The pleasure of visiting a great bakery

There are few nicer recipes for a great Saturday than a morning breakfast at your favorite local restaurant followed by a visit to the farmer's market and the best bakery in town.

In my book, that is the way to start the weekend even in January when farmer's market are at their low point.

We came away some "Winter Wine" soap, homemade bratwurst, and of course some freshly baked bread.

I have great memories of freshly baked bread from when we lived on a farm in Canada. My wife would often bake eight loaves at a time. There is nothing greater than coming in from a cold day's work on the farm and smelling fresh bread baking especially with the knowledge that you will get to enjoy some as soon as it is done.

One of the few things that I have not been able to find along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks is a good bakery.

Roanoke, Virginia does not have that problem, nor does Blacksburg.

When I used to work in Blacksburg, I often enjoyed the bread from Our Daily Bread.

During our days of living full time in Roanoke, many Saturday we took the time to visit On the Rise Bakery down at the Roanoke City Farmer's Market.

I love bread made from whole grains. On the Rise is a great place to find it.

A sign of things to come

Today I read David Brooks' NY Times article, The Two Earthquakes.

While I might not be quite as optimistic as Mr. Brooks, I do think people are ready for a real change.

We put the Democrats in power, and we still seem to have an endless war in Iraq.

Whether you agree with the Iraq war or not, it is pretty easy to agree that government does not have much to do with the common man today. Money equals access to government today.

That's about as deep as I want to get. I try to stay away from political posts on my blogs since there are lots of people who pay more attention to politics than I do.

Still I would love to see government become a place where the lobbyists don't make the decisions for our politicians.

I like seeing the people jerk the politicians around. Just maybe the politicians will figure out who pays their checks.

Read the David Brooks article and hope that he is right.

Warm weather saves work on my website

I spend lot of time working on my websites. I try to keep my main Southern Outer Banks site in sync with the weather.

This year, there has been almost no cold weather to get me to change the site. I keep shuffling a few words around and doing a new picture once in a while, but the information about the weather is almost always the same.

I can call it "Endless fall" or "Winter in retreat," but the reality is that we are having temperatures that make winter look far off. Today, December 28, the temperature approached 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you could zoom in a little more on this image you would see a lone paddler in the kayak on Bogue Sound. We were watching from a pier on Cedar Street in Emerald Isle.

Most of this week, the beach has been deserted, but it hasn't been from bad weather. As I am sitting here typing this in our kitchen the window next to me is open.

I certainly have no complaints. I moved to the coast to get away from ice and snow. Seventy degrees at the end of December is a good way to accomplish that.

I find it a pleasure just to walk to the mailbox without a coat. There were a couple of days just before Christmas when I went back to shorts. I might do it again tomorrow.

The warm weather has allowed my coastal blog to stay on top of the weather without a lot of editing.

That is fine by me. I see in the long term forecast that we have a spell of cold weather headed our way by the middle of next week.

That is okay too. I would rather have that cold stuff in January than in March. Last January we had nineteen hours of below freezing temperatures. I hope we have even less this year.

A sign the "iAge" is over

I snapped this shot earlier this week.

I was at Cannonsgate, a new development along Bogue Sound on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

I prefer to call the area the Southern Outer Banks which is a popular name if you measure it by the number of "SOBX" license plates on the pickup trucks that are so popular in the area.

When I snapped the picture of the Bogue Sound sunset, the only thing moving was the Jumping Mullet. I was actually hoping for a boat to come along so the lines on the sunset would not be so perfect.

No boat showed up, so the sunset looked like a huge "i" sinking into the sound. I worked at Apple Computer during the beginning of the iAge when the iMac was introduced, so I feel like I was around at the beginning of the iAge.

The first part of the iAge happened to be computers that you could buy in different colors. Apple long ago abandoned that thought since retailers got pretty irritated over having to stock different colors of computers.

Another part of the iAge as presented by Apple was the Internet. The iMac was easy to hook to the Internet through an Ethernet connection to a cable modem. It an entry level computer that also came with no way to back up your data onto floppies. Apple quickly gave that up also and started shipping computers with drives that would burn CDs.

Still the theory was that the iMac was your gateway to the Internet. Exploring the Internet was an individual thing back in those days.

I think there has been a fundamental shift. We now explore the Internet not so much individually but as a connected family. We share links through spots like del.icio.us. Some of us are even on Facebook, and there appears to be no shortage of blogs.

The iPod may still be a wonderful commercial success. There are plenty of folks whose obsession with their cell phone makes you think they only care about themselves.

Still the "iAge" is in retreat. I am hoping the "weAge" will be just as much if not more fun.

