Some don't even look like mushrooms.


And some appear to be the absolute classics. 

This first group of pictures represents some of the variety of mushrooms I encountered while walking in the woods over about a two week period. I guess I should have paid closer attention in Botany class.


 

Yeah yeah. I know. I haven't posted anything in a month. Not that things haven't been going on, but even people who have given up full-time work sometimes get busy.

Going back to Mid-August, when I last posted here, much has happened. When I planned this move, I figured it would take me about two years to be able to figure out whether or not I would fit in here. . .whether or not I would like it enough to stay for awhile. Unlike when I moved to Sacramento, I have had the luxury here of paying attention to my thoughts, feelings and most important, instincts. My comfort level seems to be pretty consistent and I am getting the message that Asheville and I might last for awhile. People who started out as acquaintances of whom I was fond are starting to feel like friends. All this takes time, but since I am now at the 20-month point in my stay here, it is starting to take on a level of intimacy that makes me think I will probably stay for a while.

I have been enjoying the summer mornings, seemingly commonplace now, when I get up, get my coffee and retrieve the NY Times from the drive or the front walk (depending upon who is delivering this week) and am greeted by an ephemeral mist that shrouds the neighborhood in a warmly enveloping mystery. The sun doesn't have to rise very high for the mist to clear but it is quite comforting first thing in the mornings. I have, however, found myself wanting to find a house that is more suitable. The house I bought to move here is a comfortable 1927 vintage Tudor and it certainly has served the purpose for which I bought it. I needed a place I could land here but that would be easy to sell in the even that I decided that Asheville wasn't going to work for me. I also needed to be in a neighborhood where I could walk Abner and meet people, where I wouldn't be far from the center of town, and where, fundamentally and in a literal and figurative sense, I could get my bearings.

All of this has happened largely as I hoped it would in my more optimistic moments. I have had a few days when I was missing my friends in Sacramento and was thinking that if I had moved to Bellingham WA (runner up) rather than here, I would probably have seen more of them. I actually doubt that really would have happened but occasionally I wondered. Now, though, this feels like home. Consequently, this summer I started looking for land on which to build the house I really want. This turned out to be a very educational experience.

When I bought my house almost two and a half years ago, I could have bought a lot reasonably close to downtown with a reasonable view in a good neighborhood for around $75k or $80k. Those days are gone. I have looked at every lot that is available in any reasonable proximity to downtown and has a view and there is precious little for double those figures. I even looked at a disgusting tear-down in a good neighborhood that was going for $150,000. I was having trouble wrapping my mind around it when it sold the 4th day it was on the market. You snooze, you lose.

So then, I started looking at houses. There are actually several places for sale right now in neighborhoods I like and some have a sort of view but here's the deal. One I liked with a phenomenal view and a great location would have taken every penny I could gather just to buy it leaving me no way to remodel without going back to work. . .yuck. Others that weren't quite as pricey were so disgusting that I would have almost had to start over, thus making them unrealistic as well. And then, I found a deeply troubled house on top of the mountain. It is literally at the summit of the first major mountain that defines the East side of central Asheville. It has a moderate summer view but should have a spectacular view once the leaves fall from the trees. I think, if I get it, I will remove some trees to open it up a little more in the spring and summer as well.

In August I made an offer on this place and thought I was going to get it. The house had been on the market for more than a year. Strangely enough, at the point when it had been languishing for 10 months, the owners inexplicably raised their asking price by $30,000! Now I don't claim to be an expert in residential real estate, but generally I have observed, over the years, that the way to get rid of a house that isn't selling is to lower the price. And this place has problems. First and foremost is the fact that it is all wood. And by all wood, I mean ALL wood. Floors, walls and ceilings in virtually every room in the house are dark browns of various hues and textures. Even the walls of the Master Bath are paneled. I am not certain that this wasn't some previous owner's bad idea of making the house seem more mountainy but I cannot imagine that, even in 1968, the year of it's unfortunate birth, anyone would have done this. It is insufferably dark due to all this wood in spite of having extensive glass.

