Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Scientists in a tizzy over cows lining up in pastures.

As we drive into town, we have noticed that cows seem to align themselves in different ways in different pastures. Some of you with real cow experience may be able to add some sense to this highly technical discussion by people who have probably never seen a cow close up.

Magnetic cow findings cause row among Google Earth researchers

November 15, 2011 by Bob Yirka  

(PhysOrg.com) -- Sometimes, scientists hard at work in their field, come across findings that they cannot explain, and instead of simply writing a paper describing what they’ve seen, they instead choose to write a paper describing what they think their observations have shown. Case in point, back in 2008, a group of guys with Biology and wildlife backgrounds were apparently sitting around looking at pictures taken by Google Earth, when they noticed that there seemed to be a pattern in the way some cows in a pasture aligned themselves. After looking at more pictures, a larger pattern began to emerge. Oddly enough, the cows seemed to be aligning themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field lines. The group, led by Hynek Burda wrote up a paper describing what they’d found and had it published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Later, the team did additional research and found that no such kinds of lining up occurred around power lines which they thought might disrupt the cow’s ability to sense magnetic fields.

When the paper came out, it was followed by a bit of media noise, some of which poked a little bit of fun at the whole idea. Others responded that cows lining up is nothing new, they do it to get the best angle on the sun to help keep warm, or to avoid a cold wind. But to do it based on the Earth’s magnetic field, seemed, well, a little out there.

The fire is burning in our wood stove again

 

We have been holding off lighting the stove in a futile effort to hang on to the warm weather.

In the last few days, the house has gotten cold and damp enough to make us realize that winter is really on its way and we need to enjoy the good parts as long as we can.

A cozy fire brings contentment to man and beast. We can venture outside in search of exercise and excitement but returning to a warm hearth and a good book, or a warm lap in the case of the cats, is a fitting closure to a busy day.

We were running the air conditioner in my office last week and now we are almost ready to store it away in favor of warm fires and winter long johns. We may have another heat wave during October's Indian Summer, but I expect that a fire in the stove will be our constant companion for the next seven months.

Note to self: Buy more wood.

Preparing for winter and a down economy

It's time to tear our attention away from the antics of our unprofessional and inept administration and concentrate on preparing for a long cold winter.

  While the leader of the free world concentrates on one of the few things he does well, the rest of us are helping each other to prepare for an increasingly uncertain future.

This year I did not wait until September to order firewood and it arrived yesterday. I was not the only one who is anticipating a cold winter because the owner of Sawbrier Farms who supplied the wood said he already has ten more orders to cut and deliver and this is a month ahead of the normal schedule.

My neighbors to the south came over and helped me stack the first storage area which is on the front porch. This is usually a three week supply in the coldest weather. When it runs out, we move firewood in from from the second and third storage areas that are further away.

I have about four cords of wood on hand and will need another two cords to get through the winter. I expect that my total out of pocket expense for this winter's firewood will be about $500 which makes it very attractive compared to propane or pellets.

On the economic front, we are pursuing every avenue that offers the potential for increasing our current income and generating another revenue stream.  Things are going well in that regard and we are just one of many families in Floyd who have multiple jobs or multiple businesses. It is not easy, but we are taking control of our futures and making headway as part of a tightly connected community.

I feel that this is the wave of the future. In increasingly uncertain times with a corrupt central government, becoming more self-reliant and sharing with others who are doing the same is the only way to achieve greater peace of mind.

NRV Livibility Initiative poses interesting challenges

Yesterday's kickoff meeting for the NRV Livibility Initiative brought together people with a wide range of interests and hopes for vastly different outcomes as far as the future of life in the New River Valley.

The meeting started with small group discussions of the strength and challenges of our invidiual communities, of the NRV region as a whole. It seemed that many people, including myself, had difficulty in visualizing the region as a whole and as a result it seemed that there was little concensus on what the challenges were for the region as a whole.

Trying to average the needs of a person living in a remote part of Floyd with someone living in downtown Blacksburg produces a result unusable by either.

Solutions are available of course, but my takeaway from this meeting was that a one-size-fits-all solution for any of the nine discussion areas like transportation, housing, water, etc. will meet with determined opposition from the localities that will see their quality of life being degraded by a solution that does not apply to them.

Another challenge faced by the Initiative participants is that in some cases they are trying to hit a moving target. As a community moves from a commuting lifestyle to a telecommuting lifestyle, the need for transportation drops and the demand for faster Internet services escalates. People can move to a rural area for the lifestyle and can still make a living doing what they once did at the office, but now do in their kitchen.

