November Memories

Tall Pines in November Along Raymond's Gut

Memories are funny things.  Some get stronger with age and some seem to fade away.   November is a good month for memories because of Thanksgiving.  Our family happens to fall into the category of families having mostly good memories about holidays especially Thanksgiving.

There are no pressures to give gifts and even most of us males can manage to be helpful during Thanksgiving by peeling potatoes or washing dishes.  Generally the weather is not so bad that a nice long walk is out of the question.  With traffic getting more and more challenging, the actual time during Thanksgiving that people are together seems to be getting shorter and shorter.  Thanksgiving is an easy holiday to enjoy.

Thanksgiving is also a holiday that often brings transitions.  It often is the first big holiday that you spend away from home.  I still remember the oyster stuffing that I had at a friends home when I spent my first Thanksgiving away from home in 1967.  I can well remember that first Thanksgiving four years later in 1971 when several of my college friends came to visit my old farmhouse in Saint Croix Cove, Nova Scotia.  It was the first Thanksgiving dinner that any of our crew of friends had ever attempted without a mother being cook in charge.  We pulled it off and it is still a special Thanksgiving to me. For me it became the celebration dinner for the first chapter of my sixteen years in Canada.  Those years are a big part of our book, A Taste For The Wild, Canada's Maritimes.

Certainly Thanksgiving is the holiday that most people want to be home. Because of that, there are sometimes subtle changes in our lives that first show themselves at Thanksgiving.  For years we traveled to Mount Airy, North Carolina, to have our Thanksgiving in our home place at 347 West Pine St. which for a while was a bed and breakfast.  Our family enjoyed Thanksgiving at that same Pine Street spot for nearly 100 years.

My mother, Blanche Sobotta, held sway there on Pine Street for many years.  Her story is certainly a big part of my own story and for several years I can remember my wife, Glenda, driving down from Roanoke, Virginia, a day or two early to Mount Airy, to help with the Thanksgiving preparations.  It was always a great feast held in the formal dining room.  Mother was an expert at preparing large meals and as she got into her eighties often started the preparation a week ahead of time.  I can still remember the hot rolls and other wonderful dishes.

Then there came the time when it just seemed right for my wife and I to host Thanksgiving at our home on the mountain.  I do not exactly remember when it started happening but it was likely sometime in the mid to late nineties.  We have been hosting Thanksgiving since then and only one year did we venture out to have it with one of our children. Eventually we were bringing my mother to our Roanoke home from a nearby assisted living place in Salem, Virginia. Then we moved from Roanoke and Thanksgiving came with us to live out a dream on the North Carolina coast. This year it looks like we will be in transition once again.

With traffic so bad in the DC area and a new grandson too young to travel on the other end of North Carolina, our three grown children will be own their own with their turkeys this year.  They are a lot older than I was when I attempted to do my own turkey in 1972.  No one told me about the extra parts on the inside of the turkey. One of them has already done several turkeys on her own. One does not like turkey and the other would prefer someone else put the white meat on the platter for her.

Even so our children will likely remember this year because it is a little different since they will not here on the Crystal Coast with us. They might not have the energy to cook up everything that is on our traditional menu that accompanies the turkey and which our son prefers to the turkey.  I know that we will be paring the menu down a lot if only the two of us will be eating it.  Still it will be another Thanksgiving to remember and perhaps a memory that will stand as tall as a big pine instead of vanishing.

November is also the time when we moved to our much loved farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, where we lived for ten years.  The snow was on the ground that first year when we moved in and it did not leave until the first week in May.  We got twenty-three feet of snow that year and at times we did have six feet of snow on the ground. It was to the eaves on the barn.

I went on my first business trip for Apple in November of 1984.  I still remember how cold it was walking around Montreal in a suit and dress shoes with snow on the ground.  Then there was the November of 1989.  We had just moved to Roanoke, Virginia, and it started snowing early that month and stayed on the ground until after Christmas.  The road got so icy that neighbors got together and chipped a path one half mile down the hill.

Of course November was often the time for Apple sales conferences.  I remember the wonderful one in 2001 when I won the award as national business sales manager of the year. The next year in Toronto our federal team was treated as heroes because we had done the impossible.  We had become a very successful enterprise sales team right in the heart of the very consumer-oriented Apple.

It was only one year later in 2003 when we were treated as outcasts because the company had been unable to ship the product that we sold.  That was the year and the November that I vowed that I would never return to Cupertino. I was gone from Apple eight months later and you can read the story in my book, The Pomme Company.

Beyond business, turkeys and snow, I first started kayaking on the White Oak River in November of 2006.  I have also enjoyed some of my most memorable fishing during November including this cooler full of fish.  There have been some wonderful Novembers here along our piece of coastal paradise where sometimes the weather is so nice that you have to worry about someone pinching you and waking you up from a dream.

