The Dickerson Pondit

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Month Three In Naples

I realize not to many people are using a lot of their time following this blog. The Dickerson Pondit has not been faithful to this publication. I arrived in Naples on January 10th and have been enjoying the beautiful weather ever since. A couple of weeks ago I got back to writing new chapters for my novel, The Briefcase. I now have almost fifteen new chapters written.

You might also notice that older posts are disappearing from the site. I am no longer going to post chapters on the blog. I am pushing ahead to finish the novel and then I will make a decision on how you all will get a chance to read the final product.

My focus at this time is getting my golf shots from going either right or left and paying my income tax. I will head back north at the end of April. The Briefcase should be done in draft form by then.

Friday, January 20, 2012

January on the Beach

So…..Below is a quote from my last post. It has come to my attention that this post was actually created and submitted by my recently formed “Super PAC” – OldFartinFlorida.com. I believe it is my responsibility to check the facts in the quote.

I have to confess that I always thought escaping to Florida was for the weak of heart and that real New Yorkers enjoyed the challenges of winter weather. Well I was living a delusion! How did I equate ice fishing with surf casting, snowshoeing with winter golf, sidewalk dining with soup and hot chocolate aimed at warming my insides. Wearing silk underwear instead of Tommy Bahama shirts and flip flops? What was I thinking! I will attempt to maintain my dignity this winter. I will avoid the temptation of the early bird special and refrain from joining a game of Florida “lob” tennis. There will be no pink flamingos on the lanai. I will drive at or over the speed limit and limit Kmart visits to no more than once a week. I will not purchase and wear wrap around sun glasses and will continue doing the NYT daily crossword puzzle instead of the daily word search game in the local Naples paper. If available, I will support the Occupy Naples Movement when and if it ever comes to be.

· equate ice fishing with surf casting – at the time this was written, I had never been ice fishing in my life. Except for those of Norwegian heritage living in the frozen upper Midwest, no one goes ice fishing. Can you think of a colder less active sport than ice fishing? Now, I have tried a couple of days of surfcasting. The muscles on my now longer right arm are killing me. The closest I have come to catching a fish (mammal) was one cast that landed three feet from a porpoise leisurely fishing off shore.

· snowshoeing with winter golf – I have tried snowshoeing. This was done in northern Vermont at Smuggler’s Notch. It was a great way to get four hours of walking exercise in a twenty-minute stretch. If you need snowshoes to go out walking, stay at home. Winter golf I have yet to try. Since arriving in Florida on January 10^th, I have spent most every day baby sitting contractors and shopping for home furnishings. We are already into Bed Bath and Beyond for over $1,000. Is there a kitchen gadget I have not yet purchased?

· sidewalk dining with soup and hot chocolate – Sidewalk dining is an activity we have tried quite a few times since getting to Florida. This we like. The temperature has been so fine; we usually sit in the sun. Remind me to put on more sunscreen! I have been eating soup for lunch, but prefer ceviche to hot chocolate while in Florida.

· Wearing silk underwear instead of Tommy Bahama shirts and flip flop – The PAC got this right. Silk underwear are a northern golfers last resort to try and end the season on a positive note. That strategy never works.

· I will avoid the temptation of the early bird special and refrain from joining a game of Florida “lob” tennis – Unfortunately in Florida there is a fine line between getting to a restaurant for the early bird special and arriving after seven o’clock in the evening to find the restaurant dark and the staff vacated. We are still working on our dining timing. As for “lob tennis” please refer to the bullet point about “winter golf”.

· There will be no pink flamingos on the lanai – Once again the PAC is on the mark. This is only due to the strong influence of my wife.

· I will not purchase and wear wrap around sun glasses and will continue doing the NYT daily crossword puzzle instead of the daily word search game in the local Naples paper – Since we arrived in Florida about ten days into the winter season, every store we checked was out of the sunglasses. I thought I could find a pair someone might leave in a restaurant (you know we of a certain age) but everyone seems to have them tied to their head. I wonder if they sleep with them on? I have been sticking with the NYT crossword puzzle but miss doing them on paper. It is not the same using my iPad APP.

· If available, I will support the Occupy Naples Movement when and if it ever comes to be – I hear it exists. Rumor has it they congregate at the Walmart in north Naples. There are no tents, but a plethora of webbed beach chairs. The crowd breaks up around one in the afternoon and usually heads directly to Denny’s for the EBS (Early Bird Special). Similar to Occupy Wall Street in NYC, it is hard to pin the group down on their demands. I did hear talk about wider turning lanes and roadside signs to remind people which day of the week it is.

You gotta love Florida!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

December on the Bench

Here is a lost posting, I found in my files. It was written on December 19th.

