MDC Wellness center accepting gifts for youth center in Argentina

The Wellness Center at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus will be accepting new and old toys up until Friday, Dec. 21, to benefit You & Me Together, an organization started by Jose Fuyana, a resident of Fisher Island, to aid children in Mendoza, Argentina.

The Wellness Center is in the Gibson Center, Building 7, at the MDC Kendall Campus, 11011 SW 104th St. The center phone number is 305-237-0735.

In addition to toys, the foundation accepts monetary donations and any kind of sporting equipment, like soccer balls and tennis rackets, to support a youth center in Mendoza.

The first shipment of toys will be distributed throughout villages in Mendoza on Los Reyes Magos, Three Kings Day, and another shipment will be sent in January.

For information about You & Me Together, visit www.youandmetogether.org or e-mail Fuyana at donate@youandmetogether.org.

Grocery Delivery Service

Tired of waiting in supermarket checkout lines or too busy to go to the market? Now there's a new option: www.beachgroceries.com.

The Miami Beach-based online grocery delivery service began operations in June. Its website features more than 15,000 products (up from 10,000 when the site first launched), including fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, cheeses, poultry, kosher and organic items, household cleaning supplies, health and beauty products, baby formula and pet food. Delivery is available to zip codes from the Brickell area north to Aventura.

Beachgroceries.com is a family-owned venture: its partners are Beach native Dov Lozenik, his father, Michael Lozenik and brother-in-law, Shmuli Klein.

Lozenik says beachgroceries.com has almost 1,000 customers and is already profitable. He says clients include residents, small boutiques and cafe restaurants, as well as young working people ordering for elderly parents. He says the business is a success (unlike the now-defunct Publix online service) because ``we're trying to be more local and specialize in customer service.''

To order, customers must set up an account. They get $10 off the first purchase. Grocery lists are built by browsing the store and adding groceries to a shopping cart. Then a delivery time is chosen.

Beachgroceries.com delivers weekdays via a refrigerated van from 8-11 a.m. and 5-8 p.m. Orders must be placed by 5 p.m. the prior day. There's no charge for delivery on orders over $120, $10 if under. Fisher Island residents pay an extra $20. Blame the ferry.

Art Basel Weekend!!

When the Miami Beach Convention Center opens its doors to the public on December 6 for the annual four-day Art Basel expo, a tsunami of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators and art-world followers will flood the 262,960-square-foot exhibition space to ogle, and possibly buy, everything from Impressionist landscapes and Cubist collages to neon sculptures and avant-garde video art—220 booths displaying the works of some 2,000 artists from 30 countries.

"Art Basel Miami Beach has one of the planet's highest concentrations of wealth and talent," boasts fair director Samuel Keller. "It's an explosive mixture of art, intellect, glamour and money." The art mart (a spinoff of the international fair held annually in Switzerland) has some of the glitz of Hollywood's Oscars, but it has also become one of the key events of the art-world calendar, a place where trends get set, deals get done and names get made—even if it has been criticized for its frenzied atmosphere and rampant commercialism. The New York Times has called it "an Art Costco for billionaires," and conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose work is marketed at the fair, observes: "You have to understand that it's not about mounting an art show, it's about selling art." But, he adds, "It's a chance to see a lot of good art in one place, even if it's not under optimum conditions."

"Art collectors love the sort of mall experience that art fairs provide," says Walter Robinson, editor of Artnet Magazine. "You walk down aisles and there's pressure to buy because the collectors know that there are other collectors there vying for the same choice artworks and they know they've only got a few days, if that, to make their move."

Why Miami Beach? "It seemed a good place to bring together the art scenes of the Americas and Europe in winter," says Keller, who is also one of the fair's founders as well as the director of Switzerland's fair. "The city was open and ready for a new international art show with a contemporary concept, and the South Florida art community was willing to actively support and embrace it."

