We just received a robo-call (about 9:55 a.m.) from the principal of West Forsyth HS saying that there was an electrical issue in the 1000 building that caused a lot of smoke, but no fire. The building has been evacuated and the teachers are holding class with the students in the old gym. They expect to have the kids back in the 1000 building by 11:45 at the earliest, but it could be later.
My Blackberry rang this morning and when I picked up my daughter, a freshman at West Forsyth High School, asked me, "Dad, did you get my text?"
"Uh, no," I said.
"Oh, well there's a fire in one of the buildings here at school and I don't have first period."
"Okay," I replied, "Is everyone okay?"
"Yeah, it's only in the one building so everyone else has to go to class. But everyone in the 1000 building got out of class."
"Oh, okay. Well call us back if anything changes and we need to come get you."
"Thanks Dad. Byuh."
After hanging up I checked my messages and this is the text she sent: "Dad there is a fire!"
All I can say is that I'm awful glad I talked to her before I read the text. Once again I have proof that my kids know nothing about context.
Anyhow for those with kids at West Forsyth High School there's apparently been a fire in the 1000 building. Given that there's ongoing construction on the campus I suspect it has something to do with that, but I don't know for sure. We haven't gotten a robo-call from the school and there's nothing in the news about it so it sounds like it isn't a big deal. Hopefully that's true.
DrScore.com is the latest entry into the market for physician rating sites, but the reason I find it particularly interesting is that it was started in the Wake Forest University Babcock Demon Incubator. So it's a home brewed web service.
So fare there are a little over 60,000 doctor ratings on the site, which is a nationwide site, not a site dedicated to just this area. As with other rating sites the real value will come as more people use it, so for it to be of real value the site will need to attract far more users to get a critical mass of data for each doctor. DrScore.com is trying to get doctors to use it as their default patient satisfaction service for a $150-per-year fee, and if enough doctors do that then the site could boost its numbers quickly.
The article in the Winston-Salem Journal about the site points out some of the concerns for such a service (gaming the ratings in either a positive or negative direction being chief among them), but there's a need for more transparency in health care so I think this is a good thing. Once the site gets much more data they'll also be able to provide some interesting data for researchers and that could eventually lead to more informed health care consumers. As I mentioned in a previous post about the new "buyer beware" nature of health care in the US this is a necessary step for those of us who are now tasked with managing our own health care costs rather than the insurance companies.
Real estate in Winston-Salem isn't exactly hot; existing home sales in October 08 were 34% lower than October 07, and average home prices were down 7.6%. From the Journal article:
People in the local real-estate industry had hoped for better
numbers as sales of existing homes started stabilizing somewhat during
the summer.
Glenn Cobb, the chief staff executive for the Winston-Salem Regional
Association of Realtors, says he believes that such factors as the
country's economic downturn and recent presidential election played a
part in helping to slow housing sales in October.
Several people in the housing industry have said that potential homeowners have been in a wait-and-see mood.
"The fundamentals are all still there," Cobb said. "You've got a
great selection. You've got great interest rates and a real stable
market for us ordinarily, so it still should be a good buyers' market
right now."
He doesn't expect the climate to change for the better until the spring.
The Thanksgiving and Christmas season tends to be a slow time for the housing industry.
Julie Poplin, the president of the Winston-Salem Realtors
association, said that business has been sporadic and said 2008 was the
first year that she had consecutive months where she didn't have a
closing.
But Poplin, who is also a broker for Allen Tate Realtors, is ending the year on a good note.
She is encouraged by the fact that she has three closings scheduled
in December. "People are still looking for bargains, and people are
still buying homes."
I've taken the realtors to task in the past for being just a tad delusional with their interpretations of the market and the effect of the economy on real estate, but in this case I actually sense a little bit of realism in their remarks. My only point would be that Mr. Cobb missed one crucial factor in his comments about the fundamentals being good: while interest rates and prices might be low, lending standards are much, much tighter and until that changes a lot fewer people will be out of the market and not by their own choice.
Well, another soccer season has come to a close. This weekend my daughter Erin's team, the Twin City Youth Soccer Association Lady Reds (U-15) of which I'm the assistant coach, played in the 2008 adida's Challenge Clash at Bryan Park in Greensboro. The girls won both games yesterday, one against a team that had beaten us twice earlier this season, and were guaranteed a spot in the tournament final this afternoon regardless of the result of this morning's game. As it happened the team we faced this morning was the other undefeated team in our bracket so essentially we were guaranteed to play them twice today. The team was from Triangle and they were tough, well coached and very skilled. Our girls managed to squeak out a tie in the morning game and then two hours later lined up for another go at 'em.