The biggest challengse of all is the ensuring of accurate data collection from group discussions. The volunteer faciltators seemed to have a difficult time hearing and keeping up with the sheer volume of data being provided by attendees. Unless they were really meticulous, this resulted in ideas being truncated or altered from the original ideas agreed upon by the group. A challenge of needing better roads could be summarized as needing public transportation, which is not the same challenge at all.

I was at one table where the facilitators ran good control and everyone was allowed to share their ideas. This resulted in a meeting of minds and lots of useful dialogs ensued.

I was at another table where the facilitator let everyone talk at will. As a result, a few people dominated the conversation. I heard from several sources that other tables where facilitators did not run good control were highly unproductive and were upsetting to many of the people at the table. Instead of a series of dialogs, there were opposing monologues. Additionally, at these tables the facilitators were not able to duplicate what points were being made and the notes they were taking appeared to represent their opinion. not what the participants were saying. This could have also been a result of the high noise level which made ordinary conversations nearly impossible.

These issues of meeting noise level and facilitator skill must be addressed in future meetings or there will be little confidence in the results obtained from these discussions.

All in all, I felt it was a good first effort and with a little more tuning can produce usable results to improve the quality of life in the New River Valley.

My suggestions for improving the process are:

1. Suggest appropriate solutions for unique area requirements. Do not create a general solution that degrades life in a particular area that already has a superior solution.

2. Do whatever is necessary to acquaint planning participants with the unique characteristics of each community in the NRV and what actual challenges and strengths exist in that area. Proposed solutions must fit the needs of the region involved. Avoid lunping together rural and urban areas when the needs are not similar.

3. Obtain facilitators who understand the critical importance of their role and train them to capture the data provided and not filter it in any way. In this way, the results obtained can lead to workable programs if solutions are applied as needed, not because it seems expedient.

4. Organize group discussions so that conversations can be heard. The noise level was so high at times that we could not hear people speaking to us across the table. That was probably a major contributing factor to the errors in data capture.

5. Set conservative targets for discussion times. I think that a few more minutes might have ensured a better result in terms of getting accurate data from the participants.

I am looking forward to participating in future discussions and will be interested is seeing how the NRV Initiative discussions evolve. There is much that can be done and some areas of the NRV change is needed. I would like to make sure that any areas that are happy with their situations do not suffer from imposition of a forced change that will degrade the quality of life in that area.

Changing of the Guard

As any pet owner knows, the hardest part of sharing your life with animals is that they do not live as long as we do. When our daily companion of many years dies, it creates an empty space in our lives that seems like it can never be filled. I have known families which have mourned the loss of a pet for years

In families with only one pet, the loss can be catastrophic. When there are other pets sharing our lives, these other pets seem to respond to the loss by becoming more affectionate with us and with each other. The loss of one member of the group makes all of recognize the value of our remaining companions.

We lost two of our cats in the last few months due to advancing age. Buffy, our Siamese cross, was 17 years old and Gray Kitty was 14 years old. They shared our adventures and our daily routines for many happy years. They had become part of the fabric of our lives and their passing left us with many moments of loss as we listened for the friendly chirp or purr that would not be heard again except in memory.

We live lives of considerable complexity and we do not always appreciate how skillfully our pets accommodate themselves to our daily routines until they are no longer there to greet us in the early hours of the morning or to jump up in our laps during our hours at the computer.

So, you have been wondering where all the stinkbugs are coming from?

We have been increasingly upset with this years horde of of unwanted visitors. They keep appearing even though we have captured and disposed of hundreds of them.

We could not see what they were eating and they all seemed to be the same size, so we feared that there was a little machine that was cloning them. There seemed to be no other explanation.

Then I thought of accessing Google, the universal fount of knowledge.

I googled "stink bugs" and found that most varieties were plant eaters and that's when the penny dropped. My dear wife has filled every corner of our house with wonderfuly healthy plants!

This morning we discovered stinkbugs on almost every plant in the house. They hide under the leaves and can easily be picked off and dropped into a glass of soapy water.

How bad was the drifting snow today?

You can get an idea of the difficulties facing drivers in our area when you see someone driving an ATV to buy groceries.

Our trek to the Food Lion in Floyd was a white-knuckle drive at about twenty miles an hour. Our Subaru stayed on the icy road pretty well, but we barely had enough traction to plough through some of the heavier drifts.

Once the drifted snow got deep enough, the car no longer responded to the steering wheel and we fishtailed on through until we got to the other side of the drift.

