View from the Mountain

A holiday shopping trip with memories

After a busy couple of weeks with real estate, we decided that it was time for some Christmas shopping.  While we often hit the shops in Emerald Isle and Swansboro, it is hard to get serious about shopping on the Crystal Coast without heading to Morehead City.

Morehead City, often know as MHC, is where most of the shopping for the Southern Outer Banks is concentrated. If you want clothing and don't want the prices of specialty shops, Morehead City is the best choice. For electronics and a large selection of office supplies on the shelf, it is the only choice unless you want to tackle Jacksonville which most of us avoid even during the non-holiday season.

Holiday shopping is no longer a huge deal for my wife and myself.  We have already delivered our granddaughter's holiday present, a small wooden table and four chairs. While there will be a few other things, two year olds don't need a lot to entertain themselves. We are into small practical gifts for the adults in the family, so we make strategic stops at a number of stores.  My wife is good at picking up gifts all year long, so to a certain extent we are in clean up mode at this time of year.

We can actually be in Belks in MHC in about the same time, twenty minutes, that it used to take us to make it across the Roanoke Valley to Valley View Mall from our home on the mountain. Of course going to Valley View at Christmas is a whole lot easier than leaving Valley View at Christmas. I hope the traffic engineer for that mall is still an infinite loop someplace.

Holiday shopping traffic is a whole lot less stessful on the Crystal Coast than it is in the Roanoke Valley.  While MHC does not have all the shops that you might find in Valley View Mall, that does not bother me. 

I have been ignoring malls for years.  In 2005 an abortive attempt at shopping in Tyson's Corner Mall sent me scurrying for Lexington, VA.  Over the years I have done my shopping in Charlotteville, VA and even at the Homestead.  One year, I did some shopping in Mount Airy, NC where our family lived for years.  Another year I wandered off Interstate 81 and shopped at Wade's Mill.  Even when I have shopped in Roanoke, I have managed to get most of my gifts without getting near a big mall.

Tuesday's shopping was a nice easy trip.  In addition to my wife finding some clothes for Christmas at Belks, we managed a visit to a small kitchen store, Staples, and Harris Teeter for a few groceries. All my recent real estate clients have been hard on my ink jet printer supplies.

We squeezed in lunch at Tsunami, a Mongolian grill restaurant.  While most of our shopping at Belks centered on finding an inexpensive gift for my two office parties, we did find a couple of things to stuff in stockings.

My wife and I will likely exchange very small presents as usual, and unless she gives me a suggestion or two, she might end up with presents from Northern Tool & Equipment again. I am easy, it you put a jar of Marmite in my stocking along with a bag of pistachios and a good small chocolate bar, I am a happy camper.

I think we are planning a late breakfast at Yana's in Swansboro later in the week.  Then we will likely pick up a few gifts in the local shops. After that we will head over to Reel Outdoors in Emerald Isle for a Calcutta Shirt for our youngest daughter's partner.  I might stop by Ace Hardware in Emerald Isle for a few last minute gift ideas.  Some of those local Methodist Peanuts are always popular presents.

Being a guy at Christmas is actually pretty easy as long as you stay away from the big malls.  Even today after my close encounter with all the folks in Belk's on senior day, I got to take a time out and visit one of the waterside parks in Morehead City.  There is nothing like some water to freshen up your attitude on life.

It was a cold walk out on the dock, but it was better than being in a crowded department store, and I got to snap the picture that I used in this post.  May your holiday shopping be as stress free as mine.

 

 

Responsibility for your actions

My mother taught me to never start a fight, but in the same breath to be ready to stand up for what I believe and accept the consequences of my own actions if I ended up in a fight.

That was great advice a long time ago, and to me it still rings true today.  Unfortunately there are a whole lot of people (and states) who want people to be protected even when they do stupid things.

In the same line of thought, we have the people who believe whatever they can get out of a company or another person with the threat of litigation is fair game.

However, life is not always smooth sailing like the picture above.

I am no great defender of corporations who can act like robber-barons, but there have to be some limits on both sides.

Some consumers get irrational, some get greedy, and plenty of us still get screwed.

I think we all have the right to quality services and products.  I have never worked for a company that tried to deliver something other than that.  From my own farm where I sold Angus breeding stock, to Vermeer balers, Apple computers, mail services from Webmail to real estate services from Bluewater GMAC Real Estate, I feel that I have worked with companies that tried to fairly represent the capabilities of their products and services.

