Playing Quarters (Not the drinking game)

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One of the problems with having a saturated septic field is that you really want to avoid putting any more water into it.  That becomes problematic when you have three teenagers, so we've been taking measures to limit our water use.  This week that's meant making a couple of trips to the laundromat to do mega-loads of laundry.  Consequently I've come to a few conclusions and realizations:

  • Our kids have too many clothes.  Seriously, how many sweatshirts does one boy need?  How many pairs of socks can one girl possibly use?  Sheesh.
  • Having your own, properly functioning washer and dryer at home is one of the great luxuries of modern living. 
  • Using a laundromat launches you out of your little cocoon of comfort.  Watching the people who obviously use the laundromat on a regular basis, evident by their systematic use of the machines to optimize both time and quarters, makes you realize exactly how easy you might have it. 
  • My habit of throwing my change in a box on my bedstand every night over the last couple of years has resulted in me accumulating something like $451 in quarters.  Those come in quite handy at a laundromat. 
  • I'm going to be pushing our septic contractor hard to get our system fixed ASAP.  Dragging clothes to the laundromat and worrying about every flush of the toilet is no fun.  
  • We've used the laundromat in Clemmons that's right next door to the food pantry.  Seeing people who are truly struggling definitely puts things in perspective.  All things considered having a funky septic system isn't really that big a problem so I'm going to stop whining about it. 

Recent Rain Fills Reservoirs and My Front Yard

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According to this story at WXII the rain over the past weekend combined with the snow has gone a long way to catching us up on our yearly rainfall totals.  Local reservoirs are approaching full which is a good thing.

Here on the home front the rain fall has exacerbated our septic issues.  To catch you up on what I'm talking about:
  • During the really rainy spell in December and January we notice a muddy patch in our lawn near the road that runs in front of our house.
  • Muddy patch occassionally smells a little funky. 
  • We get septic tank pumped and that seems to help. 
  • We notice that whenever it rains a lot we get the return of the funky smell.  
  • Three weeks later we notice that the patch is still there and call a septic repair guy who's the friend of a friend.  He recommends we have the county come out to look at it.
  • A very helpful representative from the Forsyth County health department comes last week and says that while our system isn't failing our septic lines are saturated.  Basically we don't have enough septic lines for the number of people living in our house.  That's actually good news compared to what we were worried about (total failure and system replacement). 
  • He lays out a plan for more lines in our yard (thankfully we have plenty of room) and pending a test showing that our soil percs well we will get a permit to put in those lines some time in the next five years (if the system was failing we'd have 30 days). 

So that brings us to this weekend.  I'd dug a hole about two feet deep and three feet in circumference to get to the lid of our septic tank so that the county guy could access it if he needed it.  I decided to leave the hole in case I needed to call the septic pump guy to empty our tank again.  Well, when we got the monsoon over the weekend that hole started to fill with water and I worried that a couple of bad things might happen: one, the concrete lid might start leaking some of the stuff inside the tank into the water in the hole, or two, that the water would freeze overnight and crack the lid.  So guess what?  Sunday after church I was the idiot bailing water out of a hole in the middle of massive rain showers and then filling it with mud.  I'd love to know what my neighbors were thinking when they drove past.

Here's where we stand now:  We're waiting for the permit from the county so that we can get the septic contractor out here to put in our new lines.  We're probably looking at a couple of weeks before everything is done, and in the interim our yard is saturated.  Luckily it's not sewage, it's just that the gray water has nowhere to go so it sits on top of the ground and provides us with the occassional whiff of putridity (Is that a word?).  It smells kind of like swamp.

While the good citizen in me realizes that we need the rain the selfish homeowner is hoping for a three week drought.

Warren Buffett on Housing

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This excerpt from Warren Buffett's letter to shareholders should be required reading for everyone involved in the housing and financial industries:

Commentary about the current housing crisis often ignores the crucial fact that most foreclosures do not occur because a house is worth less than its mortgage (so-called “upside-down” loans). Rather, foreclosures take place because borrowers can’t pay the monthly payment that they agreed to pay. Homeowners who have made a meaningful down-payment – derived from savings and not from other borrowing – seldom walk away from a primary residence simply because its value today is less than the mortgage. Instead, they walk when they can’t make the monthly payments.

Home ownership is a wonderful thing. My family and I have enjoyed my present home for 50 years, with more to come. But enjoyment and utility should be the primary motives for purchase, not profit or refi possibilities. And the home purchased ought to fit the income of the purchaser.

The present housing debacle should teach home buyers, lenders, brokers and government some simple lessons that will ensure stability in the future. Home purchases should involve an honest-to-God down payment of at least 10% and monthly payments that can be comfortably handled by the borrower’s income. That income should be carefully verified. 

Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn’t be our country’s primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.

