Southwest Virginia Blogs

The good news is that the anxiously-awaited PowerGrader has arrived and is ready for pickup at the trucking depot in Roanoke.

The bad news is that the driveway has to be dry in order to regrade it and repair the deep ruts that have turned what used to be a smooth driveway into Floyd County's most challenging off-road trail.

And it's raining. According to the talking heads it will rain tomorrow as well. And part of Thursday.

Once it stops raining, we will need three or four days without moisture for the driveway to dry out enough to scrape and grade.

Damn.

Five years ago today, I stood alongside Columbia Pike in Arlington and photographed the Pentagon as it burned. I arrived just 45 minutes after the hijacked airliner slammed into the Southwestern side of the building.

A lot of things can and will be said today about the fifth anniversay of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I think I will just let the my pictures in the video below say them for me. The photos were shot on 9/11 at the Pentagon and on the days following at the site and at events around Washington.

QuickTime Video. Don't have QuickTime? Download it here.

Gossip is a fact of life in society but small town gossip serves as the main source of news for many people. When the local newspaper is a weekly and the Roanoke TV stations need both a map and a GPS to find the county, gossip becomes the paper of record.

Gossip also provides salacious news you won't find in the pages of The Floyd Press and on news at 6 -- like who's sleeping with who, who's no longer involved with who and who left town after the rabbit died.

Salicious gossip, of course, is what most want to hear and the juicier the better -- even if untrue.

Current gossip centers around the breakup of some high-profile couples in the area. In the past week, I've been told of three county marriages that are breaking up. I can't speak for two of them but I can correct the record on the third.

Amy and I are not, repeat, not getting a divorce.

Hell, we don't have time to get a divorce. We've both been so busy lately that we see each other in passing, which is probably why people haven't seen us together a lot and that fueled rumors that we had split.

At first, I heard over lunch that Amy had moved out of our home. So when I got home and found her working in the kitchen, I asked: "What are you doing here? I heard you moved out."

To which she replied: "Just like a newspaperman. You got it wrong. I kicked you out." She had already hear the gossip.

I'm always the last to know.

Part of the front yard of Chateau Thompson: Sharing the obsession

One does not have to spend much time in Floyd County to know that many residents here are obsessed with their yards. Homeowners here have large, well-manicured lawns that require constant, obsessive attention.

Our three-and-a-half acre front yard (above) would be considered large in many areas but is about average here, although ours is on a slope that is about 35 degrees in some places which makes mowing a real adventure.

But, according to CBS Sunday Morning, obsession with yards is a national trend:

"It gets mowed twice a week," Mike Walls says of his lawn.

In Hilliard, Ohio, Walls, and his wife, Jenny, are self-described lawn fanatics. For some people, working in the yard is therapy. For the Walls, it's a sign they may need therapy.

"He's obsessive with the yard and the grass and the lines being straight and the edging and then I like the gardening and the flowers," Jenny says.

By one estimate there are 58 million lawn-owners in the country, turning what was simple maintenance into a national pastime.

"It's been known to be contagious, though, and we don't think that's a bad thing. Our neighbors see us mowing and they come over and ask us how we get the lawn like this," Mike says.

Mike has even been known to mow in the rain.

Mike admits that he becomes irked when neighbors fail to keep their lawns mowed.

"I have a tendency to wander aimlessly down the road a little ways and do another person's lawn because of that," he says.

Professor Ted Steinberg studies the environment's role in American history.

"I have etched into my mind — really burned into my mind — this memory of my father mowing, watering, fertilizing. He used to set up the sprinkler in such a way so that every single blade of grass would get some water," Steinberg says.

In the postcard perfect community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, he found the perfect subject for his next book — right out his own front door.

"I took a walk in the neighborhood and I just couldn't believe my eyes. The lawns of some of my neighbors made the perfect lawns of my Long Island past look like a bunch of beat up old cow pastures. I thought to myself, 'What's up with this,'" Steinberg says.

That curiosity turned into "American Green: The Obsessive Quest For The Perfect Lawn."

"There are anywhere between 25 and 40 million acres of turf in the U.S., which is an area about the size of Kentucky — perhaps as large as Florida. So I would say yes, it's a deeply entrenched American institution," he says.

