Paz and I went to the 22nd Annual Pompano Beach Seafood Festival last night(http://www.pompanobeachseafoodfestival.com/). You should check out the links I put in the story. Just paste into your browser (without the parentheses)since this sight does not allow hyperlinks. Anyway, Pompano Beach, sometimes referred to as Fish City, one of the oldest cities in south Florida, a former fishing village, is named after the pompano fish (http://indian-river.fl.us/fishing/fish/pompflor.html) which frequents the waters there. They feed on small shrimp and crabs and especially the mole crab, also known as a sand flea (http://www.mexfish.com/fish/cwmolec/cwmolec.htm) which lives in the sand and can be caught as the waves break over the beach. My kid's used to play with them when they were little. Pompano is one of my favorite fish. Very tasty, especially grilled. Always cooked with the head on because there is an oil gland that runs through the head similar to that of a sperm whale which contains the spermaceti (but that is another story all in itself). Anyway, the oil diffuses into the meat. Yum. Oddly enough, I did not see any for sale which does not surprise me because it is not a commercially caught fish and it's numbers are not quite what they were years ago. I did eat some excellent garlic steamed clams, raw oysters, mussels in a paella type broth, a cevichi type bowl of a shrimp, crawdad and conch vinaigrette and a couple of yummy ice cold stone crab claws served with that special Dijon mustard and mayo sauce.
The Temptations were playing on the stage which is set up on the beach (see gallery). It was a beautiful night and the old boys could still really play, dance and sing well. Good old Motown. Amazing how many hits they had and how you know all the words. It was fun but it was almost archival, like watching a video at the Smithsonian or at a Hard Rock Cafe in Detroit.
One weird thing did happen. We went with two other couples, one of which were my neighbors. The young lady next door had an unexpected fainting episode. I had seen this before in women in their 20s and 30s. Not that uncommon because it can be caused by several factors. She was not drinking or doing anything else "unhealthy" for that matter and best we can tell it might have been caused by some allergy medication she had taken with not much to eat so it caused her heart to race. The really weird thing is that I have a great picture of her passing out (see gallery). I was getting ready to take a couple of pictures and my friend turned to me panicked and said, "Joe, I don't know what to do here!" and I instinctively snapped the photo as she was going down. She said everything went white and down she went. Look at their expressions. The paramedics arrived and all that good stuff, vitals were fine and she snapped out of it and was OK but needless to say, we left early. That's OK. We are going back on Sunday.

A few weeks back I went to Key West on business, though not much of it. I call on a few accounts there but I went down on Sunday morning, made my calls Monday morning and came back Tuesday in the middle of the day. Plenty of pleasure mixed with a little business. I took Paz with me and we had an absolute blast. We stayed at a really cute B&B, rented a moped and just had so much fun seeing the sights, shopping, eating and drinking. I really hated to come back. It's soooo laid back in the Conch Republic! I put a couple of pictures in the gallery. And, oh yea, that's me fighting Spongeman. See ya'