My previous burst of enthusiasm regarding my lack of allergies here seems to have been a trifle premature. While it is true that last year I sailed through the season with almost no reaction at all, the same cannot be said this year. Make no mistake about it. It is nowhere near as severe as what I used to suffer in Sacramento, but I do awake each morning and almost immediately have an involuntary bout of swallowing because of irritation on the roof of my mouth, followed by about an hour of sneezing. The stock some of you might have in Kimberly-Clark should be going up at this time of year. There are Kleenex boxes everywhere in my house and all wastebaskets show much use.

The view that greets me in the mornings is changing again. In the winter, I get up and sit at my computer looking out a couple of east-facing windows that allow me to watch the sun rise over mountains to the east of us. As spring develops, my view is closing in due to a bunch of dogwoods currently in bloom and the lush leafing out of the trees between my house and Jay and Lori's. In the winter, I can always tell if they are home because I can see their cars parked on this side of the house. Now the cars are still just barely visible and the blinding greenery is filling in, reminding me why I don't live in the desert (I'll leave that to my dear friend Beth who is happily ensconced in Abiquiu NM), but something new was added yesterday. There is a large orange and grey earth moving device with a big front scoop and large grading blade in the back. It isn't exactly an improvement to the view but it does portend of change.

There is a double lot that separates my property from Jay and Lori's house. A couple from down the street, Steve and Karen, bought it about a year ago and have been struggling with getting a house designed for themselves for which the have requested a building permit from the City of Asheville. The permit request went in roughly 2 weeks ago which is the usual turnaround time here for a permit. This is another big difference between Sacramento and Asheville. In Sacramento, if you get your first set of corrections back from plan check in 6 weeks, you consider yourself lucky. Then you have to make the corrections (this is necessary even if nothing was missing or wrong on the plans because otherwise the plan checkers cannot possibly justify having screwed around for 6 weeks with your drawings. . .some of which they have, no doubt, lost), re-submit, wait another two weeks, all the while hoping that there are no additional and even more bogus corrections, and then you have to run around and pay school impact fees and a few other choice details prior to finally getting the permit. I used to advise clients to plan on at least 2 to 3 months to get a permit and they were rarely disappointed.

So the big digger arrived yesterday heralding the start of construction next door which I look upon with a combination of excitement and some trepidation. I don't know Karen and Steve well. When I walk by their house on occasion with Abner they are very friendly and always chat with us for a few minutes before Abner gets antsy and wants to continue on our walk. They have always been very pleasant with me although Steve smokes cigars which usually hastens my urge to keep the visit short. They currently live across the street from Joan and Nathan, who are Jay and Lori's next door neighbors on the other side, and seem to be close friends with them but have a somewhat strained relationship with Jay and Lori. In any case, either due to my friendship with Jay and Lori, or perhaps just out of a fundamental need for privacy, they have been circumspect to the point of secrecy about what they are building. When they were having architect troubles (they fired the first one) and asked me for some advice, I asked to see the drawings of what they were planning on building, but never was afforded a look. In fact, as far as I know, no one but the plan checkers at the City and their general contractor has seen the drawings. The lot is big, and I am not particularly worried about any serious impact on me other than that I will no longer be able to see what is going on at Jay and Lori's house, but it still is a bit unnerving to have a house going in next door and no clue as to what it will look like nor where it will be. I may ask again to see the drawings, now that the permit is a done deal.

Carole and Marc Sussman and their daughter Rachel blew through Asheville for about 2-1/2 days about a week ago toward the end of one of Rachel's college tours. I have known the Sussmans for more than 10 years having done a house for them in Arden Oaks back in the 90s. I have known Rachel since she was a little girl so it is a little strange to see her looking at colleges but nonetheless fun. The whole time they were here we raced around like madmen touring Biltmore, driving some of the residential areas of town, shopping, art gallery hopping, strolling downtown, and of course, eating. The pace was frenetic but that is how it seems to go for short visits. There is simply so much to see and do here you just don't want to waste time being leisurely. We had a great time though. It was really fun to see them.

Easter Sunday is a big deal here for people who go to church, and that is a significant portion of the population. It is, consequently, an excellent time for those of us who don't go to church, to do anything else we might want to do but would normally avoid due to potential crowds. Matt and I took advantage of the day by getting the dogs into Matt's car by 8:30 in the morning and driving up to an area Southwest of here around Looking Glass Falls and Looking Glass Rock. There are probably more than a dozen well established hiking trails around the area and neither of us had done any of them. The day was quite warm (an increasingly important issue for Abner) so we elected to do a hike to John Rock which is mostly through woods and has about a 1,200 foot rise. It is hard to tell what the exact distance is because the middle portion of the route is a loop. You start up a winding Forest Service road that is blocked off to all non FS vehicles. It is a dirt and gravel road and gets so little vehicular use that it really is more of a trail. The area, while being an hour's drive from my house, is still part of what used to be Biltmore Estate. It is actually close to where George Vanderbilt and Frederick Law Olmstead set up the first school of forestry in the United States.

