View from the Mountain

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

The Ghost I Knew

You cannot have a ghost story without a spooky, somewhat mysterious house and where I grew up in rural Forsyth County was nothing like that but things change.

My mother moved back to 347 West Pine Street (pictured to the left) in Mount Airy the fall of 1963. I came home to that house for Thanksgiving that year, my first at McCallie, the military school I was attending in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My bedroom had moved from our non-spooky house in Lewisville about thirty-eight miles away to Pine Street which certainly had the potential for spookiness. My dad had been in a house at that location since around the turn of the century.  My mom lived there from the mid-twenties until just before I was born in 1949. For many years, she ran a beauty shop on Main St. just walking distance from the Pine Street house.

The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome which is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house's four walls could tell never got explained to me before everyone who could shed light on the mysteries died.

Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one ever wanted to talk about them. There were things that I did not even know to ask when I was growing up. 

The house at 347 West Pine Street is an imposing home. That was especially the case to a country boy who was more comfortable in the woods than in a big fancy house. By the time, I got old enough to care, I was on a mission to get away from the house and Mount Airy. That mission took me to Canada by the time I was twenty-two.

Upstairs above the floor with the bedrooms was a full stick-framed attic complete with walnut banisters. If ever there was an area that could house ghosts along with mysterious steamer trunks, this attic was it. The house even had a laundry chute which went all the way to the basement where there was a bedroom and bathroom for a maid.  The kitchen, dining room, and great room were on the second floor along with the bedroom my father was reduced to using because of a stroke.

It did not take me long to figure out that the history I did not know about was powerful in the minds of others.  My Aunt Molly when she visited would not stay in the guest bedroom. She always slept in one of the twin beds in my mother's bedroom. Eventually I heard the story about my father's first wife's attempted suicide. My mother, who at the time was nursing my grandmother, found my father's first wife hanging from the walnut railing around the top of the stairs. She saved her but the story was born.

I was never afraid of the house but there were some strange things like how cool the hallway always felt between my bedroom and the stairs to the attic. Of course there were strange noises but it was an old house. Then in 1974 after my dad had died, my wife and I were staying in my bedroom after coming back from our place in Canada. It was our first night in the house as a married couple.

We were going to bed and all of sudden the electrical panels started popping. It was like someone was running between the two floors flipping the circuit breakers off and on. The circuit breakers were not easy to move from one position to the other. They also made a loud noise. My mother was sound asleep in her bedroom. She always slept with a baseball bat by her bed but said the ghost had never bothered her.  I thought someone had broken into the house. I took a gun from my gun cabinet and checked the whole house. All doors were locked and no windows had been breached. Things quieted down as soon as I left my bedroom.  To this day, I have never solved the riddle of the noise that night.

My mother died in the spring of 2004.  I often said that if there was a ghost in the house, it would have to deal with the life force of my mother when she entered the realm of spirits.  My money was always on my mother winning any battle of the spirits.

After her death, we were faced with cleaning out the Pine Street house. It took us many years and we often spent weekends working on the house.  One weekend my wife was working in a hall closet on the main floor. She looked towards the foyer and saw something triangular floating from the stairs to the dining room. We are pretty grounded people but we could never come up with an explanation that made any sense. It was probably my imagination, but the upstairs hallway felt particularly cold that day.

This might prove I am crazy but not long after that I decided that the blinds in the attic had to go. I ripped them down and threw open the windows. It was not long after that when I noticed how warm the upstairs hallway felt. I smiled and thought to myself that my mother's spirit had prevailed and the restless ghost had been driven out once I opened the windows and made sure the attic got plenty of sunshine.

Even after that I was the only one willing to spend the night in the house alone. By that time the guns were long gone but so was the ghost.

So that is the story of the ghost that I once knew.

