Funny how your expectations sometime pile up in a collision with reality. For years I looked forward to retirement so I could spend 10 or 12 hours a day doing only what I wanted, instead of that endless grind of making a living and putting food on the table. Ambition plans stacked up in front of me -- expand the barn, build a forge, put up a new game fence, plant a field and then a whole hillside of apple trees. Consolidate the blueberry patches, make a dozen or more raised beds for the vegetables, build a new garden shed before the old house where we store garden stuff down in the field just gives up and collapses on itself.
So, nearly two years into retirement I've managed to expand the barn and build eight raised beds. That's it. All the other projects are in various stages of their beginnings, and it ain't nobody's fault. On the good days, I've too often been gone, running down the mountain for this meeting or that appointment or to keep up with old friends somewhere down the road. On the bad days, I've been looking out the window, fuming.
So today I'm blaming the weather. When it gets wet up here, even when it's not raining, it keeps on staying wet for days on end. Zach Robinson, the estimable Virginia Tech senior and weather blogger who hopes for a career in broadcast meteorology, provides insight as he subs for Kevin Myatt, the Roanoke Times copy editor who everybody in the Middle Atlantic and Southern Appalachians turns to for weather explanations that you can understand:
Robinson writes: If you are not familiar with Southwest Virginia
weather, you may be a little curious as to what exactly my blog title
is referring to. If you are a bit more familiar, you should know all too
well the consequences of an onshore flow. At its most basic level, when
the surface winds blow from the East, they bring moisture off the
Atlantic and bank it up against the mountains. This is known also as a
“wedge” or a “dam.” The pattern is frequent enough to be a significant
player, but rare enough for us to take note when it sets up.
The Blue Ridge plays a key role in the setup, allowing for the air at
the surface to get trapped along and east of the Appalachians. The high
ridges act as a dam for the cool moist air. The result is what you are
seeing now (coupled with a shortwave trough digging through): Days of
fog/drizzle and on-again, off-again rain. This pattern is similar to the
primary pattern in the Pacific Northwest. The prevailing westerly flow
brings in Pacific moisture, dams it up against The Cascades, and causes
the wet weather that region is known for.
This happened around here in 2003, the year I started building stuff in the woods, starting with a story-and-a-half privy. It either rained or fogged or gloomed so much that the woods didn't dry out until July 1, yet Jim Newlin and I were out there in the forest in April, getting wetter by the moment, starting on the outhouse and eventually moving on to the workshop. Same kind of thing this spring. Every time I go out to do some work, it either rains, or fog closes in and drapes a layer of wet clingy invisible moss over everything, including me, or it just stays soggy and you can feel 67-year-old knees and elbows starting to rust and lock up.
And thus: The walls are framed for the new shed, but nothing else. The old farrior's forge stands in the barn, awaiting its shack. The fence posts and rool of game fencing lie in the fast-growing grass, disappearing from view a little more each day. I managed to augur out 10 of the 22 holes before the last of my shear pins gave their short lives for the cause. Lumber for more raised beds lies in my wood shed. Mulch for the blueberry patches continues to settle in moldering clumps around the edge of the fields.
And I would say that my well of patience continues to dwindle, except I never had any patience to begin with, and the well is dry. And today's forecast? More of what Zach Robinson describes as "fog/drizzle and on-again, off-again rain," looks like. About the only thing I know to do is follow the advice of a good friend: Pour a short one, get out a good thick book and lie down for awhile.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Friday, April 19, 2013
Credits in the box
During my impecunious boat-owning days a wise man told me about a theory that he felt helped keep him and his vessel safe: The credit in the box. This theory held that the more credits you put in the box -- replacing worn dock lines, changing the oil on the engine, replacing the fuel filters, updating the through-hull valves, downloading the latest chart information, upgrading the VHF radio antenna, greasing the steering cables and a million more chores -- the more likely you were to be able deal with an emergency out on the water and the less likely you were to find yourself in a life-threatening position.
It's a good theory for getting through life, too, I imagine, but at the time I was just trying to keep up with the challenge of keeping an old tub afloat and in reasonable repair so I could get back into the slip without (A) breaking anything or (B) hurting anyone. So I spent a lot of time putting credits in the box against the day that might come when all hell broke loose and I needed enough readiness and good luck to survive.
Those days came a couple of times down on the Lower Neuse just off Pamlico Sound, a treacherous body of water not because it's deep, but because it's shallow -- and the bathtub effect from raging winds in a bad storm made it supremely difficult to steer on a slow boat. We got hit twice with white squalls -- storms so sudden and so violent that it was impossible even to see the bow of our 37-foot sailboat. In both instances we relied on the trackback feature of a new GPS so that we could follow our digital path back the way we had come, and a newly replaced antenna (the old one was water-soaked, crusty and corroded and would fade after a few seconds of broadcasting) that allowed us to contact nearby shrimp boats and warn them where we were. Those unseen shrimp boats would put down their outriggers during a storm, giving them more stability but also vastly widening their profiles -- and we worried about running into them in the whiteout conditions. Nervous times, but we came through -- although after one storm I never again found the horseshoe life preserver we kept tied to the stern rail. Blew away so fast I didn't even see or hear it go. One moment it was there by my elbow, the next it was somewhere over, I don't know, Whortonsville or Hoboken.
