OK. I’ve got Spring Fever. Got it big time. Temperatures in the high 50s sent the snow packing and the morning sun cut through the trees of the back yard this morning for a little while before fog set in.

The afternoon forecast calls for a chance of thunderstorms. Thunderstorms? Yep. That’s a sure sign of Spring.

The National Weather Service issued a flood watch through Saturday because of the combination of rain and rapidly-melting snow. That’s a small price to pay for relief from this winter of extremes.

With luck, I’ll find a way to get the Harley down the mud and ruts of out driveway and put on a few miles before the rain sets in.

Here’s hoping…

Cafe del Sol: The lights go out for good

Cafe del Sol will not reopen. Frank and Sally Walker have put the equipment up for sale and will be moving out of the space in the Winter Sun building this weekend.

Sun owner Anga Miller confirmed today that Dogtown Pizza will take over the space that has housed the popular Floyd Coffee shop for the past five years and that the owners of Dogtown will also run the Sun Music Hall.

The change reduces Floyd’s coffee shop count by one and adds the second establishment offering pizza so far in this new year, joining Mickey G’s. Pizza Inn also offers pizza and related dishes.

Attempts to sell the Cafe fell through over the weekend and left Cafe del Sol’s owners with no chance to continue the business.

“It was a good run,” Frank Walker told us Wednesday.

Dogtown Pizza’s stone pizza oven became popular during the summer and fall months last year when they set up operations in a parking lot on Locust Street on Friday nights.  Miller says the new shop will offer much more.

Adds Miller:

While certainly we are all very sad to be losing Cafe Del Sol, I am also happy to report that DogTown Pizza has just signed a lease to take over the Cafe space, as well as the Sun Music Hall.

Jon Roberts and Scott Smith have wonderful plans for a complete renovation of the cafe space that includes building a wood fired pizza oven and focusing on locally grown food, as well as local beer & wine offerings.

They also hope to offer early morning freshly made coffee & donuts, great lunches, and create an evening atmosphere that will entice us all to visit for a relaxing after work meal.

Their plans also include enlarging the cafe area, including a smaller stage area that will focus on presenting our very talented and diverse local musicians, as well as begin offering a wonderful line up of regional and national acts on the larger stage.

We are all very excited about these upcoming changes here at Wintersun!

(Note: Miller’s comments were part of a comment posted to another article. We decided to incorporate the comment into this update. Our thanks to Anga for the update.)

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That’s a dramatic increase from eight years ago when one out of every 18 used food stamps.

County social services director Carl Ayers says applications for food stamps and other public assistance increase 20-25 percent every month as his department struggles to keep up with an ever-increasing case load.

We’re not talking about newcomers or illegal immigrants here (you need a valid Social Security number to apply) but long-time Floyd County families who have sought help for the first time in their lives.

Most of these folks have little or no income and property valued at less than $2,000 (including cars and personal belongings).

Anyway you slice it, that’s hurting in hard economic times.

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Three dead raccoons at the bottom of our driveway in this winter of extremes. All appeared emaciated and probably starved to death.

A number of dead deer and other animals have been found in other parts of the county — all dead from lack of food in this winter of extremes.

Experts call such deaths “winterkill,” an appropriate term for deaths of wild animals during extreme cold conditions.  In 1989, more than 5,000 elk died of starvation at Yosemite National Park when a brutal winter struck after a prolonged period of mild seasons.

Wild animals populations increased dramatically in Southwestern Virginia during the mild winters of recent years and the bitter winter of 2009-2010 has taken its toll.

Oddfellas: A place to eat...later in the week

Friends drove over from Wythe County Tuesday for dinner…or at least in search of dinner.

They hoped to eat at Mickey G’s but Tuesday is the one day of the week that the restaurant is closed.

So they headed for Pine Tavern. No dice. PT is open Thursday-Sunday.

Oddfellas Cantina? Nope. Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Cafe del Sol is closed while its fate remains in limbo.  Even when open, the coffee shop closed at 4. Same for the Floyd County Store.

That left Blue Ridge Restaurant and El Charro as dinner choices for a Tuesday night, unless you factor in food franchises like Hardees, Subway or Pizza Inn.

They ended up grabbing a sandwich at Bread Basket before heading back to Max Meadows after learning that Floyd can be a restaurant-deprived town for a sit-down dinner on a Tuesday night.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli

Virgil Goode and George Allen may be distant, bitter memories in the minds of most progressive Virginians but Ken Cuccinelli, the Commonwealth’s homophobic attorney general, stepped up late last week to remind us that cretins still exist in our government.

Cucinelli sent out a letter to state colleges and universities telling them to ignore discrimination against gays and treat them as lepers.

Cuccinelli claims the schools don’t have the authority to include gays in their non-discrimination policies, saying the Virginia General Assembly hasn’t passed any laws to make gays a “protected class.”

In other words, ignore common decency unless the doddering mental midgets in Richmond tell you not to.

Not surprising that such a directive should come from Cuccinelli, whose right-wing actions proclivities went largely ignored when Virginia voters, angry at President Barack Obama and Democrats, put him and his GOP pals into office.