December on the Bench

The Pondit is alive! It is almost noon on a sunny but brisk December afternoon. The breeze is coming in from the west –- unfortunately that means it is blowing into my face – and the keyboard of my MacBook Pro is more than a tad chilly. The sound of The Doors singing “LA Woma”n is the only thing besides my fleece jacket that is keeping me warm. Tomorrow the Christmas tree is purchased, erected and decorated with the help of family and friends. Although it might appear that The Pondit is hunkering down for a frigid New York winter; that is far from his reality. On January 9^th The Pondit and his beautiful bride board the AutoTrain outside of our nation’s capitol and head on down to warm and sunny Naples, Florida to spend four months on the Gulf of Mexico making sand castles instead of snowmen. Although I am a firm believer in global warming and even the controversial and yet to be proven theory of evolution, waiting for tropical winters in Westchester New York is out of my frame of reference. I will finish The Briefcase drinking rum and cokes and gazing northward toward Sanibel Island on our lanai in Naples. How appropriate, The Doors have morphed into Sailing sung by my brother, Russell, on my iPhone.

It is too cold to write more.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Alive and Kicking (Paddling)

I have taken quite a hiatus from my blogging responsibilities. Apparently, I am a cold weather blogger. Barbara and I just returned from a week on the sunny Gulf Coast of Florida. We stayed in Bonita Springs but visited Naples, Boca Raton and Coral Springs. We got to play two enjoyable rounds of golf in 80 degrees weather and took the resort launch out to a private beach area to catch some refreshing gulf breezes, lounge in the sand and swim in the medicinal salt water. We visited with both Barbara’s brother’s family and my brother’s family. The family visits were the highlight of the trip. We actually spent an afternoon looking at condo open houses in the Park Shore region of northern Naples. There is nothing like the first chill of New York air to spark the interest in finding a warm refuge from old man winter.

A cool and windy afternoon a few days prior to leaving for Florida, The Pondit grabbed his fishing gear and headed off to take a rowboat our on choppy Dickerson Pond. The pond had seen several days of morning frost and I judged this might be the last chance to fish this year. Rains earlier in the week had filled our fleet of wide bottomed aluminum rows boats with about twenty gallons of water. I had nothing with me to bail out our reliable behemoths. I did spot our Grumman aluminum canoe that was also inundated. It however could be lifted up on the dock and tipped over to separate the canoe from it unwanted cargo of rainwater. I accomplished this in minutes. I snatched a paddle and one floatation cushion and headed out to troll the pond. Handling the canoe solo sitting in the rear seat on a windy day while watching your fishing line was a challenge. Every time I hooked a perch and needed to reel him (her) in and dislodge the hook, the canoe would be somewhere I didn’t want it to be – usually tangled in beaver fallen tree limbs on the shore of the pond. As I reached the far end of the pond – the far end of any pond or lake is the place you are mysteriously attracted to, but is as far away from where you eventually need to be as humanly or nautically possible.

Here as the sun was beginning to set, the forty-two degree temperature winds began to stiffen. I was having trouble keeping the bow of the canoe pointed into the wind. As I tried once again to swiftly paddle the boat to turn windward a gust of wind raised the bow and within seconds the canoe’s only passenger was adrift in Dickerson Pond. I quickly assessed my fate. I was sopping wet but uninjured. The canoe was totally awash with only the tips of each end out of the water and I hanging onto one edge of the vessel. The paddle was still in my one hand but the seat cushion floatation devise was now about ten feet away and moving southward in the wind. My fishing pole was gone, but the vinyl tackle box was floating within the confines of the canoe frame. My fishing net was drifting nearby between the seat cushion and me. Did I mention that the water was damn cold!

The nearest shore point was about 100 yards to the west and although Dickerson Pond is not a deep body of water, I was not able to reach the pond bottom with my sneakered feet. I was wearing jeans and a fleece jacket at the time. My first morbid thoughts were of hypothermia. I did mention that the water was damn cold! My next thought was that nobody knew I was out fishing and there would be no people who would notice or hear me in this corner of the pond. I decided that the seat cushion would be more important to me than the swamped canoe. I let go of the canoe in order to swim the relatively short distance to the drifting seat cushion. As I let go of the canoe and tried to raise my feet to get into a swimming posture, all I did was start to sink below the surface of the pond. With my jeans, fleece jacket and sneakers, I was basically a lead sinker. I reattached myself to the rim of the canoe and tried to use the paddle to reach the seat cushion. There is probably a physics law – Heinrich’s Arm Stretch Law - to explain this, but the four-foot long paddle and my five-foot reach did not allow me to snag the cushion that was now at least twelve feet from the canoe. My next brilliant Idea was to try and kneel inside the swamped canoe. Again turning to the laws of physics, there must be a theoretical place you can place your knees in a swamped canoe and not actually tip the canoe over in the water. If you find that exact swamp you must remain totally motionless. Two realizations became evident: first, I was not going to find that magical spot and, second, if I did, then remaining motionless forever was not going to help my situation. I quickly abandoned this tactic and tried to lay semi-diagonally across the beam of the submerged edges of the canoe. I was able to do this and keep the swamped canoe steady. I looked over my right shoulder and watched as my vinyl tackle box drifted slowly away from the canoe. I wondered how long it would stay floating?

