This is something I don't think I have shot or posted before. Even though Abner and I probably walk by the Winery at Biltmore roughly once a week, I don't think I ever shot the weather vane before. It was in the perfect position due to wind and sun so I finally got my shot. If you click on this one and blow it up, I think you will see the beautiful detail including the "V" for Vanderbilt cut into the vane. I don't know the history of this. The winery itself is a comparatively new rehab of the old dairy buildings and a great deal of what you see today is modern construction but I have a feeling this weather vane might be original. I guess I have to ask Ellen Rickman next time our paths cross.

This is some of the older artillery you can see at Fort Moultrie. You really should see the diagrams they have posted on what it took to move and aim the beast in the upper picture.

These are a couple garden and entry shots of pretty Charleston historic district houses. The pink one below is on the market for something in the $3 million range in case any of you feels the need. It is a deceptively big house with guest house behind but still. . .

These shots were all taken on our day trip to Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor. The photo of Jim simply screamed to be posted. Mea Culpa.

Abner and Spencer both live for pleasure. They almost always are in the mood to play but cold weather and snow seems to add a special component to their joy.

The photo above is of a small partially frozen pond in the garden of the owner of Blue Spiral 1 Gallery. It was amazing because ice had formed in this beautiful pattern around the edges and on the fountain that feeds the pool but it didn't completely freeze over and in the clear spots, you can see the rocky bottom and the gold fish swimming around. Too cold for me.

Below is my friend Jim posing on Folly Beach with the lighthouse in the background. Believe it or not, the lighthouse used to be on land. That ship has sailed.

I took these pictures one morning when I went out to get the newspaper and there was more snow on the ground than at any point previously during my three years in Asheville. The above photo is of AB and Kitty's house across the street and the one below is Steve and Karen's new house next door.

Abner really comes to life in the cold. In the above picture he was standing staring at Spencer trying to goad him into a faux attack during a play session at Biltmore, and the shot below is of Abner in hot pursuit after Spencer took off running.

Abner is just as handsome in photos taken with the new camera as with the old. Below you can see him with Risa at the Bass pond with a light skin of ice proving that it can get cold here in January. All the geese have moved to the lagoon.

Above is the walled garden at Biltmore and the Conservatory in the background. It is still pretty there even with nothing in bloom. The small tips of a few of the tulips are just starting to poke through the mulch in some of the more protected spots in the walled garden.

Matt and Amy and Bear joined Abner and me on a walk one sunny Sunday afternoon and we came upon this pink Cadillac festooned with Mary Kay emblems and personalized plates. I just couldn't resist. I mean it is a pink Cadillac.

Well, it turns out that my optimism about the cold I had managed to acquire when I posted last month was misplaced. Rather than having made it through the worst, it turns out that I had only experienced the preamble. I am now in the 6th week of whatever it is that I got and still am not symptom free although I am feeling dramatically better than about two weeks ago when I think I pretty much bottomed out.

As a result, even though I have had two visitors since I last posted, I have comparatively little to tell you all about this go round other than a brief description of what the last month has been like, a few pictures, and a little about the two visits.

One thing I should mention up front is that I have discovered that this blog is getting considerably more readers whom I have never met than I had initially anticipated. When I started writing this in March of 06 it was a substitute for an episodic journal I was sending to a large group of friends whom I left behind when I moved here from California 3 years ago. I hadn’t counted on the power of Google and the number of people who actually read blogs. While things may have started off slowly, and while I certainly am no threat to Ariana Huffington in terms of readership, the blog is getting close to 200 hit per month from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Seems like I am still unknown in Latin America but who would have thought I would have readers in New Delhi.

As a consequence, when appropriate to maintain some people’s privacy, I will occasionally use only first names or initials. It is amazing what you can find with Google and since I don’t want to filter what I way here but I also don’t want to embarrass or hurt anyone, the names may start to fall by the wayside.

I have gotten some emails from people who have found the blog and they are, in general, very encouraging. I have come to realize that because this is essentially a personal journal, some people who are regular readers may begin to feel like they know Abner and me. Initially these letters were a little unnerving but they all encourage me to continue writing.

I composed the last post in late December when I had been home sick for about two weeks. I think I mentioned that my friend Risa was due to visit early in the month. Even though I was still pretty sick, I don’t get to see Risa very often so I encouraged her to come anyway. She is a manufacturers rep for a furniture line that is headquartered about an hour away from here so she has to visit the mother ship once a year or so anyway and for the last two years she has tacked on a weekend with me when she is scheduled to visit HQ. This year it was the first week of January and as it turned out, her departure day was the same day the worst storm to hit Northern California in about 60 years blew ashore. Poor Risa sat at the San Francisco Airport while her flight was first delayed and ultimately cancelled. Eventually, about 8 or 9 hours after she was supposed to fly to Charlotte, USAir managed to get a flight off the ground but somehow, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to only check her bags as far as Charlotte. Since she was so late anyway, that was the final blow to any chance of her arriving the day she was scheduled. By the time she found her luggage at Charlotte, the last flight to Asheville had left so she spent the night in Charlotte and flew up the next morning.

Abner and I met her flight in the morning and we hit the ground running for her very short visit. Risa hadn’t seen Biltmore House in many many years and asked if I would mind going still another time. I have to admit that, at this point, I have been through the house roughly 50 or 60 times in the last three years and there isn’t much I haven’t seen there. Nonetheless, the place is beautiful and as long as it isn’t going to be an all-day affair, I don’t mind taking my friends through. So, after dropping Abner at home and putting on the appropriate shoes for tromping through the largest house in America, we headed over to the estate. Lunch is pretty much a necessity if you are going to spend two hours walking through the house so we grabbed a bite at the Stable Café before going in. Calling lunch at the Stable Café a bite is probably a little bit of an understatement. The café is actually a large restaurant on two floors occupying the space where the old stables and bachelor servants’ quarters had been when the Vanderbilts occupied the house. The main room, on the ground floor, is a wonderful example of adaptive reuse of a historic structure. Walls, ceilings, floors, stalls, windows and doors are essentially unchanged. The old horse stalls are now booths. All the original tile walls and brick floors are preserved in this new use so the space really is in keeping with the experience of visiting a historic landmark house.