Yet in almost every case, I have seen clients who for one reason or another were unhappy with their products or services.  I can remember someone who bought a round baler from me and was not happy about the way the bales came out of the baler.  I worked hard to teach him the proper use of his baler and overcame the problem.  I had someone at a college who was unhappy because he had five bad pixels on a screen of over 1,000,000 pixels.  Then there people who just could not figure out how to manage their mail service no matter how much you helped them.

Sometimes it is best to mutually agree to part company before things get nasty.  I have replaced computers just to defuse situations, but I have also had situations where people wanted a new computer just because they thought a big company was an easy target.

It is those people who make it hard for people with legitimate claims.  At a certain point, you read the reviews, talk to people, and place your bet with your money.  There are few riskless purchases with guarantees for everything in this world.

I am not sure what kind of world we would have without any risks, but it is something we do not have to lose sleep over because it is not going to happen.

Buying real estate is a very complicated and much regulated process. Even ignoring the opportunity to look at many properties for comparison, there are multiple opportunities to be satisfied with your investment before you make the purchase.

However, it is a human process so there are always opportunities for mistakes.  Still when you consider you can hire a home inspector, a bug inspector, a septic inspector, an appraiser, a surveyor, and have the services of a Realtor®, there are a lot of ways to be as close to certain as possible about your future happiness before you pay your money when buying a home.

In spite of all the expert help, in the end, the final protection is the individual purchaser.  No one can weigh all of the data and information and decide what is right for you but you.

With that privilege also comes the responsibility to accept your purchase once you have made it.  I think there are great safeguards in place for home purchasers, but once you have bought it, it is yours.

One of my favorite clauses in the NC Offer to Purchase is the following.

CLOSING SHALL CONSTITUTE ACCEPTANCE OF THE PROPERTY IN ITS THEN EXISTING CONDITION UNLESS PROVISION IS OTHERWISE MADE IN WRITING.

The bold capitals are right out of the contract.  I have decided to use yellow highlighter on the phrase with my next contract.  I think the clause deserves it.

I suppose someone could mislead you as to what might be built next door to a home, but in this day of Internet searches, I would have a hard time thinking that is a good excuse.

We ended up buying our property on the NC coast at almost the peak of the market.  Could we have gotten it cheaper by waiting another year?  I have no doubt that we could have.  Had I been using someone other than a dual agent would I have gotten it cheaper, quite possibly?  However, it has been over three years, and I have seen literally hundreds of properties.  None of those properties have offered the same price/value ratio that I found in this home.

So I am happy with my decision to purchase.  It was a serious decision, and I take responsibility for it.

There are plenty of things that we buy which have few protections, but fortunately most of them are relatively inexpensive.

I have had plenty to say over cars, appliances, and computers over the years but they are still buyer beware. 

It is hard to argue that Microsoft owes me for the time I have spent keeping my Vista computer going since I bought it in spite of a number of negative reviews.  But I know that I have convinced a few people to buy Macs so I guess that I will have to take satisfaction from that.

However, no one twisted my arm to buy a Vista machine, I did it on my own and take full responsibility.

And that is the way it should be.

As the small stores leave

The scary thought that has never been far in the back of my mind is that some day we will get to the point that we will have to buy what the companies want us to buy instead of what we really need or want.

I am a big believer in not only small business but manufacturing driven by customer demand.  I am not so sure that we are headed in that direction.

The story of my bag of pea gravel is a cautionary tale. If you combine it with a story of gold plated USB cables, you might get the idea that we have something which is cause to worry.

A couple of years ago our local hardware, Wood's Ace Hardware, closed.  We had been going there since we moved to Roanoke in 1989.  We knew Bill and Monika Woods personally and understood their decision to close.

However, I knew that it would eventually end up making things that we used on a regular basis harder to find.  Bill was a master at knowing what people needed in the neighborhood.  Short of lumber which he never carried, there were few things which could not be found at Woods.

Today I wanted to fill a varmint hole behind one of our rock walls.  The natural choice would be something like pea gravel.  Over the years I bought a lot of pea gravel from Wood's.  Today I first went to Hammerhead Hardware in Salem, they did not carry it.  Then I went to Northwest Hardware on Brambleton in Roanoke.  They also did not have pea gravel.  Finally I ended up at Lowe's on Route 220 where I found my bag of pea gravel.  It was a lot of traveling one bag of pea gravel.

