Even though we have been here for more than 14 months, and have walked more days than we haven't, there is so much territory to cover that we discover new areas from time to time. Today was a day for discovering.

Brian Marshall dropped by for lunch and a chat about the development he is championing with which I may or may not be involved. As is typical in a situation like this one, the owner of the land has decided, now that he has someone interested in purchasing his property, that it is worth considerably more than a market study would indicate. This particular owner has agonized and delayed for a couple months over this transaction and has even gone so far as to say that he has another interested party. Today he met with Brian and announced, with apparently quite a bit of hand wrenching and rolling eyes, that he thinks his land is worth 80% to 100% more than the market study indicates but that there is some flexibility in his price. My advice to Brian was to tell him that if he has another interested party who is willing to pay that kind of money for this land, he probably should take it.

Brian and his partners have a couple other alternative sites they are considering and although this initial site was probably the sexiest of the group under scrutiny, it is a whole lot less sexy at 100% over value. I think the other interested party is imaginary and if Brian's group shows an indication that they will walk from the deal, a more reasonable number might be agreed upon.

After dishing out this advice over lunch fresh from my panini press, I sent Brian on his way to another meeting and I took Abner down to the Blue Ridge Parkway to check out some new territory. The weather has turned to t-shirt and shorts again and today was sunny with a light breeze. . . perfect hiking weather. We parked at the intersection of highway 25 and the Parkway and set off to explore a section of the MTS trail. For those who haven't either read or studied and remembered my emails of the past year, the MTS trail (mountains-to-sea) is a footpath that begins at the Appalachian Trail on the Tennessee border in Great Smoky Mountain National Park and meanders to the East, terminating at Nag's Head on the Outer Banks. When completed, and estimates range from 8 to 14 years for this to happen, it will be 1,000 miles long, entirely within North Carolina and will provide hikers a continuous pedestrian route from the Mountains to the Sea.

Abner and I had only walked about three small sections of it prior to today's stroll, but I noticed on a National Geographic map I have of hiking trails in this region that there is a fairly lengthy stretch that follows the Parkway around the Southern edge of Asheville, so that is what we started to explore today. We walked for about an hour out and an hour back through rolling terrain, mostly in fairly dense woods. The trail is very pretty and well kept. The entire portion we were on is on land that used to be part of Biltmore Estate when George and Edith Vanderbilt still lived there. There are a couple funky old wooden bridges that date back to when it was part of the route from Biltmore House to Vanderbilt's lodge at the top of Mt. Pisgah. It never ceases to amaze me that this one estate has provided so much preserved natural environment that is freely available to the public.

Geese and ducks are nesting everywhere. One of the factoids I remember from God knows where is that geese are among the few animals known to mate for life. This is very apparent with the ones at Biltmore. All winter, the geese that spend the season on the Bass Pond and the lagoon just kind of hang out in large groups and make noise. They swim around periodically sticking their heads down (and butts up) to grab a fish, but they don't seem to do much else.

In the spring though, they clearly pair off and nest. There is one pair in each of the three aquatic gardens within the Italian Garden. Another is in the small meadow above the Bass Pond (and they squawk like crazy if Abner and I are within 100 feet of their nest), and every 50 feet or so in the big meadow just south of the lagoon you can see one pair after another. The moms sit on the nests and the dads either hang out or kind of march around trying to look threatening. These geese are so well fed it is amazing they can fly. Most of them, particularly the ones that live on the lagoon, don't bother flying unless it is absolutely necessary. A whole gaggle (I have always wanted to use that word in a real sentence) of them will mosey across the road between the lagoon and the hillside that faces the water where they hang out and sun themselves. They seem completely unconcerned about traffic, which comes to a grinding halt when a parade of them is crossing. . .usually to the accompaniment of the quiet click of digital cameras hanging out of car windows. The whole scene can be pretty funny.

I am getting down to the last week or so before my springtime guests start arriving. My intention is to keep posting as regularly as possible but when I do have company there may be some gaps.

For most of the 32 years I lived in Sacramento, I was treated for allergies that made my life miserable. Every year, almost precisely to the date of March 15th (the Ides of March no less) I would begin to sneeze constantly and violently. My eyes would itch. My soft palate would itch to the point that sometimes I would start swallowing involuntarily. My nose ran and I would go through boxes of Kleenex. . .the wastebaskets around my house gave testimony every year to when the season began. Before Mitch Blum successfully tested and treated me with shots, it would get to the point where the irritation in my nose would turn into pretty severe bleeding and infection. In the late 70s and into the early 80s, I was so desperate, I considered moving to the Monterey Peninsula to get away from the misery of the Valley.