Putting credits in the box also meant keeping spares for every essential part on the boat -- spare fuel filters, spare float switches for the bilge pumps, spare bilge pumps, spare fuses, spare cotter pins, spare stainless steel split-rings and machine screws and wood screws and grommet maker and wire connectors and nylon-center nuts and 12-volt cable and deck cleats and scores of other small parts. They went into a big red box -- the boat box, full of theoretical credits and actual screws, washers, nuts, bolts, wire strippers, clamps, gizmos, widgets, thingamajigs and whatzits, not to mention a pair of left-handed round tuits, that sort of thing.
The boat is long gone -- sold to a sailor who took off for Central America and got within a mile of it before the packing gland of the main shaft floated out and the boat began to take on water. He got in before the boat went down and managed to save the day -- but I hung onto that red box. It resides atop a stack of Southern yellow pine in my shop, and it keeps on saving my day. Yesterday I went to it twice -- once for a half-inch ovalheaded machine screw and nut to replace a lost set on a six-foot long circular saw guide, and again for short stainless screws to fasten the wobbly heads on a couple of garden cultivators.
That boat box has bailed me out more times than I can recall, and every time I look in it I find something else that still may be useful one day. A single-pole, single-throw line switch. A pocket hacksaw with blade. A pair of U-bolts the next time I plan to put up a stern-pulpit UHF antenna. A small tube of a sticky adhesive caulk that sailors call White Death, because once you use a little of it, you manage to track it around the boat. It never comes up and it never dies off.
All this makes me a pack rat, of course. I hardly ever throw anything out. I still have raised panels from a door in a Greensboro house where William Sidney Porter -- O. Henry in his writing days -- played as a child. There's a half of a fancy stylized brick from walkway around the building that once housed the N.C. Supreme Court. A piece of granite, somewhere, from the foundation of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. And somewhere, if I can ever find it, there's a limb section from a tree where Mosby's Rangers were reputed to have hung some Yankees in retaliation for the hanging of some Rangers during the Civil War.
And so I hang on to old pairs of pliers that no longer ply, rusty lag screws and chewed up carriage bolts that no longer fasten and an ancient sawtooth setter that may come in real handy one day. As they say Down East, you just don't never know.
It's a good theory for getting through life, too, I imagine, but at the time I was just trying to keep up with the challenge of keeping an old tub afloat and in reasonable repair so I could get back into the slip without (A) breaking anything or (B) hurting anyone. So I spent a lot of time putting credits in the box against the day that might come when all hell broke loose and I needed enough readiness and good luck to survive.
Those days came a couple of times down on the Lower Neuse just off Pamlico Sound, a treacherous body of water not because it's deep, but because it's shallow -- and the bathtub effect from raging winds in a bad storm made it supremely difficult to steer on a slow boat. We got hit twice with white squalls -- storms so sudden and so violent that it was impossible even to see the bow of our 37-foot sailboat. In both instances we relied on the trackback feature of a new GPS so that we could follow our digital path back the way we had come, and a newly replaced antenna (the old one was water-soaked, crusty and corroded and would fade after a few seconds of broadcasting) that allowed us to contact nearby shrimp boats and warn them where we were. Those unseen shrimp boats would put down their outriggers during a storm, giving them more stability but also vastly widening their profiles -- and we worried about running into them in the whiteout conditions. Nervous times, but we came through -- although after one storm I never again found the horseshoe life preserver we kept tied to the stern rail. Blew away so fast I didn't even see or hear it go. One moment it was there by my elbow, the next it was somewhere over, I don't know, Whortonsville or Hoboken.
Putting credits in the box also meant keeping spares for every essential part on the boat -- spare fuel filters, spare float switches for the bilge pumps, spare bilge pumps, spare fuses, spare cotter pins, spare stainless steel split-rings and machine screws and wood screws and grommet maker and wire connectors and nylon-center nuts and 12-volt cable and deck cleats and scores of other small parts. They went into a big red box -- the boat box, full of theoretical credits and actual screws, washers, nuts, bolts, wire strippers, clamps, gizmos, widgets, thingamajigs and whatzits, not to mention a pair of left-handed round tuits, that sort of thing.
The boat is long gone -- sold to a sailor who took off for Central America and got within a mile of it before the packing gland of the main shaft floated out and the boat began to take on water. He got in before the boat went down and managed to save the day -- but I hung onto that red box. It resides atop a stack of Southern yellow pine in my shop, and it keeps on saving my day. Yesterday I went to it twice -- once for a half-inch ovalheaded machine screw and nut to replace a lost set on a six-foot long circular saw guide, and again for short stainless screws to fasten the wobbly heads on a couple of garden cultivators.
That boat box has bailed me out more times than I can recall, and every time I look in it I find something else that still may be useful one day. A single-pole, single-throw line switch. A pocket hacksaw with blade. A pair of U-bolts the next time I plan to put up a stern-pulpit UHF antenna. A small tube of a sticky adhesive caulk that sailors call White Death, because once you use a little of it, you manage to track it around the boat. It never comes up and it never dies off.