Damn. Should have mowed the yard on Sunday. Didn't. Spent most of the day on the couch, off my feet because of too much walking at the Carroll County Gun Show & Flea Market on Saturday. Too much strain on the knees, hip and ankle. Should have known better.

Now it's raining...again. Another soaking rain that we need so much but which also means the yard, already out of control, will have to wait. More rain means more damage to the driveway. Oh well, The PowerGrader is not due to arrive until next week. Deeper ruts just means more challenge.

Rain aggravates the arthritis. Even after two procedures to burn away the calcium, the ankle still stiffens, the knees still pop and the hip creaks.

But we need the rain. That's what I keep telling myself.

We need the rain.

Perhaps it is fitting that I spend my retirement years working, part-time, for the little weekly newspaper where my career in journalism started as a part time, after school, reporter 43 years ago.

As I sit on my mountaintop writing this, I realize that I am less than 50 miles, as the crow flies, from my first full time newspaper job as a reporter for The Roanoke Times. that gig lasted four years before I headed West for 11 years and then back East to Washington in 1981.

In Roanoke, I thought I would work for newspapers for the rest of my life. It was all I ever really wanted to do. And, even in retirement, I'm still toiling away, writing for a newspaper, even though I also own the Internet's oldest political news web site and various other enterprises that are part of the so-called "new media."

And for many who considered a newspaper job the center of their universe, the dream is over.

Writes Denis Grollmus in Cleveland Scene:

On an August day, Dave Wilson was standing in his kitchen, preparing himself for the end, when his wife nodded to his Knight Ridder coffee mug. "You don't want to drink from that," she said.

I sure as hell don't, Wilson thought.

He'd given 18 years to that damn company, a decade of which he'd spent as a reporter and editor for the Akron Beacon Journal. He snatched up the mug and headed to a co-worker's house, where Beacon employees were mourning the end of an era. Knight Ridder, once one of America's largest newspaper chains, with papers from Philadelphia to San Jose, was officially dead.

"Anyone got a golf club?" Wilson asked when he arrived. Someone slipped him a monster-sized driver. He placed the mug on a tee, then hammered it into a cloud of ceramic shards. "It was like saying adios to that whole scenario," he says.

Once upon a time that stupid little cup had meant something special -- something that fought to better people's lives, earned Pulitzers for doing so, and allowed Wilson to be a proud provider. Now, on this crappy August day, it stood for something ugly -- something full of defeat, anxiety, and loss.

Denise's sad tale tells the whole sordid story of the demise not only of the mighty Akron Beacon-Journal but also of the Knight-Ridder newspaper empire. It is a scene sadly repeated in newsrooms around the country and newspaper fall victim to the "bottom line is everything" mentality.

I still have a Roanoke Times & World News coffee cup somewhere in my collection. It comes from a time when a family owned the paper instead of a profit-centric newspaper chain. I was also fortunate enough to work 11 years for The Alton Telegraph when brave family owners put news ahead of the bottom line. I also have coffee cups from The Associated Press when it was a better news service and United Press International long before it became a victim of cost-cutting and agenda-driven owners.

Unlike Dave Wilson, I won't send those cups into oblivion with a golf club. Each stands for a pleasant memory from a time when being a reporter meant being part of something special. I'm glad I was no longer part of any of my former employers when they forgot what it meant to be journalists.

A weekend forecast of mostly rain isn't good news for the hundreds of people who need a good Labor Day weekend for their annual flea markets. Vendor traffic is already down for Hillsville's annual Carroll County Gun Show and Flea Market and a water-soaked weekend won't help things.

Yet these periods of long, soaking rains bring needed relief to our dry, parched land. Although we haven't suffered an extreme drought this summer the rain has been inconsistent and often a hard, runoff type when it does strike. Such is the ebb and flow of Virginia's climate. We need a few days of soaking rain to return moisture to the soil and restore the water table that feeds our wells and springs.

Like most things in life, rain is a tradeoff: Good news for some, bad for others. Simply a question of timing. The flea marketers would rather see the rain strike last weekend or next week. The farmers, already wondering if they can coax a second cutting of hay from parched fields, just want it to rain.

