View from the Mountain

Fall comes to the coast

This morning when we got up the temperature was around 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

That is the coolest that it has been since last winter here on the coast.

There was a seriously cool breeze as I walked out to get the paper in my traditional coastal shorts uniform.  I thought maybe I could will my way through the cooler weather.

It wasn't long after I got back in the house that I decided to but on some blue jeans.

By eleven am the winds had dropped and the temperatures were very nice outside.

Tonight we will actually dip into the forties, but I don't think it will hurt my tomato jungle which continues to produce for us.

Maybe we can have tomatoes for Thanksgiving for a change.

I am hoping this blast of cool weather will cool the waters off and get the fish to really biting.

Today I found a neat new web tool called Clipmarks.

It allows you to easily share paragraphs from a web page that has some interesting parts.

I can highly recommend it.  I used it on a NY Times article which had this to say.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

Robespierre — now firmly committed to the most militant brand of Jacobinism — condemned the “treacherous insinuations” cast by those who questioned “the excessive severity of measures prescribed by the public interest.” He warned his political opponents, “This severity is alarming only for the conspirators, only for the enemies of liberty.” Such measures, then as now, were undertaken to protect the nation — indeed, to protect liberty itself.

If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”

It is surprising how much the past can look like the present.  It is good thing I had a wonderful sunset to cast these worries out of my head for a few minutes.

Breakfast in the neighborhood

I keep wondering what makes a neighborhood. 

I guess it is people with some common interests in a loosely defined geographic area.

Still I have lived in a small farming community, and it didn't feel like a neighborhood.

We moved to a slightly larger one with a couple of stores and some churches.  Then it seemed like we were living in a neighborhood.

I can't figure out what makes a neighborhood for anyone but me.  Still one of the important things that I seem to notice is a place to have breakfast.

In small communities some of the elders will gather in the local MacDonald's, Hardee, or whatever to get the day started properly.

In our corner of Southwest Roanoke County that breakfast place is Famous Anthony's at Southwest Plaza.  We have been eating there since Anthony's opened.

I don't think it is world class food, but it is generally good food, reasonably priced and the breakfast waitresses as I have said a few times are some of the best around.

You walk in the door at Famous A's and you will likely see someone that you know.  Part of the drill is walking over and saying hello.

Sunday night used to a time when you could find many of the families in our area taking a break from cooking and enjoying an inexpensive meal at Anthony's. We haven't made that special time in many moons, but we need to revisit it.

For a while we used to eat breakfast at Famous A's three or four times a week.  Then we got to know some of the regulars, and the waitresses hardly brought us menus.

We are losing our Ace Hardware, mostly because of rising rents, I sure hope we don't lose Anthony's and the Printer's Ink next door.  Those spots along with the Bagel Shop, a relative late comer, and Bratcher's Service Station have been a part of our neighborhood since 1989 when we moved to Roanoke.

As we have found out along the North Carolina coast, houses without businesses aren't nearly as people friendly as a mixed community.  That is one of the reasons they are trying so hard along the coast to preserve some local waterfront businesses instead of watching them all turn into expensive condominiums.

Rainmakers and some water in the rivers

Thursday afternoon we were getting some gas for a quick trip down to North Carolina. 

After stopping at Sheetz we swung on to Electric Road and pulled into Salem's riverside park which is just before you head up the hill towards Lewis-Gale.

Though it was raining too much to get a picture exactly like the one in my post, "The river barely runs through it," there is no that there is lots more water in the Roanoke River.

We drove across North Carolina last evening.  In fact we went right through some of the most drought stricken areas.  It was great to see steady rain and a little tint of green in areas which had been devoid of color.

The Raleigh paper has an article, "Rain provides relief; water crisis lingers," which says most areas got a couple of inches of rain.

We crossed some pretty swollen streams as we descended from Virginia into North Carolina.  There is plenty of room for that water in the downstream reservoirs.

We drive over the Haw River on our 5.5 hour journey to NC's Southern Outer Banks.  On Monday when we passed over the river it was just puddles.  Last night, just four days later, there was water running in it. That is definitely a good sign.

As we swung down along the coast and passed through Swansboro just a few miles from our place, the skies opened up.  When we came across the White Oak River it was raining so hard that we could hardly see. That is only two or three miles from our home depending on whether you go by boat or car.