All this makes me a pack rat, of course. I hardly ever throw anything out. I still have raised panels from a door in a Greensboro house where William Sidney Porter -- O. Henry in his writing days -- played as a child. There's a half of a fancy stylized brick from walkway around the building that once housed the N.C. Supreme Court. A piece of granite, somewhere, from the foundation of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. And somewhere, if I can ever find it, there's a limb section from a tree where Mosby's Rangers were reputed to have hung some Yankees in retaliation for the hanging of some Rangers during the Civil War.
And so I hang on to old pairs of pliers that no longer ply, rusty lag screws and chewed up carriage bolts that no longer fasten and an ancient sawtooth setter that may come in real handy one day. As they say Down East, you just don't never know.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Up a lazy river -- Parkway to the Waterway
So the phone rings a few weeks ago. It's a friend calling from down south. She and her husband own a lovely Krogen 42 trawler and they've wintered over in the Bahamas, before he stepped off a dock, landed badly and shattered his ankle. Could we possibly come help move the trawler back to North Carolina from Florida?
For 40 some years the answer would have been no. Jobs, kids, obligations. But for decades I've wanted to run the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway down to Florida -- maybe all the way around to the Gulf and as far as Brownsville Texas. My college roomie's father-in-law and mother-in- law took such a trip on his retirement. And now that we're retired, it took me this long to say yes: "Lemme think about it OK we'll go."
A few days later we were in not-quite-sunny Vero Beach City Marina, loading up four dock carts worth of groceries, whiskey, clothes, wine, dogs, foul weather gear and old salts and heading up the Waterway. I once wrote a story for the Charlotte Observer about the two grand routes flanking North Carolina and much of the East Coast -- the Blue Ridge Parkway to the west, running from Tennessee through North Carolina and Virginia and linking up with national parks at either end, and the ICW, linking Norfolk to Florida as part of a longer route of protected shipping routes that you could take from New England to Texas, if you knew how.
I've long known the Parkway was a magnificent thing to see. I had traveled the ICW only from above Belhaven N.C. to Little River S.C. But over nearly three weeks in a trawler whose top speed with the wind and the tides was about 9 m.p.h., and whose slowest cruising speed against wind and tide was maybe 2.5 m.p.h., I saw wonderful things -- manatees and dolphins in the water and osprey and hawks and herons on the wing, snowy egrets in the shallows and armadillos in the sawgrass and wild horses and not-so-wild people along the way. We anchored in Walter Cronkite's favorite anchorage not far from Brookgreen Island, toured R.J. "Dick" Reynolds' fabulous mansion on Sapelo Island, saw the remains of the Carnegie family's "Dungeness" mansion (on a site where Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, namesake of my hometown Greensboro, had his own place first), toured Brookgreen Gardens for the first time since boyhood days and found a suitable dive (Salty Mike's concrete-floored barroom) in Charleston to watch a little basketball while a gale and rainstorm blew itself out.
We crossed bouncy inlets in Port Royal Sound and Winyah Bay and slid up smooth waters along the Indian River and the lower Waccamaw, where we saw ruined rice fields and miles upon miles of rotting and decaying wooden bulkheads and watergates used to flood and drain the fields in that long-ago era. We saw lighthouses and an a quaint brick toll booth in the middle of nowhere and elegant old bascule bridgehouses in the law country. We watched sunsets in places of almost indescribable peace and ran aground so briefly in one inlet that it could only be described as a touch-and-go. The lesson was a good one: If you're going to go aground, do it on an incoming tide. That way you won't be there long.
It's more work handling a boat at an average speed of 7.5 m.p.h. over a 700-mile fetch of the ICW than driving a car at an average of 45 m.p.h. down the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway -- more dock lines to tie off and springlines to warp in and dinghies to hoist and currents to fight, not to mention wind gusts that can make you break out in cold sweats in tricky channels barely wider than the boat. But I wouldn't trade it for anything. I was good to feel the rise and fall of the deck in a choppy shipping lane, hear the slap of a changing tide at anchor in the full moonlight and feel the lift when an incoming tide speeds you on your way home again.
John Masefield wasn't writing about a diesel-powered trawler when he wrote his poem "Sea-Fever," but as an old sailor I appreciate his sentiment:
"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking."
p.s.: I know. For some reason Masefield omitted some form of the verb "go" in the third word of that poem, and I have often seen it printed with "go" inserted ("I must go down....etc.). Wikipedia, if it is correct, preserves Masefield's use of "down" as the verb. It's a curiosity, and one I like. If a writer can't break the rules now and again, where's the fun of it all? JB
For 40 some years the answer would have been no. Jobs, kids, obligations. But for decades I've wanted to run the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway down to Florida -- maybe all the way around to the Gulf and as far as Brownsville Texas. My college roomie's father-in-law and mother-in- law took such a trip on his retirement. And now that we're retired, it took me this long to say yes: "Lemme think about it OK we'll go."