As big as the room is, the portions match it. The menu is large although I tend to get the same 4 or 5 things every time I eat there. Portions are enormous so it is hard to try appetizers or desserts. On top of the ample sandwiches and entrees, shortly after you order, a hot loaf of fresh bread arrives on the table so unless you exercise amazing restraint, you can be full by the time your order arrives. Sodas are refilled rapidly and endlessly and the servers, almost without exception, are friendly and helpful. The food isn’t ambitious but they do a good job of almost everything I have ever tried there. I have a particularly difficult time not ordering the pulled pork sandwich. Comfort food is served here.

Anyway, Risa and I gorged on lunch at the café and then waddled through the house for a little less than two hours. I seem to have developed something of a tour of the place for my guests. A couple fortuitous encounters with Ellen Rickman, the director of Museum Services at Biltmore, has resulted in a certain amount of information not included on the recorded tours, and going through the house as many times as I have has caused me to find certain favorite rooms and objects upon which I tend to focus. I probably ignore all kinds of wonderful details so in a way, I am doing my guests a disservice, but they are usually pretty full of information by the time we are done so maybe there is no harm in my distillation.

Since my house is nearby, and since it was a reasonably pleasant day for the dead of winter, we popped home for a few minutes after the house tour and got Abner. Then we headed back over to Biltmore to do a little walking the grounds so Abner would get out and Risa would see more than just the house. A fun day was had by all. As it turned out, that would be the last decent day of health I would have for a few weeks.
By dinnertime, I was feeling pretty sick. Tupelo Honey Café in downtown Asheville has an item on their menu that I realized was exactly what I needed. They have something called the Cheesy Grill. It is a grilled cheese sandwich with two cheeses of the diner’s selection (I did Havarti and Gorgonzola) and a generous bowl of their homemade tomato soup. If anything would have made me feel better that night, that was it. Biscuits and honey come with all meals there and I topped it off with a house salad so I was full and warm when we went home.

Risa had to leave in the afternoon on Sunday so we had brunch at Sunnypoint where you can eat outdoors if you are in the company of a dog (we were). So there we are sitting minding our own business over brunch when who should walk up but my cousin Raphael (formerly known as Roger). This is my Aunt Harriet’s eldest child whom I would guess is probably 65 or so and is the director of a theater group in Asheville. This was the third time I have seen him in the three years here (second in two days though) so it was something of a surprise. We really don’t know each other having not seen one another in 20 or 30 years before we bumped into each other last year. Since we have never had any kind of relationship nothing comes of these chance meetings but Risa insisted on trying to figure out how he could be my cousin and have a surname that doesn’t match any she has heard. It took half the drive back to my house to explain the circuitous route to Raphael’s name (and I really don’t know it myself). It’ll probably be another year before I see him again. Maybe someday I will ask about the name thing.

In the afternoon we met up with some of Risa’s business buddies who live here and the friend she was driving to Lenoir with. We had some coffee, chatted briefly, and mid-afternoon, split. This was a very brief visit but since I have known Risa for about 30 years, we seem to be quite accomplished at cramming in a huge amount of conversation and catch-up in a very short time.

I played cards with the card group that afternoon and then headed home to hunker down and try to deal with my crud. I still cannot believe how, for 6 weeks now, I have been hit by wave after wave of symptoms from this virus but that night the cough got really bad. I had seen a PA at my doc’s office the Friday before and they had prescribed some meds to deal with this but I suddenly took a turn for the worse Sunday night. The cough got so bad I was up all night. I couldn’t stop coughing. What I discovered was the only way I could cope was to sit completely upright, propped up on a huge pile of pillows, and sip very cold water about every 30 to 90 seconds. Doing this for most of the night (actually starting at 1:30 in the morning) I consumed about 120 ounces of water in the next 6 or so hours. What a night. After a while, when it was abundantly clear that I would not be sleeping at all, I turned on a light and read a little and watched some late late night television.

By the time I was able to talk to my doc later that morning I had already told John Ballenger about the situation and gotten some advice from him. The plan hatched by John and my doc here was to bombard me with high doses of prednisone, a broad spectrum antibiotic called Levaquin, a hydrocodone based cough medicine called Tussionex, Albuterol inhaler, and probiotics to keep my digestive system functioning while under the onslaught of all the rest of this crap. Let me tell you, when you are on that level of medication, you don’t do much. It felt like I saw more of my bedroom in the next 5 days than in the previous 5 months. I also learned to sleep sitting up. Funny how if you are tired enough, even that position will work.

For awhile, I considered canceling Jim S’s visit, but I was starting to feel human when his arrival date was approaching and he said that even if we didn’t do anything but order pizza and watch TV he would enjoy coming so we kept it as planned. As it turned out, it was great having him come. I was feeling enough better by the time he arrived (3 hours late courtesy of USAir and with no luggage) that it was great to get out of the house and have things to do.

Since Jim had been here before, a lot of the standard 1st-time-in-Asheville stuff wasn’t on the agenda so we had a couple pretty calm days initially. We hit galleries and walked a little with Abner, and I took Jim up to see and walk on my lot but mostly we planned where to have dinner each night. It was really nice. We even did watch a DVD one night. By Tuesday, I was feeling good enough to proceed with our long-planned trip to Charleston. Since Jim hadn’t been there before I had booked us a room at the Best Western King Charles Inn on Meeting Street smack dab in the middle of the historic district. The hotel was very inexpensive and the room was fine (although we both agreed that it suffered from pretty much the ugliest wall paper either of us had seen in a long time). It is so well located that the only time we took the car out of the parking garage was to drive to Folly Beach and Sullivan’s Island on our second day in town.

Pigging out at Aaron’s Deli (a Jewish deli that has commingled with Hyman’s Seafood just down the block from the hotel) for lunch left both of us comparatively uninterested in dinner. I grabbed a carry out salad from a place around the corner called Yo Burrito (everyone who knows my affection for Mexican food may now laugh hysterically but the salad was perfect) and went back to the room. We had walked all over Meeting, King, East Bay and the Battery that first afternoon, so it was not destined to be a late night. I still had to medicate to keep from coughing but by then the meds were much lighter so we had a decent first night and had big plans for the second day.

When we got up, we grabbed some coffee at the hotel breakfast room and chatted for a while as well as checking emails and other standard morning duties. By about 10:30 or 10:45 we finally managed to head out and jumped into the car to drive out to Folly. Now those of you who have followed this blog know that I enjoy Folly for the very reasons a lot of people don’t. It is only 15 minutes by car from downtown Charleston but still is kind of a funky old beach town. While there are some mega-beach houses that have been built in the last 10 years, much of the island is still covered with early to mid-20th-Century ramshackle houses that give it the feel of an old beach town that hasn’t become too precious.