Making matters worse, the kitchen, dining room, and den all have ceilings that are 7'1" high. The two finished rooms in the above ground portion of the basement, while not quite that short, are still well below 8' high. There are multiple levels. Entry, kitchen and dining share one level. The living room and den are up a few steps. Then the master bedroom and bath are up another half level or so, and finally there is another bedroom and bath at the topmost level overlooking the living room. And by overlooking, I mean that there is a 30" parapet keeping children or drunken adults from falling over the edge into the living room. I don't think there is a building code in America that would allow this. Clearly this room wasn't originally a bedroom, and it isn't much of one now. The whole space on this level is about 14 by 16 feet out of which a large bathroom and a small closet have been carved. You might be able to squeeze a bunk bed or twin against a wall but that is all there is room for. The bathroom is huge and brown. Toilet, tub, sink, and tile. . .all brown.

Then, if you go down a level from the entry level there is another bedroom and bath and another room of undetermined function, along with a large pleasant (albeit low-ceilinged) basement with generous laundry and work/storage space.

With three bedrooms and three bathrooms, you would think that sometime in the last 38 years, it would have occurred to someone that a bath on the same level as living, dining, kitchen or entry would have been a good idea. Well, that hasn't happened.

The house has no garage and sits on .82 acre of land sloping to the south.

On the plus side, it has a self-contained 900 sq ft guesthouse that was built in 2002 and has wood only on the floors and cabinets. It has its own laundry, a large kitchen 1 bedroom and a second room that certainly could be one, a great room and a bath with whirlpool tub. All across the view side of the guesthouse is a lovely deck, also facing south.

After visiting this place a number of times, I figured that I was probably the only person in Western North Carolina who wouldn't run screaming from this house. Clearly the paneling has to be removed and replaced with drywall. Some light colors need to happen as well as the demolition of the hideous brown bath. It needs a garage and a powder room on the entry level and is in desperate need of some lighting, but all of that can be accomplished and I can live in the guesthouse while it is happening. When it is done I could be living in a very pleasant house with beautiful views and a guest house that I can rent until I pay for my remodel.

So armed with my ambitious plans and having gone to enormous lengths to get through the morass of documents describing what can or cannot be done in this location, I made an offer that was very reasonable but based upon the old asking price since the new one was clearly ridiculous. After some back and forth we agreed upon my price but they insisted on a 30-day escrow. Since 30 days would have put me pretty much at the week I was scheduled to return from my Fort Bragg/Sacramento trip, that wasn't realistic. Furthermore, I had guests scheduled for the whole month of October and after the last of them leaves, I will have less than three weeks at home before Abner and I leave for Ocracoke Island for Thanksgiving in the Outer Banks.

With this as our only point of disagreement, these people, whose house has been empty for 13 months (actually now 14), who have long since moved back to Charleston, and who have very little hope of finding another person willing to take on this project, decided to die on the hill of the escrow date. Personally, I don't understand it. They could continue to market the house and in the unlikely event that they got another acceptable offer that was cleaner than mine, all they would have to do is give me 72 hours to either release all contingencies and schedule a closing, or give up and let the new buyers have it.

Subsequently, I found out that they thought that perhaps they would hear from me again when my house sold, but I took it off the market the day it went on since I don't want to sell this house until I have one to move to.

This saga will continue.

Abner continues to be a major attraction. Total strangers address him by name on a routine basis. On Sunday, after giving him water and a treat at the stable courtyard where we frequently stop as a halfway point in our walks, we strolled into the bookstore to say hello to Elaine, the woman who runs the store most of the time and had apparently been asking about us. I had been gone for a little more than a week visiting old friends in Fort Bragg and Sacramento, as most of you know, and in spite of what some people think, he doesn't drive over to the estate on his own so several of the people we see regularly had been wondering what had become of us. So I took him in to see Elaine and was stopped by a visitor to the house who asked what kind of dog Abner was. This is hardly a new occurrence. Anyone who has walked with us knows that I get asked about 30-50 times per visit to Biltmore. I am getting quite good at the answering and am always ready for the predictable subsequent inquiries but this guy threw me. After I told him that Abner is a Great Pyrenees his response was "Is this Abner?"

