Category Archives: Puffin Tales

Random stories of the activities and friends in or around North and South Puffin.

“This Town Ain’t Big Enough …”

Posted on by

Another Puffin Tale from Dodge City that you just can’t make up.

Nick Grindell: I’m getting tired of your meddling. This town ain’t big enough for the both of us and I’m going to give you 24 hours to get out. If I see you in Carabinas by this time tomorrow, it’s you or me!
Tim Barrett: I’ll see you at this time… tomorrow.

A tumbleweed skitters across the road from The Western Code (1932) to High Noon (1952). There are no shadows. The sun is merciless in the sky. And the Sheriff says to the d00d, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

From IMDB, When Tim Barrett rides into Carabinas in The Western Code, his reputation as a lawman precedes him. Rescuing Polly Loomis from the unwanted attentions of a saloon ruffian, he learns her mother married ranch foreman Nick Grindel shortly before her death, and left everything to him in her will. Nick has proposed marriage to his stepdaughter, and she fears violence if her hot-blooded brother Dick finds out. When a body is found at the Bow Knot, Tim barely rescues Dick from a necktie party and is deputized to investigate when Dick confesses to a crime he didn’t commit.

The Sheriff ran a d00d out of town.

You may recall the Key West shootout in October last year when Timothy Thomas got into it with deputies on Stock Island.


I shot the sheriff, but I didn’t shoot the deputy.

No matter what my daughter often says, sometimes life just isn’t a country song.

The Key West Police and the Monroe County Sheriff’s office had been looking for Mr. Thomas for an armed robbery at a home down the street from Key West High School; the school was locked down. He took off in a stolen black Ford Mustang. Deputies spotted the car in the dark out on Stock Island not far from the jail. He opened fire on them when they tried to nab him.

He shot a Sheriff’s deputy in the chest but the deputy’s bullet-proof vest saved him.

He’s charged with attempted murder of a police officer, four counts of being a felony possessing a firearm, burglary, altering a firearm serial number, and property damage.

Jump to the present.

Tyler Thurston, Mr. Thomas’ younger brother, threatened the lives of a police officer and his family in text messages and Facebook posts hours after bad guy bro Tim was jailed for that shooting.

Text 1: “I got a 357 magnum fully loaded and a 9 ruger with 16 bullets waiting for yalls names to pop back up in my f—in’ ear. I know where yall live, I’ll kill everybody in the house.”
Text 2: “…there wont be a f—ing soul that could save yall from me. I’ll kill yall b—-es slowly and unmercifully.”

“Kids nowadays just don’t realize once you text something or put in on Facebook, it’s out there forever, whether you’re serious or not,” his lawyer told the Keynoter. “He had to learn these things the hard way and he feels badly that what he wrote scared some people.”

Uh huh.

The “kid” bro has been under the care and feeding of the Sheriff since October. Last week, he agreed to five years of probation in a plea bargain with prosecutors. The deal says he must complete a two-year drug offender program. He also has to get out of Monroe County and stay out.

 

Ayup

Posted on by

Another of our randomly local stories.

Street sign theft has become a budget issue for a many municipalities. Peeps steal the signs as pranks, on a dare, for decoration, and even to claim the sign was missing to beat a ticket. “Signs that are unusual or amusing tend to be stolen more frequently.”

The theft is often costly and inconvenient (and can possibly be dangerous) for the municipality or agency that owns the sign. In the United States, street signs generally cost between $100 and $500 to replace although, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation, the bigger freeway signs cost between $30,000 and $77,000. Radio host Dori Monson has a word or two to say about that on MyNorthwest.com.

I know I’m tempting fate but I’m pretty sure no one has ever stolen North Puffin’s Abblesnaffy Boulevard sign.

Embden, Maine cannot say the same for Katie’s Crotch.

Katies Crotch Rd

The Maine town spends hundreds of dollars every year to replace their stolen street signs. Fortunately, Maine doesn’t contract with WashDOT.

Katies Crotch Road starts in East New Portland, crosses Gilman Stream, and parallels the Carrabassett River before ending on Route 16 connects Embden. I’m thinking every wag who dates a Katherine envies those road signs. Town officials unsuccessfully proposed changing the name to just Katie Road at Town Meeting on Saturday.

The road has been known as Katies Crotch since long before there were street signs in town but no one fesses up to knowing why. There used to be a tavern run by a woman named Katie on that road. We don’t know what kind of Katie she was, but eyebrows generally wiggle when that story is told. Another explanation leaves out the tavern but has that a woman named Katie used to live on the road and would sit on her porch wearing no underwear. Eyebrows waggled a lot more with that. A less intriguing story has it that a family with the last name Katie used to live at the intersection with Route 16, and “crotch” referred to the V shape of the intersection. I think it’s named for the tree that grew there that six-year old Katie climbed and perched in before she was taken from us in that unfortunate accident with the timber truck and biplane.