We drove the entire length of the island and ended up at the North East end where we walked almost to the point so Jim could see the famous lighthouse that is no longer on land. It is kind of amazing to see how much the sand that forms all the barrier islands in this part of the world migrates so much. I don’t know the exact date of the building of the lighthouse but I doubt that it is older than 100-150 years. Nonetheless it is now standing a pretty significant distance out in the water near the mouth of Charleston Harbor. I will post a picture of Jim with the lighthouse in the background and you can see for yourself.

Anyway, it was a beautiful mild day and a lovely time to be at the beach. After the walk to the point we headed back to the car and drove to the single main street of the town of Folly Beach where the few open restaurants and surf shops are located and had a nice beachy lunch at a local seafood place. . . very funky but food is good. I had a fish sandwich. Yum yum.

By the time we finished lunch it was probably 1:00ish and Jim was interested in seeing Fort Moultrie, located on the other side of Charleston on Southwest end of Sullivan’s Island. Moultrie was used continuously for more than a century and a half. It was significant in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and in fact was used until the end of WWII. Now it is operated by the National Park Service. I had been there before on a previous Charleston visit but Abner was with me that time which limited how much I had gotten to see. This time with Jim’s interest in military history spurring us on, we saw the whole place and I have to say, it was fascinating. We started in the NPS’s building across the street from the fort and took in all the displays and even sat through the corny but interesting film that cycles through every 20 minutes or so. I certainly don’t know how long we stayed, but we managed to walk through every open room and battlement of the fort and both of us just ate it up.

One of the things that was so interesting was to see the progression from simple bulky imprecise cannons that required all kinds of pulleys and hoists to move and aim, all the way through some WWII vintage artillery batteries that fired huge shells long distances with remarkable precision. Some photos of these will also appear with this month’s visual aids. We ended up blowing most of the afternoon there but made it back into Charleston with enough time to explore some of the little side streets and alleys of the historic district that we had missed the previous day. I never tire of peering into the beautiful tailored gardens that are behind or beside virtually every house, large or small in this area. There is a very appealing intimacy to the small scale of urban Charleston that I think planners in other cities should revisit.

Finally, later afternoon, we stopped for cocktails at a bar on East Bay. It had probably been pretty close to a month since I had consumed alcohol since it generally doesn’t feel too good if I am sick; so two bloody marys went down awfully easily. This, as it turned out, probably wasn’t all that wise. By the time Jim and I made it to dinner at Slightly North of Broad (aka S.N.O.B) the cocktails were a distant memory. I had decided to use Jim’s visit as an excuse to drink one of my treasured old Bordeaux and took it with us to the restaurant for dinner. Let me tell you, a 1985 Lynch Bages is pretty close to heaven right now. Over the course of the truly sensational dinner, we polished off the wine so my poor bod, which hadn’t been taking in alcohol or even that much food for that matter, was simply overwhelmed. It tasted great going down but I didn’t have a good night. The short version of this story is that I never was far from the bathroom that night, and didn’t sleep all that well.

Thursday morning we packed up all our stuff and headed back to Asheville. We went through about three or four weather changes on the trip home. Passing the airport in bright sunshine, it was needless to say, quite the surprise to drive 10 minutes further and find ourselves in significant snow flurries. They didn’t last long and nothing stayed on the ground but it was kind of strange having left Charleston in the high 50s or low 60s.

Thursday was a quiet night at home with Abner back from his two-night sleepover at Spencer’s and neither of us much in the mood to eat after the orgy of consumption that had highlighted the previous night. Mostly we sat in the living room by the fire and chatted about old friends and how the world is going to hell in a handbag (Jim and I seem to see eye to eye on socio-political issues).

Friday was beautiful if a little cool so after a leisurely morning we headed over to Biltmore with Abner and did an unchallenging walk. Afterwards we drove up to check in with Brian and Holly who were both at work and bored to distraction given that the condo market isn’t exactly on fire in late January in Asheville. Dinner followed at Sunnypoint (a must if you find yourself here) where we once again gorged ourselves on really great food. This time I paced myself though. One glass of wine sufficed and I didn’t consume a pound of mussels before my entrée arrived. Felt a lot better Friday night than I had on Wednesday.

Jim had to head home of Saturday afternoon but we managed to fit in a visit to Hoss Haley’s studio before Jim had to head to the airport. You should all check out Hoss’ work online. He is represented at Blue Spiral 1 gallery in Asheville and another gallery in Charlotte as well the name of which eludes me. I have a painting from him but lately most of his work is sculptural. He is doing a lot of commissioned work for municipalities and corporate HQs and is, in my opinion, one of the top 5 artists in this area. Check him out if you are interested.

Anyway, I am still a little sick but am getting back into functioning. Abner and I manage to walk almost every day, although they are shorter less challenging ones than what I was managing before I got sick. I have come to realize that if I were old and infirm, this virus could have easily done me in. Never, in my 59 years, have I been sick for this long and I have to say it is no fun. Hopefully by the time I write my next post I can report being completely symptom free.

I trust you are all surviving the doldrums of winter and will emerge into spring renewed, as we all seem to manage to do annually. Drop a line when you can.


Steven and Abner

The far side of the lagoon offers a mirror image view of Biltmore House on calm winter days. Sadly, few visitors to the estate venture this far.

The photo below shows a little less than half of the Grove Arcade on a winter afternoon. Abner and I were waiting for Regie and Spencer who were due to meet us for dog treat shopping at Three Dog Bakery where the boys have a legion of fans. I have always liked this building and recently considered renting an apartment on the third floor for an experiment in downtown living. Ultimately, I decided against it due to the lack of out door living space. The ground flooor of the arcade is devoted to retail, 2nd floor to offices, and 3 through 5 to apartments. Wonderful place.

Hiking with Matt Vande, Amy Musser and Bear along the French Broad River on Biltmore grounds, Matt displays his standard level of dignity while Amy and Abner try to pretend he isn't terminally weird. Bear simply looks the other way so no one will notice him.