Our grass and trees need rain. The well can use a few more inches in the water table. Well drillers tell me a number of county residents had their wells run dry this summer and drilling a new one can drain several thousand dollars from your bank account.

Rain also means more of our driveway will wash from the top of the hill to the bottom and more work when the PowerGrader we've ordered arrives in a couple of weeks. Rain means the grass I should have cut last week will be thicker next week and the grass catcher on the mower will be useless.

And rain aggravates my arthritis, tightens up the joints and requires more time in the hot tub which, as the rain falls, is not a bad way to spend a dark, dreary day.

Yes, rain has its tradeoffs.

OK. This is war. All-out war. Man vs. the driveway. But this time, man will be armed.

After three months of fighting an ever-eroding surface on the 35-degree, 450-foot long slope that, in one rainstorm, went from a smooth driveway to Floyd County's most-challenging offroad trail, I've decided to bring in the big guns.

A power grader.

On Monday, I ordered a DR Power Grader, quasi-heavy equipment tool that its makers promise will restore my driveway to its former glory.

David and Gretchen St. Lawrence speak highly of implements from DR. They bought one of their log-splitters not long after moving to Floyd County and David says the company delivers well-made products and backs those products with excellant customer service. I was further seduced by a well-made video and other excellent material from the company explaining just how the Power Grader works. I also talked to a friend in Carroll County who has one and swears by it.

According to the order confirmation received Monday night, the Power Grader will be shipped via truck this week and should be ready for pickup at the trucking company depot in Roanoke in about 10 days.

Enjoy your few remaining days of rebellion driveway. Your days of insubordination are about to come to an end.

The news that Arrow Truck Sales, a division of the Volvo Group, is coming to Floyd to build a truck component remanufacturing plant in the Branwick Center, dominated lunch table conversation Tuesday with most saying "Thank God" that the county had found a use for the cavernous shell building on Christiansburg Pike and some wondering why the big announcement meant "only 25 jobs' for the county.

At a time when other areas of Southwestern Virginia are announcing large factories with hundreds of jobs, the news that 25 new jobs were coming to Floyd may seem puny at first. Stuart has added 10 times that amount with two announcements in the past month.

But, as in any venture, we are talking economies of scale. The Branwick Center, while large by Floyd County standards, is really not that large of a building when it comes to industrial space. Two, we are talking about a business that is, for the most part, largely automated.

Yes, 25 jobs may seem small but those 25 jobs are ones that didn't exist on Monday of this week. They could represent 25 people who no longer will have to spend 45 minutes or more on the road each day to reach a job in Roanoke or the New River Valley. Or they could represent 25 younger residents of our county who won't have to leave after high school graduation to find work elsewhere.

Those 25 jobs represent people who will have money to spend here at home on groceries, gas, hardware and meals at local restaurants. Their employer will pay taxes and, hopefully, become a good corporate citizen that contributes generously to local organizations.

If the plant is successful, it will expand and those 25 jobs that exist in 2007 could be 30 jobs the following year and 35 jobs the year after that.

Floyd County faced the budget-busting prospect of having to shell out $2.8 million to buy the building next year. Enticing Arrow to come to Floyd will still add costs to the budget -- $242,000 in rent subsidies over the next five years and another $250,000 in modifications ot the building but Arrow has promised a multi-million investment in the county. If it doesn't work out, the county will still have to buy the building five years down the road but, like all business ventures, it is a gamble.

In business, nothing can -- or for that matter should -- come easy. There are gambles, and tradeoffs, and cost. But I would rather see my tax money used to try and fail than to simply give up.

Even for just 25 jobs.

Friends who moved here from Blacksburg last year have decided to return to live in the university town, buying a house there. Both will continue to work within the Floyd County educational system but will commute here from Montgomery County.

This prompted a conversation with a third friend who shook his head and wondered aloud just why they would give up a slice of heaven in the country to return to the quasi-urban madness of the New River Valley.

As someone born in an urban area (Tampa), raised in mostly-rural areas (Gibsonton, Fla., Farmville, Va., and Floyd County) and who lived most of his adult life in urban settings (St. Louis and Washington, DC), I can understand why some folks just don't find country life all-that-enticing.