 

 

The First Cold Day

Living on the North Carolina coast, we always considered the first cold day to be the one when we had to give up wearing shorts. When I lived on the farm in Tay Creek, the first cold day was when I had to start wearing mittens. That was actually a whole lot colder than you might think. I rarely used mittens until it got below zero.

Growing up in North Carolina, cold is not something you think about very much. To me it was cold when the red dirt banks sparkled with frost crystals. As I got older and went winter camping with our Boy Scout Troop 752 at Camp Raven Knob, I got to know real cold. There is nothing like rain and chilly weather to make you appreciate a nice warm home. Still it was not serious cold.

The first serious cold that I remember was on a trip freshman year from Cambridge to Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. I cannot remember why we went but I do remember it being minus twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit the Saturday morning we left. Fortunately, serious cold does not last very long if you are in a functioning car. Still it left an impression.  While temperatures in Cambridge got down into single digits, they could not come close to Hanover.

Sometime in my college years I caught a snow-loving virus. That and a obsession with having some land of my own led me to head off to Maritime Canada. In the early seventies land was cheap in Nova Scotia and life seemed like a throwback to life in the fifties in the United States.

The old house that I bought on the shore of the Bay of Fundy was not exactly the warmest house around. In spite of lots of efforts and a newly built fireplace, it could still be cold especially since the wind often howled in St. Croix Cove where the house was.  That part of Nova Scotia was famous for storms that went from rain to snow to sleet to freezing rain back to snow accompanied by bitter cold.

Fortunately for the snow loving part of me, the lousy Nova Scotia weather was also bad for cattle so my wife and I decided to move to New Brunswick. Without much thought other than falling in love with a farm, we ended up in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the middle of New Brunswick's snow belt. Our first winter we had over twenty feet of snow. We also got to endure minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit that first year. In January of 1982, when our youngest daughter was born, the thermometer dipped to minus forty.

Most years in New Brunswick the first real  cold came in the first week or so December just about the time busy mothers needed to finish up their Christmas shopping. You could tell the real cold weather had arrived when on successive days the previous day's low would become the next day's high temperature. Things would continue that way until it bottomed out at something seriously below zero Fahrenheit.

I endured some bitter cold on our New Brunswick farm but I doubt that I ever got colder than when I went fishing in a skiff on the rainy, wind morning of October 25, 2005 when the temperature was in the forties. When we finished fishing that morning and I was dropped off at the dock, it only took me about a block of walking before I realized that I could not feel my extremities. There is nothing like being completely soaked in the wind to make cold penetrate to your bones. I had to spend some serious time in a very hot tub bath before I recovered. It is no surprise that I did not feel cold while I was catching all the fish. That fishing trip remains one of my coldest memories next to sitting on a brick hard seat in my pickup at minus forty.

I guess that I am getting soft. I now consider today our first cold day of 2021. I don't think we broke fifty Fahrenheit. I was wearing shorts when I went out to retrieve the paper but as the day failed to improve, I changed to blue jeans. I even put on socks.

 

 

 

 

 

Streaming is Like Self-Serve Fuel Pumps

Technology changes like ATMs and self-serve gas pumps arise not because they were designed to immediately make our lives easier. Technology change almost always puts more pressure initially on the end users than it does on the people deploying the changes. In the case of ATMs and gas pumps, a lot of people lost jobs. I suspect it took most people a while to get used to both changes and that does not include the people without jobs. I know it me a while to adjust.

It had been easy just to drive up to the gas pump and not worry about getting gasoline on my hands or clothes before a sales call. It was also easy (at least when the Cable was working) to spend years in the simple-minded world of cable TV. When we first started using cable TV, there was no cable Internet. We got our first Internet connection through a dial-up modem on a telephone line.

A number of years ago, I started streaming with a Roku box. Netflix was the first service we tried. Since those early years, I have used many streaming services and devices but we always could fall back on cable TV.