Winter seems to have it's own beauty here. The hills are bare but you can see great distances on clear days. We are also almost at the end of the popular tourist season. If I were looking to visit Asheville when I wouldn't have to compete with other tourists, I would come between New Years and the first of April. As you can see below, the tourists may be departing but the Canada Geese certainly aren't. These birds are quite large and beautiful but there is a danger being in the fields in which they spend their winter. Goose poop, and lots of it. These birds produce more than most medium sized dogs and since there are hundreds of them hanging out around the lagoon at Biltmore, the meadow south of their watering hole is a major poop danger zone.

One day in late fall, Matt and Amy and I took Abner and Bear up to a place called Max Patch. It is located on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee and on clearer days than the one we had, they say you can see those two states plus Virginia and Kentucky. Personally, I will wait to see that proven. At the summit, the Appalachian trail passes over the bald that is Max Patch. Above, you can see Abner posing in front of the AT sign proving that he has, in fact, hiked a portion of the AT. Below is a view back into North Carolina.

Stephanie is one of the professional photographers at Biltmore who spend their days taking pictures of guests. She is one of Abner's big fans at the estate and on this particular day, we turned the tables. After a big hike, Abner get's some down time to recoup his energy for the next one.

Today (Dec 23rd) is my birthday and I am struggling with some crud in my throat that makes me cough all night and sound like a basso profundo during the daytime, so I am laying low and figured this might be the appropriate time to post to the blog.

In the time since I last posted my attention has been dominated by a couple of activities. Finding housing for myself has been a big priority for about the last 18 months. Between looking for a house or land with a view, buying the lot, designing a house and getting help producing working drawings and engineering, obtaining bids and going through the previously described ordeal getting a building permit, only to decide when it finally was approved in October, that I couldn’t afford to build the house at this time, I was largely burned out on housing issues. Nonetheless, I decided to look for something that would suffice as an interim location and maybe try out my fantasy of living downtown.

I researched the market with the assistance of my buddy Brian Marshall (who was the real estate agent through whom I found my first house here as well as the first of the rental properties) I set about the task of finding out what was available in the way of downtown condos. Surprisingly there was comparatively little inventory. There is one project under construction next to the Thomas Wolfe House that looked interesting to me but due to a number of problems that arose once I was in specific contract negotiations with the owner, it just didn’t come together. I looked at a number of other properties and found one that interested me a lot. It is a two-story, one bedroom condo in a historic building downtown. The condo itself is an interesting design. The building was apparently gutted in 1997 and rebuilt behind the historic façade. The unit in which I was interested was about 1150 sq ft and came with a two-car tandem garage (a real rarity for downtown) as well as a small storage room in the basement and shared access with one other unit to a roughly 20 by 40-foot roof deck with splendid views.

I was really excited about the possibility of buying this place in spite of what was, in my opinion, an inappropriately high asking price. Brian took me to see the place and I was very interested. We asked for a copy of the condo docs since pets are an issue in many condo projects and Abner certainly is going wherever I go, but the seller’s broker didn’t get them to us. Ultimately, I made an offer and entered into rather lengthy negotiations that took place over almost two weeks. I made my offer contingent upon my review and approval of the condo docs as well as a number of other things.

On the day the owner and I finally met and came to an agreement on price and terms, I was finally provided a copy of the condo docs. Apparently few people involved in this little project were very familiar with the documents because when I read them and raised a number of objections to elements within the 70 pages the owner provided, the president and VP of the condo association were completely flabbergasted to be informed of these problems. Everyone was very nice and tried to be helpful in offering to change language, but ultimately, on the good advice of the real estate attorney I use here, I terminated the deal. In the end, there was no guarantee that Abner wouldn’t be an issue. The documents stipulate that a waiver must be granted for a pet in excess of 50 pounds and further reading indicated that the condo board could revoke any waivers or variances. I simply was unwilling to take this risk.
And so, I am anticipating homelessness in about another 5 months. I have reached a level of burnout on the whole housing thing that I have decided to stop looking for a couple of months. After the last of my January guests departs, I will start looking for a rental that will last me until I can figure out what to do to get the house built. I think that the construction market here is showing signs of finally slowing down after a decade of boom. If that happens, it is my hope to get more realistic numbers and get the house built.

Aside from the never-ending housing search, I have had a few other things happening. I managed to get through the entire month of November without taking a trip. This may not sound like much of an achievement but it was the first month since July for which that claim could be made. In early December though, I fell off the wagon and flew to Puerto Vallarta for 8 days with Judy Carver and Jim Rogers. This trip had been planned since last March when Jim and Jean Ann were going to fly down with me to meet Judy and her brother and sister-in-law. When Jean Ann got sick we had to postpone the trip. At the time we had decided that by rescheduling for December it would give Jean Ann plenty of time to get over whatever was wrong, and would be back into the season when it is pleasant to be in Mexico. Of course, as it turned out, Jean Ann succumbed to cancer in May but Jim and Judy both still wanted to do the trip, so off we went.

All of our flights were supposed to be on Continental, with whom I have had the most consistent good luck of any of the airlines serving Asheville. Unfortunately for us, they stopped their early morning departures for Houston on Saturdays several months ago and booked us instead on a short hop to Atlanta on Delta, with connections for Houston and PV back on Continental. Well, true to form, Delta had a surprise for us when, after arising at 4:00 in the morning and getting to the airport at 5:15. We arrived for check in only to be told that, as usual, the first flight out was cancelled. Delta has gotten to the point that they no longer bother lying about why they cancel this flight. Now they don’t even try to come up with an excuse. They just say it was cancelled due to weather (no doubt there was a storm in Tierra Del Fuego. . .weather in both Atlanta and Asheville was fine).

The guy at the Delta counter who was “helping” us was very nice but seemingly rather deficient in his computer skills. With the line of increasingly irate passengers getting longer by the minute this guy stumbled around for about 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do with us. In the end, his suggestion was that we wait for a flight the following afternoon to Cincinnati, from which we could fly to Salt Lake and from there take a non-stop to PV. I suggested that he look a while longer and asked Judy to run over to the Continental counter to see what they could do. She had much better luck with them. They had a 2:30 departure for Houston that would connect and get us into PV at about 9:00 PM. . .only 6-1/2 hours behind schedule. It meant missing the dinner we had planned with friends from here who would be spending their final night in PV that evening, but we at least would only miss a half-day of our vacation.