Newspapers and magazines often carry stories about urbanites who escape the city for the tranquility of country life only to return to the city within two years. The Washington Post calls it "reverse urban flight." During our 23 years in Washington we knew a number of couples who fled the city but quickly returned.

In Arlington, our "yard work" consisted of sweeping off the outdoor carpet on our condominium balcony. It took, at most, about 15 minutes. Tending to our three-and-a-half acre yard in Floyd County takes a weekend and more.

We owned a "garage condo parking space" in the garage under our building and our monthly condo fee paid for upkeep. If there was a problem, we left a note at the front desk and it was taken care of. We now toil endlessly to keep the ruts and potholes out of our 450-foot long, uphill grade of a driveway. It's a losing battle.

If we didn't feel like cooking our going out to eat in Northern Virginia, we could pick up the phone and get food delivered from more than 50 nearby restaurants. We could walk to the grocery store, the post office, the bank or nearby shopping areas. We could shop for groceries at 2 a.m. or get a quick bite to eat at one of two nearby diners at 3.

Of course, all these amenities cost a lot more. The cost of living is far higher. Our property taxes for a 1300-square-foot condo were five times what they are for both our home in Floyd County and our farm in Carroll.

Some people find they cannot live without the amenities of the city. So they return. Others adapt and learn to do without, feeling the country lifestyle offsets the losses of other things. Some try to compensate by working to bring the amenities of the city to their rural environments which, of course, destroys a major part of why they and others moved there in the first place. Spend a little time in the traffic around Smith Mountain Lake and you can more easily understand the dangers of trying to merge city amenities with a country lifestyle.

True, we sometimes miss the ability to get Chinese food delivered at midnight but that is easily offset by relaxing in the hot tub and listening to the crescendo of crickets in the woods behind our home. Eventually, we will win the battle of the driveway and, hopefully, victory will come without the need for paving. A plan for new trees to reduce the size of the yard will cut back on some of the mowing.

City life is not for everyone, but neither is life in the country. Each serves those with different needs, different lifestyles and different interests. Our friends are young and still have many life adventures ahead of them. We've been there, done that. Now we approach what AARP calls the "twilight of our years" and country life offers a more relaxing environment for that.

Some call it "different strokes for different folks." We call it choices. We made ours. They made theirs. Neither is necessarily right nor wrong. It is simply a matter of personal preference.

Noticed a lot more "For Sale" signs around lately? Welcome to the new reality in the housing market. We are officially in a slump.

Reports Business Week:

The housing market turned in one of its worst performances in years, with existing-home sales falling 7%, to an annual rate of 6.7 million in the second quarter, according to data released on Aug. 15 by the National Association of Realtors. The results show a clear bifurcation in the market. States that had seen a big run-up in home prices are experiencing the most dramatics sales declines, while markets with strong economies and lower-cost housing are still seeing sales increases.

"There's a lot more merchandise and tremendous amounts of price reductions," says Phyllis Haber, a realtor with Prudential Douglas Elliman on New York's Long Island. "It's crazy. It's like someone waved a wand and everything changed." New York saw sales drop 4.8% year over year.

The big losers include California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and Virginia. All of the states saw sales fall by more than 20% from the same period last year. In the once red-hot Southern California market, sales of new and previously owned homes fell 27% to 22,700 in July, according to market researcher DataQuick. That was lowest number of homes sold since July, 1997.

Hold on a second. Did they say Virginia? Yep. Most of that slump is in Northern Virginia but the trickle-down effect takes over here as well. Local Realtors tell me houses in Floyd County can be on the market for a year or more unless owners are willing to drop their asking prices. Just a few months ago sellers could expect to get more than their asking prices as bidding wars erupted over desirable properties.

In Northern Virginia, where we sold our condo in two days in 2004, properties may be on the market for six months or more and the final sale price is often below what they seller wanted.

Reports the Ithaca Journal:

For years, nothing seemed to faze home buyers (in the Washington area). Price didn't matter. You could sell with dirty dishes still stacked in the sink. Even the eyesores got multiple bids. In the past year, though, the number of homes on the market has tripled. Some sit for months instead of days. To sell, the experts say, the price has to be right and the house has to look move-in ready.