When we arrived at the parking lot, we were a little confused about where the trailhead was and asked a couple of frighteningly hard-bodied middle-aged women who were finishing up a jog in the area. They were very friendly (Abner and Bear have that effect on people) and seemed to know the area well and advised us as to the options for climbing John Rock. We asked about climbing Looking Glass which they said was also worthwhile, but that the view was better from John Rock.

The hike up was very beautiful through dense woods that are just beginning to leaf out. While it is a fairly substantial climb, on the route we took, it was never too steep and the dogs had plenty of places to sniff and pee. Near the top, there is a large granite outcropping that you can walk out on that provides a really breathtaking view of Looking Glass Rock, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and miles of the Pisgah National Forest that surrounds the site. We stopped and took a few pictures, some of which I will attempt to post, and let the dogs have some water, snack and rest in the shade. I gobbled a Cliff bar which, by then, I needed. After maybe a 10 minutes break, we continued along the loop toward something called Cat Gap (a lot of the names around here are quite interesting. . .I am particularly partial to Possum Trot) and were a little surprised that the trail continued to climb. On the trail map it looked like the ridge we were on was pretty level, but I later noticed that the topographic increments on this map were 40 feet. Tends to be a little deceptive as to what is almost level.

Once you do reach the top, the descent is fairly abrupt. Matt and I found ourselves happy that we hadn't gone up in that direction on the loop. I tend to prefer a gradual rise at the beginning of the hike and a coast down for the end. . .and this hike fit the bill perfectly. On the way down we encountered one pair of hikers who were probably around my age or possibly even a little older. They were clearly more serious hikers than Matt or I are, equipped as they were with paired lightweight aluminum composite walking sticks (for the uninitiated, they looke like ski poles without baskets) and serious looking hiking clothes. We chatted about the route they were taking and they told us about this really nice section they had just done. To them, the little day hike they were on was something that wouldn't take too long. . .he said you could run it in about 2-1/2 hours. The hike was more than 12 miles through mountainous terrain with considerably more vertical than Matt and I had done. When we finished our hike, we had spent close to 4 hours doing less than 4 miles and 1,200 vertical feet. To do the loop this guy was suggesting, we would have had to have a tent and sleeping bags, and food for the dogs and ourselves. . .2-1/2 hours is what it would have taken me with a helicopter.

I am continuing to look into getting involved in a development project here. It will be different from the last 15 months of being free from any serious responsibility other than keeping Abner entertained, but it kind of excites me and I could use the cash. Tax day brought the unpleasant realities of paying capital gains tax on my Sacramento house into full glory. I am over the depression that set in when I had to write the checks to the IRS, and both North Carolina and California for the tax (don't get me started on why I had to pay both states) but feel like it wouldn't kill me to do a little work and replenish my investment account. As it becomes clearer whether or not this is going to happen, I will post more details.

It is now Saturday the 22nd and I spent most of yesterday and part of today in computer panic mode. I was talking to Roberta Rakela about plans she and Bob are making to come for a visit in October when my computer froze. When I got it to reboot I was greeted with the disturbing flashing message that said WARNING: HARD DRIVE FAILURE IMMINENT. BACK UP DATA IMMEDIATELY AND REPLACE HARD DRIVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Having never had a message like this before I had no choice but to take it seriously so I spent hours burning CDs of old photos that I wouldn't want to lose, backing up Quicken, my correspondence and other business data, and any other files I could find on the computer that I would be very unhappy about losing. I then did a quick internet search to find a deal on a new hard drive and drove to Best Buy to purchase it. As those of you who know me well realize, installing the new drive and migrating software and data files would not be something I know how to do without thinking about it. Fortunately, Jay is very good with this stuff (he is still in his 30s) and was willing to take responsibility for getting me back up and running.

This morning at around 10:00, he and his son Ashton came over and set about the task of rebuilding my computer and Lori and I had latttes. Lori did her toenails. . .I didn't do mine. The final stage of the process is for Jay to come over and reconnect the drives so the new one becomes the primary drive and what's left of the old one is for backup only. I think I will reformat it and see if it will work as a backup disk for awhile but now I have a 320 gig primary drive that ought to last me for awhile.

Abner and I did a short walk at Biltmore today while I was waiting for the file migration to finish doing its thing. While we were there, we met the smallest dog I have ever seen. It was pretty funny to watch these two check each other out. The dog we met, whose name, we discovered, is Stuart is one of the terrier breeds and, according to his owner, weighs less than a pound. By contrast, Abner weighed 15 pounds the day he arrived at my house and is up to 98.5 pounds as of our visit to the vet last week. Stuart seemed unfazed by the difference in size and I'm sure Abner had no idea what he could do with this little thing, but it certainly entertained the people standing around watching the encounter. And, by the way, for you flower lovers, the azaleas are in full bloom now. It looks like the tulips will last at most another week but the rhododendrons are just starting so the flower obsessed who flock to the estate at this time of year are still wandering around agog over what they are seeing.

I am going to, once again, attempt to post photos. I'll try to explain what each is with notes, but this is the one portion of this blog system that doesn't seem to work very well.