A few days later we were in not-quite-sunny Vero Beach City Marina, loading up four dock carts worth of groceries, whiskey, clothes, wine, dogs, foul weather gear and old salts and heading up the Waterway. I once wrote a story for the Charlotte Observer about the two grand routes flanking North Carolina and much of the East Coast -- the Blue Ridge Parkway to the west, running from Tennessee through North Carolina and Virginia and linking up with national parks at either end, and the ICW, linking Norfolk to Florida as part of a longer route of protected shipping routes that you could take from New England to Texas, if you knew how.
I've long known the Parkway was a magnificent thing to see. I had traveled the ICW only from above Belhaven N.C. to Little River S.C. But over nearly three weeks in a trawler whose top speed with the wind and the tides was about 9 m.p.h., and whose slowest cruising speed against wind and tide was maybe 2.5 m.p.h., I saw wonderful things -- manatees and dolphins in the water and osprey and hawks and herons on the wing, snowy egrets in the shallows and armadillos in the sawgrass and wild horses and not-so-wild people along the way. We anchored in Walter Cronkite's favorite anchorage not far from Brookgreen Island, toured R.J. "Dick" Reynolds' fabulous mansion on Sapelo Island, saw the remains of the Carnegie family's "Dungeness" mansion (on a site where Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, namesake of my hometown Greensboro, had his own place first), toured Brookgreen Gardens for the first time since boyhood days and found a suitable dive (Salty Mike's concrete-floored barroom) in Charleston to watch a little basketball while a gale and rainstorm blew itself out.
We crossed bouncy inlets in Port Royal Sound and Winyah Bay and slid up smooth waters along the Indian River and the lower Waccamaw, where we saw ruined rice fields and miles upon miles of rotting and decaying wooden bulkheads and watergates used to flood and drain the fields in that long-ago era. We saw lighthouses and an a quaint brick toll booth in the middle of nowhere and elegant old bascule bridgehouses in the law country. We watched sunsets in places of almost indescribable peace and ran aground so briefly in one inlet that it could only be described as a touch-and-go. The lesson was a good one: If you're going to go aground, do it on an incoming tide. That way you won't be there long.
It's more work handling a boat at an average speed of 7.5 m.p.h. over a 700-mile fetch of the ICW than driving a car at an average of 45 m.p.h. down the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway -- more dock lines to tie off and springlines to warp in and dinghies to hoist and currents to fight, not to mention wind gusts that can make you break out in cold sweats in tricky channels barely wider than the boat. But I wouldn't trade it for anything. I was good to feel the rise and fall of the deck in a choppy shipping lane, hear the slap of a changing tide at anchor in the full moonlight and feel the lift when an incoming tide speeds you on your way home again.
John Masefield wasn't writing about a diesel-powered trawler when he wrote his poem "Sea-Fever," but as an old sailor I appreciate his sentiment:
"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking."
p.s.: I know. For some reason Masefield omitted some form of the verb "go" in the third word of that poem, and I have often seen it printed with "go" inserted ("I must go down....etc.). Wikipedia, if it is correct, preserves Masefield's use of "down" as the verb. It's a curiosity, and one I like. If a writer can't break the rules now and again, where's the fun of it all? JB
Friday, March 8, 2013
This too shall pass, just not soon enough
In a little hollow corner at the southern end of the century old farmhouse doiwn in the bottom, the daffodils have begun to assemble, riding in from the country for their annual family reunion. These are short, tough flowers, stunted by decades of harsh work and parching winds, but their reappearance late each winter is the first sign we have that things will thaw -- unthaw, as they say in Guilford County -- and the world will turn green again and another winter will be behind us.
It's a good thing to know, because a few hundred feet west and a few score feet up the altitude ladder, we're still frozen in. The ice storm that was supposed to leave us no more than 1/10th of an inch of ice was more generous than Accuweather, Weather Channel, Weather Underground or NOAA ever imagined. It coated limbs and trunks and hog wire and decks with 3/4 inch of ice that somehow managed to fall off in 6- and 8-inch hollow cylinders and jagged shards of cold glass. Some has melted, but nearly 10 days after the storm, it still coats the northern approaches to the garage and surrounds the northwestern end of the barn.
On the other hand, a storm that had first been predicted to drop as much as 18 inches of wet snow somewhere in these hills gave us a break, providing barely a half-inch of frosting on the cake hereabouts while most of its fury went on to the northeast. But it left the ground hard and cold, resistant to the blade of those who want to get into the garden and turning soil. I had managed to get the batterboards set up for the new garden shed foundation the day before the ice storm; since then the only outside progress has been cutting up the winter's limbfalls and hauling them down to the burn pile. So far the size is roughly that of one of the larger Airstream trailers; it may approach three gondola cars before it's over. A good four more trailerloads are on the immediate agenda. Then there's the shed, the new fence, the tilling, the planting. Blueberry bushes need more trimming. There are stumps to cut off and grind, more logs to cut into billetts and split and stack, bulbs to fertilize, moles to fight, possums to run off.
We're burning oak that came down in the ferocious winter of 2010, so much of it that we cut the logs to stovewood lengths and stacked 'em under tarps. Now I'm just getting to the last cord of so of that three-year-old stuff, and it burns bright on a cold late-winter's night. In a day or so Daylight Savings Time returns and and the night will only seem to shorten more. We'll still have weeks ahead of cold weather -- can't forget that sub-freezing Easter season just a few years back, when the buds froze on the canes and consumed most of the blueberries before we ever saw them. But we can see little signs that this winter -- not as cold as many, not as many bad storms as some, not as much damage as often happens -- too shall pass. Just not soon enough.