Then we moved in February 2021. As part of our move we cancelled our cable service on February 1. We never even made contact with a cable company when we moved. There was no need because we were relocating to a home with a great fiber Internet connection. We signed up for a 500 Mbps symmetric fiber Internet connection and went all in on streaming.

The world of streaming in not as easy as turning on the TV and changing channels with a flipper. However, it is not impossible even for those less technical than me.

The first thing you need to do is to buy a new smart TV unless you have bought one in the last year or two and have yet to be able to figure it out. It might well be all you to embrace streaming. The next step is to cancel your cable subscription at the end of the month. Going cold turkey is an important step. Otherwise you might fall back into what is easiest but not cheapest. Your Internet will likely cost you more once you stop “bundling” with the cable company but you will still end up saving money.

Unless you pick an all-encompassing streaming service like YouTube TV, your choices of streaming services should be viewed as more whim than long term commitment. With a couple exceptions, most of our streaming choices only last a few months.

One of the exceptions is Paramount+. Because we can get live local TV for the news, we have yet to cancel Paramount+. Other services, even Netflix stay on a rotating schedule. We subscribe when we hear something interesting is about to be broadcast. Sometimes we ignore a service for months.

The other exception is Amazon’s Prime video. It comes built into our Prime membership. One of the other tricks to streaming is that we manage many of the subscriptions through Amazon. Now it doesn’t always work because there are raging battles for position in the industry. I believe HBO Max and Prime just had a falling out. You cannot get Apple TV on Amazon Prime because Apple wants you to manage your subscriptions on their Apple TV hardware. However, if you do use Prime, you can sometimes find channels on sale. We have tried a couple for 99 cents per month.

Currently, we subscribe to Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+ and Apple TV. The average cost is $5.99 per month for a total $29.95. When added to our $84. 99 symmetric 500 Mbps Internet , our entertainment expense without telephone or Prime Video is $114.94. Prime membership costs us $119 a year and I feel comfortable allocating it the same $4.99 a month that I pay for Apple TV.

With that our entertainment costs are $119.98 monthly if you allocate all of the Internet costs to entertainment. However, I work from home and use the Internet for work at least three times as as much as I use it for watching TV. I could easily say my entertainment Internet cost is $21.99 a month and my business cost is $63. Using that logic, streaming services (Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+, Apple TV & Prime Video) cost $34.94 and Internet for them costs $21.99 for a total of $56.93 per month. If you throw in the full Internet, the services rise to total of $119.98 monthly.

A lot of people use their cell phones for home phones, but since we have fiber, we bought an Internet VOIP service. It costs us $12.67 monthly for unlimited calling to the US and Canada. It includes voicemail, fax, and a number of other features. The line is used almost exclusively for outbound business calls.

However, if you are looking to compare a complete triple play cable modem Internet, cable TV and phone system to ours, our total cost with all entertainment & Internet costs would be $119.98 plus $12.67 for a monthly total of $132.65.

There are three or four months out of the year when we watch Netflix now at $17.99 per month. However, we work to keep our streaming costs under $40 per month so we will pause two or three of the other services when we are using Netflix.

Before we moved our typical cable bill for Internet, phone, and as little TV as we could get was close to $180 per month in 2020. Even then we were still using Amazon Prime Video and some Netflix on top of that. Our costs for all of it was around $200 per month.

Conservatively, we are saving $65 a month from our previous bills. On top of it all we have better Internet service and our phone calls are crystal clear. I can also do multi-point video conferences straight from my computers. The saving are almost identical to the $65 a month we are saving on our two cell phones after we switched from Verizon to the Google FI service.

Our total communication charges are now less than $200 a month including cell phones. At one time it was over $330. We are saving over $1,500 a year.

Today we have a more flexible system. We often watch our local news on an iPad Pro on the kitchen table. You have to be smart about streaming and it takes some learning but with a little practice, you can watch a very wide variety of shows and save significant money. Just like ATMs and self-service gas pumps were in their day, streaming is the wave of the future. You can embrace it now or cling to the old ways until they practically disappear.

