Picking your battles wisely

All it takes is one teenager living under your roof to convince a person that you need to let some of the small stuff slide and save your energy for the big battles. If you have three teenagers like we did, that becomes a necessity.

Life at Apple reinforced the view that you just need to accept some things and be willing to fight for some others. I cannot imagine telling Steve Jobs that he needs to start sharing secrets with employees.

This afternoon I got confronted over on the Point at Emerald Isle by a somewhat crazy lady. But before we get to that story, you need to understand that living and driving on the North Carolina coast where we live demands attention to the speed limit.

In the off season, when there are not enough tourists to watch, the police have little to do except catch speeders. The consequence of this is that you learn to drive very close to the speed limit, or you end up with a ticket.

I try really hard to stay below the speed limit because if you do not and end up with a ticket, your insurance rates go up. I have managed three years down here without a ticket, and I drive a lot. I am also knocking on wood as I write this.

Today we spent a few minutes talking to the Mayor of Emerald Isle. The town's new administrative office had used a number of my prints for decoration, and we had stopped by to see them. I asked him about the recent flooded streets, and after talking, we decided to go have a look ourselves.

So we drove down Coast Guard Road, and we found more water than we expected. Driving through water as deep as we found requires driving slowly unless you want to stall your car, so we were driving especially slowly since my wife does not like axle deep water.

We finally got to where Coast Guard Road runs into Inlet Drive. I stopped and made the turn to head to the corner where you can access the Point. Less than halfway there we passed a "lady" walking a dog which tried to take a bite out of my car. Instead of walking on the shoulder of the road facing traffic as the law requires, she was actually walking with her back to traffic in the middle of the lane where I was supposed to be driving. I moved over to the other lane, and as I did not think it was any big deal, I went on down to corner, turned around, parked, and walked up the ramp to shoot a few pictures.

It only took a few minutes, I got back in my car and headed out except the "lady" was blocking my way. I rolled down my window, and she said she wanted to remind me the speed limit was 25 mph because I was flying through the neighborhood and two children lived there.

About that time her dog jumped on the door of my car, I pointed at her dog, and told her to drop it. I rolled up my window, and we left. As we were pulling away, I asked my wife what speed she though I had been doing. She ventured that I might have been doing 25 mph, but that she doubted I could have been going any faster since we passed the lady so close to the stop sign.

Tonight I used Google tools to measure the distance between the stop sign and where I pulled over to take pictures. It is around 1685 feet. Assuming I had traveled less than half the distance when we passed the "lady," I had gone less than 800 feet. If you have ever ridden with my wife, you would know she is not a big fan of fast starts. That being the case, I do not do them.

So why was my accuser so upset? Perhaps her dog being upset when we drove by carried over to her. I suspect that when walking down the middle of street, anything driving by you appears to be flying. While it is the beach, it is also a road which my car has as much right on as our walker and her dog. Actually I believe she is supposed to walk on the shoulder of the road and not take up my driving lane, but like I said, it is the beach so we yield to people walking in the road.

However, to get back to the point of my post. You do need to pick your battles wisely. I have probably been down that same road 200 times in the last few years. I have passed literally hundreds of walkers, many with dogs, and more than I can count with small children. No one has ever blocked my exit and accused me of flying through the neighborhood. That is because I do not do it.

So here we are on an Island with strictly enforced speed limits, and we have someone blocking the road to complain about someone who was likely doing the speed limit or very close to it. I could have chosen to argue with the walker, but long years have taught me that she was the type where you can never win a logical argument. Her perception, right or wrong, is all that she would ever believe. She was definitely one of those, don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up people. Picking a battle would have been a waste of my time. She had already wasted hers.

I started thinking the walker could have used her energy more wisely by complaining about some much more serious problems to people who might actually listen to her.

Before we had stopped by the Mayor's office, we had visited with the folks at Reel Outdoors. The talk there was of the damage that gill nets are doing to the fish and turtle populations.

It is a serious problem, and one that bothers many of us. Then there is the problem of beach access. Our walker apparently lives along the road to the Point. There are a couple of very nice beach accesses there, but the only parking which is a good distance off on Coast Guard Road is often full in the summertime.

Many of us who would like to take advantage of all the state funded CAMA accesses would love to see some parking on Inlet Drive so that people who want to fish the Point do not have haul their gear so far. I suspect our walker would oppose that, but I know that some additional parking would be very popular with a lot of the population that does not happen to have a home on Inlet Drive.

I hate to point it out, but the beach below the tide line belongs to the people of North Carolina and eventually the majority might rule in the case of beach access.

Beach access and banning gill nets are both battles worth taking up, but I think speeding on Emerald Isle is pretty well under control

Unconditional Love

I consider myself one of the privileged few whose life has been touched by a number of wonderful animal friends. Today, Percy, one of my favorite friends of all time passed away.