I find exploring the world with the help of friends a lot more fun than doing it on my own.

A nice to have rainy day

Last Monday we had a rainy day.

Many of the places that I have lived that would not be a big deal.

When we lived in Nova Scotia, rainy days were pretty common. In fact I can remember a rainy month or two. There were even times when I was in Atlantic Canada that maybe we should invest in an ark.

If you work hard outside, a rainy or even snowy day can be a welcome change in your routine especially if you have been living in the Southeast this year, where rain has been very scarce.

Here along the Southern Outer Banks we have been lucky this summer with enough rain to prevent any problems. Fifteen to twenty miles inland, people have not been that lucky.

Still we haven't had any days that I remember since spring when it rained for a whole day.

I took advantage of the recent wet weather and cleaned out a lot of papers. I will not proclaim that cleaning out papers is a lot of fun, but I will admit that it is something you have to do.

Otherwise you can be overwhelmed with paper. The idea that a paperless office is just around the corner seems to have receded somewhat.

It appears to have died under the weight of paper.  Some of my past when I was a real estate agent  seems to be all paper. From faxes to contracts, I appear to have been swimming in paper.

For a while I tried to get away with using my Macintosh for real estate. My twenty years at Apple left me pretty comfortable with a Mac but unfortunately no company makes a forms generation package for NC real estate so I ended up buying a Windows machine. You have be able to generate all that real estate paper at a moment's notice.

If you think paper has disappeared from the business world, just try buying a house. It will be good for the economy and will convince anyone that we have a long way to go before we can dispense with paper.

In addition to giving me a chance to clean out my papers, the rain has helped to keep my tomato plants going. I did not have any idea that these three plants would last so long and produce so many tomatoes. We will be eating tomatoes from our three plants well into January.

Unless tonight turns out to be very cold, I fully expect to pick my first December tomato tomorrow. Once I have done that I am going to pull up the tomato plants, and watch all the green ones turn red in January.  I doubt there will be much more tomato ripening weather anytime soon so I can get the vines out of here before it becomes cold outside.

New beginnings at Thanksgiving

I am not surprised at how often we hear about life changing decisions at Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is one of the few times of the year that modern families manage to get together.

With distance often playing a factor, people sometimes use turkey day as an opportunity to bounce ideas off their families.

A good Thanksgiving holiday can be an easy informal atmosphere where people can view new ideas in the positive light of a good holiday meal and some great friendship.

Whether the decision is a new job or moving to a new area, Thanksgiving is not a bad time.

When I first was hired by Apple in Canada, it was just after American Thanksgiving. We had to find a new home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We actually moved on Christmas day in a blizzard.

It was not an ideal time, but there is no great time to move. We managed to survive by clinging to our holiday traditions and by taking advantage of the holiday friendliness of our new neighbors.

Last year at Thanksgiving, we were having our first holiday on the coast. This year we might having one of our last ones in the mountains, but at this point, we do not know.

We'll go forward one step at a time and keep to our traditions no mater where we live.

I would rather be trying another path during the light of the fall than the darkness of January.

Still time for fishing

Surprisingly the real estate business has been pretty business the last few weeks. Still a fellow has to have his priorities straight.

I have managed to sneak in a little fishing. Tomorrow, I am hoping that it is warm enough to spend a little time focused on it.

That could perhaps be a challenge since according to the weathermen the eastern part of North Carolina is one of the colder places in the country tonight. The cold weather is here a week or so earlier than last year.

The forecast for cold weather got me to build a little tent out of blankets for our tomato plants. I am amazed but we are still getting tomatoes in quantity off of our vines.

The exciting thing is that they are delicious. I figure this is a huge victory for home grown produce. If I can get through the month of November, that will mean that we have enjoyed homegrown tomatoes for five months.

We might see enough of the green ones to get us to January. We got local hot house tomatoes for an additional two and one half months.

Having great tomatoes over seven or maybe even eight months out of the year, means that meal planning is simplified. We can always make something around a tomato.

It is strange to be thinking about tomatoes when Turkey Day is just around the corner.

We lived in Canada for over sixteen years, and the one thing we missed the most was Thanksgiving Day.

While Canadian Thanksgiving is in October, it pales in comparison to American Thanksgiving.

That special Thursday in November starts my favorite time of year. It is a time when we all get together. It is above all a time for family and for renewing connections.

This year will be special for us since our son will be able to come. Last year when I wrote about Thanksgiving in Truly time for turkey, I was saddened by his absence.

With any kind of luck, I'll catch some fish to eat before we have to get serious about turkey next week.