Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Beauty is where you find it

I am getting in some early morning blogging 300 ft above the surf at Myrtle Beach, SC.

The sound of the surf and the twittering of birds can still be heard over the roar of the air conditioners on the buildings below. The sun has yet to peep above the horizon, but a few hardy souls are having an early swim.

I am in a good vantage point to observe the interface of mankind and nature on this July morning. Looking east along the shoreline, I see the green of semi-rural South Carolina safely separated from the ocean by a massive wall of condominiums and hotels.

It is like seeing a beautiful country girl after she has been worked over by a Hollywood makeup expert. The results are certainly showy, but they are no longer natural. On the other hand when one is playing to a major audience as we see here, one needs to appear larger than life and perform accordingly.

Points of interest rather than space - Sanity Check Part 2

It occurred to me that one of the reasons that American attention is directed so much at America is that there are so many unique points of interest in this country. There are probably more unique points of interest in Manhattan alone than there are in some entire countries.

Readers have commented that they were required to study maps, imports/exports and other characteristics of countries in school. I did that also and as I recall, most countries were covered in a few pages, some in a paragraph.

Consider what that would mean when the subject was our state of California which had a gross domestic product  of $1,727,355,000,000 in 2006 which would have made it the eighth largest nation in the world in terms of the value of goods and services produced.

When we recall a place we have visited, we tend to recall the events, the vistas and the food that gave us experiences to remember and share with others.

I think a map that identified points of interest rather than space alone, might show an even more skewed  distribution than the map shown in the previous article. Certain countries might have to be enlarged to properly list the points of significant interest to visitors.

Creating this kind of map will be an exercise for the student ,as one of my professors used to say, but it is already being done with maps of topics on the internet where integrity and reproducibility of content is more important than the name or historical value of the source.

Imagine a map that captured this point of interest information and how it might appear. If anyone has a link to such information, please feel free to share it.

Stylin' in Las Vegas

The 2008 West Coast Art & Frame Show was a visual feast. Thousands of framing and art industry professionals met in the Las Vegas Hilton to trade ideas, launch new products, and to develop and strengthen relationships to meet the challenges of 2008.

I will try to cover some of the exciting new products and their implications in a later post, but I wanted to capture my impressions of the fashion statements being made by convention-goers and other Las Vegas visitors.

The image at the top shows statuary in the lobby of the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas which affectionately portrays the high rollers who were the basis of the original Las Vegas economy.

While a few Las Vegas visitors still carry on the grand tradition of wearing glitz and glitter that rivals onstage performers, most of the visitors I saw presented a vastly different appearance.

Gene Eichner, Co-Chairman of Framerica, one of the major exhibitors at WCAF, provided one of the best examples of understated sartorial elegance at the show. Impeccably tailored, his passion for his company and his customers comes through at first meeting.

There were so many stylishly dressed buyers examining art in the Convention Hall that some areas looked like a gala gallery opening. These smartly turned out men and women gave the WCAF convention a distinctively cosmopolitan flavor.

Booth personnel, on the other hand, were dressed in a wide range of attire from business suits to T-shirts.

Essentially, they were dressed for work and their attention was on presenting their service, like Tami Elhart, a marketing manager at Kandu, a non-profit organization in western Michigan which employs the handicapped.

The vast majority of convention attendees were dressed for modern airline travel: jeans and sneakers, with an occasional sports jacket crammed with literature. These were mostly small business owners and they came for information, not to put on a fashion show.

Many of these attendees looked just like me and cousin Martin Picard, seen here dining at the California Pizza Kitchen in the Mirage Hotel. From our attire, we could have just as well been sitting in the Blue Ridge Restaurant in Floyd, Virginia.

Speaking of airline travel, there are few vestiges of the fashions that prevailed when I first started traveling for business in the mid-Sixties. We travel in jeans and sweats now and flight attendants rarely present the visual delights that stewardesses did in the early days of air travel.

Huge jets and demanding schedules have demanded a different skill set for airline personnel and you rarely see someone who looks like this charming AirTrans flight attendant any more.

That's a pity. We need beauty in all aspects of life. We all need to be stylin' in one way or another.

(stylin': 1. (sti-lin) slang. meaning looking good or in fashion.) from the Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Revisiting Northern California

We have been so comfortable with our simpler country life that we have forgotten what it is like to live in Northern California east of San Francisco Bay.

Our first two days in Northern California gave us a chance to re-experience urban life again. It still has its attractions, but I am very happy that we don't have to live in this environment. It is an endless sprawl of neighborhoods, shopping centers and restaurants.

When you live in Floyd country you get used to a certain level of background noise and you have a feeling for how long it will take for you to drive 30 miles.

Traveling to a more developed area like Contra Costa County in Northern California is a major shift in reality. Traffic noise is so pervasive that it fades from your notice, except at night when trying to sleep. Then it sounds like jet noise.

Traffic density is so great that trips of less than two miles become major expeditions. Not quite bumper to bumper traffic, more like trying to drive two miles on shopping center parking lots. It can be done, but it takes great care and patience.

This is a result of the extreme density of shopping destinations. We are staying in Pleasant Hills, in Contra Costa County, and we can find almost every store we can think of in just a few mile radius. Getting to the store and back takes almost as long as a 10 mile trip into Floyd, VA.

The scenery here is tastefully arranged, but it is mostly man-made. Outside of the irrigated areas, the landscape is tawny brown with a few touches of dusty green.

The saving grace is that the natives are friendly and superb restaurants are near at hand.  We have done our best to sample everything that is recommended to us.

I will try to post some images later today which may capture the spirit of our trip.

Thanks for dropping by.