It is strange that as the area has grown, some services have moved to the outside edges of town.  When we first moved to Roanoke, there was a Lowe's over at the intersection of Apperson Drive and Keagy Road.  It was closed soon after we moved here.  Apparently it was too small to suit the company's taste.  There was also a Brendle's on Apperson.  You could get almost any small appliance or item for the house there.  It closed sometime after the Lowe's left.

Now if you want a small appliance or some lumber you have to drive either over near Valleyview or down to 220 south of Tanglewood.  As I drove by the still empty former home of Wood's Ace Hardware, I had a hard time remembering how many times I slipped over there on a Saturday afternoon to pick up something that I needed for the home.

So now we have been herded into only being able to shop in certain areas which are usually a distance from our homes.  How big a jump is it to the point that we end up having to buy what the manufacturers want to sell us?

Consider my case of the gold USB cables.  I bought an inexpensive printer a couple of years ago.  When I decided to get a dedicated cable for it, I found that most of the cables being offered were gold plated and priced at around $34.95 which is almost as much as I paid for the printer.

Fortunately there are still sources of cheap USB cables.  I recently got one for $9.95 at Walmart.

However, if you think about it much of what we buy today is more designed to meet the needs of a manufacturer than it is our needs.

I am a big fan of coffee made with a vacuum coffee pot.  A few years ago one of our died, and we had to get another one.  Black and Decker had stopped making them.  Apparently the volume was not there.  We were lucky to find a Bodum one.  A year or two after that one of our Bodum pots quit working.  In doing research we found Bodum had also stopped making electric ones.  The only ones available had to be used on the stove.  It is hard to say why the electric vacuum ones seem to be disappearing, but it might just be another case of manufacturers deciding what they want us to buy.

Another good example is Apple and their computers.  For years I fit in the category of a "prosumer," or someone who needed more features than the average consumer.  My requirements always took me to a desktop machine at Apple which most of the time I could get for $1595 to $1795.  Apple in its wisdom no longer sells standard desktops at that price point.  You have to be satisfied with an iMac which means all the nice displays that I use are no longer of use.  If I want a standard desktop I have to pay $2,495.

This does not just happen in electronics. 

I have done a lot of weed whacking over my years.  I quickly found out that there was only one kind that was the right tool for the job.  It was one with with a mostly wood handle.  As we have gotten more and more foreign goods in our stores, it has become nearly impossible to find the right kind of weed whacker.  Most of the ones sold now have a very small wooden handle and a cheap steel rod for the rest of it.  You can hardly use it before bending it.  It certainly will not last for seasons.  One of those will not even last a few hours in the kind clearing that I used to do.

Obviously the answer is competition, but there seems to be little of that at the low end of the scale.  While I can buy a terrific digital camera for $250 that has features which cost over a $1,000 only a year ago, it is nearly impossible for me to buy a good $17 weed whacker.  Heck I would pay a lot more for a good weed whacker

Perhaps there just are not enough people really using weed whackers to justify someone making good ones.

Maybe we will get to the day when a local shop ends up making small limited runs of quality custom products at the same time the foreign giants turn out millions of fantastic electronic products.

However, I remain a little suspicious.  Just think digital TV and check out all those new energy saving appliances that we all desperately need.  I just saw a refrigerator in Lowe's for $3,000.  I hope I never "need" one of those.

Here is my next bet.  The Kroger at Ridgewood Farm across from Lewis Gale Hospital will be closed because it is too small.

How do we get across the concept that keeping neighborhood stores alive is critically important?  Just look at the difficulty of getting them to come back to an area like downtown Roanoke.

What does it take to be rich these days?

Today the Washington Post ran George Will's article, A Lexus In Every Garage.  This afternoon I was over in Beaufort, NC.

The article talks about how hard it is to show that you are really rich.  We should invite George Will down to Beaufort for the annual migration. 

Beaufort happens to be one of the spots that the toys of the really rich visit.

The location of Beaufort and it's great deep water harbor just off the Intracoastal Waterway means that the personal watercraft of the east coast masters of the universe happen to pass through a couple times a year.

They head north during hurricane season and often start wandering south again as the hurricane season winds down.

I'm not sure I want to know much it costs to fill up one of these vessels.

As I watch one of these vessels dock today, I decided that the last thing that I need is something that requires that much effort to get to a dock.

We live  near Swansboro, which for some reason does not have the same concentration of money that you see in Beaufort.