Zillow lists a nice looking, 768 square foot, 1 bedroom, single family camp on 1.66 acres on Katies Crotch Road. Water views and everything.

That sign may be the most stolen in the country. The Selectboard chair says the thefts occur so frequently that “you would think every dorm room in the state of Maine should have one by now.” It cost $200 last year alone, not including labor, to replace the one road sign in Embden. A previous motion to rename the street failed in 2012.

Fortunately, the measure for a new Interstate with an Embden exit (and the accompanying $30,000 sign, approximated below) also failed although Troy, Michigan reports that their Big Beaver Road, Exit 69, is only the seventh most stolen road sign in the nation.

Katies Crotch Rd - Exit 69
 

Backhoe Boy(s)

Posted on by

Under ConstructionThe roads and streets here in the Keys are often “under improvement.” North Roosevelt Boulevard in Key Weird has been torn up for 86 years, we think. We all know about the $330 million 18 mile boondoggle that had that part of U.S.1 all discombobulated for almost as long. (It’s “finished” now, which means we have new paint on the pig and a single accident can still close the road for hours.) Marathon dug up Overseas Highway to put a sewer pipe down the middle which guarantees more digging to fix the sewer pipe down the middle. And here in South Puffin, we’re cutting through driveways to install storm drains.

And those are just the purposeful slowdowns.

Construction season lasts decade-round here in the Keys and there are always Tonka toys to play with. Great big Tonka toys.

Today’s stories start about when we arrived in South Puffin, back when Whitehead Street in Key Weird was dug up to replace storm drains. As with all Keys roadwork, Whitehead was a shambles for months. The Green Parrot tells the story:

“Toppino would leave their heavy equipment outside the bar over the weekend and one of our regulars, ‘Caveman Dave,’ a heavy-equipment operator himself, decided that rather than walk or take a cab, he would simply borrow one of Charley Toppino’s backhoes to continue his bar-hopping. The police caught up with Dave as he pulled up to The Bull and Whistle and the best part of this story is that the Key West Police, wanting to return the backhoe to where it belonged and realizing that none of them knew how to operate it, made Dave drive the backhoe to The Parrot before arresting him for DUI in full view of a Parrot crowd that was simultaneously overjoyed at Dave’s seemingly successful circuit, with police escort no less, and outraged at his subsequent incarceration.”

It goes without saying, the Parrot said, that Dave was “good people.”

Caveman Dave’s spiritual nephew was up in Marathon the other night.


A homeless guy took a hoe on joyride and ran afoul of several deputies. He started out by borrowing the backhoe from near the Marathon Community Park about four-five miles from the bridge. Sewer work is still ongoing there along U.S. 1 and the keys were in the ignition. He dumped boulders at this end of the bridge to build a chicane at around mile marker 47. He then headed south, topping out at at least 13 mph, and nearly made it to the other end at mile marker 40 before spinning it around on its axis to come back the other way.

His apparent reason for the adventure: Traffic moves too fast, man. He wanted to slow the other motorists down.

The storied Seven Mile BridgesThe deputies reported “He wasn’t really too coherent.”

Florida Department of Transportation says “Backhoe Boy” caused only about $30,000 in damage to the Seven Mile Bridge.

Backhoe Boy bunged up (and probably broke out) hundreds of the reflective pavement markers and did “minor damage to the bridge concrete deck.” Betcha that’s not what the report in the DOT budget says. The repair work should be completed in a couple of days.

Charges filed against Backhoe Boy include driving on a suspended license, driving an unregistered vehicle and not having proper lights for night driving. They also dinged him for vehicle theft, reckless driving, fleeing from law officers, aggravated assault, littering and damaging U.S. 1.

Of course, it will be a $7 million, two-year project at the other end.

As far as I know, the backhoe was left on the bridge for some time after the incident.

 

Mail Order

Posted on by

Both North and South Puffin are somewhere beyond the end of the rainbow so instant gratification is more than a little difficult here. When I was a child, my family would literally mail an order form to a company like Sears and they would send a box of goodies by parcel post the day after the order reached them.

Mail call was always like Christmas around the Harper household and planning was important because it generally took a few days for the (first class) letter to get to the vendor and more than a week for the package to get back.

Today, we click a button on a website and a fulfillment house somewhere generates a label for same day or next day delivery but the principle is the same.

And some of us still call it mail-order. Heck, I usually counsel clients to ship via the US Post Office. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it gets there on time, I tell them. In fact, I shipped a box by parcel post to a business up north on Friday. It was in their PO Box this morning.

Confession: I take drugs.

The Thin, Gray, Plastic PouchThese days, of course, most people my age do. We take anti-cholesterol meds and anti-arthritis meds and blood pressure meds and anti-anxiety meds and anti-dizziness meds and anti-gout meds and antihistamines. We take drugs to combat osteoporosis and respiratory difficulty and heart attacks and sudden bladder symptoms. Then we take diuretics to help us pee. After all that, we really do need the antidepressants.