It's a good thing to know, because a few hundred feet west and a few score feet up the altitude ladder, we're still frozen in. The ice storm that was supposed to leave us no more than 1/10th of an inch of ice was more generous than Accuweather, Weather Channel, Weather Underground or NOAA ever imagined. It coated limbs and trunks and hog wire and decks with 3/4 inch of ice that somehow managed to fall off in 6- and 8-inch hollow cylinders and jagged shards of cold glass. Some has melted, but nearly 10 days after the storm, it still coats the northern approaches to the garage and surrounds the northwestern end of the barn.
On the other hand, a storm that had first been predicted to drop as much as 18 inches of wet snow somewhere in these hills gave us a break, providing barely a half-inch of frosting on the cake hereabouts while most of its fury went on to the northeast. But it left the ground hard and cold, resistant to the blade of those who want to get into the garden and turning soil. I had managed to get the batterboards set up for the new garden shed foundation the day before the ice storm; since then the only outside progress has been cutting up the winter's limbfalls and hauling them down to the burn pile. So far the size is roughly that of one of the larger Airstream trailers; it may approach three gondola cars before it's over. A good four more trailerloads are on the immediate agenda. Then there's the shed, the new fence, the tilling, the planting. Blueberry bushes need more trimming. There are stumps to cut off and grind, more logs to cut into billetts and split and stack, bulbs to fertilize, moles to fight, possums to run off.
We're burning oak that came down in the ferocious winter of 2010, so much of it that we cut the logs to stovewood lengths and stacked 'em under tarps. Now I'm just getting to the last cord of so of that three-year-old stuff, and it burns bright on a cold late-winter's night. In a day or so Daylight Savings Time returns and and the night will only seem to shorten more. We'll still have weeks ahead of cold weather -- can't forget that sub-freezing Easter season just a few years back, when the buds froze on the canes and consumed most of the blueberries before we ever saw them. But we can see little signs that this winter -- not as cold as many, not as many bad storms as some, not as much damage as often happens -- too shall pass. Just not soon enough.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Is that a 1953 Buick grille on our deck?
The weather forecast was for maybe a tenth of an inch of ice, at worst. Then it was two tenths. Then a quarter inch. What we got, as indicated by this photo of a '53 Buick Roadmaster grill I found on our deck this morning, was 3/4 inch of ice, accompanied by downed trees, billions of ice cubes and frozen grass locked inside translucent cylinders of ice. Herewith:
Oh, wait, maybe that was a '52 Nash Rambler. Or a '47 Willys Overland with the flathead four-cylinder?
For sure, the place looks like a picnic area where about 10,000 dedicated beer drinkers emptied their coolers of ice cubes. And ice cylinders and ice chunks. Crushed ice. Bergy-bits. We've got old sailing friends coming this weekend and I'm going to scoop up some of the ice to show them how we keep the brew cold up here in the hills. Down in some of the warm spots where we used to sail, a good-sized bag of ice could last up to,k oh, 15 or 20 minutes, on cooler days.
Look like it will be cool around here for a while. The pictures don't do Nature justice, but you get the idea.
We didn't exactly expect this result. Kein Myatt, the weather guru at the Roanoke Times, was explaining in print just the other day how the terrain up here complicates weather forecasting, and why we sometimes get long-lasting ice when others not far from us get a good breeze and a melted malt:
" If you’ve lived in Southwest Virginia for several years, you know by now that the high terrain of Floyd and Carroll counties, often extending into the Bent Mountain area of extreme southern Roanoke County, is very often the bullseye for ice storms. As recently as Dec. 26, much of this area was suffering power outages and was iced in for days when most of the rest of Southwest Virginia experienced what was mainly just a nuisance mixed precipitation event. The Blue Ridge widens into more of a plateau in that region, rather than a sharp ridgeline, so it can be harder to sweep cold air away as it clings to the rolling and raised terrain, somewhat protected from southerly winds by even higher mountains to the south and southwest. It’s also susceptible to the easterly upslope winds lifting additional moisture, providing cooling with the lift even when the winds are blowing out of a “warm” southeast angle, and trapping cold air against the east side of the Blue Ridge even when it begins to be scoured out around it. It’s also just south enough to experience thicker moisture earlier in most events than locations farther north, which may have more time to warm above freezing before the bulk of the precipitation arrives. For these reasons, Floyd and Carroll counties have been placed under a winter storm warning for heavy ice, though even at that, it appears to be a low-end warning with a quarter-inch of ice accretion – the bottom boundary for an ice-inspired winter storm warning – expected in some spots."
We're in Patrick County, but in the Blue Ridge part, where our climate is closer to Floyd and Carroll than to the Piedmont climate of Woolwine and Stuart. We look at four different weather forecasts -- NOAA, Accuweather, Weather Channel and WeatherUnderground, and I'm unhappy to say that none of them has figured out how to get our neighborhood -- about 1,500 feet from the edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment -- reasonably correct. Our best sources of information, as always, have been the window and the thermometer.