Then there is that memorable for me day, November 23, 2004, just one day shy of ten years ago when I published my first blog post, My Welcome To Windows.  I have written thousands of posts since then. Many are scattered all over the Internet but there are links to a smattering of them on my homepage.  Just a little over one hundred of them are located here at my Ocracoke Waves site. There are lots more at my Crystal Coast Life site and almost fifteen hundred at my View from the Mountain blog with hundreds more at  my Saltwater On My Feet blog and my Applepeels site. The four hundred plus posts which were once at Applepeels were the basis for our first book, The Pomme Company.  I have written a few other books along the way and I just started my first truly fiction book. It comes as no surprise that I started it this November.  That might become another good November memory for me.

I am going to look forward to the memories that I make this November.  There will be yet another turkey to carve, mashed potatoes to make, and this year I am in charge of rolls.  There is also still time to catch some November fish and finish a few November chapters of that new book.

I hope that each reader makes good memories of their own this November 2014.

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.

The need for an audience

If you are blogging, you probably enjoy having an audience. If you make comments on a blog to a certain extent, you also want an audience.

Many blogging services are free, so it is pretty easy to make the transition to writing a blog from making comments.

Of course it helps if you have something to say, and you can find some people willing to listen.

It will be three years this November when I did my first post. In those days I felt lucky if a few people would read them in a week. It is not unusual these days to have over three thousand visitors in a day.

I have had a day or two after writing something particularly popular like my Guardian article on Steve Jobs and the iPhone when twenty thousand people have visited in a day.

There is lots of stuff on the web these days, the challenge is creating interesting content that is worth reading and connecting with the people who might enjoy it.

It is easy to get lost in the forest of blogs. I have my own Southern Outer Banks website where I do new content once or twice a week when time permits.

My original View from the Mountain blog gets the most regular attention, but I also have a Coastal NC Blog, and I have started one on WordPress and a Carteret County blog on .Mac just to try out some new forums.

I find many of those who post harsh opinions aren't willing to expose themselves to public opinion by having their own blogs. It is not easy work and most of these folks would rather be snipers.

I find topics are easy to come by, but the time to do quality writing is at a premium. If I could just write and take pictures, I would be a happy camper. Unfortunately these things don't pay the bills.

My real estate efforts at blogging are actually work, but I still enjoy the writing. Having a ready audience make it a lot easier.

Blogs and personal product marketing

We absorb so many marketing messages that it can be very hard to make intelligent buying decisions. I doubt that is a surprise to anyone.

What might be a surprise to those who aren't paying attention is the way that bloggers are providing some interesting twists on marketing. There are so many products on the shelves these days that picking the best one can be a huge challenge. Sometimes it doesn't matter. I probably won't be upset by which Tide detergent my wife picks from the six different scents.

I would, however, be very upset if someone that I knew went out and bought a Volvo without listening to the challenges that I have faced. I wrote the post, "High tech car, low tech dealer," back in the fall of 2005. I am still getting comments on it. In fact one came in today. It closed with this comment.

I have completely lost faith in Volvo.

Now a few people complaining about Volvo isn't going to do huge damage to the company. Still in a world where people are becoming more and more connected it isn't going to Volvo any good either.

The thing is that as more and more intelligent buyers start to depend on each other's opinions, it will matter. In fact as marketing gets more questionable, the opinions which gain credence on the web will start to make a difference.

Today I had an article, "What Jobs told me on the iPhone," published in the Guardian Unlimited in London, England. In less than twenty four hours eighteen thousand people had taken the time to click on a link from the article and visit one of two main blogs, "Applepeels" or "View from the Mountain." My Ocracoke Waves blogger site is one where I don't track the traffic, but I am sure some folks wandered by here.

I had numerous notes and comments which lend me to believe that people trust what I say. I take that trust seriously. As someone who has been selling things since he starting knocking on doors in the first grade and selling first aid kits, I have always sold things in which I believed. That includes Angus cattle, Vermeer Balers, Apple's computers, G3 Systems Inc. integration services, and outsourced email from Webmail.us. It hasn't mattered whether I was selling it in a face to face meeting or recommending it in my writing. My integrity has always come first. I am not going to sell or recommend a bad product.

I have also tried to separate my personal dislikes on companies from their products. Some places it is easier to do that than others. Writing about Apple, it's pretty easy to love many of the products while not be very excited about the company. Yet even with Apple, when I have a product that has problems, like the MacBook I recently bought, I'm not very shy about saying something.