Well that really got me because I was pretty certain I had never seen or talked to this guy before. He explained that he works for Wachovia Bank and had heard about Abner through other people at the bank. This kind of thing is happening more and more. People are now discussing him in their workplaces so we are starting to encounter total strangers who already know who he is. It really is a little strange. Sometimes I think I am walking Brangelina.

I am not going to go into a long description of the California trip since many if not most of the people who read this blog saw me or talked to me. What I can tell you is that I will certainly do this differently the next time. I don't know what I was thinking but trying to see 33 years worth of friends in a week, only 4 days of which were in Sacramento, was overly optimistic. I am hoping to come for a month next year. I have a wedding to attend in early August and would still like to go to Winesong the weekend after Labor Day, so if I can rent a car for the whole month and drive out with Abner, I can have a more leisurely visit and see more people more easily. I really do appreciate Anne Jackson and Sue Boeger throwing parties for me so I could see more people in one spot than I could possibly have seen one at a time. Being gone for 8 days was interesting though because the season seems to have changed while I was gone. Suddenly the days are cooler and the nights considerably so. I am hoping we will get good fall colors this year if we can start getting cold nights. The vegetation we see on our walks is starting to diminish and it is starting to look like fall. I have been obsessed with the myriad of types of mushrooms that have been around for the last few weeks. When I finish this post I am going to post a bunch of pictures I have been taking. I never realized how many different kinds of mushrooms could exist in one place. I am certain there are scads of them that I haven't even noticed as well.

I am trying to take things a little easy since I will have visitors again starting October 5th and would like to be rested and ready when they start arriving. It will be a busy month. I have made another offer on the house on top of the mountain so there may be some action in that department too.

And so it goes (as Linda Ellerbee used to say). 20 months have elapsed since I left Sacramento and more and more this feels like home. I will be seeing many of you here this fall, a few this winter, and a bunch in the spring. Can't wait.

This has been a quiet but oddly busy time for me. Ann Thoke came for a visit in late July when son Matt was departing on a 12 day outdoor adventure in the mountains all around us. It was Ann's first visit to Asheville and was kind of short but ridiculously busy. Those of you who have been here know how much there is to do and when really there were only a couple days, we really laid it on.

I have also been doing a bunch of things with Jean Anne Rogers and Judy Carver who are the women who manage my rentals. Judy was widowed last year and Jean Ann is married to a really nice guy named Jim who celebrated his 59th birthday last night. From time to time, along with some other friends of theirs, we have been playing a card game called Hand and Foot that is based on Canasta. I haven't played anything but Bridge since I was in high school and barely remembered Canasta from when my grandmother taught me to play when I was probably 9 or 10. This game though, is really fun. You play in teams and the play can become quite spiteful and vindictive. . .gobs of fun. Besides, these folks are all from here and have the best stories and jokes, not to mention that my grasp of North Carolina colloquialisms is improving.

One night we all got together with Judy's brother and sister-in-law who were visiting from Maine, and 3 other friends of Judy and Jean Ann's and all went on the Smoky Mountain Railroad's Gourmet Dinner train from Dillsboro to Whittier. It was a hoot. The food varied from a great appetizer to pretty bad cheesecake for dessert, and while some of the scenery is pretty great, you also pass rusting old trailers out in the woods with toothless banjo pickin' families that wave at you as the train goes by. It is a little strange. You even go by a dump that was recently purchased for a purported $3-million and is being cleaned up for residential development. It is odd to see old Western North Carolina and exploding development side by side.

Last night, at Jim's birthday party, several of their friends brought instruments and played and sang for a couple of hours after everyone had eaten. This was an amazing experience for me. This is a crowd of people with whom I never, in a million years, would have expected to be included, but it also was one of the best birthday parties I think I have ever attended. Besides the food, which several of the guests prepared and was sensational, sitting around afterwards and listening to these people perform was just fantastic. I have never been a fan of country or bluegrass music, and what these folks were playing was kind of a cross between those genres and rock but it was really wonderful. They are good singers and amazing string musicians. There is this one guy named Scotty who apparently is primarily a mandolin player in their band, but was playing both acoustical and electric guitar last night and was incredibly talented. He does very complex and dexterous string picking while the others are strumming and the effect is pretty powerful. I guess they all play together in a band that has a 2 month long gig at a bar in Marshall (about 30 minutes from Asheville) in September and October. I think a bunch of us are going to go watch them perform.