As you walk down Front Street in Beaufort, one could end up amazed at the home prices.  Still the sand castles over on Emerald Isle blow away the value of real estate in Beaufort.

It is hard to get a feeling for the home values even through something like Trulia.  Just don't plan on buying anything much on the water side of Front Street for less than one million.

My guess is that some of this conspicuous consumption is keeping the wheels turning in Beaufort.  Harvesting a few dollars from the really rich when they pass through is good for the local economy and has been going on for years.

After all we're a little isolated from much of the modern world so we should be pleased by an occasional cash transfusion.

The grocery store as a restaurant

There is a lot of modern life that allows an individual to do things that might have taken a professional years ago.  A modern computer is an empowering device.

A modern grocery store is an invitation to forget some basic skills like cooking.

When we graduated from college in 1971 there was a noticeable back to land movement. While you often heard our parents' generation worry that no one from our generation would ever learn how to can and preserve food,  it turned out to a premature worry.

Many of our generation did go back to the land.  We learned not only how to garden, can, freeze, and preserve vegetables but some of us, my wife and I included, went further.  We ended up on a farm.

While it seems eons ago, we had a milk cow, did our own butter, and even made yogurt and tried our hand at cheese.  We grew all on our vegetables, had chickens for eggs, and produced our own beef. I even butchered a few pigs and cattle.  We made salt pork and were fairly self-sufficient for a family living in the Canadian north.

We went to the grocery store for some essential like salt, coffee, fruits that we couldn't grow, and poultry since the chickens were considered members of the family.

Before we moved to our commercial cattle farm we lived on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia in Saint Croix Cove.  There we even pickled fish and often bought our other fish right from the fishermen.

With all those great ingredients and a southern heritage, my wife Glenda became a great cook though she nows worries that she has forgotten how to cook.  That is a worry completely without foundation.

Now that we are in our late fifties and cooking as little as possible, I am beginning to worry that real cooking from scratch is a dying art and that the modern grocery store is hastening the death of cooking.

We were in the new Ukrop's in Roanoke, Va yesterday.  I was amazed at the number of prepared foods even down to hot dogs that had already been inserted into buns.  While Glenda loved the lighted shelves, I kept wandering from one counter of prepared food to the next, shaking my head all the time.

There were many complex dishes, yet I saw nothing that looked as good as a home cooked meal.

Over the years we have tried a few grocery stores dishes, and once in a while we still grab a salad of some sort.  When Fresh Market came to Roanoke we tried a number of their items.  While some were fine, all were expensive, and none were better than what we could prepare at home if we were willing to take the time.

Time is the one thing that most people don't have these days.  We are all rushing from one place to another often chasing our own tails.  Cooking is something that takes time.

Still cooking doesn't have to be that complex.  In fact Glenda comes close to refusing to cook anything with more than five ingredients.

While a plate of home fried chicken might be more than you can ask a modern cook, a bowl of classic southern pimento cheese is easy enough for anyone to fix and can be done for a lot less than nine dollars a pound. It only has five ingredients counting the salt.

Even a meal like pan fried flounder, slaw, and hush puppies isn't that hard to do. 

Of course there are plenty of healthier meals like Glenda's fantastic vegetarian baked beans but the point is that you will probably never know what good food tastes like if you depend on restaurants and grocery stores striving to become your source of take out food.

Our kids all hung around the kitchen while food was being cooked.  Now when we have a holiday, part of the tradition is the kids making part of the meal.

Cooking together takes eating together one step further.  We even have meals that the kids count on having like some of their mother's clam chowder when they come home for Christmas.  The kids also get very excited when their mother decides to make cornbread which has been a southern staple for years.

Of course not all cooking is universally approved in our family. 

I am only allowed to cook Dutch Mess every three or four years, but I can survive between times on my Rotisserie Chicken, homemade tuna fish, bologna, or tomato sandwiches.

I hope cooking doesn't go the way of the home handyman who is also rapidly disappearing just like the neighborhood hardware stores.

Maybe I should cook myself some country ham and eggs for breakfast before all the frying pans are gone. It is almost as good as my perfect Saturday breakfast that kept my father going for ninety years.

I know one thing, it will be a long time before I pay almost eight dollars for a small plastic box of watermelon with the rind removed.

More thoughts on grocery stores over on my Once was a Reston Resident Blog.

On another note lots of the slide shows of my boating adventures and the local festivals on the NC coast have links posted at this site.  How does a nice Oyster Roast sound?  People better not forget how to roast oysters.