Less than two miles from the house, the first car we saw was canted down into a ditch. The driver was OK and was waiting for a truck to arrive and tow him out.

Some roads were open, but Franklin Pike was down to a single lane in some places because of the drifting snow. It was especially treacherous because there would be long stretches of road that were fairly clear except for spotty patches of hard-packed snow and then you would suddenly enter an area that was almost blocked by foot-high drifts.

I resisted the temptation to pick up speed on the open stretches and stayed at 20 miles an hour. Even then it was touch and go when cars came at me from the other way and we were both straddling the center line.

The only reason we were able to get out onto the road at all was that our new neighbor John Hale had taken it upon himself to clear all the driveways in our lane. It was a pleasant surprise to see his big John Deere backhoe zipping up and down our driveway even before we had finished our morning coffee. It inspired me to take advantage of his generous act and get into town while we could.

I understand that there are some who have still not been able to get out of their driveways. It is unfortunate that global warming is merely political fiction. We sure could use some of it this winter.

In Floyd County, you never know who is going to offer help when you need it

As I get older, I really appreciate the help I get from my friends. I'm pretty handy with computers and cameras and technical stuff, but firewood presents a challenge that is best met with the aid of extra helping hands.

Gretchen and I managed to burn through a huge load of wood in the last few weeks and I was getting worried that the incoming storm would catch me with no firewood in our staging area on the front porch. This staging area holds about a ton and a half of wood and it was really getting low this morning.

Artist John Wade came to my rescue today and we transported and stacked a months supply of firewood in a matter of hours. He drove up from Union School Road to help me out and I will work a trade with him to design an online gallery to showcase his art.

John works in oils and has created some powerful pieces that deserve a wider audience. I have had the pleasure of framing two of his recent pieces and am looking forward to working on more of his work. The top piece is called "Bones" and the bottom one is titled "Packing Out".

He works on several pieces at the same time and his studio home on Union Schol Rd is filled with works in progress. He also paints murals.

When his website is operational, I will post a link so you can see more of his work.

If you own a pellet stove, you need to know Josh Muncy

A pellet stove is one of the most sophisticated wood-burning devices I have ever run across. It provides even heat under thermostatic control and you only load it once a day even in the coldest weather. That's the good part and is why so many owners swear by their pellet stoves.

But...

Owning a pellet stove is somewhat like owning a Jaguar. The performance is marvelous, but you need to know a capable mechanic to keep it in tune. Once set up, they will run for months without needing maintenace, but they can fail on you without giving any warning.

That's where Josh Muncy comes in. He lives in Floyd County, in the town of Check and he has recently set up his own HVAC business after years of working at Blue Ridge Heating and Air. Blue Ridge is known for having really good products but the main reason I patronized them was because  Josh did their servicing.

No matter what problem our pellet stove developed, Josh was able to diagnose and handle it. There were never any callbacks because something had stopped working again. If Josh fixed it, it stayed fixed. That has not been the case with any other service technician.

Josh Muncy has been a real life saver for us and I want to spread the word that he is still in the HVAC and pellet stove business but on his own terms.

If you depend on a pellet stove for heat and you live anywhere near Floyd or Montgomery Counties, you need to copy this card image and tape it to the lid of your pellet stove.

It's not too late to consult a chimney sweep

This winter promises to be one of the coldest and those of us with woodstoves and fireplaces are watching our primary heat sources consume our wood piles faster than usual.

This is the time of year you definitely do not want a chimney fire. You only have to hear that thundering jet engine noise once to become a believer in regular chimney cleanings.

We are fortunate to know Rick Eanes, of Eanes Chimney Sweep and he is the reason we sleep easy at night. He came by a few days ago and completely dismantled our Dutchwest Wood Stove to find out why it was not drawing properly when the damper was closed.

We could run the stove with the damper open, but this produced a high heat level that could not be brought down easily.

After Rick got through with his work, we had a wood stove that could be throttled back so a couple of small logs would burn for four or five hours and a full charge of several logs would burn all night.

The stove was no longer tempermental and could be set to run stably at whatever heat level we set it to. It now runs as well as when it was brand new.

If you are in the Floyd, Christiansburg, or Radford area, you can reach Rick of Eanes Chimney Sweep at 540-382-7760. He is fully insured and does inspections, relining, masonry repairs, tuck pointing and installs caps and dampers as well as sweeping the chimney and cleaning out your stove or fireplace.

We insist on having Rick check our wood stoves at least twice a year. He is meticulous and if any problems arise, he makes sure that they get handled promptly.

We appreciate the fact that his work gives us peace of mind.