View from the Mountain

Dreams of the beach

I would like to just skip the next month.  Doing that would have the added advantage of missing a birthday which I would not mind.

Overcast skies are back here on the coast at least for another few hours.  That does not help with the thoughts of an impending birthday.

On the weather front, we have seen everything from a very rare few inches of snow to almost normal weather which allows us to get outside and go hiking.  To the west, parts of North Carolina and the mountains of Virginia are seeing some pretty cold temperatures.

Boone is sitting at a very cold eighteen degree Fahrenheit, and Roanoke has dropped under 30 degrees.  Roanoke should also see strong winds this afternoon.  I am just glad that I will get to "enjoy" those winds from the coast where they will not be nearly as gusty.  However, that does not mean we are getting by with no impact.

I just saw that the Ocracoke ferries are going to change their schedules because of the increasing winds.  Of course the worst impact of the NE storm is that our warm temperatures and pleasant days have disappeared once again.

With the potential of yet another winter storm next week in the Roanoke area, I am expecting the worst. Whenever I am in the area or just before I get there, it seems to snow.  I guess there is no way around it in this "Winter to Remember."

My wife has set in motion the elements for a hearty winter dinner for us tonight.  This morning the kitchen was full of a smell from my childhood, pinto beans cooking.  Around five PM would be a good time to drop in and catch the aroma of some homemade cornbread.  The pintos and cornbread will be joined by a pot of cooked cabbage.  I am looking forward to it.

I am also looking forward to warmer weather and some opportunities to go for a beach walk when I do not have to bundle up.  We were over on the beach Tuesday evening.

It was a beautiful scene, but the cool temperatures were the reason so few people were out walking.  Spending time at coast and no dog to walk each day has certainly made me a wimp when it comes to cold weather. 

These days I would rather dream about a warm beach than walk a cold one.  The reality is that even New England's weather will start improving by late March which even now is on the distant horizon.  Our weather should be to the point by the of March that we can be thinking nice beach walks and planting our tomatoes.

Getting tomatoes in the ground early is important if I am to have a chance on being a champion three times in a row in our annual tomato growing contest.

In a good year, the ocean water can be warm enough to stick your toes in it by April.  With as cold as it has been this year, my guess is that we will have to wait until May, but I would love to be proved wrong on that point.

If the sun were shining and the wind not blowing, I just might be able to let my mind drift back to one of those warm June and July days when we had so much fun playing in Bogue Inlet.  The warmth cannot get here fast enough this year.  With the economy in the dumps, good weather is one of the few things that can bring smile to almost anyone.

Trying to shake off winter

My mind tells me that winter is far from over.  There will likely be more snows in Virginia.  The possibility exists that we could see another big one in the Roanoke area.

In spite of that my soul tells me that it is getting time for spring. On our most recent trip to the Carolina coast, we quickly ran out of the snow after crossing the border between North Carolina and Virginia.

I was reminded of one spring when we hosted German exchange students. It was in April, and Roanoke got eight inches of snow.  The German students were keen to see some spring so we loaded everyone into the car and headed to Charlotte, NC.  I still remember coming down the mountain from Fancy Gap to the already great green plain of North Carolina.  That day it was smooth going on Fancy Gap.  Sometimes winter hangs along the mountain there.

Most of all I remember the giant pansies which were everywhere in Charlotte.  It was as if Charlotte had become the center of the pansy world.  We have planted pansies at our second home in NC now.  Watching pansies grow is one of treats of winter in the south.  While flowers help with winter, the sun is my strongest ally in the battle against winter.

One of my tactics for forcing winter to retreat in my mind is to find a warm sunset whose colors overwhelm the senses.  If you can catch the sunset in the right spot where you are protected from breezes and perhaps warmed by the sun, you can almost imagine that spring is a little farther along than it is.

While the sunset picture with this post involved some cool breezes, the colors have stuck in my mind and are a welcome relief to all the flashbacks of Roanoke snow that seem to haunt my dreams.

For today, I plant to enjoy the weather and maybe drop my boat in the water so I have a virtual trip to the Inlet and remember those warm waters which I hope arrive much sooner than expected.

It certainly beats the snow that happened last weekend.