Before I tell you the result let me tell you that our girls showed more gumption than most teams I've been around either as a player or a coach. In between today's games the medical tent had at least five of our girls in there getting treatment for sprains, strains and contusions. The girls also knew how big and tough this team they were going to play was because those were the same girls that sent them to the tent in the first place. I should emphasize that the Triangle team did that with hard, clean play and not dirty soccer. Still, our girls eagerly laced em up and went out to try and win a championship.
For the most part the game was played in our defensive end. Those Triangle girls really were very good, very athletic and very well coached. Unfortunately one of our girls had a blatant hand violation in the penalty box that resulted in a penalty kick (and goal) for them. A few minutes later one of our defenders got tangled up with one of their players in the box, and although it clearly wasn't a foul another penalty kick was awarded that resulted in a goal. I'm going to be generous and say the ref had a bad day and leave it at that. Anyway, we entered half time down 2-0.
In the first 25 minutes of the second half we again survived a bunch of action in our own defensive end and honestly I thought the girls were going to just try and make it through the game without breaking something or giving up another goal. I should have known better. For the last 10 minutes they fought and scrapped and managed to finally get a goal with three minutes left. They kept pouring it on and had another couple of chances before the whistle blew and it was all over.
At the end of the day our girls played the best tournament they've had in the three seasons Erin and I have been involved. They made the finals and gave a very strong team all they could handle. It was a sight to behold.
As for me, well I managed to get a ref to yell at me for the first time since I've been the assistant coach. I thought she'd done a terrible job the whole game and with about ten minutes left one of our girls got steamrolled and when I didn't hear the whistle I pulled a John McEnroe and yelled "You've GOT to be kidding me." Then she blew the whistle and yelled at me to hush up and if I'd given her the chance she was getting ready to blow the whistle. In my head I said, "This year would've been nice" but out of my mouth came "Sorry." It cracked the girls on the bench up, but it was a little embarrassing.
My hat's off to our head coach Mac, who dealt with all the crap with the club, the league and the tournaments and never once lost his cool. It ain't easy being the go-between for 16 fifteen-year old girls, their families and a youth sports bureaucracy but somehow he did it. Now he'll be able to do his day job uninterrupted for a few months and we'll all get our weekends back for a while.
And of course there was our team manager Rick. He must have sent out 10,000 email this season and made just as many phone calls in an effort to get us where we needed to be on time and ready to play. I'm not sure what we would of done without him.
We also had a great bunch of parents on this team. They were all very positive, never getting down on the girls and never yelling objectionable things at the opponents or the refs. Heck, if anything they were too nice, but I'll take that over the prima donna parents any day. Not to be overlooked is their time commitment in getting their girls to the practices and games and I hope we were able to communicate our appreciation to them adequately.
Finally, I have to say that these girls were a true joy to coach. I'm not sure how much good we did them, but they did a world of good for us. They made us laugh, a lot, and roll our eyes at all the stories about boys and school, and boys and boys and in the process only drove us a little bit crazy. What more can you ask from a bunch of teenage girls? Thanks Lady Reds.
A couple of days ago I posted about some rumors I'd heard,
namely that the Winston-Salem downtown stadium project had come to a
halt and that Mike Mulhern, the Journal's NASCAR columnist had been let
go. I heard directly from Mike that he had indeed been let go, which
is a bummer but it sounds like he's already working on his next act.
As for the stadium, I got an email yesterday from Jake at the Chamber
of Commerce and he'd checked it out and been told that the project was
still going to meet its deadline of being ready for the first pitch of
the 2009 season. Then I saw in this morning's Journal that reporter Laura Graff had asked the mayor about it after the city's economic forum last night. From the article:
Construction on the $22.6 million baseball stadium in downtown
Winston-Salem is being slowed but that should not affect the scheduled
April 2009 opening, officials said yesterday.
Mayor Allen Joines said in an interview after the city's economic
forum last night that the delay was caused by negotiations between two
of the Winston-Salem baseball team's owners, Billy Prim and Andrew
"Flip" Filipowski.
Joines said that Prim, who is also the chairman and chief executive
of Primo Water Corp., could buy out Filipowski, who is also the
chairman and chief executive of SilkRoad Technologies Inc. Earlier this
month, Filipowski's company laid off at least 12 employees…
"There have been some delays in the stadium's construction while we
work on restructuring of ownership of the team and stadium," said the
spokesman, Kevin Mortesen. "We anticipate finalizing that in the near
future and that everything will proceed to enable the team to play in
the new stadium for the '09 season."
