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.

My love affair with mornings along the southern coast

It is a real privilege to go to bed at night and be excited about waking up the next morning. What I do in the morning is not very exciting, but I enjoy doing it were much.

While I do enjoy my first cup of coffee, the coffee has nothing to do with the pleasure I take from my morning rounds of our home place at Bluewater Cove. First I usually check our tomato plants to see if anything is ripe enough t0 pick or if the plants need water. I also check our palms and our one perrenial hibiscus.

Then I will usually walk down to the dock to check the tides and see what sea creaturing are lurking around the dock. After that I make my way out to the mailbox. Along the way, I get to enjoy the warm morning breeze, our roses, and the pine trees growing in the lot next door. I will also scan the yard to see if any ant hills have popped up.

Sometimes I will wander over to boat ramp to see what is swimming around there. These hot mornings I often hear the carpenters up the road. They come to work early during the heat of the summer.

It is a special time in the morning. There are even some mornings when you can forget all your cares. It is a relaxing time of the day, and I have even been known t0 take an early morning dip in the pool.

I sometimes get a lot done before 9:00 AM. As early morning is my favorite time of day, I do not mind working hard. It is better to get chores out of the way early in my book.

Evening comes in a distant second as a time I enjoy, but it does have moments also like this walk down Emerald Isle's main street.

Front porch storm watching

Maybe it is a southern thing, but I have always enjoyed watching thunderstorms from the porches of our homes.

We have had a few homes without porches, but those have been in the minority. Perhaps my favorite storm watching porch before we moved to the coast was the one in Mt. Airy, NC where I spent my teenage years.

Our side porch there was protected but had a great view of the building storms that skirted the Blue Ridge Mountains. That former home is now a bed breakfast, Sobotta Manor, so you can book a stay and hope for a nice southern thunderstorm for some entertainment.

Thunderstorms sometimes break the heat in the south or at least provide some temporary relief. Sometimes they are damaging, but often they just bring welcome precipitation and some noise like they did today here on the Carolina coast.

Watching the power of thunderstorm is a humbling experience. I actually like North Carolina and Virginia thunderstorms much better than the ones we had in Canada. The Canadian ones were ill defined. They seemed to be all over the place. You could never really tell their direction.

Make no mistake, you can tell if a southern thunderstorm is headed for you. Most of them leave no doubt. Tonight's edition went south of us. We got to watch the fireworks without getting in the line of fire.

Still the strong breezes and lightning brought back many childhood memories of listening to the rumble of thunder in Mount Airy or Lewisville, NC. Storms in Roanoke, VA were a little different. Once they got in the mountain valley that is Roanoke, they could go in circles. Many times we saw the same storm more than once.

In the summer, thunderstorms are a regular occurrence here near the water. When we are fishing we try to have our boats back at the dock by three PM which is when the storms often fire up. With the flat territory, you can see them for miles.

I know the storms are to be respected. I had a cousin killed by lightning, but I like to think that if I am careful, the front porch makes a pretty good spot to watch a storm unless we are in the middle of it.

Not a normal dinner spot for us

We are actually more comfortable out on the beach than we are going out to dinner these days.

Still when someone gives you a gift certificate to a good restaurant, you do not want to waste it. With that in mind we headed off to Red Lobster in Roanoke, Va. recently.

We managed to get there during their lobster festival. With my love of lobster, I ended up ordering a dish with a couple of kinds of shrimp, a lobster tail, and a few crab legs.

After a Caesar salad and some of their yummy rolls, I was feeling pretty good. Dinner arrived quickly since the restaurant was not as packed as has often been the case before the economic recession.

It was hard not to compare our dinner since we had just fixed some shrimp and grits at home down on the NC Coast. That is something we do fairly often so we are pretty familiar with seafood. To say I was a little surprised at the tiny size of the shrimp on my plate is an understatement.

Shrimp of the size that I was served in garlic butter would never even make it to bait shrimp on the Crystal Coast. In fact a couple of our Crystal Coast shrimp would equal the amount of meat in the lobster tail on our plates.