When she came back with the information for the Delta guy, he still couldn’t transfer the etickets from Delta to Continental so we ended up with what he said were paper tickets (although we never actually had them). Over the course of the 4 flights on Continental, being stuck with this hybrid the Delta guy had created proved to be a lot of trouble when it came to getting seats assigned or checking in online or even at the kiosk at the airport. Nonetheless, once we were released from the claws of Delta, we got to our destinations comfortably, with our luggage, and on time.

I have been telling my visitors for three years now to avoid Delta like the plague. They have the most amazingly consistent policy of canceling first and last flights of the day between Asheville and Atlanta. This creates havoc because not only are you stuck somewhere but since the planes are small in the first place, usually there isn’t any room to get all the passengers bumped from the cancelled flight onto the next one or two or three flights. I can’t tell you how many times I have rented a car at the airport either in Asheville or Atlanta and driven the 3-1/2 hours. They are an awful airline. They have tired dirty smelly old planes, unhappy employees who frequently aren’t as pleasant as the dim bulb who had so much trouble with our flights, and a schedule that they treat as a loose guideline. I am of the opinion that when a company is as abysmally run as this one, they shouldn’t be allowed to stiff their employees, stockholders, and creditors with serial bankruptcy. They should be forced to shut down and their gate space and routes should be split between the airlines that are actually functioning.

Maybe I will start a new blog called I Hate Delta.

Aside from that, the Mexico trip was wonderful. Weather was great the whole time we were there. Matteo, the house Rottweiler was very happy to have so much company and pretty much migrated from Jim to Judy to me in a cyclical pattern so he could almost constantly get his ears or belly rubbed. We had a wonderful lunch at La Laguna in Nuevo Vallarta with Tere Martinez who manages John’s house. This is a restaurant I had visited many years ago after the closing on the original purchase of Casa Del Mar and it was just as good as I remembered. The setting, beside a marshy lagoon filled with turtles and waterfowl (including the occasional egret) is lovely and the food is wonderful. I have only had lunch there but both times it was filled with Mexicans. I think this is always a good sign. When the locals support the local restaurants, the chances are that the food is both good and authentic.

Aside from eating, lounging by the pool, playing cards, and walking the galleries and a few shops, we didn’t do a hell of a lot. We did go to a place called Chico’s Paradise, which is south of Mismaloya about 20 or 30 minutes from Puerto Vallarta. This is a restaurant and bar with some kitschy shops thrown in for good measure but is built in the gorge of a river running from the mountains down to Banderas Bay. The water falls and jungle are quite dramatic and local boys run along the tops of huge boulders and then dive into the falling water in seemingly death-defying spins. They all seem to come up fine so it is pretty clear that the exact spots they have chosen to enter are safe but the diving is fun to watch just the same. Since my camera died a week or two before we left, I have not a single photo from the trip. Jim took a bunch so maybe I’ll get some from him at some point and post them.

No sooner did I return (and this is pretty literal) than the boys from Quality Air showed up to begin the process of dismantling the old heating system in the house. We got home at about midnight on the 16th and they started at 9:00 on the 17th. I didn’t quite understand why the new owners of the house decided that they needed to replace the heating system at this precise moment in time, but I didn’t have much to say about the decision. On the first day, they took out the old boiler and a couple of the radiators. Returning at 9:00 the following day, they removed the remainder of the radiators and left two of them lying on the front lawn. Since they didn’t get removed until the 28th, I got a few remarks from neighbors about the “Grapes of Wrath” quality of the house. One unsigned note shoved into the mailbox a couple days ago asked me when the sofa would appear on the front lawn to go with the radiators.

The bigger issue was that the lower levels of the house had absolutely no heat and we had a couple days when it got pretty cold. I borrowed a portable radiator from Regie and another from the boys at Quality Air, but it still was comparatively nippy for a few days. It then began to warm up just in time for me to come down with the cold that has afflicted half the country. On Thursday night (the 20th) Holly had a dinner party that I planned to attend but I could feel the sore throat beginning to nag at my well-being. I attended anyway but by the time I got up on Friday I felt like I had been run over by the Queen Mary. With full blown symptoms including all-night coughing, painfully exploding sinuses, green ooze coming from my nose, a big gob of mucous in my throat, and eventually a low grade fever and body aches everywhere, I cancelled all my holiday plans. Movies with Anna-cancelled. Birthday Brunch with Regie and Eric-cancelled. Christmas Eve dinner at Rodney and Diane’s-cancelled. Christmas Day with the card group having leftovers from Christmas Eve-cancelled. In fact, the only thing that wasn’t cancelled was the appearance of the asbestos removal crew on Monday the 24th. This was a particularly charming day. It was, from a symptom point of view, the worst day of my cold so there was no way I could leave home for a few hours to avoid the filling-shattering vibrations that came up from the basement as they sawed through 80 year old cast iron steam pipes for 6 hours. Poor Abner didn’t know what to do. It can’t have been too much fun to hang out with me as I coughed up a couple lungs and filled wastebasket after wastebasket with snot filled Kleenexes (did anyone check to see if Kimberly Clark stock is up?). Staying downstairs put him terribly close to the very noisy action emanating from the basement so he alternated between going outside, and spending time with Death’s Head.

So now I have made it to the 29th and am feeling somewhat back to being among the living. I still have some of the symptoms, but my voice is almost back to normal and the cough is largely gone. The fever broke a couple days ago and with it went the body aches so I have started hiking with Abner again.

There is a dearth of photos this month due to the lack of a functioning camera. I hope to have the replacement soon and should be back up to speed in the visual aids for my next post.

January is around the corner, and with it, visits from my friend Risa early in the month and Jim Sundquist later on. I am hoping to have resolved my photo issues before Jim gets here since we are including a trip to Charleston in his visit schedule. With the arrival of the beginning of 2008, I will have completed 3 years of living in Asheville. 2007 has been stimulating but had its bumps. . .particularly in the housing department and with the deaths of a couple of people to whom I had been very close. Nonetheless, the great experiment continues to go well.

I hope all the readers of this blog have a happy, healthy, prosperous 2008. I have come to realize that there are people who follow this blog whom I have never met but I am flattered that you find the stories and pictures interesting enough to read. My postings will probably continue to be sporadic and haphazard but they seem to parallel my life or at least my ability to observe it as it happens.

In the words of Winnie the Pooh, TTFN. Limited pix will follow.