The boom had to come to an end eventually. The real estate market has spiraled out of control with prices going up daily and overly-ambitious buyers using interest-only loans to buy homes they couldn't afford. In Loudoun County, Virginia, home foreclosures are up 40 percent and we're not talking about families eeking by on $25,000 a year but high-income homeowners with six-figure incomes and adjustable-rate mortgages they can no longer afford.

From WTOP Radio in Washington:

Homeowners who have adjustable rate mortgages are in for a shock in the next few months as the ARMs they took out three to five years ago end and higher mortgage payments kick in.

"There is sort of a day of reckoning coming," says Steve Sacks of Rockville's Rydex Investments.

"It's estimated the average American's home payment could go up anywhere from 25 to 50 percent."

The Washington area could be hard hit since a lot of folks opted for adjustable rate mortgages because that was the only way they could afford mortgage payments.

Sacks says some consumers who are already stretched thin may be in trouble, especially since interest rates are rising and household debt is higher than ever. Already mortgage foreclosures are rising.

The higher interest rates come as median home prices have declined for the first time in the past five years in parts of the metro area, and as home sales cool down in Virginia.

Fairfax and Loudoun counties have seen declines, according to The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the Virginia Association of Realtors reports that the number of closings on sales was down 18.99 percent in June compared to May, and 15.28 percent for the year-to-date compared with last year.

Last month there were 12,577 closings. In June 2005 there were 15,526.

In addition to declines in northern Virginia, the association says lower sales were reported in Hampton Roads, the Dan River area, the Massanutten area, the Winchester/Front Royal area, Fredericksburg and the Greater Augusta area.

Areas where home sales increased last month include Lexington, Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, the New River Valley, the Roanoke Valley, the Eastern Shore, the Chesapeake Bay area, Richmond and southwestern Virginia.

OK. Sales are up in Southwestern Virginia. That can be good news or bad news, depending on your point of view.

But things are even worse elsewhere according to Foreclosure.Com:

-- Michigan currently has the highest new foreclosure rate per household,
with one in every 1,085 homes currently in foreclosure. This marks
the highest foreclosure rate for a state this year.
-- California's new foreclosures dipped by 41 percent from June to July,
while the active inventory increased by 7.3 percent.
-- The largest monthly increases in new foreclosure rates were recorded
in Alabama (+21.3); Colorado (+12.9); Illinois (+11.6); Michigan
(+38); Minnesota (+31.1); Missouri (+48.2); and Ohio (+14.3).*
-- The largest monthly percentage decreases in new foreclosures were
found in California (-41.3); North Carolina (-14.3); Pennsylvania
(-21.3); and Texas (-16.9).*

Hobbling around on a bad knee and ankle this week, courtesy of too much calcium buildup on both knee and ankle and a little medical intervention to take care of the problem. One more week in the brace and I should be back to normal, which in my condition means moving ever-more slowly as age overcomes ambition.

There are, unfortunately, no real ways to avoid the ravages of age, especially for those of us who abused various bones, joints, ligaments and whatnot in our youth. When they x-rayed my ankle, the doctor looked at the mass of calcium that blocked any probing view of the joint and asked: “My God, how many times have you broken that anke?”

I really don’t’ know. Six, maybe seven times.

“It’s a wonder you can still walk,” he said.

I wonder about that sometimes too, particularly when it is damp or cold. Arthritis slows the use of both ankles, both knees, both hips, both hands and one shoulder.

I don’t remember who it was that said “if I had known I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself,” but he was right.

Sploid, a flashy, gossipy entry from the Nick Denton blog factory, bit the dust this week after Denton failed to find a buyer. It's not the first time Denton has dumped a web site that didn't meet his immediate expectations of fast bucks but this time the execution involved a friend -- Ken Layne, Sploid's editor.

As Ken writes in Spoid's farewell:

Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

It is a great victory for bullshit peddlers everywhere ... if they had any idea Sploid existed.

Shut down, laid off, on the nickel, run out of town, shown the door, eighty-sixed, suicided, under heavy manners, finaled by the fuzz, down in the hole, out of the groove, sadder than a map, under the Hoover blankets, taking a bank holiday, riding the rails to Hungry Town, brought down and fought down.