Anyway, our insurance companies train us all to buy by mail order to save us money and time.

I do.

I ordered my usual 90-day refill from the Humana Pharmacy in Phoenix on December 4, 2015.

12/7 email
Your Humana Pharmacy Order Has Shipped!
Order Number 120128889
Estimated Shipping Time: 3-5 days
Click on “Tracking id” under your order information.

Humana sends its mail order drugs by US Mail. They drop the bottle(s) in a thin, gray plastic pouch and send it off into the night from the Phoenix PO.

USPS Tracking PageI clicked the tracking link.

Humana sent the “preshipment info” to the US Postal Service the same time they sent me the email notification. The next thing I know, the package is in Essex, Vermont, just three days later. Nobody, least of all USPS, knows how it got there from Arizona.

Pretty good, eh?

Except it was supposed to be shipped to South Puffin, not North Puffin.

12/11 Tracking Page
Available for Pickup, North Puffin VT

12/11 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT

12/18 Tracking Page
Arrived at USPS Facility, Brockton MA

12/18 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold

From Massachusetts, the package went to Jacksonville and back to Springfield, MA.

12/27 Tracking Page
Departed USPS Destination Facility, Springfield MA

12/27 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold

Destination Facility? It was on its way back to North Puffin.

12/28 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT

12/29 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold

That was the last email from Humana which still may think they haven’t heard from my doc. It was also the last we heard from USPS for a while.

They did turn up ten days later. The USPS tracking page reported they “arrived at our USPS facility in JERSEY CITY, NJ 07097 on January 7, 2016 at 8:54 am. The item is currently in transit to the destination.”

Unbelievable. Jersey City is *never* in the routing from North Puffin to Springfield MA to Jax to here. Humana shipped December 7. Humana, btw, keeps emailing “Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.”

My drugs went to Phoenix.

Phoenix?

Really? Phoenix?

When they arrived at the “facility” in Phoenix, I called my friend Liz Arden who lives out there somewhere. She promised to look for them. No joy. Meanwhile, I used the “Contact us” link on the tracking page to send them this nastygram:

“USPS has forwarded this package
everywhere except to me. The
package contains prescription
medication that is now almost
a month overdue.
USPS needs to find it and get it
here by January 15, 2016 even
if you have to send it by FedEx.”

On January 16, my drugs were in California and I had not heard from USPS.

I hope they really are the drugs I ordered.

Philadelphia on January 18! It will be interesting to see if the drugs turn north or south; odds on they’re headed for North Puffin again. On the other hand, the postmaster in Marathon called and left a message. She had gotten my nastygram from the website. She didn’t leave a phone number, though. I tried to call back at the phone number given on USPS.com (and at 1-800-Ask-USPS) but the number has been disconnected. Except when it’s busy.

The tracking page said my drugs were still in Philly on January 20 but I did finally reach the Marathon Post Office. A nice rep there said she would send a slip to a supervisor. She also suggested I call USPS customer service.

After 33 minutes on hold at the 1-800-CallUSPS number, the lovely Sammy came on the line. Sammy sounded Chinese which made me wonder. We do know USPS outsources a lot of functions, particularly truck transportation of mail, so I figured it’s possible. I found lots of tin hat sites saying that USPS outsources their call center but no real evidence. One fellow posted this:

“So here’s the deal – I called the USPS to get information on a lost package I had shipped. After 20 minutes of miscommunication, on both ends, I asked, ‘Are you working in India?’
“Response – ‘Yes.'”
“For shits and giggles, I called 1-800-ASK-USPS a few hours later. Had a brief conversation about the tracking of the same package. The accent prompted me to ask, in a pleasant voice… ‘What country are you working out of today?’
“Response – ‘China’.”

Anywho, Sammy promised to have a supervisor find my package, take it out of the forwarding system, and manually send it to me. Yeah, you’re right. That didn’t happen either.

The post office (eCustomerCare National @ usps.gov) emailed me January 23 and apologized for “the inconvenience that you have experienced in regards to the delivery of your package.” The tracking page had had no updates since the drugs arrived in Philly. eCustomerCare National suggested I ask Humana to send a replacement order.

1/28 Tracking Page
Arrived at Post Office, North Puffin VT

1/28 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT

The North Puffin Post Office received the drugs and forwarded them before I knew they had left Philly.

<SMH>

Still, when I called, the clerk there said she’d find them on the truck. She called the Swanton PO to divert them, tracked them down on the truck, had the driver hand the package to a clerk in the Swanton PO. The Swanton clerk had prepared a Priority Mail box so she dropped the bag of drugs in the new box and sent it. They departed the Swanton Post Office at 3:18 pm. The North Puffin clerk called me back with the tracking number. Expected Delivery Day is Monday, February 1, 2016.