About five to eight minutes had passed and I had accomplished very little. I lost my seat cushion and my tackle box. I was getting colder by the minute and the sun was continuing to set. Although my seat cushion, net and tackle box were being blown to the wind to the shore at the south end of the cove, the heavy swamped canoe and its soggy passenger were merely inching along. My ETA for windblown landfall was about twelve hours. I needed a plan, even a bad plan. If I moved further across the rims of the canoe with one side across my mid thighs and the other at my chest, I could actually move my arms a bit. Choking up on the paddle handle, I could gently, ever so gently, make a small, shallow padding action using only my wrists. Whenever I tried to increase my stroke, my upper body tilted into the water and I feared the canoe would tip over. I did not want to try to use an upside down canoe to use as a floatation device! Did I mention the water was damn cold?

After about twenty-five to thirty minutes of mini-paddle stokes my craft and I were reaching the shoreline. Of course, I came to shoe amid another tangle of beaver induced fallen tree branches. After two failed attempts to sidle off the top to the canoe and stand in the water (even ten feet from the shore I could not reach the bottom of the pond – perhaps my legs had shrunk), I was standing in the primal ooze of the pond bottom. Crawling onto the shore, I took stock of my situation. First I was not injured or shivering. Those were good signs. I removed my fleece jacket. This was something I should have done about three minutes after falling into the water. I checked my brand new iPhone to see if it was operational – NOOO. I realized that my dickersonpondit.com baseball cap and my glasses were still on my head. In fact I had on my sunglasses and soon realized it was not nearly as dark as I thought it was! The canoe was not going anywhere. I started walking toward the trail that encircles the lake carrying my fleece jacket in my hands. I now realized that not only was the water pretty damn cold, but walking in the woods sopping wet in the wind was also on the cool side.

I walked briskly hoping the pace would warm my up. In another twenty minutes I was opening the front door to my condo. Stripping out of my wet clothing, I headed straight to the bathroom to run a hot bath. It was a good bath! I did notice that the clear water was turning slightly green as I lay soaking. I was sporting a couple of black and blue marks from where I was laying of the rimes of the canoe, but all-in-all, I was feeling OK. I put on warm, dry clothes and hung my fishing wardrobe to dry in the laundry room. Tomorrow I would head out to rescue the canoe and try and recover my tackle box. Some people never learn.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Girl from Marine Park and the Boy from Highbridge on the Riviera

The Village of Eze

The Pondit has been preoccupied these past few weeks.  Getting to the computer to turn his thoughts into computerized words has not been a priority.  This morning I find my self twixt the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.  Looking up from my laptop I see only sea – waves and a few white caps and eventually the endless line of horizon between the deep blue water and the azure sky.  The waves are rising up the hull of the ship as the Silver Wind spends a day at see traveling between her last port of call in Taormina, Sicily onto the island of Korcula, Croatia.

Barbara and I are on our honeymoon.  It started with two glorious days in Eze, France.  We stayed in the Château de la Chèvré D’Or in old Eze village.  This hotel is in a part of the city where there are no cars or trucks.  The village is situated on a mountaintop high above the French Rivera coast between Nice and Monaco.  We spent every minute of these two days within the village.  We did walk around the town, or better put, up and down the town.

Our room, like most of the hotel room was remote to the common service areas of the hotel.  Room 34 was up some steps, always steps, and around the corner from the reception and the restaurant area.  Our balcony overlooked the bar and fountain area and had a breathtaking view of the Rivera coast a good 1,200 feet below us.  Breakfast on the balcony was a treat both days we spent in Eze.  The meals at the hotel were some of the best we have ever eaten.  Those French know how to throw some grub together.