Winners write the history books, but anybody can write the blog post. So get right up close to your computer screen and we'll tell you a little story.

I met Ken Layne during his time in Washington working for United Press International, another doomed enterprise. Ken was one of the early pioneers of Internet news, having started tabloid.net, a web publication since lost in the dustbins of cyber-history. He and Matt Welch also started the LA Examiner, which died, reborn and died again.

Ken was kind enough to link to one of my web sites, Capitol Hill Blue during its early days and that link helped drive traffic to our site. Matt wrote a nice piece about Blue for some trade publication that is also long gone and that helped the site grow and prosper.

Tabloid.net is gone. So, now, is Spoid. Matt works for the editorial page of The Los Angeles Times. Ken, I know, will rebound. He always does. But Sploid was one of my daily reads. It will be missed.

T-shirt spotted recently at Oddfellas Cantina:

Out of my mind...Leave a message

The lights blinked off shortly before 8 p.m. Exactly 45 seconds later we heard the v-twin engine behind the house start and the power came back on, courtesy of 15kw of power from a propane-powered automatic backup generator.

We put the Guardian generator in right after we bought the house nearly two years ago and, other than the weekly 12-minute test starts it runs every Saturday morning, the only times we needed its services came when AEP shut down power in the area to replace a transformer at a nearby church and a second time when a wayward squirrel fried itself on our transformer.

Attempts to call AEP to report the outage proved fruitless at first. Apparently everyone else in this end of the country tried to call as well and Citizens Telephone just responded with an "all circuits are busy" message. When we finally did get through we got a message saying power was out in Floyd, Montgomery, Carroll and Grayson Counties and it should be restored by 10 or 11 p.m.

No problem. The Guardian kept power flowing to the house and we went about our business, working on computers, watching TV and enjoying other parts of a typical Monday night.

Shortly before 10 p.m. the generator powered down but the electricity remained on. Power was back and the Guardian took itself offline automatically after switching back to the power from AEP. The two hours of generation used less than 1 percent of our propane supply.

Technology triumphs. Life goes on.

I’ve witnessed a lot of pathetic displays of human pettiness in more than 40 years of journalism but nothing, repeat nothing, can match the courtroom melodrama that played out in Floyd County general district court Thursday afternoon.

A long-simmering neighborhood squabble involving Floyd County’s only gated community, Park Ridge, erupted into full-fledged legal warfare in front of Judge Thomas Frith and displayed just how incredibly stupid and idiotic people can become over minor problems.

On one side sat the angry father of a combat Marine and an ally of a neighborhood association board of directors ousted in what one resident calls a “hostile takeover.” On the other, the new board and its leader, an often-hysterical, arm waving despot who loses control while accusing others of doing the same.

“Your honor, this has been a circus,” current Park Ridge Association president Larry Martin told Judge Frith after more than four hours of testimony. Martin should know. He was the ringleader of the carnival that played out in the courtroom.

This latest war erupted when Chris Koumparakis, father of a property owner – Marine Capt. Speros Koumparakis - - appeared before the Park Ridge Board in August of last year to ask for a waiver of his son’s community association assessment while the Marine served overseas in Iraq and also to demand payment of an overdue bill for survey work the elder Koumparakis performed for the old board of directors.

Miller and his backers say Koumparakis was there simply to stir up trouble at the urging of Donald Stoneman, president of the old board of directors. He may be right. Animosity runs deep between the two factions and you could feel it from the snickers and giggles from both sides of the spectators that packed the courtroom on Thursday.

So the new board went into a stall, telling Koumparakis they would check into the matter and get back to him. When he heard nothing, he came back in September and, from all accounts, things got nasty.

So the board banned Koumparakis from future meetings and threatened to place a lien on his son’s property for the unpaid assessment. Koumparakis returned to the November and December meetings only to be ejected by Floyd County deputy sheriffs.

He appeared in court Thursday as a defendant facing two counts of disorderly conduct and two counts of criminal trespass. He also swore out a warrant for assault against a Park Ridge owner, Reece Prillaman, for assault, claiming Prillaman belly-bumped him at the September board meeting and threatened him.