Thank goodness for Generac and the Stihl Chain Saw Co.
For sure, the place looks like a picnic area where about 10,000 dedicated beer drinkers emptied their coolers of ice cubes. And ice cylinders and ice chunks. Crushed ice. Bergy-bits. We've got old sailing friends coming this weekend and I'm going to scoop up some of the ice to show them how we keep the brew cold up here in the hills. Down in some of the warm spots where we used to sail, a good-sized bag of ice could last up to,k oh, 15 or 20 minutes, on cooler days.
Look like it will be cool around here for a while. The pictures don't do Nature justice, but you get the idea.
 |
| A cold seat |
 |
| Buford's Woods |
 |
| Twisted laurel |
We didn't exactly expect this result. Kein Myatt, the weather guru at the Roanoke Times, was explaining in print just the other day how the terrain up here complicates weather forecasting, and why we sometimes get long-lasting ice when others not far from us get a good breeze and a melted malt:
" If you’ve lived in Southwest Virginia for several years, you know by now that the high terrain of Floyd and Carroll counties, often extending into the Bent Mountain area of extreme southern Roanoke County, is very often the bullseye for ice storms. As recently as Dec. 26, much of this area was suffering power outages and was iced in for days when most of the rest of Southwest Virginia experienced what was mainly just a nuisance mixed precipitation event. The Blue Ridge widens into more of a plateau in that region, rather than a sharp ridgeline, so it can be harder to sweep cold air away as it clings to the rolling and raised terrain, somewhat protected from southerly winds by even higher mountains to the south and southwest. It’s also susceptible to the easterly upslope winds lifting additional moisture, providing cooling with the lift even when the winds are blowing out of a “warm” southeast angle, and trapping cold air against the east side of the Blue Ridge even when it begins to be scoured out around it. It’s also just south enough to experience thicker moisture earlier in most events than locations farther north, which may have more time to warm above freezing before the bulk of the precipitation arrives. For these reasons, Floyd and Carroll counties have been placed under a winter storm warning for heavy ice, though even at that, it appears to be a low-end warning with a quarter-inch of ice accretion – the bottom boundary for an ice-inspired winter storm warning – expected in some spots."
We're in Patrick County, but in the Blue Ridge part, where our climate is closer to Floyd and Carroll than to the Piedmont climate of Woolwine and Stuart. We look at four different weather forecasts -- NOAA, Accuweather, Weather Channel and WeatherUnderground, and I'm unhappy to say that none of them has figured out how to get our neighborhood -- about 1,500 feet from the edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment -- reasonably correct. Our best sources of information, as always, have been the window and the thermometer.
Thank goodness for Generac and the Stihl Chain Saw Co.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Tyranny of The Winter Project
Some years ago I fell victim to the theory that months as awful as January and February might be redeemed in small measure by tackling and completing what became known around our house as The Winter Project. It got us through some miserable winters down in the flatlands when there was little to do but watch basketball, shovel ice and wait for the Daytona while dreaming of warm breezes, soft sandy beaches and beam reaches.
One year it was painting the dining room, front hall and living room before the paper hangers came to put on wallpaper. (We had learned years early not to hang wallpaper together. Some projects are not worth doing, together or otherwise.) Another year it was pulling up old carpet and old carpet pads and yanking up about nine gazillion rusty staples that held the carpet pads down on an otherwise perfectly serviceable oak floor. Last year it was building two sets of built-in bookshelves in the new house.
This year it was building a large spice rack to hold 45 or so of the most frequently used spices, so as to clear out a kitchen cabinet, and to stack the stacking washer and dryer, revise some shelves built to hold cleaning products and expand by 60 percent the size of the kitchen pantry shelving.
Here's how I prepared for the job: 1. Smashed my left hand in a bizarre accident when the tongue on an overbalanced 4x8 trailer half full of firewood let go from the hitch ball on the RTV and banged the hand against the underside of the dump bed on the RTV. From this I learned the dangers of the runaway lever and a stationary object; 2. Shot a 1 1/4" finishing nail into the tip of my little finger while miscalculating where to hold a 3/4" square support for one of the pantry shelves. From this I learned the dangers of 100 pounds of pressure behind a small nail that doesn't want to penetrate a knot; and 3. Bruised a shinbone and raised a baseball-sized lump when, seeking a change from hand-smashing and finger-shooting, I took a hike downstream and took a tumble on a steep hillside overlooking the upper reaches of the Smith River while trying to find a long-overgrown trail that led by a spooky old house I once found while looking for something else. From this I learned that hand-bashing and pinky-puncturing were not so bad.
It would all have gone a lot faster had I been able to find the handy-dandy 8-inch sharp-as-a-new-chisel Bostitch prybar that is essential to removing shoe molding, baseboards, nails driven into fingers and other misplaced objects. Tore up the workshop looking for it; failed to find it; substituted a much larger and not half as effective Wonderbar, a magnificent tool in its own right, but much too bulky for close finish work. After filling half the remaining trashed shop with sawdust while rebuilding the shelves and fitting new trim, I spent a couple of Sunday hours cleaning up the mess. Restacked lumber.Found some things I was looking for weeks and weeks ago. Put away hand tools. Found the right boxes for some power tools. Rearranged odd pieces of trim, tucked away some cutoffs too good to burn for kindling, stored some old speakers too good to burn for kindling, and kept an eye out for that little prybar. It drove me crazy looking for it. Opened every box, every bag, every drawer, every cabinet, every tool box dating back to the 1956 model my Dad made for me out of an old shipping crate. No prybar. But that shop looked better than it has in, oh, three years or so.
