Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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.
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.
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
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
Sunday, December 30, 2007
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.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
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.
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.
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