This situation was ameliorated by shots that I took pretty much year round. Still, every spring, from March 15th through the end of June, and again in the fall for about 6 weeks, I went through some symptoms. They were sufficiently under control with the shots and occasional use of Zyrtec that I stopped considering moving to Monterey or Carmel, but the problem never really went away. It was also pretty time consuming to get shots every week. By the time I drove or rode my bike to the Dr's office, waited my turn for shots, spent the required 20 minutes after the shot to prove that I wasn't going into anaphylactic shock, and drove or rode home, I usually killed between one and two hours.

Well things have changed! I was warned by my neighbors here that this is a bad area for allergy sufferers and to brace myself for the onslaught. Now I realize that it is possible that I will eventually suffer here as much as I did in Sacramento, but the apparent sum total of my allergic reaction to the stuff in the air here is to sneeze between 2 and 4 times in the first 20 minutes or so after I get up in the morning. That's it. I don't have shots. I don't take Zyrtec. I don't have a landfill named after me for all the Kleenex I go through. It's a miracle.

For those of you who were worried about my home life turning into some bad sci-fi horror flick, relax. I went downstairs this morning and didn't find a single fly in the kitchen or breakfast area. Decie, my housekeeper came yesterday and cleaned all the windows that were covered with Raid residue, vacuumed up the hundreds of dead flies from the window sills and floors, and unleashed another attack on them in the laundry where I hadn't realized there were more of them. There are still a few stragglers buzzing around upstairs, but I suspect I can get rid of them without unleashing nuclear weapons.

My sister pointed out to me the irony that I was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat.

Not certain what happened to this picture from the previous post, nor do I know why a portion of the text ended up underlined. The blogosphere has some mysteries. 

OK, so I underestimated the fly population. Today Big Rat is certainly getting back at me. After nailing about 8 or so of these hovering mammoths in the kitchen before Abner, Matt, Bear and I left for a couple hours hiking in the National Forest this afternoon, we returned to find about 30 of them virtually immobile on the windows in the kitchen. Now normally I do not consider myself a killing machine but this afternoon, armed only with an already read section of the New York Times, I felt positively like Dick Cheney on safari. Slam, whack, squish! These things are so slow and sluggish a blind guy could take them out. If the birth rate continues to rise I will probably go out and buy a can of Raid and really take care of them. For now, there is an odd sense of satisfaction in doing a "Soprano" on these nasty critters against the window with my own newspaper.

That was Sunday. Yesterday things really got ugly. The heaviest concentration of these winged Buicks is in the kitchen but a few have spread to other rooms in the house. I decided to take the WMD approach and bought a large can of Raid. Upon our return from hiking at Biltmore yesterday afternoon, I unleashed the weapon on the 20 or so unsuspecting behemoths that were lounging casually on the two kitchen windows above the sink. It was almost instant carnage. There was a little buzzing and flopping around, but death was pretty quick. The population was down considerably this morning. Not one additional living fly was visible in the kitchen. I suspect there is lingering fallout from the "bomb". There are a few stragglers in the breakfast room and refugees in the dining room and the upstairs bathroom, but most of those can be gotten with conventional weaponry. . .the New York Times.


As you can see from the pictures, Abner and I have been enjoying the beginnings of spring in the gardens and on the grounds of Biltmore. The crowds are still pretty light other than on weekends, but the closer we get to the beginning of April, the more people show up to see the flowers. The displays are pretty minimal now, but are showing hints of the explosion to come. Tulips are the biggest of the hidden surprises. They do something different each year, but the shear numbers of them are pretty impressive irrespective of type and color. The picture of the lagoon and the picture of Abner lying down resting and watching some horses ambling by with paid riders are taken from the same spot. The shot of the house with the still bare trees is just uphill. A lot of the flowering trees and shrubs are already blooming but few have leaves. This is something that still surprises me when it happens. It seemed like most of the foliage in California bloomed and sprouted leaves at the same time.

Well, it's not like I wasn't expecting this. A small plague of very large black flies has descended on my house. It has been a few weeks since the death and consequential stink of Big Rat and, as I feared would happen, the flies that were around at the time of his decay apparently all got together and decided the time was good for having a family. I don't know where the corpse ended up but he must have been somewhere where he would be accessible to small flying animals.

On the bright side, these things are big, dumb and sluggish and are fairly easy to execute even without the aid of my trusty fly gun. The catastrophe, thus far, isn't on the scale of what happened to me 20 years ago or more at my Garden Street house where there were so many I had to set off a fumigation bomb in the house and leave, returning later to vacuum up thousands of the disgusting buggers. In numbers, I would guess there are fewer than 20 who have appeared so far. Nonetheless, I will have to report to Jean Anne Rogers, one of my property managers who suggested that this bait thing had never been a problem for her, that she will have to rethink her advice on these matters in the future.