Air Mail Package in the Baggage CompartmentJanuary 28. The cool news of the day is that, 52 days after Humana shipped them, a human bean found my drugs put them in a new box, and sent them by airplane.

January 29. According to USPS.com, my drugs arrived in Nashua this morning … and stayed there. USPS.com isn’t very good at updates.

“USPS is definitely not good at updates and communication,” Miz Arden said. “I rarely get information about USPS-based shipments, except those via Amazon or similar company that will themselves track the package and provide the updates. Sometimes USPS provides an update (I suspect the company who shipped with them worked that out with them), but it’s usually the day they ship, and then the day after the carrier placed it in your parcel box.”

They seem willing to tell us when things arrive at (some) entry points but seem to have no idea of departures and waypoints.

This package started in Phoenix, AZ. It went to North Puffin three times, to Florida twice, back to Phoenix, and surfed in California once before winding up in South Puffin after 54 days. You should see all its passport stamps!

US Mail AM107, a 1942 DC-3 in Ozark Airlines liveryJanuary 30. My drugs arrived! A day ahead of schedule and 54 days after they shipped. And all it took was a real person who put her hands on the package to rip it out of the forwarding system. The thin, gray plastic pouch inside the Priority Mail box looked like it had been ravaged by wolves. And I have no idea what Humana was talking to my doctor about.

At least we now know how to get a package from Phoenix to South Puffin, now. It has to go by way of the Ozarks.

 

Bzzzzzzzz

Posted on by

It was anything but an average night in South Puffin. The temp dropped almost to 50°F. I woke in the dark and didn’t want to get up because it was c-o-l-d in that room. Actually c-o-l-d in this whole house. I did get up eventually because the alarm sounded like robot bees.

That’s unexpected because I should wake to oldies music or, at worst, commercials, one after another.

I used to have a wonderful GE clock radio on my bedside table. Super-Heterodyne receiver. Direct entry keypad for time and radio tuning. “Woodgrain” finish. Gradu-wake. Two alarms, each with completely separate controls so I could set one to turn on the radio and the other the alarm buzzer. And did I mention direct entry? None of this tap-and-hold-and-hope-you-don’t-speed-past-the-time setting.

It died, darn it.

Now I have two alarm clocks by my bed, one set to turn on a gentle radio, the other to wake me with the alarm. Two separate appliances to do what one did. Two separate appliances with the same Stone Age controls my 1970s GE replaced.

Anyway, robot bees.

South Puffin is over the horizon from pretty much everywhere so we have no over-the-air broadcast TV and our few FM radio stations are the ones with antennas right here on the island chain. I generally tune to an oldies station (it’s The Mix for anyone who cares) with its antenna on Survivor Island, the island known on maps as Boot Key. There is no bridge to Boot Key any more, so when the station goes out, someone has to swim the channel.

That happens with some frequency.

Still, this morning, the station was playing; it was my antenna that screwed the pooch. I reached out to the power cord from under the blankets and the mad bees faded into the Crests singing 16 Candles.

Cold out there, so I pulled my hand back. The bees returned.

I’m thinking the mad bees are electronic noise.

I put my hand on the cord again. “Sixteen candles in my heart will glow…”

Back under the covers. Bzzzzzzzzz.

Radio Bob tells us that Most clock/table radios use the power cord as an antenna although an iPod with an FM radio uses its headphone cord as the antenna! I don’t know how the radio chip in cellphones works. FM radio waves travel line-of-sight, meaning more-or-less in straight lines. Objects that get between the transmitter and receiver weaken them.

The antenna is me.

This is not a new phenomenon; I’ve always been able to affect radios although it doesn’t always happen. I do it to the stereo in my North Puffin study. I do it to the living room A/V system here. I’ve done it at Rufus’ and Lee Bruhl’s and Fanny Guay’s. Even Liz Arden noticed it once.

Ms. Arden and I talked about it this morning. She’s an Electrical Engineer so I figured she’d know. She thinks it may be impedance matching.

Huh?

“Hmm,” she said. “You need a broadcast engineer or RF guy.”

Radio Bob says there are plenty of sources of interference like ham radio operators, computers, TVs, fluorescent lights, and electric fences. The hams have been quiet. I hadn’t started the computers, TVs, or twisty fluorescents (I was still in bed, remember?). And South Puffin ordinances forbid electric fences.

Radio Bob says Get a better antenna or a better location for it. Or move me to a different room.

In our next episode, Liz Arden asks why she turns off streetlights when she drives by.

Really. I’ve seen it happen. She can drive along in her motorized roller skate and a streetlight will go out as she passes only to come back on again a minute or so later. It’s happened often enough not to be coincidence.

I think it’s her Cerulean aura, but I’m open to other theories.