So: The Winter Project is done. The shop is clean. The bruises are healing. Oh -- and at 3 a.m. this morning I awoke to receive an internal e-mail .jpg from the quirky cerebral harddrive hidden somewhere inside my aging skull. The .jpg was a mental picture of a little wooden toolbox that I keep in the back of the RTV, about 30" from the site of the ambush on my left hand. Nestled neatly in that little toolbox was the black-and-yellow prybar that would have made The Winter Project oh, so much easier. From this I learned to take the advice of a good and wise friend: Next time I have the urge to undertake an ambitious project, I'm going to go lie down until the urge passes.
One year it was painting the dining room, front hall and living room before the paper hangers came to put on wallpaper. (We had learned years early not to hang wallpaper together. Some projects are not worth doing, together or otherwise.) Another year it was pulling up old carpet and old carpet pads and yanking up about nine gazillion rusty staples that held the carpet pads down on an otherwise perfectly serviceable oak floor. Last year it was building two sets of built-in bookshelves in the new house.
This year it was building a large spice rack to hold 45 or so of the most frequently used spices, so as to clear out a kitchen cabinet, and to stack the stacking washer and dryer, revise some shelves built to hold cleaning products and expand by 60 percent the size of the kitchen pantry shelving.
Here's how I prepared for the job: 1. Smashed my left hand in a bizarre accident when the tongue on an overbalanced 4x8 trailer half full of firewood let go from the hitch ball on the RTV and banged the hand against the underside of the dump bed on the RTV. From this I learned the dangers of the runaway lever and a stationary object; 2. Shot a 1 1/4" finishing nail into the tip of my little finger while miscalculating where to hold a 3/4" square support for one of the pantry shelves. From this I learned the dangers of 100 pounds of pressure behind a small nail that doesn't want to penetrate a knot; and 3. Bruised a shinbone and raised a baseball-sized lump when, seeking a change from hand-smashing and finger-shooting, I took a hike downstream and took a tumble on a steep hillside overlooking the upper reaches of the Smith River while trying to find a long-overgrown trail that led by a spooky old house I once found while looking for something else. From this I learned that hand-bashing and pinky-puncturing were not so bad.
It would all have gone a lot faster had I been able to find the handy-dandy 8-inch sharp-as-a-new-chisel Bostitch prybar that is essential to removing shoe molding, baseboards, nails driven into fingers and other misplaced objects. Tore up the workshop looking for it; failed to find it; substituted a much larger and not half as effective Wonderbar, a magnificent tool in its own right, but much too bulky for close finish work. After filling half the remaining trashed shop with sawdust while rebuilding the shelves and fitting new trim, I spent a couple of Sunday hours cleaning up the mess. Restacked lumber.Found some things I was looking for weeks and weeks ago. Put away hand tools. Found the right boxes for some power tools. Rearranged odd pieces of trim, tucked away some cutoffs too good to burn for kindling, stored some old speakers too good to burn for kindling, and kept an eye out for that little prybar. It drove me crazy looking for it. Opened every box, every bag, every drawer, every cabinet, every tool box dating back to the 1956 model my Dad made for me out of an old shipping crate. No prybar. But that shop looked better than it has in, oh, three years or so.
So: The Winter Project is done. The shop is clean. The bruises are healing. Oh -- and at 3 a.m. this morning I awoke to receive an internal e-mail .jpg from the quirky cerebral harddrive hidden somewhere inside my aging skull. The .jpg was a mental picture of a little wooden toolbox that I keep in the back of the RTV, about 30" from the site of the ambush on my left hand. Nestled neatly in that little toolbox was the black-and-yellow prybar that would have made The Winter Project oh, so much easier. From this I learned to take the advice of a good and wise friend: Next time I have the urge to undertake an ambitious project, I'm going to go lie down until the urge passes.
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| The wayward prybar |
Friday, February 1, 2013
Why is Warren Buffett buying up Southern newspapers?
Dang if I know why Warren Buffett is buying up Southern newspapers, but I suspect it's for the same reason he buys other stuff: he thinks he can make money. Despite cackling and heckling from newspaper detractors for at least the last decade, newspapers have not vanished from the face of the earth. Circulation has certainly declined precipitously and newspaper advertising revenue has plummeted and employment had dropped, yet newspapers are still publishing, still paying the help, still making money, though hardly as much as they made in the heyday of the industry.