When our checked our rain gauge at our home on the White Oak, it showed about 1.5 inches of rain which means the rain didn't start until just before we got home. It was pouring so hard we had to wait a few minutes to unload.

Since it started raining the day after we got to Roanoke and rained on us all across North Carolina and poured as we got back to our coastal home not far from Emerald Isle, I'm going to declare us rainmakers.

In fact it my memory serves me correctly, once we bought our house in Roanoke in 1989, it couldn't stop raining.  I think we crushed the drought of 1988.

Today is the big day for Apple lovers, money will be raining on Cupertino.  I celebrated by buying a Windows Vista HP laptop from Staples.  I still use my Macs, I just couldn't see paying double for a new laptop that I needed.

There were other "rainmakers" around last night.

We did make it home in time last night to see the second half of the Va. Tech-Boston College game.  We could have stopped for dinner and still seen all we needed to see.

Yesterday before we got on the road, I wrote a post, "The Game," on the Blacksburg Web Villages site.

In it I explained why previous ties to Boston made pulling for Va Tech not a simple or automatic decision for me.

On the long drive down, I had decided to cheer for Boston College.  After watching a few minutes of the game, I thought that my rainmaking might have jinxed them, but in the end they turned in a remarkable comeback very similar to the Harvard-Yale one that I wrote about in my The Game post.

Instead of being just a bunch of football characters, I think Boston College showed some real character in not giving up. While it was obvious the TV announcers had given up on them, they hadn't given up on themselves.

It is one of those times, that it was fortunate that they were listening to their leaders and themselves instead of what technology or television could deliver to them.

Matt Ryan obviously showed some great leadership.

Maybe I'm crazy but I think a lot of success comes from failure or near failure and the ability to overcome it.

Boston College should be in good shape for their next challenge.  We'll have to see how Va. Tech responds.  In the end, it is still just a game which unfortunately has a lot of money attached to it.  I suspect we'll be seeing Matt Ryan on a lot of Sundays in the future.

Whatever happens with college football, it is nice to not be worrying about the mountains catching on fire this fall.  For that and the rain which came in the last fews days, I am very thankful.

I'm also thankful to not being reading the Roanoke Times this morning and all the articles about last night's game.

Dining in the neighborhood, T-Bone Jacks

The Roanoke area is filled with those of us who like to eat out.  Just try to find a spot on Friday night after the work week is over.

That means that every new restaurant is warmly greeted, and if they can deliver on good food, reasonable service, and bearable prices, they will find some willing fans here.

Recently my wife, Glenda, and I made our first trip to T-Bone Jacks at Ridgewood Farms across from Lewis Gale hospital. We came away impressed with the food we were served.

Glenda had a Reuben sandwich and I got a chicken tender salad with a bowl of spicy chicken noodle soup.

My previous golden standard for chicken tenders was the Texas Steak House near Tanglewood, but I think the salad is much better at T-Bone Jacks, and the chicken tenders are very close in quality.

Glenda rated her Reuben as very good with especially good sauce and bread.

The iced tea and soup were both very good, and the service didn't disappoint us.

As it is with all restaurants, that was just one trip and a few items off the menu, but we would recommend T-Bone Jacks highly based on our first but not last visit.

We decided for our next visit, we'll just get a bowl of soup and split the chicken tender salad.  The portions were hearty enough that I'm sure we'll get plenty to eat.

The NC Drought

While the drought has been bad in Roanoke, it is severe just to the south in North Carolina.

We were recently driving up highway 421 from Siler City to Greensboro.  Siler City appears to have run a giant flexible pipe for miles to one of the local rivers.

Along most of our trip from our second home along the Southern Outer Banks of the NC Coast, the roadsides are almost black.

We are lucky along the coast as we had plenty of moisture until the last few weeks.

I snapped this picture of a dead bush in a Taco Bell parking lot in Greensboro where we stopped for a bathroom break.

With the moon in the sky above it and the warm dry air, it sure felt like we were someplace else besides NC in later October.

I guess the Roanoke area has a lot to be thankful for since the drought isn't as bad here and an inch of rain is expected tomorrow.