Percy was a rescue cat with the smallest feet that I have ever seen on an adult cat. She also had the biggest heart of any cat that I have ever met. She never saw a lap that she did not try out. I think she was convinced that all humans loved her as much as my daughter, Erin, did.

After being an outside barn cat living somewhere near Harrisonburg, Virginia, Percy was rescued by our Roanoke area vet. When I first met Percy, I knew a cat who enjoyed being cuddled that much would be perfect for my daughter whose other two rescue cats remained a little aloof.

The name, Percy, seemed to stick to the little cat whose sometimes grumpy look had nothing to do with the love she radiated to her human friends. She was also pretty good at soaking up love just like a sponge.

That first trip years ago when I took Percy to my daughter's house in Northern Virginia was just one of many that Percy made. She was a traveling cat. She loved to go wherever my daughter went. Though she would have preferred to sit on someone's lap the whole trip, she did agree to being comfortable in a seat as long as her litter box was not too far away.

Percy had no trouble winning over our Lab, Chester. She even was the only cat that ever managed to withstand the intense scrutiny of my other daughter's two big dogs, Dozer and Byerly. Still she preferred the company of humans to that of dogs or other cats.

Percy did not ask for much in life except a regular dinner and a soft spot for her naps. She got that in spades from my daughter who made sure Percy always had a lap and a warm bed. Percy's daytime bed in my daughter's room was an electrically heated one. Because the two other cats often picked on her, Percy often got a personal escort to the litter box. At night all the warmth she needed came from cuddling with my daughter.

We are going to really miss Percy. Her unique personality touched many people including some known dog lovers. Some of my best memories of Percy are from when I was working at Apple in Reston, Virginia. I would often be the first at home, and I was not above taking a nap before dinner. Percy was always glad to see me. I can still remember how she would drape herself around my neck. My daughter kept the thermostat in the sixties, so a warm bundle of cat fur felt pretty good as I dozed through the national news.

Percy enjoyed her meals. While some cats are picky eaters, I think Percy knew how lucky she was to have Fancy Feast every night on her own plate. She also had a great talent for finding a ray of sunshine and soaking it up. We never knew Percy as a kitten, but once in a while she would play like one. It was far better entertainment than television.

Percy regularly made the trip of seven hours to our beach house. She loved the wide windowsills there. She always acted like it was her home. She would walk right in and expect to have dinner, and then she would go off exploring to make sure we had not moved anything.

When she visited us in Roanoke, she had a special hiding place in our basement. Still the best surprise that she ever gave us was one Christmas morning. We had looked all over the house trying to find her. Eventually we found that she had made her way inside the large dollhouse in Erin's room. You will find her in the second picture in this post.

While Percy is resting in peace, my memories of her will stay fresh especially on a cold winter evening when I could use a little cat fur around the neck to keep me warm.

Social Networking the Marshes

I have been a fisherman since I was old enough to hold a pole. That has been a very long time, and I have learned much about fishing and life over the course of my life long love affair with the sport.

I have fished for native brook trout in Canada and for Grayling in Alaska, but mostly I have fished the state of North Carolina from the mountains to Cape Hatteras.

There is one golden rule that I have learned with fishing. You will never catch any fish unless you put a line in the water. You cannot catch fish by standing on the edge of the water and just looking at the water.

It occurred to me this afternoon that fishing is a lot like social networking. In social networking you have these rivers of information like Twitter or great pools of fish like Facebook. It is unlikely that someone can stand up in front of you and really get across the essence of social networking.

The opportunity that social network offers has to be balanced against the challenges that it places on information gathering and decision making.

Social networking is a logical expression of the changes that have happened to our society. Fifty years ago when I was growing up in the small town of Lewisville, North Carolina, there was no need for social networking. We were a small town world. While there was some mobility in our towns, but it was nothing like what we have seen since the turn of the century. People were born in a community and often died there.

You met people at church, at school, at work, or someone introduced you to them. Ancestors from our family had lived within twenty or thirty miles of where I grew up since not long after the revolutionary war. We lived on a street named after our family not far from another road named for the ferry my great grandfather used to run.

There are not many people who have the luxury of growing up in an environment like that these days. Jobs take people all over the country if not the world. Children are lucky if they start school in the same town as where they were born.

In the days before the Internet, if you wanted information you mostly wrote letters, and you had to judge the person on the other end by the quality of the letter you received in return. Telephone calls could be very expensive even if you were able to figure out the right person to call.

In 1971, I ended up buying an old farm in Canada. While the project started with letters to a real estate agent, it eventually required a couple of trips to personally evaluate the agent and the land. What I found out about the area came from books and visiting the area. There was no Internet for research. In the end the decision was mine based on what I had learned the hard way. There was no supporting cast of people in the area to tell me that the North Mountain of Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley was a good place. I had to take a gamble.