I am thinking I will forgo the accompanying photo I had planned to use with this post. I am fairly certain every last one of you reading this has seen a large black fly before.

Spring is trying to really develop at Biltmore. Each of the three ponds in the Italian Garden has a pair of geese. The appropriately named Spring Garden is bursting with Forsythia and Baby's Breath. There are even some Rhododendrons, a couple early Azaleas, the early Tulips, and some Camelias blooming. Abner still pees on everything so that hasn't changed. Finally after close to 4 months of looking like hell due to a big dredging project and the repair of some drainage pipes, the Bass Pond, one of my favorite spots at the estate, has been refilled and is starting to look normal again. There is a lot of perimeter foliage that has to be replanted or has to grow back from roots, but all in all the place is starting to look pretty good.

The first of my anticipated Springtime guests are due in less than three weeks. I wouldn't want my second home to be looking shoddy.


The new landscape crew I hired has started working on my yard and, while they probably will never provide the pure entertainment value of Bryan Fore and his gang, they seem to be a whole lot more likely to make the place look decent and keep it that way. They have been here twice this week and have not only done a substantial cleanup of what Bryan's guys had left last October, but the back yard has been aerated, fertilized, seeded and has straw spread over it in hopes of actually generating a lawn. As many of you know, I have an unerring ability to kill any plant that is within 500 feet of me so it should be interesting to see if this lawn works. Abner resents his oak chip nests being disturbed and I have to really regulate the time he spends in the back yard until there is actually some grass there. I guess I need to have some optimism about all this since these guys seem to be so earnest and dependable.

More optimistic than I can be though, is my friend Holly Black who came by yesterday. She saw the newly cleaned out planting beds in my sunny side yard and said they would be a perfect place to grow tomatoes. I almost burst out laughing. I am the only person who couldn't grow them in Sacramento. I seriously doubt that I can grow them here. Nonetheless, she is threatening to plant some herself when she returns from a ski trip to Telluride. We shall see. 

This is my 433rd attempt at putting a photo on here that I can use for our profile. I'm about to give up and just leave the damned thing here in the middle of the blog. 

This past week, I had a tree service remove the stumps of two old Oaks in my back yard. Abner has taken advantage of the enormous piles of chips that resulted from the procedure and has built two nests in which he gets all cozy and barks at passersby as if he is the boss of the world.

Today is Sunday and amazingly enough, my new lawn service guys showed up at about noon and spent 3-1/2 hours weeding and cleaning leaves and debris that the former yokels, about whom most of you know too much at this point, had left unattended since October. This was an expensive cleanup, but the place actually has a chance to look decent in a month or two. They are supposed to be back on a dry day this week to aerate, fertilize and seed, and this time, I have been promised a layer of straw over the seeded area providing the seeds a chance to do something other than wash away or provide feed for the birds. I have some degree of confidence in these guys though. They showed up looking like regular humans (I'm not sure that Bryan and his crew could have been described that way), didn't employ a riding mower (although, in fairness, they didn't mow) and succeeded in both unlocking and relocking the gate (a task that the previous crew never quite mastered). I am, as they say in the papers, cautiously optimistic.

 

Yesterday, Abner and I went to the vet due to a recurring licking issue in one spot on his behind. While normally I wouldn't consider this a particularly noteworthy event, nor one to celebrate, a couple things arose that made this visit a little out of the ordinary.

When we arrived in the waiting room to the usual chorus of greetings for Abner (I get none. . .I am not certain any of the staff there knows who I am) and he finished his mandatory sniff and greet with the other dogs in the room, one of the women waiting with her teeny tiny longhaired dachshund puppy asked me how much Abner weighed. Since the answer has been 91 pounds for almost a year, I started to say it again, but realized that I needed to put him on the scale anyway, so we trotted over to the large walkon digital number in the waiting area and he climbed on in his usual casual but cooperative manner. When the scale finally settled down, it read 95 pounds. I am so proud. He has finally gained back the weight he lost when the weather turned warm last year. He is still positively emaciated compared to Harvey or Dan Delaney's Big Moosh aka Everest, but this is a step in the right direction.

