboney. Check. Dinner with friends. Count it as a great Key West day.
Key West Watch was named one of three runners-up in the annual McCormick Foundation New Media Women Entrepreneurs Initiative. The program, which awards grants to start-up companies owned by women, this week recognized four winners and three runners-up from a field of 227 applications. Being a runner-up on this list is a very big deal. [...]
You may be wondering who in the heck is posting to this great blog in its infancy. Let me introduce myself, I am Lee Cunningham, Linda’s son, and CIO. I am a social technology leader for GE Power and Water, and part of my real life job is helping our businesses learn to leverage the [...]
Key West Songwriters Festival — May 2012. Jeffrey Steele coming back for the first time in many years and playing free concert on Duval Street! The Studios of Key West will have two fabulous shows! Tickets ($30) at www.keystix.com; went on sale yesterday and sell out QUICKLY! Free shows all week all over town. Go [...]
Back in 1977 I was among the first newsroom users of a new DEC front-end system for word processing, content management and pagination. It was so primitive by today’s standards that we had to hard code our copy as we were writing stories, headlines and cutlines. Baffling at first, it didn’t take long before we [...]
Although all I wanted was to sked an appointment with my resident geek, he has now installed the new site. Gotta love that kid.
If the Susan G. Komen foundation board can reverse its tone-deaf decision to pull grant funding from Planned Parenthood, then the Obama administration can say “oops, we goofed” and rethink its decision mandating religious organizations include contraception in their employee insurance plans. I think health insurance plans — public and private — should cover contraception. [...]
Update at 11 a.m.: Reuters reports Komen has reversed its decision to pull Planned Parenthood funding. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation can give its money to whomever it wants. No problem with that. I can, too. No more pink ribbons for me. And, while I’m at it, I think I’ll avoid purchasing [...]
More on the ad rep in just a minute… I bet half of my friends and acquaintances think we’re already in Key West. Wish we were, but we’re spending one more snow-and-wind-chill winter in Rockford, IL, though there’s been (thankfully) precious little of both this season. We’re winding up two decades of “stuff,” from getting [...]
Illinois voters ought to be able to tell the nation a couple of things about governance by charisma, ego and brilliance run amok. After all, we danced with Rod Blagojevich for a lot of years before the ex-governor flamed out while selling Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat. None was better than Blago in front of [...]
Update 1-19-2012, 7:02 p.m.: This from Joshua Kopstein at Motherboard: “But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to [...]
If your annual household income is $150,000 and you’re living in most of Florida, you’re in the top 4 percent of those who live here, and in the top 9 percent nationally. You’d need an annual household income of $289,657 to wear the Florida 1-percenter badge and $383,001 to match the national 1 percent ranks. [...]
By the time, Michele Bachmann pledged yesterday to rally round the eventual Republican nominee for president, I’d wearied of hoping she’d come front and center as a viable candidate. She just couldn’t do it. There are a handful of analyses on the whys of Bachmann’s fall from the elephant, including an empathetic one from Washington [...]
One of the unintended consequences of living one’s life digitally is the dearth of snail mail addresses. So, this year the annual Christmas letter to friends and family goes cyberspace for those whose virtual addresses have replaced “real” ones. Be warned, though, this is a big file, so unless you really care about what we’ve [...]
You may understand the First Amendment only when it’s gone. Fight the good fight for the freedoms of the First Amendment. It’s a local matter, too. #freetotweet
It started with letters to the editor — missives from newspaper readers that are equal parts tinfoil hat and insightful commentary. Letters to the editor were the first “user generated content.” Add in a couple pounds of the ubiquitous “press release,” a tablespoon of original poetry, a cup of weddings, engagements, anniversaries and obituaries and [...]
At 10, I wasn’t today’s news junkie. I did “know” that the POPE IN ROME was going to run the United States and we were going to have to eat fish on Fridays if John F. Kennedy were elected president. Not being fond of fish, I sure didn’t want that JFK as president. I wasn’t [...]
Americans are Bell Curve people. We live happily along that 80 percent bulge in the middle of things, and we’re open to learning new things from the strident fan-folks farther down the curve and out to its edges. For a while. Not forever. Just about the time fan-folks think the rest of us have become [...]
Since when does this become “horsing around”? “As the graduate student entered the locker room doors, he was surprised to find the lights and showers on. He then heard rhythmic, slapping sounds. He believed those to be sounds of sexual activity. … he looked into the shower. He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose [...]
I do not care what the Bible says. Physically assaulting a child is wrong. I swatted our son Lee on his backside more than once as he was growing up. My parents occasionally chose among a switch, a ruler, a paddle, a belt and a pancake turner. That the assorted physical punishment was part of [...]
Friday Five: Odds and ends from the week’s world of news. * That Super Committee that’s supposed to fix America’s fiscal house by Thanksgiving? Well, it’s not going to happen. Not because there are no solutions, but because its hardline Republican and Democratic members have no intention of collaborating. Raise taxes; cut expenses. That simple. [...]