What a month. After feeling like I was in a battle with the City for a building permit, when it finally seemed like there was nothing more that could go wrong, I decided to take time off while I could. With an expected start of construction approaching, and the prospect of a business trip to Switzerland before November began, I figured that the beginning of October was my best bet for catching up with family.

So on the morning of October 4th, with little advance planning, I packed up the car with my stuff and Abner’s and headed off for a week of visiting my sisters and my parents.

Driving out of Asheville around lunchtime that day, the weather was mild and pleasant. We headed west on I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge into Tennessee and it seemed like each mile we traveled the temperature rose. By the time we were on the ring road around Knoxville picking up I-75 to Cincinnati, the temperature was in the low 80s. As we headed north, it kept getting warmer and warmer. In the two years since the last time I had done this drive, I had forgotten how beautiful the Eastern parts of Tennessee and Kentucky are. 75 should be on the maps as a scenic highway. You drive through the western edge of the Appalachian chain for miles and much of the roadway sits up quite high so the views to the east are often spectacular. Much of the freeway is carved through ancient rock strata so you alternate between driving through slots in the stone to being on high plateaus with views for miles. The area around Cumberland Gap is particularly impressive and probably will merit a visit one of these days.

On the 4th though, Abner and I had to make it to Fort Thomas, KY where my newly married sister Jan and her husband live. In case I haven’t said it before, I love my gps. The drive up to the Cincinnati area is an easy one and it is almost impossible to make a mistake. Once you get to the Kentucky suburbs though, all bets are off. The terrain on the south side of the Ohio River is rolling and strewn with rivers and creeks so the roads tend to wind all over the place and the hills prevent you from seeing too far until you are practically in downtown Cincinnati. I had set my Jan’s address in the TomTom when I left home so it took me right to her house. These things are great.

Once there, after having been driving for the better part of the day (6-1/2 hours door to door for those who are interested. . .add time for gas, food and pee breaks), Abner and I were both in the mood for a walk so after letting him get acquainted with Jan’s black Lab Erev, we took the dogs for a short neighborhood stroll. Fort Thomas, at least what I could see of it, seems to look like a lot of residential areas that were part of the boom of the 20s. The houses are generally neo-European styles like Tudor, Norman, and Georgian. Most are not huge but nicely scaled for the smallish lots on which they are built. It reminded me a little of Curtis Park, but hillier (anything is hillier than Curtis Park) and with more brick. Stucco, in the preponderance one sees in Sacramento, is a rarity in this part of the world.

We really didn’t do much while I was there but it was fun anyway. Jan has a new job and had some limits on how much time she could spend with me on Friday. Abner and I just played tourist and checked out Cincinnati in the record-breaking heat wave that hit the first week of October. When we arrived in Fort Thomas it was 91 degrees. The following two days were both in the high 80s and low 90s, which was something of a shock to Abner’s and my systems. Nonetheless we walked around downtown Cincinnati for the better part of the day on Friday and then met Jan mid-afternoon. Friday night Jan, Chuck, and I went to eat Indonesian food at the restaurant where they had had their wedding dinner and then found an art opening that we crashed where there was some amazingly good work. It always is shocking to me the sheer volume of excellent art being created in this country at a time when the school system and our culture itself does so little to encourage the arts in children. I guess creativity is such a fundamental urge that it rises up in people in spite of all the discouragement modern day America throws out.

Saturday the three of us toured the Ascent, the new, almost completed high-rise condo project in Covington KY right across the river from downtown Cincinnati that was designed by Daniel Liebeskind who is currently one of the major architectural darlings in the US. He had two projects going in Sacramento, but I gather neither one will be built. Well the Ascent has been built and is pretty impressive. It is hard to describe but is essentially a helix in plan spiraling up to something like 21 floors at its highest point. At the very top is a 7,500 sq ft condo, as yet unfinished, that is on the market for $5 Million and apparently has some people looking at it pretty seriously. The ceilings reach 36 feet high on the upper two levels (the lowest level of this 3 story unit with its own elevator is all Master suite), and there is a small roof garden. Views are, as you can imagine, pretty amazing from that height. The whole riverfront of Cincinnati including downtown, both the baseball and football stadiums, and the Underground Railroad Museum directly opposite the site of the Ascent are visible without obstruction. At the foot of the building is the 1865 vintage Roebbelin Bridge, which is, in my opinion, a work of art in and of itself.

If I were going to live in the Cincinnati metro area, this is the building I would be in. There are many smaller condos, all with great views, that are more affordable than the monster on the top, but it was fun to see anyway. Even looking at t place like that makes you feel like a high roller or minimally like you are hobnobbing with one.

After a really great brunch on where Abner was a welcome guest in the outdoor dining area (this and the existence of the Ascent leads me to believe that Covington Kentucky may secretly quarter an inordinate percentage of the cognoscenti) and attracted his usual amount of attention, the two of us hit the road north toward Fort Wayne to see my parents. It was, by then, October 6th and in the low 90s as we drove through western Ohio and across into northeastern Indiana. It was actually an easy drive of about 2 hours and 45 minutes during which time my brother Michael called. We talked for about 45 minutes of the drive (don’t get excited. . .I use a bluetooth earpiece when I am driving) which was, I believe, a record. The following day Michael turned 60 and I don’t think that in the almost 59 years I have known him, we have ever talked for that long at a stretch and certainly not in a phone call. Oh well. Records were made to be broken.

We arrived in Fort Wayne before 4:00 but the drive in was a little strange. I drove through all manner of small towns in northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana that I remember hearing about on weather reports, traffic and snow announcements, and tornado warnings and sighting reports while I was growing up but realized that I had never known where they were nor what they looked like. It has dawned on me, as a result of this drive, that in spite of my parents having made significant efforts at making travel a part of life for us as children, when we were at home in Fort Wayne, we must have led rather insular lives. I really saw very little of Indiana growing up.

Over the next three days Abner and I just hung out with my parents and a few of their old friends. We ate at their country club and a couple of their favorite haunts. We had dinner with Bud Latz who is one of my parents’ oldest and best friends from when they first moved to Fort Wayne in the mid-40s. He is now a widower and lives alone but sees my parents often. I have never thought of myself as a particularly nostalgic person, and particularly not about growing up in Fort Wayne where I believe I never really fit in, but seeing Bud is always one of the highlights of a visit. There is something reassuring about seeing people who were the adults I grew up around still plugging away, and in many important ways, unchanged. Bud has the physical signs of aging (and who doesn’t?) but when you are sitting at t dinner table with him talking about life, his wit and the intensity with which he involves himself in every conversation is still there.