Our TV hardware includes the following, LG - 65” Class CX Series OLED 4K UHD with Smart webOS TV and a Fire TV Cube — 4K Ultra HD - 2019 release. The Fire TV cube is under $100 and allows you to control some of the TV with your voice. There are TVs with Fire TV/Alexa built-in. We tried the LG Web TV interface but preferred the Fire TV interface that we were already using on another older TV. You can buy less expensive Fire TV devices. I am not sure how they compare. There is no exact way to put all this together and when you sign into the services make sure that you keep your passwords straight. I guarantee you will need them especially when you start turning services off and trying new ones.

Our Pandemic Move - Life Lessons - Part 1

Our Neighborhood east of Mocksville, NC

We just finished a move just one month shy of the first anniversary of the COVID19 pandemic. We had to sell our old home, move, and settle in to a new community at a time when people are even avoiding their own families. It was our hardest move including the time when we moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Columbia, Maryland, and had to deal with a border crossing. We were still in our thirties when we did that move. We are now in our early seventies.

Certainly being older had an impact on this move but when we moved in 1987, there was no Internet. We did not have cell phones. The only way to see a house was to get into a car and visit it or wait for snail mail pictures. We carried prepaid long-distance phone cards to communicate when traveling. You could not find things out by going to a website. In the eighties, there were no websites. You either had to write a letter or pick up the telephone.

One of the underlying reasons that we were able to make this move is that a massive amount of new technology now underlies most of the business processes involved in a move. Sure there is still a lot of manual labor involved but during a pandemic, I seriously doubt you could buy a house without all of today’s remarkable technology.

We learned a lot with this move and I am not going to try to cram it all into one blog post. I suspect it will take at least two or three posts. For this first post, I am going to cover deciding where to live and buying our new home. I will probably do a post on selling our home and another on the actual move.

First just a little background, this is our seventh move as a couple. We did one corporate move and the rest we have done ourselves. My wife and I had 200 head of Black and Red Angus cattle on our farm in central New Brunswick in Canada. After dispersing our herd of cattle, I eventually went to work for Apple Computer after a two-year stint at an early computer reseller.

We moved from the farm in December 1984 and I worked for Apple in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then Columbia, Maryland. Finally, we lived in Roanoke, Virginia, while I worked out of the Reston, Virginia office where I became Apple’s director of federal sales. I worked for Apple for almost twenty years until July 2004. I did some consulting and spent some time at a couple of other companies before trying real estate for a few years. I went back to my technology roots in 2011 and continue to work as a Vice President for that same company that builds community fiber networks.

I have been faced with figuring out where to live in unfamiliar areas several times. The one element which can make or break finding the right place to live is establishing a relationship with a realtor who knows the area where you have decided to live. In each move where we found a good home, there was a realtor who helped us make the right decisions. We have been fortunate to work with some great realtors.

Purely by chance when we started looking at places to live, we lucked into signing a buyer’s agreement with a great Realtor, Carrie Gibson of Mays-Gibson Real Estate.

I am a big believer in test-driving cars and real estate agents. In the early stages of moving, we saw a house listed that interested us. We emailed Shelia Mays, the listing agent, asking some questions in early January 2019. Before she had a chance to answer, a personal emergency happened and we ended up working with Carrie Gibson. It was a very fortuitous accident that made all the difference in finding a house in the right place that came as close as possible to meeting our needs.

Carrie was everything we could ask for in a buyer’s agent, knowledgeable, personable, caring, persistent, a good listener, patient, and a great communicator. I am convinced that our move would have been far more stressful and less successful without Carrie’s expertise.  Moving at any time is difficult especially when you are in your seventies. Moving during a pandemic is a huge hurdle and Carrie Gibson made our move possible. We bought our home twenty-five months after we first talked to Carrie.  Carrie is the best buyers' agent that has ever helped us and we have worked with a couple of stars.