The biggest news is that I may be closing in on a house. I have just about given up on buying land and building from scratch. Property I like and can afford is too far from the center of town for me to feel connected with Asheville, and the lots I have found that are close enough and have great views are either hideously expensive or unbuildbable with the Hillside Development Ordinance. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I started to expand my hunt to include houses. I had hoped to find a read dump on a great lot that I could either gut or tear down, but what I found instead is a fairly strange multi-level 1968 vintage contemporary house. It has a lot of good things going for it but is terminally brown. Virtually every surface in the house that can be, is wood. Paneled walls and ceilings and hardwood floors are everywhere. The master bath is even paneled. What tile there is is mostly brown. I can't stand it.

On the good side, it is the right size for me, 6 minutes from downtown but about 800 feet higher up than where I am now so the temperature will be cooler. It's winter time view will be spectacular and summer views can probably be opened up a bit with some careful tree pruning are removal. It has slightly more than 8/10ths of an acre of land and a really lovely self-contained guest house that even has it's own laundry. Anyway, I am still investigating it and still looking at other places, but if I can't find anything significant wrong with it, I may make an offer.

The other biggy is that I have allowed myself to be nominated to the Planning and Zoning Commission. When I saw Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" it made me angry about the state of things in this country all over again, and in particular about environmental issues. I found myself feeling like I probably should do something active again and decided that this is, at least at this point in my life, probably the best use of my skills in terms of any public sector activities. Who knows, they may even appoint me.

Well, Abner and I are off to hike a stretch of the MTS trail with Spencer and Regie. I hope you are all well. We are.

On a hike with Matt Vande and Bear, we encountered masses of these butterfles all over the gravel roads in the area below Craggy Gardens leading to the village of Dillingham. They were extremely intent on whatever they were doing and wouldn't fly away for anything, including a moving car. My assumption was that this was egg laying but who really knows?
 

One of the locations of which I have grown quite fond for the days when it is a little too warm in Asheville is a place along the Blue Ridge Parkway called Craggy Gardens. It is about 15 miles Northeast of town and is often 15 degrees cooler at about 5,500 feet of elevation. This view is from one of the peaks in the area and you can see the Parkway itself snaking Northeast toward Virginia.
I was always told that anything that appears in the wild and is red is probably poisonous. I am guessing these mushrooms are. While on the same hike in Craggy Gardens when I found these, we saw a little toad sitting on top of a larger mushroom. I remembered that when I was little in Indiana, wild mushrooms were called toadstools. Now I know why.
Probably a day or so later, Abner and I went back to the Arboretum and found this Swallowtail either eagerly devouring something or laying eggs. Whichever it was, we certainly didn't prevent him/her from staying on task. It amazes me that these butterflies just sit there when you get this close with a camera.
And these are Turban Lilies that were abundant on a hike we took at Graveyard Fields about a week and a half ago. They range from pale orange to vivid red but always bloom facing downward with petals that curl up. Very pretty. 

Last year I told you about my growing fascination with the butterflies that proliferate in these hills, but I never got a good picture. I am trying to do a better job this year. This type seems quite common, particularly at higher altitudes, but I don't know what they are.
I have also recently discovered the pleasures of eating berries as I walk. These wild raspberries are all over the place and the wild blueberries are a whole different experience. They are smaller and sweeter than the steroidal ones you see in big plastic containers at the supermarket. I have taken to hiking with zip lock bags just in case. . .

In my neighborhood, in the woods just up the hill from my house, there is an old historic slave cemetary that dates from the early 1800s or possibly late 1700s. Many of the graves are so old that they are either unmarked or the headstones are so worn that you can barely make out what they say. These two, both of which are post civil war, are readable. It is a quiet, lovely interesting place.

Another walk in the same woods as the spider web seemed to feature reptiles. Toads and turtles were the sightings of the day. Abner completely missed the turtle who was sitting right in the middle of the trail, but the toad hopped around and Abner got his nose right down on top of him. I had to discourage any close contact as I could imagine him trying a taste.