Actually I am not certain that the purchase that I made in 1971 would be as easy today. Nowadays there is always a risk that your decision making can end up overwhelmed by too many opinions and too much information. In 1971 too much information was not a problem.

As the geographic ties that held many families together have dissolved, more and more people have faced a world where they do not know their neighbors or their neighbors change so often they do not have enough time to know them.

Distant corporations email, online forums, and instant messaging loosened some of the bonds that made the person next to you less important than the person 3,000 miles away with whom you exchanged messages.

Then there is the whole generational issue where many younger workers communicate more with their friends than their colleagues. It is pretty easy for this to become a distraction at work so it comes as no surprise that social networking starts with something of black eye in most corporate circles.

In that we find the most interesting paradox, those companies which could benefit most from social networking often show great resistance.

If you look at the marsh and the waters in the picture accompanying this post, most people would understand that there is very complex web of life at the boundary between the marshes and open water. The afternoon we fished there, we caught a wide variety of fish in that one spot.

Had we not taken the time to anchor and fish there, any speculation as to what might be there would have just been speculation. We fished there, now we know what to expect the next time.

Social networking done right can provide a tremendous amount of information about market trends and customer preferences. Becoming part of a social network interested in your products or services is like being part of the largest customer focus group possible.

On top of customer information, social networking can also be an amazing learning opportunity. You can see first hand how people respond to certain messages. It is the ultimate testbed for marketing campaigns.

Even just watching the information flow on Twitter is like sticking your hand in a river and understanding the currents.

Certainly every business hoping to grow should have an active social networking strategy.

Peace in the pictures

When you are working as hard as you can to build a business using online marketing techniques, you often feel like you are on an endless treadmill that keeps speeding up.

The challenges are immense in my world of real estate.

You have to work your job, but you also must provide exceptional content to attract new clients. In my case content ends up being articles and photos about the Crystal Coast of North Carolina. Of course they are posted all over the web from my own sites to Twitter and any place that I can find an audience.

The one good thing about providing good content is that you have to live the life you are describing or you have no chance of being authentic.

So if I am talking about surf fishing, I have just come from surf fishing. If I write about being the last person to close down the beach, there should be no doubt that I closed down the beach. With that in mind, I really enjoy it when I write about kayaking or fishing from our skiff.

Right now "living the life" is one of the few benefits of the job. I describe what I experience to the fullest. That works well except for the fact that instead of relaxing with a book or watching some TV evening, I am always up in my office writing. Sometimes I end up with keyboard prints on my face.

With a lifestyle that is buring the candle at both ends, I have to find peace and relaxation wherever I can find it. Often I find it in the viewfinder of my favorite camera which right now is a Panasonic ZS-1.

In a certain sense I live through the lens of my cameras. Composing a relaxing scene like the Atlantic Beach one in this post relaxes me.

Even when I see the picture downloaded onto to my computer, I find a certain sense of peace.

In a world of digital deadlines and increasing demands, I will take my peace wherever I can find it.

Peace on the water

One of the things that I look forward to each morning as I roll out of bed, is walking across the road to check out the water in Raymond's Gut. While I often first look at it from the dock behind my home, I enjoy another view which lets me see all the way out to the White Oak River.

I am alway especially pleased when the waters are so calm that they form mirrors for the scenery. It is a pretty neat way to start the day.

It certainly beats a freeway and bumper to bumper traffic. I was just finishing a post about how hard it is to find good jobs in the places where it is a pleasure to live.

If you have lots of jobs, you might have too many people in paradise so I am not going to wish for over development. We have lots of places in North America that can lay claim to being over developed. The Crystal Coast is not one of them.

With crystal clear waters that give us our name and water within in sight almost everywhere, it is no surprise that many people move here because of the opportunity to be close to the water.

Having the chance to start your day looking at water and end your day watching a sunset over water is a great privilege. It also helps to keep your soul energized.

When the world around you is so beautiful, it is hard not to have good thoughts. I am probably a whole lot easier to deal with just after my morning walk to see the water than I am after sitting in an office with only a print for my water view.

Of course the water can be powerful and dangerous. It is suicidal to ignore its power.

I guess you could say that with great beauty comes great power.

I am pleased to be under the spell of the water. It certainly makes the outlook for tomorrow a little more pleasant.

Searching for intelligent development

Our primary home is in a small subdivision called Bluewater Cove. We live just across the cul de sac from the swimming pool pictured in the post. The pool and water access for boating are the main reasons that we live on the Carolina coast near Cape Carteret and Emerald Isle.

