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.

School Pride

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Over the years I've not been shy about declaring my pride as an alum of mighty George Mason University.  You know, the school that knocked the Heels out of the 2006 NCAA tournament?  My alma mater was so unaccustomed to the spotlight that they had to scramble to write a fight song for the run to the Final Four. Well, Mason's been busy building its national reputation for years by hiring big name faculty and going on a building spree that has turned it into one of the best campuses in the mid-Atlantic region, if not the east coast.  Now Mason is set to make the national scene again for a reason I don't think anyone could have anticipated: last week the student body elected a drag queen as homecoming queen.  From The Washington Post:

Spend time with George Mason University senior Ryan Allen and it's clear why he's a Big Man on Campus. He wears size 12 pumps.

Allen, who is gay and performs as a popular drag queen at local clubs, assumed the title of Ms. Mason. He was wearing a green-and-gold bow, sewn for him by the theater department costume's shop, that was visible even from the cheap seats, a sequined top, a black skirt and heels. Ricky Malebranche, a junior from Woodbridge, was named Mr. Mason…

Allen said he decided to enter the Ms. Mason contest this year as a joke, a last hurrah for his senior year. Soon he had donned a silver bra and zebra-print pants and was lip-syncing to Britney Spears's "Womanizer" at the qualifying pageant Feb. 9, overseen by Miss Virginia 2009. Competitors included a government and politics major from Chesapeake and a Chi Omega sorority member who told the school newspaper she should win because "I have pride in Mason to the point where my towels are green and gold."

Allen's drag name?  Reann Ballslee. 

Honestly you can't make this stuff up.  Here's a fun thought for you: what would happen if a drag queen tried to run for homecoming queen at Wake?  What would happen if he won?

Sen. Burr Nominates Mt. Tabor Student for Naval Academy

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Sen. Burr's press office sent out notice of his military academy nominations and two were from the Winston-Salem area, including Mt. Tabor student Jennifer Penley of Pfafftown.  Sen. Burr nominated her for the U.S. Naval Academy.  Congratulations to Jennifer, and best wishes to her especially as she gets ready to head to plebe summer.  Any kid willing to give up the half of their last summer before college and to knowingly go into the grueling atmosphere of the Naval Academy deserves our respect, big time.

One of the craziest guys I knew in high school, Andrew Heino, went to the Naval Academy and the last time I saw him at a party during our college years, he said that getting through that summer was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.  He also said his whole first year was no picnic.  I haven't seen him since then, but every once in a while I'll catch word of him.  In February, 2007 he was interviewed on CNN's Accent Health show about some of his men doing yoga and at that time he was a Lt. Colonel in the Marines.  That comes as absolutely no surprise to me.  

Heino was the guy who got me through an open water test for our SCUBA class in freezing water in a quarry in West Virginia.  On that dive the visibility was about one foot and the water was literally freezing and when we got down to the dive platform (I think it was at about 50 feet) the guy next to me went into shock and the dive instructor had to do an emergency ascent with him.  There was another instructor around but we couldn't see him and I was ready to head up, but Andrew grabbed me and signalled to sit tight.  We did and eventually the instructor came back and we finished our test.  That's the kind of guy Heino was.  Also, he could recite every line of Apocalypse Now verbatim from memory, and I guess that says something too. Heck, the fact that he talked me into taking a SCUBA class says a whole lot about him.

Health Insurance Relief for Laid Off Workers Thanks to Stimulus Package

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My wife Celeste is a bookkeeper by trade and as a result receives a lot of publications that, quite frankly, make my eyes gloss over.  However, today she forwarded me a newsletter from the American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers that contained an article about "hidden traps" in the new stimulus law that definitely had my eyes wide open.  Here's part of what the article said:

The new law includes a 65% federally funded COBRA continuation subsidy that lasts up to 9 months for workers (and their families) involuntarily terminated from Sept. 1, 2008-Dec. 31, 2009. The subsidy terminates when the former employeeis offered employer-sponsored health care coverage by a new employer; orbecomes eligible for Medicare; or has COBRA coverage that has expired.  
Notify within 60 days of Feb. 17 former employees involuntarily separated between Sept. 1, 2008-Feb. 17, 2009. Notify those who elected COBRA that they are entitled to a lower premium starting in the first coverage period after Feb. 17. Notify those who rejected COBRA that they have 60 days to elect COBRA and receive the subsidy. You can let former employees choose a less expensive plan. No subsidy is available to former employees whose income is over $125,000 a year or a family income over $250,000 a year, but employers are not required to monitor for the income phaseout.

Later on the article mentions that the employers are responsible for paying 65% of the health benefits up front and then getting reimbursed by the federal government by reducing their federal income tax contributions.  If the amount of healthcare subsidies exceed what the company owes in taxes then the company will have to apply for a reimbursement from the US Treasure, and there's no telling how long that will take.  Can we say cash flow problems?  Also, the first subsidies can come due as soon as March 1, 2009 so companies literally need to move on this now.

If you've been laid off and are paying COBRA or paying for insurance as an individual this could save you some serious money.  For instance if you're using your employer's health plan via COBRA to cover your family, which means you're paying 100% of the cost, then you could easily be spending over $1,000 per month for your premiums.  With the government picking up 65% of the tab that payment drops to $350 which is some serious savings.

Keep an eye out for a notice from your former employer and if you don't get one within about 45 days then contact the human resources department or whoever at the company is responsible for administering benefits and ask them to send you more information.

 

Lingonberry Soda It Is

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Yesterday when I posted my tips for shopping at Ikea I mentioned that one of the great things the store offers is a restaurant with good, affordable food and a soda with some exotic fruit that I couldn't name.  Laura left a comment saying she thought it was lingonberry soda and 'lo and behold she was right.  Esbee ventured down to the store in Charlotte today and had a meal and a lingonberry soda and she posted a picture just to make the rest of us jealous.  

Newest Investment Scam Has Piedmont Ties

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The newest investment scam, the alleged $8 billion fraud perpetrated by a Texas billionaire named Allen Stanford who had himself knighted in Antigua, has ties to the Piedmont Triad.  In 2007 the operation opened a Greensboro office that was run by eight executives from US Trust Co. who were charged with targeting wealthy investors.

In July 2007, the company hired a team of eight executives from U.S. Trust Co. to work out of Greensboro, North Carolina, where the firm’s private-client group planned to target wealthy investors, according to statement at the time. The team was made up of John Rich, Glenda Burkett, M. Jo Brooks, Ken Dimock, Anthony Monforton, Virginia Saslow and William “Wes” Watson and Suzanne Wilcox.

FYI, a big part of the scam was selling investors financial products that they called CDs and pitched as even safer than FDIC insured certificates of deposit.  The money for the "CDs" was then funneled to a bank in Antigua controlled by the company accused of perpetrating the scam.  The company implied that the funds were insured, but never explicitly said they were insured.  By all appearances it's a nasty little scam.

Between this scam and the Madoff thing I've never been so happy to be an unconnected, unwealthy guy.

Reporter of the Future

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Steve Rubel has a great post about The Reporter of the Future.  Essentially he describes how a reporter who covers the Yankees for a smaller New York area paper is using all kinds of tools to cover spring training.  The reporter takes pictures with his iPhone, he has a blog he updates daily, he has a Facebook group, he produces a podcast and he hosts an live text/video chat with readers using CoverItLive.

Yesterday I wrote about the folks at the Winston-Salem Journal having to take 10 days of unpaid leave.  Maybe the reporters can spend some of that time studying this guy and seeing what their future professional lives might look like.