Mortesen said in an e-mail that construction would continue during
the delay. He said that crews were at the stadium yesterday and will be
there today.
Now that the thing is started I really hope they get it done, but with
the ongoing financial mess and its unexpected, long reach into all
kinds of business sectors it's not a stretch to believe that this
project could eventually become a victim too. I'm not implying that
the Prim folks are misleading us, rather I'm hoping that they don't get
blindsided like so many other institutions have been over the last few
months. After all I seriously doubt the folks at Lehman Brothers saw their demise coming either.
Over the past few weeks I've heard two rumors that are unverified but came from some pretty good sources so I'm wondering if they're true.
Update: Received an email from Mike Mulhern this evening and he indeed was let go. He mentions it on his last video for JournalNow. He also mentions that he'll be back on another channel, most likely MikeMulhern.net. Go get 'em Mike.
Feel free to leave comments regarding either rumor. Like I said these aren't confirmed, just things I've heard through the grapevine, which is why I carefully inserted the word "allegedly" in the opening sentence of both rumors.
I stumbled across the blog for realtors Brad and Angela Lawrence and they have a chart on there that's just plain depressing, but before I get into that let me give them a compliment for having the blog in the first place. I know I've taken some realtors and their association to task in the past, particularly for saying things that make them seem obtuse about current market realities, but that doesn't mean I have it in for all realtors. There are some I really respect and I think they play an important role in the housing market, so it's nice seeing Brad and Angela using blogs and email newsletters to augment their shoe leather sales.
Now, to the numbers. They have a chart showing the housing market activity for the Piedmont Triad for the week of 11/1/08 – 11/7/08. What struck me is that the percentage of listed homes that sold seems really low and more houses were newly listed than were sold, which means that the inventory of unsold homes actually grew. I don't know if the numbers were higher or lower than historical norms, but they just seem really, really low. Here they are by county:
The following numbers are the Pendings/Solds/New Listings/Actives for Week of 11/1/08 – 11/7/08
Source – Triad MLS
| County | Pendings | SOLDS | New Listings | All Actives |
| Guilford | 56 | 17 | 130 | 4620 |
| Forsyth | 39 | 22 | 111 | 3421 |
| Davidson | 8 | 11 | 34 | 1271 |
| Randolph | 10 | 8 | 34 | 748 |
| Davie | 0 | 0 | 14 | 407 |
| Stokes | 4 | 1 | 8 | 300 |
| Surry | 3 | 1 | 9 | 421 |
| Yadkin | 2 | 2 | 7 | 117 |
| Alamance | 7 | 1 | 7 | 378 |
| Rockingham | 9 | 3 | 13 | 548 |
If I'm doing my math right then there were actually 80% more homes newly listed (367) than were sold or pending sale (204). Also only 1.7% of all homes on the market were sold or pending sale. This really can't be good, especially if those kinds of numbers are consistent for months on end. Maybe someone out there with access to historic numbers can tell us if this is representative of the market over time.
On another post about where people look for home listings Brad and Angela say the following:
In our area (Piedmont Triad), the preferred online search tool is Listingbook.com,
it is a service that is fed from our MLS every 30 minutes. No doubt it
is best search tool, it is far superior than any other search tool that
we have experienced. It allows buyers to have their own personal
account, save favorites, make property notes, communicate back and
forth with their agent through property notes, very customized search
critera and FREE………here are more benefits of Listingbook.
We do not know of any buyers that look in the newspaper or magazines
anymore, if we get a call, they saw it online or a yard sign.
What I really like about this is that they take the time to provide information that may not lead directly to a sale, but it does show their expertise and understanding of the market. Good stuff.
Local blogger Brian Leon is an avid photographer, but it's not his profession. Still, his pics are appearing in published works including a new travel book about North Carolina. What's interesting to me is that he's being found by people searching Flickr and then contacting him for permission to use his photos in their work. Not all of it is paid, but some is and as Brian says there's a great sense of satisfaction in seeing his work published.
On another note Brian recently reformatted his blog to use the "magazine" format and it looks great. I'm thinking I might need to do something similar.
When I migrated from Netvibes to Google Reader for my daily info fix I somehow missed adding the Winston-Salem Journal's food blog Dishing it Out to my Google account. Luckily I re-found it and was immediately rewarded with a pointer to a fresh seafood store called Sea Products, Inc. tucked away in Winston-Salem. Proprietor George Streblow has started publishing an email newsletter that you can subscribe to here, and according to the Journal's Michael Hastings the newsletter offers some great info on things like the difference between wild and farmed salmon.
Celeste and I might have a new place to shop for dinner.
Befuddled 