We have had the privilege of living in a wide variety of places from the isolated shores of Nova Scotia to the suburbs of Washington, DC. We have lived on a farm in a small community in New Brunswick, Canada. For twenty we were on the slopes of a mountain overlooking Roanoke, VA. My wife and I both grew up in Mount Airy, NC otherwise known as Mayberry. We even owned our family home there for a while.

We have had the experience of driving twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. We have also seen our kids be able to come home for lunch from school. Given that wide variety of experiences we have chosen Bluewater Cove in western Carteret County as our latest place to live.

I just penned an article, When the small stores leave. It is about my concerns on the hollowing out of commercial services in the area where our home is in Roanoke, Va. It seems that all the commercial enterprises want to be in the same concentrated areas. The result is that neighborhood services are disappearing. Perhaps this is inevitable.

I still remember walking to the local hardware, drug store, and movies when I lived in Mt. Airy. When I lived in Lewisville, NC, I could walk to school, church, hardware, and grocery store. There was even a small restaurant within walking distance. Much of that has disappeared.

We saw the planned development model when we lived in Columbia, MD and the years that I worked in Reston, VA. While having controlled development might help rationalize some decisions, I am not sure it works very well either. I know in Columbia all car services were pushed to the outskirts of town. In Reston neighborhood grocery stores have disappeared.

On the North Carolina coast we have a long commercial strip probably five miles in length. Most of the homes are on roads that branch off of the commercial strip. Homes still on the strip are gradually being converted to commercial businesses.

Some of the commercial development is starting to centralize and of course there are a number of subdivisions where residential development is also concentrating. It is almost a hub and spoke model of development. The hub is the centralized shopping area and the spokes lead to the residential areas which are often subdivisions.

In spite of the small population in the coastal area, we have better access to many services than we do in a larger town like Roanoke. Today in Roanoke I drove several miles to get a bag of pea gravel. It probably took me nearly an hour before I found what I needed. I could have accomplished the same task in under ten minutes on the Carolina coast.

It is almost counter intuitive that I could get something done more quickly where in theory there are less services. However it turns out there are actually better located services in the smaller area. Roanoke has two Lowe's Home Improvement stores and two Home Depots, all are about 20 minutes from our home. There is no hardware closer to our Roanoke home than ten minutes.

In Cape Carteret on the Carolina coast, we have only one Lowes nearby, but it is only seven minutes from our house. There are two hardware stores under ten minutes and another two at about fifteen minutes. There are other Lowes and a Home Depot within twenty to thirty mintues.

Things are similar when it comes to grocery stores, but if you start looking at medical care, Roanoke has far more resources which are close by.

Our closest hospital in Cape Carteret is about 25 minutes away. In Roanoke we have one under ten minutes away and a second one twenty minutes away.

What is surprising is that aside from medical care, life in a rural area like Cape Carteret stacks up pretty well.

The good news is that Carteret General Hospital has decided to build an imaging center close to us. Hopefully that is the first step in addressing additional medical services for the area.

With a Walmart probably coming to town in 2010, we will have just about all the modern conveniences that we need. My wife would only add that we need a Target.

Maybe intelligent development happens if you plant yourself in the right spot. I hope western Carteret County is it.

It certainly is not hollowing itself out like Roanoke is at the present time.

Apathy is not a solution

I was talking to another Realtor the other day about a potential new way to advertise for clients. She indicated that she had little or no enthusiasm for any new tactics.

It occurred to me that apathy is rarely a successful solution. Allowing yourself to become someone who watches while things happen instead of being someone who tries to control the future by being proactive is just not an option for me.

I have found that either working to be a success or planning to get out of what you are doing are really the only options ever available. You cannot just sit and let things happen to you and expect those things to be good.

I have been in tough positions a number of times in my working career. Hiding under the desk has never worked.

Understanding the things that you can change in a tough environment is one of the most important first steps to building a plan to get out of your challenging spot.

You should focus on what you can do to be ready to be successful. If you position yourself to take advantage of the next opportunity for success, you will be in a lots better position than if you spend your time complaining and doing nothing.

Right now real estate is in a terrible tailspin. While we have more buyers looking than we have had in a while, most of those buyers are very finicky and often looking for deals that just do not exist.

I have decided that now is the time to build my brand and to own the content about the areas where I sell real estate.

When serious buyers take the places of the ones we are seeing now, I should be successful. It means that I work harder than some colleagues.

That's is okay with me. I would rather be ready for success than sitting and hoping that things might change.

In the meantime, I will enjoy life here on the Crystal Coast spending as much time on the water as possible thinking about what I can to do to position myself for success.

Waiting for failure is not any more of an option than trying the same things which are not working over and over.

As far as I am concerned a Perfect Beach Day can spur the imagination and lead to success.