The day after our dinner I took Abner over to Bud’s house to meet him. Abner likes meeting new people and Bud likes big dogs.

I also walked three blocks away to visit another close friend of my parents from way back. Helen Fine lives in the same house I always remember her in a short distance from my parents’ house. A couple things were different on this visit. First of all, Helen’s husband Bernie Fine (Charles Bernard Fine to be precise. . .professionally known when I was growing up as Seat Cover Charlie) had died a week or so before and I was a little nervous about visiting since condolence calls have never been my forte. Nonetheless, Mom, Abner and I walked up to her house on Old Mill Road and went for an afternoon visit. The house was pretty much as I had remembered it, as was Helen. She has always defied age both in her physical presence and her style. Being around her was much like a flash back to 40 years ago. Her hair is almost the same color (I suspect that was due to some assistance then as now), her face is still younger looking than it should be, and she has the most infectious smile and laugh I think I have ever known. It was really nice to see that despite being recently widowed, all that remained. What was really surprising though was that her daughter Cindy, whom I had known all through the public school system when I was growing up, was also there. I don’t think we had seen each other in 40 years and Cindy has changed. She still looks great (different, but great) but the real shock is that she not only has three adult children (28-35) the youngest of whom was there with her, but she has grandchildren. I cannot understand how someone who is my contemporary can have grandchildren. I mean I understand it in a clinical sense. . .it just is hard to digest psychologically.

We had a nice visit. Abner sniffed around the baby a little and mostly went around checking out the house as he does at every new place we go to. Pyrenees seem to have this internal demand to determine and patrol the perimeter wherever they are. I guess one always has to make sure that there are now wolves or coyotes lurking in an unused bedroom or closet.

During our lunch at the country club one day, we were talking about longevity in Dad’s family. I realized that I didn’t know many of my paternal grandfather’s siblings so Mom and Dad started going through the list about who they all were and how long they had lived. Dad got to my uncle Al, whom I actually do remember, who apparently died about a year ago at the age of 98. My mother then remembered a sister who was as yet unmentioned. “What about Beverly?” she asked. Dad’s reply was one of those priceless comments that you need to write down to tell. “Oh god” he said “she’s about 103” but then he continued barely skipping a beat “but she’s dead”. Mom and I looked at each other for about a quarter of a second and burst out laughing. It took Dad about another quarter second before he erupted as well. . .pretty funny stuff.

Hanging out with my parents is in many ways very encouraging. Dad is now 87 and Mom 82. They are both astoundingly active and sharp. Mom went walking with Abner and me a couple times and looking at her, it is hard for me to believe that she is 82 years old. I have friends who are my contemporaries who don’t get around as well as she does. She works 5 days a week as a social worker at a clinic in downtown Fort Wayne and is still very active in community issues. Dad still also goes to his office every day, manages a complex investment portfolio, sits on numerous boards, writes guest editorials for one of the local newspapers, plays golf, and has a weekly lunch with a group of his cronies. He is very ambitious about his computer skills at an age when the most technologically advanced thing most people do is change the channel. Actually, at 87, most people are turning to dust. I am enormously proud of who my parents continue to be.

The three days in Fort Wayne were all very warm, but we managed to walk extensively around the old neighborhood and Foster Park into which my parent’s house backs. We didn’t do anything dramatic while we were there but it was really a comforting visit. I will be missing seeing my parents this year on the family trip due to some travel conflicts I have so this week helped make up for that.

Tuesday morning I packed up the car and we headed off on the relatively short drive to Lisa and Dave’s house in Carmel, IN. Carmel is a very large suburb on the north side of Indianapolis where they have lived for the last 8 years so with the aid of my GPS and a special suggestion of a newly opened route that Lisa had told me about, we made good time getting there. Mostly what I did in Indianapolis was hang out. The first day Lisa and I ran errands, had an outdoor lunch in the recently cool weather (dramatic change the day I drove down to Indy) picked up and dropped off various children, most of whom were Lisa’s and in general, had a Lisa-and-Dave standard two-day experience. Since my nieces and nephews are getting older (all in their teens now) the conversations are a little different. We attended a football game (7th grade) that Zachary played in and in which he caught a pass to score a two-point conversion. Pretty exciting stuff. It had been about 16 months since the last time I had seen Lisa’s kids and there were some dramatic changes. Cort’s voice has changed and he has gotten tall and a lot older looking. Zack and Kailee both are much taller and older looking as well. . .particularly Kailee who still has this sly smile that I think will take her places. The only one who seems just to keep going along on her own schedule is Arlee. She has always bee something of a free spirit, living in exactly the world she has chosen, and that seems not to have changed. She is more mature looking than the last time I saw here, but the change is less significant than in the other three. With two sets of boy/girl twins, it is very interesting to watch how different their development is.

Finally on Thursday morning, Abner and I hit the road for home. We headed south on I-65 to Louisville, east from there to Lexington, and then retraced our path back to Knoxville and Asheville. We were back in my driveway before 5:00 on the 13th having had a very full week.

All this travel has really been getting to me. In August I spent a week in California for Jason and Maren’s wedding. In September I was back there for Winesong for another week. Now October featured a week in Kentucky and Indiana. I was supposed to go to Switzerland for a week in late October or early November to consult on a remodeling project for one of Sue Boeger’s nieces but that, thank God, has been pushed back to January or February. In December I am scheduled for 8 days in Puerto Vallarta as well. It’s a good thing I am home enough to do laundry.

In Asheville things have pretty much settled into the fall scene. On the weekends the streets are clogged with the fall tourists who come to see the leaves and who this year are probably pretty disappointed. Between the late freeze last April, the drought of the summer, and the very mild fall weather we have had, there isn’t nearly as much color this year as last. The town is still fun for people to visit and there are lots of mini-events going on, but it just isn’t the same as the spectacle of color to which we were treated last year.