After four hours of charges, counter charges, some shouting and a lot of hyperbole, Judge Frith dismissed the two charges of disorderly conduct against Koumparakis and the assault charge against Prillaman but convicted Koumparakis of two counts of criminal trespass and fined him a total of $400. Kourmparakis plans to appeal so the matter is far from over.

“You folks have a real mess up on that mountain,” Frith told both sides.

Park Ridge is a community with a long history of neighborhood warfare. It illustrates the dangers of community associations and boards of directors who rule their fiefdoms in Gestapo fashion. Those who know Park Ridge’s story consider the neighborhood a joke and the best reason of all to do everything possible to make sure that no future gated communities spring up in our county.

The mass migration to Floyd County is slowing, crippled by a bursting housing bubble in urban markets and a general slowing of the economy.

County Realtors tell me houses for sale in Floyd County stay on the market longer, sometimes as long as a year, and that prospective sellers, for the first time in recent memories, must reduce their asking prices to sell.

Lydeanna Martin, Floyd County's director of economic development and tourism, reports that approval of new housing plats is running far behind the record paces of 2004 and 2005.

The New York Times reports today that the market for second homes is in a slump. John M. Berry, a columnist for Bloomberg News Service, wrote last month that the housing slump has federal officials worried.

Browse Realtor.Com for houses in the area and you will see a number of listings that say "price reduced."

If the housing bubble has truly burst, it was long overdue. When we sold our condo in Arlington in November 2004 home values in the Washington, DC, area were rising at $10,000 a month. We had three offers on the first day our property listed and sold it in two days for several times what we paid for it in 1984. Our neighbors criticised us for not holding our for even more but we made a good profit with enough money to buy a nice home here and still have some left over.

The young couple that bought our condo gutted it and spent a considerable amount of money refurbishing it in the hopes of flipping the property for a tidy profit but the market flattened right after we left and they ended up renting 1,320 square feet of space for $3,500 a month plus condo fee.

I ran into a couple from Boston in Cafe del Sol a couple of weeks ago and they said the housing market in that area was in shambles with prices falling and homes on the market for a year or more.

It had to happen. No boom lasts forever. While it is bad news for those who want to sell their homes and move to a more tranquil lifestyle like the one we have here in Floyd County, it is good news for those of us who worried about being overrun with urban escapees.

I took the week off. No, not from work at the studio where a busy week of printing photos from FloydFest, writing two stories for The Floyd Press plus getting some last minute entries ready for a new show at The Jacksonville Center filled the limited number of hours available.

Instead, I took the week off from Blue Ridge Muse and didn’t write, blog, post or respond to a thing. I’m already on self-imposed hiatus from Capitol Hill Blue and won’t return there until sometime after Labor Day, if at all.

It was time, I thought, to take a respite from the daily pressures of blogging, of writing for a news web site, from trying to express myself in cyperspace.

What I found amazing was the amount of time that little respite freed up, how much later I could sleep in the morning, how much earlier I could go to bed in the evening and how more of the day became available for other pursuits.

I’m still undecided whether this phenomenon called blogging is real or simply the CB radio of the new century. Technorati says there are 50 million blogs out there and hundreds of thousands of more added to the cyber jungle every day.

Are there that many frustrated writers out there? Is there a need for that many people to tell the world what they think on subjects ranging from beer bottle collecting to politics?

Most of the 50 million are mom and pop bloggers, writing their thoughts, essays or diatribes to an audience of friends and family but blogging is also a commercial enterprise for many, finding – as all opportunists do – a way to turn a fad into quick money. Some, like The Daily Kos, use blogs to further a political agenda and pad the client list of a partner. Daily Kos ranks 4th among the 50-plus million blogs tracked by Technorati with 12,632 blogs linking to it.

Blue Ridge Muse, on the other hand, ranks 51,290 on the list of 50 million (still pretty good I guess) with 56 blogs linking to us on a regular basis. On the other hand, our news site, Capitol Hill Blue, ranks 505 with some 5,000 links from 1,489 other sites.