I have no idea about these flowers. They were just there, all by themselves beside the trail. It amazes me what just seems to spontaneously appear in nature. 

I am a little embarrassed at the amount of time that has passed since I posted anything here, but I have been busy with many things in a quiet summer. Abner and I still go on our walks whenever the weather permits. If it gets hot and muggy we head up to higher altitude. These first 4 shots though are from Biltmore on days when it wasn't too bad. These bizarre water lily-type flowers that look like trays are quite amazing.

The angus cattle are quite fascinated by Abner and usually either watch us go by or saunter over to the fence to get a good look or touch noses with him. . .very cute. I have gotten to where I kind of like these critters. They don't seem particularly smart but are kind of sweet.
This spider web just amazed me. The day I found it in the woods on the estate, we stumbled across several others just like it. These are quite large and geometrically perfect. This one was about 2 feet across with it's owner exactly in the middle, waiting for lunch. 

The last picture for this post is of a small section of the Biltmore Estate Equestrian Club's annual horse show. It goes on for about two weeks. There are hundreds of horses and thousands of people involved. I am not into horse shows because I really don't know what is good deportment for a horse. . .to me they just lope around gracefully and jump over the occasional invented obstacle. Nonetheless, it is hard not to watch them because they are so pretty. 

In spite of the lateness of the season, there are actually a few species of azaleas (I think) still blooming in the azalea garden. Most are gone, along with the rhododendrons and these positively elephantine things called large leaf magnolias. Next year I need to get a shot of them. They are so big you'd think they came from Chernobyl.
This is the border around the pattern beds and it is composed of two different colors of coleus. Positively amazing.
And this is what midsummer looks like in the pattern beds. I have gotten to know the guy who designs and maintains these all year with a crew. He is a trip and is obsessed with flowers. He also has an almost frightening knowledge of them.
This beauty is actually a squash blossom. The hint of yellow you see behind it is another type. I guess the blooms don't stay on for long but they sure are impressive. 

This very cool little toad (I guess. . .don't really know how toads differ from frogs, but he was pretty far from water, so I am going with toad) crossed the path right in front of Abner and me while we were walking in the woods the other day. I didn't even see him until he jumped. He actually looked a lot like a leaf.
This is a type of hydrangea that grows profusely around here. They are snow white and form almost perfect spherical clusters.
OK, this bug was a complete mystery to me but you couldn't miss him on the path so I got down pretty close to snap this picture. He was very slow moving and seemed pretty indifferent to us. I had to convince Abner to back off a little though. I could see him picking the thing up in his mouth to decide whether or not it was a treat.
As I have reported before, the geese at the lagoon are certainly in the family way. People who know about these things inform me that the percentage of goslings that have made it to the size you see in this picture is exceptionally high this year. Several of the couples still have 4 babies with them. Don't know what the predators are eating but it has been a good year for geese. 

This is some kind of very cool butterfly that I don't remember seeing last year. Not the best shot, but these critters don't stay in one place for very long.
This is what the grape arbor that runs down the middle of the walled garden at Biltmore looks like these days. The grapes are looking pretty healthy and now the squashes are starting to bloom.
Still another flower I really like but have no clue as to its identity.
And another view of the bass pond in the still of a summer morning. Ducks seem to have taken over from the geese, who had their babies here but seem to have moved to the lagoon to hang with the other geese.

 

It is Bastille Day, not that there is much significance for me, and around 3:00 this afternoon a thunderstorm blew into town. After watching from my office window for a while, I went downstairs, made myself a latte, and sat out on the front porch and enjoyed the downpour. Abner joined me for a bit, but soon became bored with the lack of action and went back inside. But as I sat out on my porch, with a light breeze and about 73 degrees temp, I began to, once again, realize how lucky I am these days. My front porch, for those of you who haven't seen it, is a large area, perhaps 12 by 15 feet, which is covered completely and is open on two sides. One faces the street and the two houses directly opposite mine, and one faces the garden to the side where, besides the abundant flowers courtesy of the people from whom I bought the place, there now are tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers growing surprisingly well due to the efforts of Jay Coble, my talented neighbor who decided to garden in my yard this summer. Of course, there is also the view of the construction of the new house for Steve and Karen Blair right next door, but since it is raining and there is lightning and thunder, there is no activity going on next door.

