View from the Mountain

Tomatoes and Me

I would not venture to guess when it was that I ate my first tomato.  Tomatoes likely appear on every page of my life story.  Shortly after we moved to the small town of Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem in 1952, my mother had tomato plants growing in front of our house.  When she moved from her Mount Airy house to our Roanoke house, there were still tomatoes growing near her back steps.   When she got to our house, there were tomatoes growing by the side of the house.

I remember loving tomato sandwiches, even to the point of ordering BLTs for breakfast when traveling.  Some time during my teenage years when on an overnight fishing trip with a friend, I learned about bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches. It was love at first bite.  This was well before all cured and processed meat was pronounced as bad for us.   However, we can cling to the knowledge than nothing is better than a plain tomato sandwich on the great bread of your choice with the perfect mayonnaise which in my case is Duke’s.

To eat really good tomatoes, you must face the challenge of growing tomatoes unless you live in an area with lots of farmers’ markets.  I planted my first tomatoes in Nova Scotia in 1972, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  We started the plants from seed and hardened them off in cold frame made from salvaged windows.  We barely managed to get tomatoes before the first frost. Since they were all we had and North Carolina was a long way off, they seemed delicious. However, there just wasn’t enough heat out on the shore for tomatoes to be a reliable crop.

For lots of reasons including better hay making weather for our cattle, we moved inland to the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was much easier to grow tomatoes (and make hay) there.  By the time we got to the mountainside in Roanoke, in 1989, I had a lot of experience growing tomatoes in harsh conditions.  Even so, getting a ripe tomato by July 1 on our Virginia mountain was a challenge.

Then in 2006, we decided to make a move to North Carolina’s coast.  We ended up on a marsh on an inlet of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It was definitely a tomato friendly climate. The spring of 2007, we planted our first coastal tomatoes. Even though we got them in the ground late, we had ripe tomatoes before the end of June.  The next year we had ripe tomatoes before the end of May.

Eventually, in 2016, we managed to grow tomatoes for twelve months using wagons to move them in and out of the garage.  The ripe ones we got in January and February weren’t the best but by the time the heat came in March they were pretty tasty. 

Now we are back in North Carolina’s Piedmont where my mother grew her first and best tomatoes.  On March  8, I planted my tomato seeds for this year’s crop. I will get them into the ground in late April.  Hopefully, we can still manage to beat that July 1 date that I used to chase on the mountain.

A Real SUV

This is my second Acura MDX and with over 115,000 miles on it, it has seen plenty of challenges.  My first MDX helped clean out my mother's home in Mount Airy, North Carolina.  There seemed to always be some furniture riding up Interstate 81 with us to Roanoke, Virginia or even to Reston, Virginia where a couple of our children live.  When we moved from Roanoke in 2012,  the Acura made several trips to the coast fully loaded mostly with very heavy hand tools left over from our years on the farm.

In 2012 we sold our big Nissan truck.  We were driving it less than 3,500 miles a year and it hardly made sense to keep a vehicle we were driving so little. I decided to put a hitch for my boat on my MDX and make do with it.  The hauling chores for the Acura have gotten more and more interesting.  I keep a tarp in it almost all of the time.

Usually in spring and fall, there are at least a couple of trips for sod.  Then there are bags of mulch and dirt that we use in our gardening. Last year I took my tarp into the woods and raked pine straw on it and dragged it to the Acura, then hauled it home and dragged the tarp to the beds on the far side of yard where I spread the pine straw with a pitch fork.  It was very similar to feeding the loose hay that we sometimes had on our farm in Canada.

This year the pine straw was not so good in the woods so I bought bales of long leaf pine straw from the home improvement stores.  I made three trips nearly fully loaded with 10-15 bales each trip.  After that I ended up giving our palms a haircut and hauled the palm fronds away to the dump.

Our MDX also pulls my kayak up the slope and out of the water behind our home.  I have had a lot of vehicles over my life but I do not think I have every had one more versatile.  Usually it has a cooler or two bouncing around in it.

Certainly my Acura MDX is not a luxury vehicle dedicated to cruising to school and picking up groceries, but it is a faithful companion and has helped bring home its fair share of the sea's bounty.

Pricing models that irritate me

I am a pretty reasonable consumer.  I don't mind paying for quality services or goods, but I really hate "hidden charges" or charges cleverly disguised.

Last night we were having dinner at one of our favorite restaurants which will remain nameless.

We ordered our normal items and as we like to do these days asked if we could substitute steamed vegetables for french fries.  The waitress said no problem, and that was the beginning of the problem.

The main items we ordered were fine and our veggies were not quite as good as usual, but they were okay.  However, when we got our bill I noticed we had been charged an additional 99 cents each to switch from fries to vegetables.  We had ordered the same meals a dozen times in the last six months without being charged extra.