If I swatted one guy, I swatted a couple hundred. Occasionally, literally. Most often with words that started with “Touch me one more time, and I’ll ….” There were no human resource departments for my first 20 years in the workplace, so when the guys got out of hand — and they always did, do, [...]
Friday Five: If yours is a family inclined to Sunday dinner conversations, then you know there are a handful of subjects generally off the table: sex, religion, politics and money. That leaves precious little about which to chat, except for the weather and your sibling’s awful spouse, that last one guaranteed to have someone leaving [...]
Oh, how we love shopping. Think not? Take a few minutes to ponder this consumer nuttiness — the “out of the box” or “unboxing” experience. I swear to all the retail gods, we’ve made an art of describing, experiencing and reviewing a product just as it comes out of the box. Sleek, smooth, enticing. That [...]
Added a handful of pictures from earlier this summer. Testing best practices for managing photos for Key West Watch. Follow us on Facebook.
It takes no particular bravery to call the Illinois General Assembly a passel of I-got-mine slackers. They are all that and more. Throw da bums out. Oh, wouldn’t we wish? The American revolutionary way; no blood; the ballot. Don’t like what one’s elected representative is doing? Why threaten to vote for his (mostly his) opponent. [...]
Friday Five: Odds and ends from the week behind. * Seems 3,400 retired Chicago public school teachers are getting a wallet-sweetening $250 a month they might not be entitled to. The Chicago News Cooperative reports today there could be a $90 million mistake. Oops, says pension fund and school board. Rats says the judge trying [...]
The good news is Illinois state investigators caught him. The bad news is that over about three years, George E. Smith appears to have sidetracked a handsome portion of $18 million in state grants to somewhere other than to the kids who were supposed to be helped. Associated Press reporter Christopher Wills broke the story [...]
Friday Five: I cannot bear one more CNN-MSNBC-Fox “analysis” of Occupy Wall Street. That’s this week’s topic of choice; every week there’s a different beat-it-to-death headline. By Friday, it’s time for the off button and five “worthy stuff” notes from the week. * Consumer spending was up in September, the first time in seven months. [...]
Two veteran teachers in a household push their income beyond middle class. A veteran firefighter has a darned good chance of having an upper class income. Ditto for a slew of folks who think they’re making middle class incomes, when, in fact, they are playing on that much-maligned “rich” spreadsheet. That ubiquitous “Joe the Plumber” [...]
(Mental health professionals in Illinois are scrambling as Gov. Pat Quinn threatens to close seven facilities to save money. The headlines are, today, in Illinois, but they are being repeated across the country.) In 1972 I did my first reporting for a pay check. That was, give or take a couple months, 40 years ago. [...]
Sometimes karma gets it right: Tonight, the death of one of the world’s brilliant minds will overshadow the political non-news chatter of one of its dimmest bulbs. Sarah Palin takes second chair to Steve Jobs.
I’ve written a column-turned-blog for the Rockford (IL) Register Star and rrstar.com for 20 years, and for 15 years before that. When I left the legacy newspaper business in May 2011, I kept up my rrstar writing. Writing is a disciplined task. Take a break and it’s almost impossible to get back to daily writing. [...]
Assuming the headline got your attention, stick with me for a minute. I haven’t totally lost my mind. Public employees are the last fragments of the United States’ once robust middle class. If their jobs disappear, we can kiss our community farewell. That “tipping point” all the local movers-and-shakers talk about when they get together [...]
Let’s not fool around with Irene. Not sure folks north of OBX are taking seriously what’s eying their homes. Too bad Jim Cantore and his wannabes have sensationally “cried wolf” so often no one pays attention. This is one scary, scary forecast.
Five weeks in EYW most good. Extended visiting no substitute for living here. That’s why ELC and I always said we are moving, not retiring.
Cheap ride for millionaires, corporations on shoulders of American middle class. Buffett lesson 101: Rich can afford it. http://ow.ly/65pKR
This is the final week for this beta version of Key West Watch. For the next few months, I’m going behind the scene, so to speak, to build the integrated architecture that will support the company. While the WordPress platform and various social media programs can do a lot, they can’t support the entire operation [...]
Consulting project (the paid kind) invoiced. Check. (Thanks, QuickBooks). Grant application submitted. Check. Refi paperwork done. Check. Key West Watch photo gallery figured out. Check. Sun going down. Check. Sunset at Mallory Square? I think not.
Key West as Locals See It, a set on Flickr. Key West is a beautiful place for locals and for tourists. But locals see their hometown slightly differently than the tourists who stop in for a day or two. For locals, it’s an empty Mallory Square. It’s washing windows, picking up trash and swearing at [...]
Key West Watch is owned and managed by editor and publisher Linda Grist Cunningham, a nationally recognized newspaper editor, publishing executive and project manager with more than 40 years of professional experience. A resident of Key West, Cunningham was a non-resident homeowner during which time she developed Key West Watch. She retired in May 2011, [...]
Key West Watch is a fully integrated, multimedia service that provides news, information and resources designed for off-island Key West homeowners. Its combination of Web and print products, including the innovative “home watch” multimedia program, keeps non-resident homeowners connected to the Key West political and governmental issues and decisions most likely to affect their property [...]
