John Carter's been at it again:  figuring it out and then showing us.  Here's his information on how to deal with keychain on Mavericks:  
        Setting up the Keychain Access to share between devices got to be a bit of a chore today.  I had to go online to resolve a serious problem.
        A prompt popped up asking me for the keychain 'Local Items' password, and then it wouldn’t accept anything I put in.
        The solution is (found online 
here) :
        Your login.keychain password is out of sync with the new iCloud keychain and needs to be re-sync'd.
         The new iCloud keychain is either called "Local items" if you don't have 
syncing enabled or "iCloud" if you enabled iCloud keychain sync.
- Open 'Keychain Access' Application
- Select the 'login' keychain from the keychains list
- Click the lock at the top to lock the login keychain
- Click the lock again to unlock the login keychain
5. After entering your login keychain password you should be presented with a dialog: 
6. Clicking the reset button will re-sync your login.keychain password with the iCloud keychain password.
If everything from the above fails for whatever reason the last resort you can do the following:
- Open terminal
- cd ~/Library/Keychains
- ls  
- When you 'ls' here you will see a folder that contains a bunch of random number liks so:
- 94ED610F-DD96-4ECF-A2BC-7D2F8651A464  (this number is unique on each system)
 
- rm -rf 94ED610F-DD96-4ECF-A2BC-7D2F8651A464
- Reboot 
-  and  when you log back in everything should be back to normal.    And that's it.  # # # 
Thanks, John for your expertise!