So it really didn't come as a surprise when he bought up the newspaper I worked for from the time I was a kid on a bike throwing an afternoon route, a high school sports stringer, a college dorm route carrier, and later a copy editor, reporter, Washington correspondent, Raleigh Bureau Chief and editorial writer and columnist over nearly three decades. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BH Media) bought The News & Record of Greensboro yesterday. It once was a fine newspaper that you could find in just about any sizable town in the state. Now it's a small almost tabloid-sized paper, but the people who work there still aim to do the kinds of things it did when it featured such luminaries as Jonathan Yardley and Ed Yoder and Jim Jenkins and Larry Keech and Wilt Browning and Sherry Johnson and Greta Tilley and Jerry Bledsoe and Ned Cline: break stories, provide good writing, publish compelling commentary and tell people what they need to know.
Buffett's company has been buying up newspapers in this region for at least the past year. It owns larger papers such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch, medium-size papers such as the Winston-Salem Journal, smaller N.C. papers such as those in Hickory, Morganton, Statesville, Marion, and Florence, S.C., and he has bought up smaller community papers such as Floyd, Va, Bristol, Va. and Reidsville, N.C. We are, it seems to me, becoming surrounded by the new media king of this region.
A longtime friend and former newspaper executive recalled the other day that this kind of thing once would have been against the law, back in the days when the U.S. Justice Department worried about such things as monopolies and trusts and one company dominating a single market. Once upon a time, Landmark Communications, which owned the Greensboro newspapers as well as the local CBS affiliate, sold the TV station in Greensboro to avoid questions, or worse, about anti-trust issues. You just don't hear those kinds of questions being raised much these days, perhaps because a lot of people think newspapers and even TV stations are dying and it won't be long before they're gone.
I don't think they're dying so much as they are changing in dramatic ways. They'll look a lot different in years to come, as newspapers maneuver to attract more paying online readers and as they reshape general news products to attract subscribers still interested in print editions. I'm also guessing that in small towns, print will remain a viable product for a long time -- as least in communities where newspapers still cover the news vigorously and give people reasons to buy it. From what I've read, that's one reason Buffett is buying: He still thinks newspapers are important to their communities.
While I've never met Warren Buffett, I did spend a lot of time with his distant cousin Jimmy's music during our sailing days. It occurs to me that I've spent considerable money over time with the Buffetts -- with CDs about pirates and shrimp and schooners and sloops, and with several of Buffett's current newspapers, currently including the weekly Floyd Press, where there's always some kind of a story that comes as a surprise about the colorful people and their aspirations for a small town with ambitious ideas. Given that most TV stations and the bigger papers pretty much ignore the place except for the obligatory quarterly pieces about the arts, I expect the Press is going to do all right -- at least in comparison to its citified cousins down yonder in the flatlands.
So it really didn't come as a surprise when he bought up the newspaper I worked for from the time I was a kid on a bike throwing an afternoon route, a high school sports stringer, a college dorm route carrier, and later a copy editor, reporter, Washington correspondent, Raleigh Bureau Chief and editorial writer and columnist over nearly three decades. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BH Media) bought The News & Record of Greensboro yesterday. It once was a fine newspaper that you could find in just about any sizable town in the state. Now it's a small almost tabloid-sized paper, but the people who work there still aim to do the kinds of things it did when it featured such luminaries as Jonathan Yardley and Ed Yoder and Jim Jenkins and Larry Keech and Wilt Browning and Sherry Johnson and Greta Tilley and Jerry Bledsoe and Ned Cline: break stories, provide good writing, publish compelling commentary and tell people what they need to know.
Buffett's company has been buying up newspapers in this region for at least the past year. It owns larger papers such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch, medium-size papers such as the Winston-Salem Journal, smaller N.C. papers such as those in Hickory, Morganton, Statesville, Marion, and Florence, S.C., and he has bought up smaller community papers such as Floyd, Va, Bristol, Va. and Reidsville, N.C. We are, it seems to me, becoming surrounded by the new media king of this region.
A longtime friend and former newspaper executive recalled the other day that this kind of thing once would have been against the law, back in the days when the U.S. Justice Department worried about such things as monopolies and trusts and one company dominating a single market. Once upon a time, Landmark Communications, which owned the Greensboro newspapers as well as the local CBS affiliate, sold the TV station in Greensboro to avoid questions, or worse, about anti-trust issues. You just don't hear those kinds of questions being raised much these days, perhaps because a lot of people think newspapers and even TV stations are dying and it won't be long before they're gone.
I don't think they're dying so much as they are changing in dramatic ways. They'll look a lot different in years to come, as newspapers maneuver to attract more paying online readers and as they reshape general news products to attract subscribers still interested in print editions. I'm also guessing that in small towns, print will remain a viable product for a long time -- as least in communities where newspapers still cover the news vigorously and give people reasons to buy it. From what I've read, that's one reason Buffett is buying: He still thinks newspapers are important to their communities.
While I've never met Warren Buffett, I did spend a lot of time with his distant cousin Jimmy's music during our sailing days. It occurs to me that I've spent considerable money over time with the Buffetts -- with CDs about pirates and shrimp and schooners and sloops, and with several of Buffett's current newspapers, currently including the weekly Floyd Press, where there's always some kind of a story that comes as a surprise about the colorful people and their aspirations for a small town with ambitious ideas. Given that most TV stations and the bigger papers pretty much ignore the place except for the obligatory quarterly pieces about the arts, I expect the Press is going to do all right -- at least in comparison to its citified cousins down yonder in the flatlands.
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