A bunny moved onto my property (or perhaps was born here) a couple months ago and he seems to have taken up residence in the back and side yards. He is pretty brazen and frequently doesn't bother to scamper off until you are within perhaps 10 feet of him. I think he is dining on some of the greenery in my yard but thus far has left the veggies alone. He also is getting bigger with each passing week. I watched him for a while in the rain while I was enjoying my coffee and he is looking quite healthy. I am pleased that he is growing as much as he appears to be since there are a half a zillion cats in the immediate vicinity of my house and when he was younger, he would have been easy prey for them. As he is now almost as big as several of the cats, I suspect he is less of a target. If he stays, I think I will name him. Nothing comes to mind yet, and of course, while I refer to him as "him", I truly am not certain of gender, so I could end up with something non-committal like "Pat" or else I may have to make an arbitrary decision if some name simply leaps out at me. It is fun being able to spend time sitting drinking coffee and listening to rain on the canvas awning and not having to feel like it is stealing time from something else I really should be doing.

And speaking of things I should be doing, yesterday I spent the afternoon reading the rest of the second of two books I have agreed to review for a publication called "Theatre Design and Technology". Both books are about the process of designing and building theaters, and if you think this subject matter would fail to make compelling reading, you are absolutely correct. The first one, a 140-page paperback called Building Better Theaters was as dry as dust. Thank God it was so short because otherwise I don't think I could have tolerated reading the whole thing. The amazing thing about this book is that there is absolutely not a shred of information in the first 80 of these pages that applies solely to the building of theaters (as opposed to every other building type). It certainly isn't clear that this author had any notion of the composition of his target audience. There is very little in the last 60 pages that would be germane for an architect who really was going to design a theater, and what technical information he does provide in that part of the book is probably too simple and basic for theatrical, acoustical, or lighting consultant to not know it already. Illustrations are small and only in black and white. . .some of them are so bad that you literally can't tell what you are looking at. Perhaps the most annoying thing of all is that there are countless grammatical errors in this tome that the editor failed to correct before sending it to the presses. Fortunately the second book is dramatically better. It is lavishly illustrated and well structured so it can be used as a reference book rather than forcing the reader to sit down and plow through the whole thing to get whatever information he needs from it. I think the biggest difference is that a different person wrote almost every chapter. Each one wrote only on a topic with which he or she is a recognized expert. The editor made the prose flow smoothly, as if there had been only one writer, but you definitely don't get the feeling you are reading something that represents only one, sometimes pissy and resentful viewpoint. Anyway, I now have to write a review of both and submit it by the 15th of August. I guess it isn't a good idea to be too acerbic in criticizing the weaker one, but I need to be negative enough to tell the readers of the magazine not to waste their money or time. I don't think this is going to be my new career, but it will be interesting to see how I do with this one.

A couple weeks ago, the two women who manage my rentals here invited me to another social event. I had really enjoyed the dinner in which they had included me at Jeanne Ann's house a month or two ago so I accepted the invitation to go to Rodney and Diane's to play cards. Rodney is Jeanne Ann's nephew and he and Diane, Jeanne Ann and her husband Jim, and Judy Carver and her late husband had done many things as a group, among them, getting together for simple dinners and a few hours of cards. Since Judy became a widow last fall, the games had stopped, but one day when I was chatting with the two of them after picking up the rent check, they said they thought I would be a good replacement.

Well, two weeks ago we had our first card soiree and it certainly was fun. We all met at a hole in the wall restaurant in Weaverville (a tiny burg that is just North of Asheville and all of a 15 minute drive from my house) that they all like. Dinner was pretty basic, to say the least. I had chicken parts and a variety of dipping sauces. The dinners come with a positively ridiculous amount of French fries that no normal person could possibly get through, and all the ketchup, mustard, ranch dressing, bbq sauce, etc that you want. I also had a diet Coke and my total bill was less than $8. It isn't haute cuisine, and it certainly isn't health food, but it tasted great and was cheaper than dirt.