While most of the action takes place at the convention center, there are a dozen or so subsidiary fairs—Pulse, Scope NADA, Aqua and Wave, among others—that have sprung up in Miami Basel's wake. An ancillary Design Miami fair, across Biscayne Bay in Miami's booming Design District, showcases furniture, lighting, antiques and objets d'art.

Sparked by Art Basel, Miami's art scene is enjoying a rapid escalation. Galleries in the Wynwood Art District, not so long ago a run-down area of old industrial buildings, warehouses and factories, are opening left and right. And two of the city's largest museums have announced ambitious expansion plans. The Miami Art Museum (MAM) is building a new $220 million space downtown, and North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) will nearly double in size. The city's art mania is also due in no small part to a handful of energetic collectors.

Beach Club sand Renewal This week

The Beach Club BEACH will be closed Monday, November 26 through Thursday, November 29. We are dredging the beach. We are sorry for the inconvenience. The club BEACH will re-open on Friday November 30, 2007.

Golf range opens this Saturday!!

This Saturday, November 17^th the golf practice range will open in a limited capacity. The practice tee on the west end will be open beginning at 8:00 a.m. and close at 5:00 p.m. Due to the course renovation, carts will have to be parked on the cart path along the fifth hole. It is possible, if there is a large turnout that the range may have to be closed for an hour in the middle of the day for the purpose of picking up golf balls. The recently laid sod necessitates picking the balls up by hand as the range picker can not be used for approximately one week. This is the first step in a very exciting time for “The Links” as we look forward to the opening of your newly renovated golf course

TS Noel updates

Tropical Storm Noel will not make landfall over Florida; however, south Florida through Thursday will be lashed by strong wind gusts, rain and pounding surf.

The forecast track maintains that Tropical Storm Noel's storm-force winds will remain well offshore the southeast Florida coast, but the combination of Noel with high pressure across the southeast United States will result in a strong pressure gradient that will result in winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts in excess of 40 mph through Wednesday evening before the storm begins to move way from the area.

On a bright note, The high winds and swells from Tropical Storm Noel are combining for some good surfing conditions from Third Street beach to Government Cut.

In Florida, foreign buyers help buoy high-end real estate market

In a situation typical of wealthy enclaves across the United States, the glistening waterfront glass towers on Miami Beach, the sprawling estates of Palm Beach and the clustered mansions in Naples continue to sell.

Indeed, Florida homes and condos with price tags of $1 million or more are still changing hands at roughly the same price, albeit not as briskly as they did a year ago, according to real estate data. And the rate of foreclosure for lower-income homes is far greater than for homes over $1 million.

"The very, very high end of the markets in communities such as the Bay area, Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Miami and to a lesser degree Chicago, Seattle and Washington that have global appeal have held up much better the rest of the housing market," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "The top end runs on its own dynamic that tends to be more immune to the ups and downs of the global economy. A recession would certainly not help the high end but it would not undermine it. And much of their buying is done with cash and not affected by the global financial turmoil and its impact on the availability of mortgage."

The Florida market not only continues to appeal to wealthy retirees and to second home buyers, particularly from the Northeastern United States. The state's temperate climate and low taxes have also for years drawn well-healed foreign buyers, which have helped buoy the market's upper end.

Ten percent of all foreign buyers bought homes for $1 million or more, according to the National Association of Realtors' study of home buyers in Florida in 2006. The study also showed that of the foreign buyers 21 percent are from Britain. The next major group is from Latin America: principally Venezuela - 11 percent, followed by Colombia at 4 percent.

On Fisher Island in Miami Beach, a tony private island that has its own golf course, tennis courts and spa, half the island's residents are French, Russian and South American and the balance are U.S. citizens.

The market's higher end remains healthy. In the Miami area, the median price for condos over $1 million is still holding steady at $1.5 million so far this year, according to the Realtor Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches. And the median price for single family homes has in fact risen to $1.51 million from $1.46 million.

Further north on the exclusive island of Palm Beach, the median prices for both condominiums and single family homes have risen this year, according to data compiled by the Palm Beach real estate lawyer Leslie Evans.