Once inside the exam room, we had a fairly lengthy chat with Warren Riggle, our primary vet, who went through all the possible causes of Abner's apparent irritation and consequential licking, but in the end, he suggested that he may just do it when he hasn't got anything better to do. Well, that wasn't particularly good news, but the surprise is how this is treated. It seems that the recommended treatment for a dog who licks his butt, or any other portion of his anatomy, out of boredom, is an antidepressant made for humans called amitryptoline, more commonly known as Elavil. So Abner, the least depressed dog on earth, is now on antidepressants. We will try this for a while and see if it stops him from licking without causing any unwanted side effects. . . like sleeping all day.

The Marshalls (Brian and Stephanie, Jason and Kim, Laverne and Victor and all associated kids) threw their annual St. Patrick's Day bash at a beautiful outdoor pavilion at the Wolf Laurel Ski Resort about 30 miles from Asheville up in the higher mountains that form the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. Prior to heading up to this event, I had never driven this far North from Asheville along I-26 and was unaware of how pretty it is and how dramatic the terrain. The freeway drive to the exit, three miles south of the Tennessee border, was quite beautiful. It is a relatively new stretch of freeway with scenic overlooks and huge runaway truck ramps that are characteristic of newer mountain roads. Fortunately, it was still light enough on the drive up to see the sights.

Once you leave the freeway and begin the ascent into Wolf Laurel, things get pretty interesting. It appears that this development was plunked down in an area that previously had housed the cast of Deliverence, some of whom may still live there and may still be having carnal knowledge of pigs. It is quite strange to drive up this valley and pass very old decaying mountain cabins with trash of every imaginable type lying on crumbling porches and in front yards and then, a few hundred yards later on the same road, pass a rather grand new home, immaculately landscaped with the requisite Range Rover or Cadillac Escalade parked in the loop driveway. It makes you wonder what the remaining inhabitants of the crumbling structures think of the invasion all around them. Gentrification appears to be a pretty big issue in these mountains.

Upon arriving at Wolf Laurel, after religiously following the directions Brian had emailed us, Holly and I encountered the entry gate and the guard whom we nicknamed Gomer. Gomer was very nice but certainly was a relic of the region's past. We explained that we were there for the Marshall party for St. Patrick's Day (Brian had advised us to tell him we were Irish and that we needed to get in but we thought conceptually that might be a little too complex for Gomer so we stuck with the truth). Gomer was very large and reminded me of Tennessee William's "no-neck monsters" but he was very pleasant and helpful. He informed us, in an accent that I attempted to emulate later that evening, that the "poarrty is at thu pervillion" and that you "kin git thar ifn you tern raht at the ferst street". Holly and I both kept our composure just long enough to get past the gate before we both burst out laughing and had a whole conversation in our newly learned dialect.

Once we got to the party, we realized that most of the other guests had also be treated to the same greeting and were equally entertained. Now you must understand, Holly went to Alabama for college and has spent a good deal of her life in the South, and several of the other guests with whom we shared this experience were native Carolinians who were just as entertained by this dialect as I was.

The pervillion is a beautiful structure composed of columns made from whole tree trunks with the bark still on them, and roof beams and rafters made of branches of appropriate smaller sizes, all bolted together into trusses. It is a striking building with lots of uplighting mounted in the beams so the roof and all of its components are celebrated as you approach it in the dark of night. There is a very large stone fireplace on one side with a large hearth that no one used for very long due to the heat being generated by the roaring fire. The Marshalls had also brought two more portable firepits that were roaring as well. It was a good thing since at this altitude the temperature after dark was 35 degrees and there was a pretty good breeze.

The crowd was largely the usual suspects who attend Marshall events and since this was my fourth (2005 Superbowl Sunday, St Paddy's and Christmas) I am beginning to feel like I know some of these folks so it is fun to see them each time. The Marshalls, as I think I have mentioned before, are an almost unnaturally warm and gregarious lot. Little kids were running around with glow sticks and various hats and wigs. . .I particularly liked Brian and Stephanie's two year old daughter Emma Cade who wore a bright green afro for much of the evening but had to be kept far from the fire to avoid a wardrobe malfunction in view of the probably petroleum content in her do. Jason and Brian both wore kilts and Brian at least had the good sense and decency to wear slacks under his kilt. Jason treated us to a view of his very white (actually blue as the evening got colder) lets coming out of black boots. Periodically he pulled his kilt up to expose full thigh and some black undies. I chastised him severely and said he would be responsible for a lifetime of psychological damage for some of the younger children but he insisted on his appalling appearance for the whole evening. At one point, I believe because he was so cold, Jason was dancing some kind of Irish Jig with Brian.

Food and drink were plentiful and pretty good. Burgers, hot dogs, salads and side dishes of every description, chips and dips for days, and a table of desserts that were all pretty good kept everyone busy. We tended to huddle in group conversations close to the fires but all in all, it was a hell of an evening.