After dinner we drove the short distance to Rodney and Diane's house and convened in the dining area of their great room at a large rectangular table. The first order of business was seating. It seems that the tradition with this group is that the men form one team and the women another. Jeanne Ann informed me that the women generally whup the asses of the men in cards and that since I was new to the game, I shouldn't count on winning. Once seated, we began the elaborate process of shuffling the 6 decks of cards that they use for a game called "Hand and Foot" which is, it turns out, a variant on Canasta. I remember my Grandmother teaching me Canasta when I was about 10 or so and I probably hadn't played it since maybe age 11 or 12. I really didn't remember much of the game, but they patiently taught me and provided a printed cheat sheet.

We played a first hand that wasn't going to count on the scorecard just so I could get the hang of it, and the men won decisively. After that, Jeanne Ann said that I was on my own and that they take no prisoners. It turns out that it is a fun but rather simple game. For someone who is used to playing Bridge, which requires a lot of attention, this game is a cakewalk. The upshot of it being so easy to follow is that there tends to be a lot of conversation during the game. Now you have to appreciate that these folks are all native Carolinians and the conversations can get pretty colorful in a Southern sort of way. As the stories and remarks got wilder and more lewd, any sense of keeping things sedate for the new guy went out the window.

At this point, perhaps 2 hours into our game, Judy, having heard pretty much everyone at the table using some foul language, announces that now that the "F" word has been bandied about so generously, she has a joke to tell, and it went like this. Two ancient Southern Belles are sitting beside one another in rocking chairs on the front porch of the old folks home where they live. They have been friends from their youth and often reminisce about the old days. After chatting for a while, this one evening, one turns to the other and says, "Mildred, do you remember the minuet?" Mildred continues to rock languidly and says wistfully to her friend, "Oh honey, I can't even remember the min I fucked".

There were more stories and more jokes, and in the end, the men whupped the women by about 100 points (which is nothing). I had a really great time and am getting the biggest kick out of these 5 people. I have now been invited to join them for a gourmet dinner train ride through the Smoky Mountains along some very picturesque route early next month. Needless to say I am going. I will post a report.

I have booked a house on Ocracoke for Abner and me over the week of Thanksgiving. I have decided to make a real tour of it and drive the entire NC coast for a little less than two weeks. We will probably start in Wilmington, a small historic city on the Cape Fear River near its mouth and only about 40 miles from the South Carolina border. I can get there pretty easily the first day and intend to overnight there at least one or maybe two nights. Then I will drive up the coast to New Bern, another historic site, for a brief visit there and then take the Cedar Island Ferry out to Ocracoke. I have the house for a week and there is extra room in case any of you has a burning desire to spend Thanksgiving at the beach.

We will probably spend the whole next seven days on Ocracoke although we might do a side trip to Portsmouth Island to see the only ghost town on the Eastern Seaboard. It sounds interesting and is only 20 minutes by boat from Ocracoke. Then, on Sunday after Thanksgiving, we will head North to the end of the island, take a 45 minute ferry to Hatteras Island, and from there, spend the next 3 or 4 days exploring the Outer Banks and the shore of the mainland up to the Virginia border. I have been wanting to do this since I moved here but hadn't really found the correct time, but this plan puts me there in the off season but while the weather will probably still be in the mid-60s and there is very little rain. There will be a full report of this trip when I complete it.

Next Saturday Ann Thoke arrives with her son Matthew for a brief visit. Matthew leaves from Asheville for an outdoor adventure group trip with a bunch of other kids and Ann is taking a few extra days to hang out with me and see Asheville. I can hardly wait. As most of you know, Ann is one of my oldest and dearest of friends and she hasn't made it to Asheville since I moved here, so this should be a lot of fun.

Then, in September, I am going to California for 8 days. I will spend the weekend after Labor Day with a crowd of you at Winesong in Fort Bragg, and then will head to Sacramento for about 4 days that Sunday. This will be my first time back to CA since I moved and I am really looking forward to it. In 3 days, I will have been here for exactly a year and a half, and for the most part, it is all good. I guess no aspect of life is perfect, but considering what a leap this move was, it sure has been a positive experience so far. I miss you all, but I continue to enjoy this adventure. More later. I will also post some more pictures soon.