I would like to think we are heading into a world of products which receive personal reviews that I can trust. The trouble is that most of the time I cannot find the right information. A good example is my latest purchase of an "AIO" or "all in one printer, scanner, copier, and fax machine" I searched the web for good information. All of it was rather worthless.

I talked to friends, no one had current experience using a Mac with one of the machines. I went to the big box electronic stores and most couldn't even make them work. I ended up gambling on the purchase. Yet when I got it all working, I wrote about it and the articles, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX," and "The not so reluctant home system engineer," have been very popular. I am now the expert and get questions about the product almost daily.

I try to answer as many as possible, but the interest I have seen in these posts borders on more than I can handle for free. This interest in finding real answers is very indicative of the lack of trust that many people have in the standard over-hyped marketing that we're seeing today. People are accustomed to buying things where the performance doesn't match up to the marketing materials.

Over time the smart people become cautious and look to other ways to evaluate important purchases.

Companies haven't figured out how to utilize people like me since I don't want anyone to give me a product. If that happened, my review would probably be worth as much as the reviews done by magazines that are trying to protect their advertising revenue. Maybe people like me are a disorganized low budget free Consumer Reports without any consistent standards but with lots of personality.

I'll take a personal recommendation from someone I know over any marketing that I see. It might be interesting if Blogger or Typepad developed a rating system for bloggers like eBay has for buyers and sellers.

Just maybe we would find it a little easier to find out what we need before we give these companies our hard earned money. I encourage everyone to speak honestly about the product you use.

I love where I live, I tell people about my experiences on North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks (SOBX). There are certain restaurants that I really like. I want them to stay in business so I write about them. My favorite place to buy fresh shrimp prompted me to write about how to fix shrimp in the post, "The easy way to perfect shrimp." The shrimp then need the right cocktail sauce so I have to tell people about Kelchner's Cocktail Sauce.

I don't consider it wrong to give a plug for something that I enjoy or which has provided me with good service or great taste. I don't make it any money for my positive comments, and most people like to have recommendations to help them filter through all the marketing hype.

I have started recording some of my recommendations on a new blog, "Coastal NC Daily Record." I hope it ends up being useful for at least a few smart consumers.

The glue for the modern world

Our lives continue to change. While my mother grew up in a very rural North Carolina where horses were the default mode of transportation and most people farmed. While my life has spanned 57 years, I cannot remember a time when people didn't go off to work in factories from their suburban homes.

How we connect with people has changed massively as this move off of the farm has accelerated. People used to know their neighbors well. The local stores had people who lived near you. Much of your information came from your neighbors or relatives.

As stores became larger and centralized in shopping malls, the likelihood of knowing any of the stores' employees decreased geometrically. Family and friends ended up being scattered by the demands of modern life. While there are exceptions to the rule, many people probably live in neighborhoods where they have only a passing acquaintance with their neighbors.

As this has happened, the need for locally significant information has increased greatly. Often adult children are at a distance from their parents and may actually work for companies that don't even have offices or where the necessity to work hard and socialize little has been become the norm.

Perhaps that is the explanation behind the great success of online communities like MySpace. While I believe that blogs provide a significant connection and community for some, the reality is that many bloggers might feel more community spirit with other bloggers than they do their readers.

In spite of that, much of the information and opinion provided by bloggers fills in the cracks left by the dissipation of family and friends across the country. You might not be able to get local information from mom or dad but you might be able to find answers at a local blog that you respect.

The information and guidance you can pick up from someone not trying to sell you something is well worth the effort. You can likely tell quickly how valuable the information is by the author's posts. The fact that Google and others index all this information and keep it at our finger tips makes it even more useful.

Some of our local personal relationships have disappeared only to be replaced Google's ability to recreate them by providing a virtual hook to the local area from neighboring people we have never formally met.

I have only met one of my favorite blog authors, yet I feel like I know all of them in spite of a few being anything but local.

I think you will enjoy reading Fragments from Floyd, Seans's Horse Farm and Family Blog, Loose Leaf Notes, NosceTipsum, and Leaves of Grass. My first stop if I cannot find information about Floyd on Google would be Fred, and Sean would get tapped if were looking for something in Boone's Mill.

Today you can find some virtual communities that are more formal such as the ones done by Backfence. The first done by Backfence are in California, northern Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. This areas need a lot more glue to hold them together than we do in southwest Virginia or coastal North Carolina. We still do talk to our neighbors down here.

As we have more and more online content to fill in the cracks in our information overwhelmed world, blogs provide a valuable link to others. We have a need to communicate and get information from sources that are more than just anonymous voices. Fortunately on the web, we can strive to be more than just unknown outposts of sometimes useful information.

Perhaps you should look at bloggers as lighted guideposts to find your way to your way in this very complex world when you have exhausted all of your local sources