Unfortunately we did need to leave this fairytale setting to head to Monaco to meet our cruise ship.  That trip was only six kilometers.  Arriving at the port, we easily got settled in our room on the Silver Wind.  We caught a taxi to head into the city to do some emergency shopping.  Due to a poor choice of electrical converters, Barbara’s usually tame hair curler transformed into an inferno powered hair burner (Her hair was actually fused to the curling iron!).  Although both her head and the device seemed to recover from the incident, the curling iron was no longer to be trusted. It is now locked inside our room safe on the Silver Wind. An attempt to find a curling iron in Eze was like trying to find a glass of water in an Irish pub.  The taxi dropped us off several blocks from the very upscale Metropole Shopping Plaza near the casino in Monaco.  By the way, everything is upscale in Monaco.  We did find a device that was a distant cousin to a curling iron that was very accustomed to using 220 volts of power.  This ten dollar hand held electrical device found in most Duane Reade drug stores in Manhattan cost seventy-eight Euros in Monaco.

Well Monaco is a very crowded city that is build straight up a mountain.  The narrow roads wind back and forth with no apparent plan as to their location, width or direction. We waited at two cabstands where empty cabs just drove on by.  We called the number our portside taxi driver gave us to use to request a return trip.  The number did connect us to a recording announcing there were no cabs available.  The late afternoon sun bounced off the heat saturated pavement and buildings while Barbara and I trekked back the two miles to the dock and our ship.  Apparently the only reliable transport in Monaco is a chauffer driven Bentley or Mercedes coupe.

But one bad incident does not ruin a wonderful start of our cruise around Italy.  I will try to find some time to chronicle each of our stops and include some photographs of the voyage. The Internet connection on the ship is quite slow and adding photos to the posting is beyond tedious.

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Briefcase, Chapter 89

May I be thunderstruck! Almost two years ago the Pondit added a post to this blog on the subject of his frustration with a fickle aberration of nature, the trumpet vine. In that post (http://dickersonpondit.blogspot.com/2008/08/strumpet-vines.html ) I lamented that it had been five years since I planted two of the vines near my patio area and was still waiting for the first flower to appear on these rapidly growing plants. I vowed to burn the vines in the fall of 2008 if they did not yield a flower that summer. Alas, it was just a paper threat. I waited all summer of 2009 and now have given up hope for 2010 since I have seen other trumpet vines in the area with flowers from the end of June. What do I do? I feel as badly as Patty Finnegan: see chapter 89 below.

Lo and behold!

Here is a link to the first chapter of The Briefcase posted on my blog:

[ http://dickersonpondit.blogspot.com/2009/08/author-author.html ]

Chapter 89

Patty Finnegan was devastated. It was now an hour and a half after his call with Janet Grissom and Bob Walsh. Patty was sitting in a darkened bar about six blocks from the DEA office. He was staring into a shot of Jameson trying to unravel the events of the past several months. What was most baffling in this case were the number of leads the DEA had and the fact that almost all of them lead to nowhere. In fact, following what ended up as blind leads, consumed most to the energy expended on the case. Patty was not in all his faculties and he realized this. But in the back of his mind he wished he could take large model of the tracking transmitter and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine in the anatomy of the entire DEA technical team. How many hours did he and his team spend tracking that transmitter just to have it stop its signal just when it was most needed? It was like the devil himself was turning it on and off.

Patty ordered another shot of Irish whiskey and then let his mind drift off to Connecticut. What in the world did Anthony Costanzo and the Mafia have to do with this case? Sure there were marked bills found in Mystic and at the Foxwoods but did that trail actually lead back to Miguel Rivera? And he was totally perplexed by Ernesto and Pablo; all that time in the tomato fields of Immokalee and not a “marked” dollar to show for it? Why were they hiding from Miguel, if they did not have the money?

These were baffling events but not nearly as eerie as what happened in Santa Anita – one million dollars of DEA money winding up at the race track during the Breeder’s Cup. How did the money get there? Who brought the money there? And what was the purpose of wagering that money at the racetrack? Although still convinced that there was some inside hanky-panky going on at the track that day, the chances of uncovering that connection was getting slimmer and slimmer. What seems so obvious and neatly packaged had completely unraveled for Patty and his team. Life wasn’t fair and the Jameson was helping him confirm that observation.

Patty ordered another Jameson with a Smithwick’s chaser. He now had to make a career decision. He knew he could not let this case just drop. In fact, he could not even imagine how easily Janet Grissom was letting this go. That woman did not have a heart. No wonder she had earned the nickname, the Ice Queen. But Patty was very aware that Janet would be watching him. She knew as well as anyone that this case was under Patty’s skin. He had to be careful if he wanted to continue on the case. He did want to do that. He had no choice. He had to continue. He decided to dedicate his Saturday mornings to the case. He would not involve anyone else at the agency. He pushed away the last half of his ale. He realized he had only the rest of the day to work on the case in an official manner and knew he had to make some requests for information that would be consuming his next several Saturday mornings.