Snowy afternoon on the mountain

There are some really neat things about having a home on a mountain. On most days you can see thirty or forty miles.  Only really clear days the world seems to be at your doorstep.

Because of the geography of the Roanoke Valley, snow sometimes drops down from the north.  It did that yesterday.  I first noticed the snow at the foot of Tinker Mountain where Interstate 81 wraps around it and heads north to Troutville and places up the Shenandoah Valley.

Gradually the snow worked its way across the valley. It was not long before the Peaks of Otter disappeared into the white.  Not long after that downtown Roanoke was swallowed up. One after another valley landmarks disappeared until all we could see of the valley was a white cloud.

Then we were basically down to the woods behind our house and the homes near us. Yesterday there was no real worry about isolation, I knew the snow would be gone by afternoon.  But for a moment it was nice to focus on the snow in the trees and forget some of the big problems that we face.

We seem to have become a society that is very hard to please.  We want it all, but no one wants to pay for anything.  We seem to mobilize well only in times of disaster.  I once surprised a manager that I had at Apple.  It was in the late eighties, very early in my career there.  She had asked to see my business plan for my territory.  In a world of of people focused on hitting their quarterly number, I had created a five year business plan.

My manager was amazed.  I only worked for her for a year or two before I ended up being a manager myself. I made a lot of progress on that five year plan in a short time.   For the next twelve years, one of my trademarks was creating long term plans in a company that only cared about short term results.  The plans were not built in isolation.  I took the best ideas of my team, and we wrapped them around the company's direction and created a road to success.

At the beginning of each year, we would make a top ten list that I would work at delivering to my team.  The list was important to them because it has come from them and their experiences with their customers.  Sometimes we made a lot of progress, and other years we only checked off two or three things.  It was a good way to do business.

It seems we Americans have a hard time agreeing on our top ten list.  Some believe we need to fix our infrastructure.  Others have no other mantra than we are being taxed too much.  Those with health insurance seem to care little about those who have no health insurance or those whose premiums are continually going up.  Everyone believes in education, but no one can agree on how to deliver it.

On top of it all, we have put people in positions of power who spend most of their time trying to stay in power. Then there are the special interests who spend amazing sums of money to get close to those people in power. I am not surprised to hear politicians resigning in frustration.  Is it even possible these days to do what is right and win an election?

Now I am back to the trees standing resolutely in the snow. I am comforted by their presence.  I know that at one time all the mountains around Roanoke had the trees stripped from them.  Now in the year 2010, for the most part the trees have reclaimed the fields that were on the mountains.  Our creaky system has figured out how to produce food more inexpensively from distant flat fields with giant tractors, often using mechanical harvesting equipment.

The farmers that farmed these hills went to work in the plants near the city or on the railroad.  Today the plants are mostly gone and the railroad is not the employer that it once was.  We create information, analyze it, and try to make money from the knowledge that we mine.  Much of the production of goods is thousands of miles away.

I have this feeling that we are about one year into a five year business plan, but the only problem is that no one has a copy of the business plan. One of the sayings at Apple used to be that the best way to control the future was to invent it.  Apple has done well at that, but inventing the future is a process, not just an one time event.  Only time will tell us if Apple's new iPad is part of another new future or just a footnote on a page.

Today there is no longer snow in the air, but the winds are blowing hard from the north.  We are feeling someone's snowstorm from far away.  This is a winter that will be one to remember.  There has been winter snow in all the 49 states at one time. Snow has even fallen on along the coasts of North and South Carolina.  It has been an undeniably snowy winter.   Visiting Northern Virginia even through pictures makes you think you are in Canada.

Our friends living near Dublin have had snow on the ground almost continuously since the first week in December.  Their driveway also looks like a scene out of Canada. Yet when I talk to Canadian friends, their winter has been mild and relatively painless.

So it is with the weather and the economy.  While some suffer, others prosper.   The cold winds of change are blowing hard across American this winter.  We will remember the economic challenges just as well if not more vividly than the snow. The challenge is always figuring out where to be so that you can enjoy the warmth and prosperity.

Opportunities that are not seized are just like bare ground.  The trees will find the bare ground. That is way in works in nature. It happens just as in the business world someone will figure out the opportunities where new business will grow in the shadow of old dying businesses.