While we ended up buying a place less than twenty miles from where I grew up in the fifties, the growth in the area makes it almost unrecognizable. My memory has to stretch to accommodate all the changes.

We made a trip to the area in the spring of 2019 to decide on areas where we might want to live. Carrie showed us around the area and gave us a good feel for where we might want to live. We actually tried to pick our area out before we put our home on the market for the first time. Because we were selling a waterfront home after Hurricane Florence paid a devastating visit to NC’s Crystal Coast, it took longer than expected. In fact, as the pandemic started to rage, we took our home off the market in the summer of 2020. We put our back on the market in the fall of 2021, that time it sold in thirty-seven days.  Carrie never stopped communicating with us or treated us like we were taking too long to buy.

When our home sold in early November, we had to buy a home and we needed to buy it before Thanksgiving. Carrie had been in the loop of the selling of our home and was prepared for us but it was still hard to absorb how fast homes were selling at the time. In the middle of the summer, we had sixty homes on our potential list. By early November, the number was down to a dozen. By the time we got in the car to make the four-hour drive to go look at homes, there were only eight homes left on the list. When we got up the next morning, we were down to six homes.

Carrie lined up the homes on a Thursday and after taking a second look at two homes, we made an offer Friday afternoon on a home about the same age, fourteen years, as our current home. The owner countered with a full-price offer. We upped our offer another $5K and when we got no response, we withdrew our second offer. We decided to buy one of the other two homes.

Saturday we had a close look at both homes. We rejected one because of poor cell phone reception, lousy Internet connectivity, and its location where we would have endured several homes being built nearby.

We ended up buying a beautiful spec home that we had initially rejected because of vaulting in the living room. It has Fiber to the Home for Internet connectivity, is on public sewer and water, plus the lot gives us the feeling of spaciousness. We feel like we live in the country but new construction is done on our street. Our home has 2,400 square feet home compared to our recent coastal home's 3600 square ft so we have down-sized like we wanted to do.

There were significant negotiations with the builder and Carrie’s expertise helped those go smoothly. She did a great job writing up the final contract. We also had a challenging closing because we didn’t receive the money from our closing until Monday before our 9:30 AM closing the next day. Once again Carrie smoothed out things on that end while our real estate agent at the coast, Don Whiteside, went above and beyond the call of duty to get us a check that would work for our next day's closing. I will talk more about Don when I write the article about selling our home.

Carrie also played a big role in helping us get settled but that too deserves its own article. When I did the walkthrough with Carrie and my son the week before closing, Carrie was on top of everything just as she was when we negotiated the finishing of the house.

We are living in what I consider to the perfect location in a very well-constructed home. We live in a quiet countryside area less than ten minutes from Mocksville’s quaint small-town charm and impressive services. We are fifteen minutes from just about any service that you could imagine in Clemmons and only twenty to twenty-five from everything else including Trader Joe’s and Costco which were an hour and a half from our coastal location.

The story of our new phones illustrates how much closer we are to civilization. Somehow during the move, some pieces of our previous Panasonic phone system went missing. I looked online and it was two days for an Amazon delivery. I checked Costco thinking I might drive in and pick up a system. They had a four-handset system for $79. While looking, I noticed they would deliver. So I started shopping and while doing that figured out I could add groceries. I placed my order which included a famous Costco rotisserie chicken, some of my favorite Canadian bacon, some beef sausages, the largest bag of Cape Cod chips that I have ever seen, and 40 lbs of cat litter. An hour and nine minutes after hitting submit, I am watching the Costco shopper/delivery person back out of our driveway. The chicken was still warm and required tasting.

We are very happy with our new home, its location, and our experience of buying and selling homes. We acquired a great home at a fair price which is something we cannot say about every one of our other moves. While lots of new technology helped us buy our new home. I cannot emphasize how important a role our agent, Carrie Gibson, played in the success of this whole operation.