I questioned the waitress on the charge, and she said it was the new computer system which automatically added the charge.  She offered to have management come talk to be about it.  Since I know the owner, and knew he wasn't around, I said not to bother.  However, I wrote him a personal note about it this morning.

This irritates me almost as much as the restaurants that don't tell you how much their beverages are unless you ask and find out they are charging $2 for a glass of tea.

I have gotten irritated at some lawyers charging inflated prices for every fax that they do.  I recently sat through the presentation of a lawyer who is doing real estate closings for a flat fee.  It makes sense to me.  He will even come to our office so the customer is in more familiar circumstances.  I may give him a try.

Next on my irritation list are car dealerships with their surcharges on your service bill.  You would think with rates as high as they charge, that they could cover waste disposal some other way than tacking it on to your bill.

Then there is the whole mess of cable TV pricing and Internet access.  I thought someone was going to protect us from these highway robbers.  Our cable bills are ridiculous considering how little television we watch.

Yet the only solution seems to be bundled services.  The trouble is I want a high quality land line and good internet access.  They're both in different bundles where we live.

I am not willing to go with DSL or live all the time with Internet challenged telephones.

The idea that we can be sucked into some bad services with good pricing on one good service just isn't going to work for me.

It all reminds me of the Apple Computer model of business.  We will give you the best operating system around, but the only way you are going to get it is to buy our over priced hardware.

Perhaps that explains why I haven't bought a Mac in two years.

The weekend car wash

There are lot of things that don't happen often these days, and a few of them bring back a lot of memories.

When I was growing up there were a couple of things that got done on the weekend, and one was mowing the yard.  The other was washing the family car.

I know it is hard to believe, but until after I got my driver's license, our family only had one car.

It was that way because we didn't need another car and couldn't afford a second one anyway.  I was living with my mother then, and I can still see her out in the driveway washing the car.  There were plenty of times that I helped, but I was usually trapped behind the lawn mower.

After all the chores were done, we would often go out for dinner on Saturday night.

When my parents got back together we still went down to one car until I got my driver's license.

There weren't many Saturdays when I was home that I didn't wash my car.  I was fortunate as an only child and got some nice cars overs the years. 

There was a downside.  I got sent off to a Presbyterian military school in Tennessee for my high school years.  I didn't get to see my car very often until my senior year when I got to keep it at school, but not drive it unless I had to rush home to see my dad who was in and out of the hospital that year.

Still I enjoy washing a car, it is a job which can be very rewarding.  I also admit finding the mowing that I do pleasurable so I may be a little weird, but maybe that is what happens when your formative years were the fifties and sixties.

I especially like mowing our yard down near North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  It's flat and has few bushes to mess up your long straight runs. It helps to have a great lawn mower.

Washing my car is a different thing down on the coast.  We're right on the water and though our driveway water is filtered before it hits the water behind the house, I would just as soon use a place farther from the water so I usually stop at a car wash where I can use one of those power wands.

It is not as much fun as doing it in your own driveway and being able to admire your handwork, but I'll still get to that once in a while when we visit Roanoke.

I guess that is just one of the trade offs for living on the  coast.

Technology that I'm not certain I need

I sometimes wonder about our mindless rush towards new technology.

We bought a new Toyota Avalon a couple of years ago.  It was one of the earlier cars to feature no keys.

I can see some benefits in having no keys.  The door doesn't get scratched.  I don't have to fumble for key, and no one can run off with my key and easily have a copy made.

I have been driving cars for over 42 years.  Scratches on the door from keys have never been a big problem for me.  I have managed quite well getting in my cars, especially with automatic doors that unlock when I press a button on the key fob.  No one has ever copied one of my keys except me, and that has turned out to be pretty handy when three people needed to use the same car.

So none of those are good reasons that I need keyless starting of my car.

We have found the batteries in the keyless entry/start fobs lose their power quickly.  You have to go back to the dealer to have them replaced.  One of our lasted less than two years, the other slightly over two years.  The dealer says the average is about a year.

I guess the odds of both batteries dying at the same time are slim, but ours went out just a month a part.  While there is a key hidden in the fob that will open the doors, it doesn't do you much good if you also want to start the car.

It just might be that we have some great technology whose most visible effect is that it is just one more reason we have to go back to the dealer.

These days there is no way a shade tree mechanic could do much more than drain the oil from the engines of these cars.  It would probably take an engineering degree to change the spark plugs.

Now I have to have an electronic key to get the motor to run.  The key and switch were some of the most reliable technology on cars.

The companies have decided it is time to move on, I guess that is way "progress" happens these days, we need new technology just so we can have something new to sell.