Now I had plenty to eat, but I am not certain how much money Red Lobster is saving in the long run by purchasing juvenile shrimp and lobsters. The crab legs were also tiny. Serve fewer but bigger shrimp. I would rather have three shrimp that I can cut into bites than six which are so tiny that you hardly know you have eaten them. I have to believe that normal size shrimp is a better use of marine resources. Of course here I am thinking that these shrimp were caught in the sea. They were probably farm shrimp.

However, the lobsters had to be wild caught, and my guess is that they came from Canada where I have heard the size limit is smaller than Maine. I know there is a certain size lobster which the lobster men in Maine claim should be harvested. Anything smaller or bigger hurts the lobster stocks which I want to make sure survive. You can read about their efforts at lobster sustainability.

We had some great lobsters this fall at our area church suppers, and I know they came from Maine because I saw the truck. The lobsters were on the order of 1.5 lbs each. I cannot believe that the lobster tails that we ate at Red Lobster recently came off of a lobster anywhere close to even one pound in weight.

I think that perhaps I will go back to making my own seafood dinners. Now I just need someone to donate some right-sized lobsters.

Riding the right wave to success

Watching ocean waves is a favorite activity of mine. Getting a picture of just the right color wave is a challenge that I love.

Getting the right picture to post is far more important to me than staying on top of the latest trends or gossip in the entertainment industry.

Our society is moving so fast that it is hard to keep up on even things that interest me. I finally got to the point that I realized that there are lots of things which I can live without understanding. I am not embarrassed that I could care less what Brittany Spears is doing today or that Madonna is not in the news.

I want to focus on what I know and where I can be successful while enjoying what I do. That removes a lot of fluff from my life.

I know that there are lots of television shows which can be downloaded, but I will remain a bystander since I have a hard time finding ones worth watching much less downloading.

There are the extreme sports fans who like jumping off a mountainside and buzzing roadways in the Alps. That is fine with me, just do not expect me to chip in on the medical bills. I really do not care how hard it is drive a truck in Alaska or work in a kitchen with a maniac.

I am also not interested in endless complaining about how poorly the new administration in the United States is doing. They inherited the mess, it will take a while to fix. No one is smart enough to be able to tell if this stuff is going to work yet. That is the end of the brain discussion for me except that rooting for a President to fail is about as low as it gets.

One of the best lessons that I ever learned was to spend more time listening and learning than telling others how to do their jobs. If the job is never going to be yours, you might as well see how well your advice works in your own life.

I can still remember the time when during one of Apple's many reorganizations, I ended up being moved from years of managing a team calling on higher education institutions and selling directly to calling on businesses and selling through resellers.

It was not a move I wanted. I had two choices, become a whiner or figure out how to do the job to the best of my ability.

I knew how to manage people, and I knew how to be a good reseller since I had been one twelve years earlier before I came to Apple.

After the move, I spent a lot of time out in the field with the existing reps, listening to them and their resellers. Mostly I found an incredible amount of arrogance among the reps. Some of the system engineers were even worse. One even gave a new sales rep bad directions to an account so he would look incompetent when taking me there.

Being successful was an option that most of them felt required too much hard work. Complaining about everything was easier. In a year's time the only person out of nearly twenty that I had inherited was my area associate. I had found new people who were willing to work, to listen, to learn, and to be successful.

We put together a series of mini-MacWorld seminar events and delivered them in nineteen cities across the Southeast. We partnered with resellers instead of complaining about them. The resellers loved what we did. The customers were beyond enthusiastic.

We brought value to the equation, and in spite of what the former experts said, we ended up being successful.

We were one of the top regions in the country the next year. Sometimes success just takes fresh faces with new ideas and the willingness to work hard. It did not happen over night, and a lot armchair experts told us we would fail.

We believed in what we were doing and kept going even when the hours were long, and there were lots of people pulling for us to fail.

I think I will keep doing what I know works even now when the times are tough.

You can ride the right wave to success