Snow Day and Why I Won’t Qualify as a Good Samaritan This Week

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Last night's snow was easily the most significant of my family's five winters here. There's finally enough white stuff to actually do some real sledding or snowball fighting.

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I have a sad admission to make: last night after we went to bed we heard a truck go by the house and then we heard some spinning wheels for a minute or two.  My wife asked me if I thought it was the neighbors and I said no that it wasn't one of their cars because I would have recognized the sound.  The sound went away so I figured that whoever it was had gotten firm traction and taken off and after that I didn't think much of it.  Then this morning I went out to get the newspaper (yes it was delivered on time this morning so big time kudos to our newspaper delivery folks) and saw that a pickup truck was stuck in my neighbor's yard.  Now I'm feeling guilty that I didn't get out of bed to check it out and see if someone did indeed need help.  Of course if they need help today I'll be all over it since guilt is a powerful motivator.

Rumor Mill: Ask SAM Quits

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Rumor from a very reliable source: Rhonda "Ask SAM" Bumgardner has resigned from the Winston-Salem Journal effective Monday. I'm sure details will follow from the newspaper in six point font at the bottom of page A23 next to the funeral home ad. 

Not exactly surprising news since the paper laid off her husband not too long ago.

Free Pizza Downtown in One Hour! Oh, and BTW the Oral History Project is Coming to Winston-Salem

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WFDD is holding a press conference in about an hour to officially kick off the first day of the StoryCorps oral history project that will be in residence here in Winston-Salem until March 21st. If that doesn't excite you this might: Mellow Mushroom's providing free pizza at the kickoff.  From the press release:

88.5 WFDD, the National Public Radio affiliate licensed to Wake Forest University, will hold a press conference this Thursday, February 26th, at 11:30am, at Winston Square Park. The press conference will officially kick off opening day of the StoryCorps national oral history project, in residence in Winston-Salem until March 21st, 2009. While in Winston-Salem, StoryCorps will be collecting the stories of everyday residents of the Piedmont Triad and surrounding region. These stories will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and some may be selected for broadcast on WFDD, as well as National Public Radio.

At 11:30am, Mayor Allen Joines will read a proclamation officially renaming North Marshall Street between Second and Fourth Streets "Honorary StoryCorps Boulevard" for the duration of StoryCorps's visit. Remarks from WFDD General Manager Denise Franklin and StoryCorps Site Supervisor Sara Esrick will follow. The first two interview pairs of the day will be present. H'tuyet Rahlan, a member of Greensboro's Montagnard community will be interviewed by her sponsor; and James Ballew, a well-known area piano tuner, will be interview by a long-time friend. The Mellow Mushroom will provide pizza for attendees.

StoryCorps's Airstream trailer, now a sound-proof recording booth, arrived in Winston-Salem last night. Parked in Winston Square Park, near Winston-Salem's iconic Sawtooth Building, it makes for a striking visual. 88.5 WFDD is proud to partner with StoryCorps to bring the mobile recording booth to the community. It is an honor for our area to be selected as a stop on the national tour.


If You Could Describe Forsyth County in One Word

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Yesterday I attended the first session of Visit Winston-Salem's community brainstorming project.  Basically they're looking for input for their 2009-2010 marketing plan and they've opened it up to the entire community and are hosting four separate sessions (info here).  

As part of the meeting they asked everyone in the room to use one word that would describe how they feel about Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.  I thought most of the words offered were good representations of our fair county, but I couldn't really come up with a word that would best describe how I feel about Forsyth.  Okay, I'll be honest.  I did have a word pop into my head but I didn't share it because I thought it might be taken as a negative.  However in my mind it's very much a positive.  Having escaped the hustle and bustle of Northern Virginia I love that our county is…

sleepy.

Okay, your turn. If you could describe Forsyth County in one word what would it be?

Duke Walks All Over Wake

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Before I get started let me just say this: I don't think a missed walking call or five in favor of Duke is why they won the game against Wake last night.  Gerald Henderson could have been shooting a beach ball at a donut and he would have made it.  He was absolutely on fire last night.  Sure, there was a stretch where he had like seven straight dunks with nary a Wake defender within 10 feet of him, but he also hit jump shots with guys inside his shorts so let's give him some credit.  Same goes for Scheyer.

All that said I have to ask this, "What in the sam hell were those refs looking at last night?"  There were several occassions when Duke players shuffled their feet and there was no call.  Wake probably had a couple too, but there were some blatant travels by the Dookies and none were called.  Here's the worst:

Town & Country Memories

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Last night I was invited to a friends house to watch the Wake-Duke game and as I approached his neighborhood I realized it was just across Ransom Road from my grandparent's home in Town & Country.  I don't get over to that part of town much, but whenever I do it always brings back some great memories of coming down from D.C. to spend summer weeks with my grandparents back in the 70s and early 80s.