Turning to the bartender, Patty asked, “Sean, can you get me a cheese sandwich and a large mug of black coffee?”

Sean turned toward Patty, “It is about time. I thought you were going to drown in your whiskey. I guess I do not have to ask how things are going at work.” Sean chucked and walked off toward the kitchen area. In the morning, He was both bartender and cook.

Reaching inside his jacket pocket for his notebook and pen, Patty started yet another list:

Copy of betting records at Santa Anita
Copies of video of counting area in the betting pit
Copies of videos of at least two of the betting windows at the track
Log of all times the briefcase transmitter was active
Copies of the videos with Anthony Costanzo at Foxwoods

If he could get these copies today, he will be able to review this evidence outside the prying eyes of Janet Grissom. They had to have missed something that was in these pieces of evidence. Patty was also considering some field trips he might take. One would be to the Grand Caymans to check out those private banks. Another trip might be to confront Miguel Rivera in Cali. Obviously this last idea was either desperation or the Jameson doing the talking. Visiting Cali would be a suicide mission and not a side trip! Whatever, but Patty knew that Miguel Rivera would know his name before long. No one kills one of Patty’s agents, steals his money and gets away with it.

Patty ate his sandwich and had two mugs of coffee. One long visit to the men’s room and he was headed back to his office with his list in his pocket.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Where the Hell is Nevis?

I am somewhere east of Puerto Rico and west of Casablanca. The island of Nevis is only a short boat ride from the southern point of St. Kitts and is a fairly round dot in the middle of the Caribbean. The center of the island is dominated by a dormant volcano that is over 3,200 feet high. I am staying at the rather comfortable Montpelier Plantation Inn on the low hills south of the volcano. This has been a dry February for Nevis. The cold air up in the United States is keeping warm tropical air trapped to the south. This posting is emanating from poolside – a rather inactive poolside where my fingers typing away seem to be the only human activity except for some occasional breathing by several other guests. Most of the guests are from the United Kingdom. Nevis/St. Kitts is still a Commonwealth country loyal to Queen Elizabeth (but I am not certain they know that this is Queen Elizabeth the second!).

Getting here from New York City last week was a bit of a challenge. Originally we were scheduled on an early morning flight Friday to San Juan and then an afternoon connecting flight to St. Kitts. It is very hard to find flights to Nevis although they do have a small airport. The weather predictions in New York led us to change our outbound San Juan flight to Thursday afternoon. That we did but our three and one-half hour flight took us over seven hours to complete. We spend at much time on the runway at JFK then we did in the friendly skies. We stayed in San Juan and caught our scheduled Friday flight to St. Kitts. The trip after deplaning is more of a logistical challenge. The airport is about ten minutes from the capital of St. Kitts where there is a twice a day ferry to Nevis but it is about thirty mountainous miles to the beach on the south end of St. Kitts where you can arrange for a water taxi to take you to a beach on Nevis. That was our choice. Michael, out cab driver met us outside customs at the airport. With hardly a word he took us over the winding coast road to a dirt path that led to a short dock in the middle of nowhere. In front of us was a dive boat moored at the pier. There were people on the beach enjoying the sunny weather. Looking out we could see Nevis just a short boat ride away. After dragging our five bags through the sand to the dock, we boarded the rather large dive boat. We were handed two Carib beers and were glad to be sitting down with Nevis in sight. We waited about twenty minutes and were into our second bottles of beer when four young day trippers joined us for the ride across the channel.

We docked in Nevis and paid the boat operator $80 and tipped the crew. Our prearranged cab driver was waiting for us as we disembarked. She was anything but quiet, a feisty Brit fro Yorkshire who has been on the island for eighteen years. The ride to our inn was about twenty minutes with each turn off the highway leading to roads of less and less attention. The final two miles were two parallel strips of concrete with a grassy path in the center. Mind you this was still considered a two way road and we did encounter a truck coming at us from the opposite direction. We made it to the hotel; then we settled into our gorgeous room and were able to make cocktail hour -- a Pernod for me and chardonnay for Barbara -- before moving out to the west terrace overlooking Charlestown for a scrumptious dinner.

I have added some pictures and will continue our vacation saga in another posting.

Here is Nevis from the southmost point of St. Kitts. Those are clouds and not fumes on the top of the volcano!

Living full time in Nevis is a real temptation. Life is soft and easy.

Nevis has been waitng for years for a visitor of distinction. Little do they know he is on his way.

This is a great shot of Barbara! Our taxi is visible in the distant. If there was a road to the beach, that would also be in the picture. We arrived on a goat path.