Abner and I had a brief bonus as a result of our being buddies with the folks at the Garden Shop at Biltmore. A few weeks ago they had an end of the season sale to get rid of as many of their seasonal plants as possible before the cold weather sets in. It is a two-day event that they hold on the West side of the estate at their commercial nursery facility. Passholders are invited to come during those two days to snap up major bargains on various beautiful specimens. If I weren’t anticipating a move, I might have even have made a purchase. We dropped by anyway, partly just to say hi to a number of our friends from the shop who were over there working the sale, and partly to see what a little of the West side looked like. I had never been there before because it is generally accessible only on guided tours operated by the people at the Outdoor Center.

Anyway, while we were there, Jackie Allison who manages the Garden Shop and with whom we have become quite friendly introduced me to Dawn who manages the nursery. Jackie asked Dawn if there was any reason why Abner and I couldn’t hike occasionally on the West side since we have done all the trails on the East side hundreds of times, and Dawn said it would be fine on Wednesdays and Saturdays as long as I checked in with her first.

Well this was great news since it would potentially open up 4,000 additional acres of land to us for exploration so I thanked them both profusely and made plans to go on a Wednesday to check it out.

So a couple of weeks ago on a warm but mild October day, Abner and I drove over to the West side, checked in with Dawn, and headed off on a really great loop that took us up to the vineyards and their small headquarters building, through some woods, down to a trail that parallels the French Broad River, back up through more woods and around the East side of a small lake (although probably 4 times the size of the lagoon on the East side of the estate) and finally back down through the vineyards again. I took pictures some of which will be included in this post. Unfortunately for us, as it turned out, on our way back to the car we met a young man who works for the company police who was quite curious about who I was and what I was doing there. I explained the arrangement to him and assured him that I had permission to do this hiking. He pointed out that I should check with the company police office on days that I intended to hike since during the hunting season, from time to time the Biltmore Company will grant permission for fund-raiser hunts on the property. It wouldn’t be a good idea to be walking around in the woods with Abner if there were hunters on the grounds. I agreed with him and assured him that we would obey the rules and would check in before hiking to make sure it was safe. He acted like everything was fine and even gave me the phone number for the company police office.

Well, the access to the West Side was short lived. When we showed up yesterday and checked in with Dawn, she said that no sooner had I left that Wednesday but this guy came up to her office and informed her that she was to tell me that I couldn’t continue to hike there. I guess he is the resident ranger for that side of the property and is a real stickler for the rules. Pity. It was really beautiful over there.

My housing situation is more unsettled than ever. As those of you who are regulars on this site or who talk to me with some regularity know, there have been a lot of bumps in the road toward getting my house built. In September we found out that the newly-enacted Steep Slope ordinance was going to be applied to my lot and I had to do a whole lot of extra and costly compliance work in order to get a permit. To make a painfully long story short, the process of working through the multiple divisions of City Planning in order to get this permit was frustrating, lengthy and expensive. It took just over 7 weeks to obtain a permit (the City quotes a turnaround when you submit of 5-7 days) and was characterized by countless miscalculations, errors and delays on their part. On more than one occasion, I was forced to recompute a number for personnel because when they had calculated some ratio or other it indicated that I was non-compliant when in fact the opposite was true. The end of the process was an approval of the application on October 23rd. Unfortunately this was about 5 days after the contractor with whom I had been working since last spring on this project told me that he had redone his spreadsheet for our contract and had discovered about another $44,000 in costs that we hadn’t worked in the last time. After having already cut about $60K out of this plan, I really wasn’t in any kind of mood to eviscerate it further so I have put the plans into temporary hibernation. My thinking now is that I will buy a small downtown condo to live in for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I think the construction industry here may find that it’s ten-year boom may soften a bit over the next year or two and there might be a little more competitive pricing of some of the subcontracts. Some of these guys are so used to being busy that they don’t even bother returning phone calls. There is one HVAC contractor who is actually 5 weeks late in returning a phone call (and almost a month since he sent me an email saying he would call that day) who doesn’t know that I have temporarily abandoned the project and apparently is so loaded with work he doesn’t care.

So for the last two weeks I have been scouring the MLS and ads looking for the right downtown space. My thinking is that one of three things will result from this plan. In two years or so, I will decide that I really want to build the house and will put it out to bid again. By then I will be getting very close to being able to collect Social Security which should help put me in a position to more comfortably afford the house even if there is no reduction in costs. Possibility number two is that I will like living downtown and will sell both the lot and the condo and buy a bigger one and stay downtown for the foreseeable future. After all, a downtown condo/loft was what I had wanted to do when I first came looking in Asheville almost 4 years ago. There was just very little available that I could afford. Possibility three is that not only will I like living downtown, but I may even get used to living small (most of what I am looking at is in the 1,200 sq ft range) and will sell the lot and use the proceeds to buy Abner and me a place up north somewhere to spend the summers. Today I made an offer on a space so we will see what happens. No doubt there will be more to report on the next posting.

As you may gather from the above, while I am disappointed about not being able to build the house and have my gorgeous view, the options available aren’t so bad and I don’t have to give up the land to try them out. So life is still good.

The weather has now turned considerably cooler and it is starting to really feel like winter is on the way. Some of the trees are still green and others are almost done shedding their leaves. It is a strange phenomenon of having had such warm weather a month ago I guess. The drought persists here but there was a good drenching a couple weeks ago and then the weather turned cooler so the rate of evaporation is somewhat diminished and people who seem to know about these things feel like the worst may be past us. I guess October is statistically the driest month of the year here so things should get better.

I am going to leave other stories for another post. It has taken me way too long to finish this one. Don’t forget to click on some of the pictures below. When viewed full-sized some of them are pretty impressive.

In the ongoing process of posting shots of all the people who do so much to make Abner (and me) feel so good about living here, I am adding two of the folks who work the entry kiosk at Biltmore. Above is our friend Jennifer who is probably the most enthusiastic Abner spoiler of the front gate crowd. Carlos, below, is lower key in his approach but still never fails to have a smile and friendly word for us.

The vineyards on the West Side are just amazing looking. They are astoundingly well tended and follow the slopes around the lake like contour lines on a survey.

This view is from the top of the vineyard area looking back at the barns by Biltmore's commercial nursery facility.

This is the French Broad River from the West Side of Biltmore. There has been so little rain lately that not only is the river crystal clear but it is so shallow and so slow that it is more like a pond. We could have waded acoss at this point.

Most of the vineyards on the West Side are arranged on voluptuously rounded slopes that flank a long lake. It is achingly pretty.