For those of you unfamiliar with Town & Country it's a small subdivision off of Reynolda Road that's comprised of 50's era houses built on rolling hills and situated around a couple of ponds.  Granny and Grandpa's house was on Loch Drive and their back yard was a steep hill that ran down to one of the ponds.  The hill was terraced, but in such a way that it looked like a series of ripples running down the hill so if you started from the top and ran down like an idiot you were almost guaranteed to spend the last half of the trip plummeting down head over kiester until you slid to a stop at the bottom.  What 10 year old boy wouldn't love that?

One year my uncle climbed one of the tallest trees in the back yard, tied a rope to a limb near the top and created what had to be the best rope swing in the city. The tree was situated about a third of the way down the hill so if you grabbed the rope and walked up the hill all you had to do was lift your feet and you were off like a shot. The only problem with the swing was that it didn't go over the pond so there was nothing to leap off of the swing and land in without breaking your neck.  Not to be denied my brother and I would aim ourselves at a stand of trees towards the bottom of the hill and if we managed to hit one we'd grab it in a bear hug, let the swing go and then slide to the ground.  We gave Granny fits, but I think Grandpa thought it was pretty cool.

The summer that I was thirteen years old I took one of my grandpa's bamboo-and-string fishing poles down to the pond to see if I could catch anything.  In earlier years I'd managed to catch a bunch of little "sun" fish (our term) that could have only weighed a couple of ounces each, and bless her heart Granny would cook them up if I asked her to, but this year was destined to be my year.  I hadn't had the line in the water more than five seconds before this monster hit on my line and about broke that bamboo pole in half.  I grabbed the string and yanked as hard as I could and a nine pound catfish flew past my head and smacked into the hill behind me.  I sat there for a second looking at the thing and started trying to figure out how I was going to unhook it.  All I knew about catfish was that they had some kind of stinger thing and I would be damned if I was going to touch that fish before I figured out where it was.  Then I remembered that Grandpa was home so I ran up the hill dragging that catfish along behind me the whole way.  My Grandpa heard me yelling and came out to meet me.  As soon as I saw him I said, "Grandpa I caught a big ole catfish, but I don't wanna touch it or it'll sting me!"  My Grandpa took one look at that fish, covered in grass clippings and conspicuously not gasping, and after he was done laughing said, "Son, that fish is as dead as it's gonna get.  Lemme show you how to unhook one of these things now that we know it can't thrash around."  With that he grabbed the fish, then grabbed my hand and put it on the appropriate part of the fish and showed my how to best unhook it.  I haven't caught another catfish since, but I still remember him showing me how to unhook it so I figure I'll be okay the next time I do.

I asked my Granny if she'd cook the catfish and for once she declined. She said that catfish were "garbage fish" and she wasn't going to mess up her skillet with it.  She did offer, however, to freeze it so that I could take it back to D.C. with me the next week.  I really wish I'd taken a picture of the look on my Mom's face when she saw that thing.

Dying Anonymously

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Yesterday I received a text message from one of my kids that said a girl from her freshman class had died the night before.  She didn't provide details so I replied and asked if she knew the girl.  She replied in the affirmative.  I then asked if they'd been told what had happened and she texted back that they hadn't.  All she knew was that during morning announcements the principal had said that this girl had died the night before.  She also said that one of her teachers had read an email from the principal that had provided a little more detail.  My last question was to ask if the school had provided any counselors for kids to talk to if they needed it and she said that she hadn't heard of any.  My son who also goes to school there said he assumed they had because they usually do, but he hadn't heard of anyone going to see a counselor or an announcement that counselors were available.

Later in the day I went to get my hair cut and while there the barbers told me that the girl had lived right across the street from their shop and that she'd had a tough life.  She didn't know her father and her mother had moved north without her or her brother and left them to live with the girl's grandparents.  Her great-grandparents lived next door and apparently they were all pretty close.  A while back both great-grandparents passed away on the same night and not long after that her grandfather died.  Her mother moved back home for a year but then left again to return north, again without her and her brother.  Despite all that they said she seemed to be a really happy kid, always with a smile on her face. 

All of this has been running through my head over the last 24 hours.  What's troubling to me is that when we lose one of our students under tragic circumstances like a freak accident on the football field or a car full of students killed by a drunk driver, we tend to pay a lot of attention and go to a lot of effort to honor those students' memories. That's as it should be. On the other hand when a student dies in quiet solitude we don't seem to react the same way.  If we speak of the child at all we do so in hushed whispers.  We don't come together as a community to celebrate that person's life or to acknowledge the impact of their loss on our community.  I think that's a shame and I think it robs our children of the opportunity to deal with the impact of losing one of their peers.  

Sadly a young member of our community died two days ago and very few of us know what we've lost.