Blue, however, is not a blog but a national news site that gets a lot of attention (good and bad) from the blogging community. Let’s stick to Floyd County-oriented blogs. Fragmented Fred First, dean of the local blogging world, ranks 13,448 with links from 776 links from 170 blogs. David St.Lawrence, who is turning into a blog factory, doesn’t have a ranking with Technorati for Ripples, but a search does show 887 links to his blog.

Colleen Redman, easily the most prolific of the county bloggers, easily outranks Fred or I with a ranking of 7,517 and 854 links from 277 blogs.

In a society where winning is everything and competition rules, this should spur Fred or I to buckle down and work harder to draw more readers. Fred is welcome to try. I have no interest in playing a numbers game.

I’ve been writing for a living for most of my life. I’ve written news stories in longhand, on clanky Underwood typewriters, recalcitrant portables, IBM Selectrics, clunky word processors and lightweight laptops. I’ve always loved the immediacy of journalism, the rush of getting a story to print while the adrenaline flows and the words come in rapid-fire action.

Blogging, for those who do it well, is a more leisurely pursuit, calling for thought and retrospection. Such a pace does not serve a journalistic mind. Fred, David and Colleen are careful, thoughtful writers who spend a lot of time considering and composing and that care shows in their work. I write on impulse, driven by speed and a desire to finish the task at hand and more on. That attracts attention and readers. It also attracts trouble.

My week away from the keyboard allowed me time to rediscover something called a life.

I think it is time to start living it again.

Long day Saturday working on our yard, driveway and other projects. Amy sacked out for a nap while I eased into our hot tub on the back porch to let the pulsating water ease the aches and pains.

One corner in our hot tub is called a "rumble seat" with extra jets to pound the back and a collar that sends pulses of water on your neck and shoulders. It faces the woods that close in on the rear of our home and the floodlights that illuminate our back yard provided a serene view. As the water soothed my aching muscles, I closed my eyes and relaxed.

Then a loud snort jolted my eyes open and I found myself stating into the curious eyes of a fully-grown black bear standing on its hind legs less than six feet away and just beyond the screen of our porch.

Somewhere in the recesses of my water soaked brain emerged the warning: "Stay perfectly still!" I didn't move but the water swirling around me did. The tub's water, set on full agitation, obviously had the bear's attention.

The bear continued to regard me and the water as I pondered options. If our curious visitor decided to join me in the hot tub I might be able to scramble out and make it to the door leading into the house. My anti-bear defense system, a Henry "big boy" 44-magnum rifle, sat inside the house, too far away for easy retrieval but available if the curious animal decided to follow me.

The bear's eyes shone in the light and I could see its eyes following the swirl of the water in the tub. Would this bear confuse our hot tub with a steam of rapids and start hunting for salmon? Wait. Wrong part of the country and wrong species of bear. Still, I'd photographed black bear hunting fish in the waters of the Little River.

I'm not sure how long we stared at each other. Finally, the bear dropped down on all fours and ambled off into the woods. I waited a few minutes to make sure it was, indeed, gone and then scrambled out of the tub and into the house. It took a few minutes for my heart rate and breathing to return to normal.

As I sat, still soaking wet, Amy wandered into the kitchen.

"Oh," she said. "You hit the hot tub. That must have been relaxing."

Yeah. Right.

Hmmm. Maybe I've found the solution for mowing our mammoth front yard.

From ABC comes this dispatch:

A man riding on a suped up lawn mower set a new world speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats with a speed of 81 miles an hour. "A lot of people might say you guys are crazy?"

"Yea I hear that all the time," said Bob Cleveland as he sat atop his tricked out grass clipper. But if driving a suped up lawn mower down a track on top of a salt covered lake bottom means you're crazy then Cleveland admits he's crazy. "This is my job and I enjoy it. It's a lot more fun than cutting the grass."

When the wind died down on the Salt Flats, Cleveland hit the throttle and sped away. Within a few seconds he topped out at 81 miles an hour a new world's record. "That was great, it felt good, I believe we can get a lot more out of it," Cleveland said.

In addition to his speed work Cleveland also races on the professional circuit, winning the U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association's National Championship 8 times.

Unfortunately, Cleveland's souped-up lawn mower doesn't have a cutting blade.

Oh well.