In his letter to the colleges and universities, Cuccinelli claimed:

Several inquiries recently have been made regarding the authority of public colleges and universities to approve inclusion of “sexual orientation,” gender identity,” “gender expression,” or like classifications in the non-discrimination policies of the respective institution.

Cuccinelli is a liar. Richmond insiders tell us no such inquiries exist. The AG has planned, from the beginning, to go after gays and his missive is just an opening salvo in his campaign to drive Virginia back into the stone age of intolerance.

Virginia remains one of the few states that keeps archaic anti-gay laws on the books, including a legal ban on oral sex, even between man and wife.

Cuccinelli went so far in his homophobic tirade that even new Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell moved quickly to distance himself…sort of.  The governor’s spokesman, Tucker Martin, said Saturday that no action would be taken against any college or university that tells Cuccinelli to go to hell and ignores his screed.

Said Martin:

The governor expects that no Virginia college or university, or any other state agency, will engage in discrimination of any kind.  The governor will not tolerate discrimination in the Administration and his official written employment policy for the office of the governor expressly forbids discrimination on any basis other than qualification and merit.

McDonnell, however, is not as enlightened as propaganda merchant Tucker would have us believe.  Earlier this year, he signed an executive order barring discrimination for sex, religion or age but did not include sexual orientation. McDonnell has yet to support, in the General Assembly, a single bill banning discrimination against gays.

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The Lady Buffs in their 2008 State Championship run

If all had gone according to plan, I would be headed to Richmond Thursday for the semi-finals of the Virginia High School League state basketball tournament at the Seigel Center at Virginia Commonwealth University and, I had hoped, staying over the final game on Saturday.

Been there for the last four years photographing the girls’ varsity basketball team’s annual appearance in the final four.

But the girls lost in the semi-final regional game to Glenvar — the final game for retiring coach and legend Alan Cantrell — and Chilhowie beat Radford and is headed for Richmond after winning their quarterfinal game last week.

We had two shots at Richmond this year. The boys’ team also qualified for the regionals but lost in the opening round.

The March trip to Richmond had become an annual rite. Besides seeing, and photographing, some great high school basketball, the visit gave me a chance to meet Floyd Countian Randy Hallman, for many years a sportswriter and editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, for brunch and have dinner with other friends.

Still, the girls had a great run: four straight trips to the final four. The streak had to end sometime.

So I will stay in Floyd County this week with the hope that this will finally be the week when we can free Amy’s Jeep Liberty from the clutches of the ice and snow that still chokes the top of our driveway.

Cafe del Sol: Will the lights shine again?

Plans to sell Cafe del Sol as a business have fallen through, the owners are selling off the coffee shop’s equipment and will move out of the location in the Winter Sun building over the weekend (March 13-14), bringing the cafe’s five-year run to an end.

The coffee shop in the Winter Sun building closed for it’s “annual cleaning” on Feb. 28 with plans to reopen on March 1 but remained closed as March 1 came and went. An ad in the Charlotte Business Journal and other venues listed the establishment for sale for an asking price of $50,000.

On March 1, Sally Walker posted the following notice on the Cafe del Sol web site:

It is with much sadness that I announce that I will not be reopening Cafe del Sol on Monday, March 1.

It was our sincerest hope that the Cafe would reopen under new ownership at this time. There have been, however, “blips in the road”. We are still hopeful that the Cafe will reopen, providing the community with everything we have become known for.

Sally and Frank Walker opened Cafe del Sol five years ago and quickly turned it into a favorite java and food spot in Floyd.

(Updated on March 10, 2010)

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But not right away.

Gov. Bob McDonnell signed the bill Thursday that raises the speed limit to 70 but the Virginia Department of Transportation say it will take months to conduct traffic studies to see what roads can handle the higher speeds.

Jason Bond, Salem District spokesman for VDOT, says budget cuts that led to staff reductions will slow down the studies to determine where drivers are driving faster.

Got a news flash for VDOT. People are already driving at least 70 on the Interstates. Many drive faster.

Blast by a radar-running Virginia State Trooper at 72 miles-per-hour and we won’t even look up from the readout on his speed-monitoring machine. Troopers usually give a 10 miles-per-hour leeway to drivers on the Interstate. Even on 55 miles-per-hour rural roads, troopers tell me they don’t even consider writing a ticket unless the driver is doing at least 61. Spend a morning in General District Court in Floyd and you hardly ever see a speeding citation driving less than five miles per hour over a posted speed limit unless the driver is doing something else stupid on the road.

On a recent trip on I-81, I set my cruise control on 73 miles per hour. Most cars and trucks passed me. I didn’t pass anyone, even in the 14 mile of stretch near Roanoke where the speed limit drops to 60.

Which raises the question: If the limit on I-81 or other Interstates eventually rises to 70, will that allow drivers to speed along at 80 without fear of getting a ticket?

Joe Kenny from Floyd County sends this photo from Bike Week

If you can believe the forecasters, prognosticators and talking heads who disquise themselves as “meterologists,” a weather pattern with some distant relationships with something called Spring is out there and ready to come visit.

Starting Saturday, daytime highs will climb into the mid and higher 50 and even flirt with 60 over the next week. My Monday, nighttime lows may even manage to stay above freezing.

But doubts persist. Maybe they’re teasing us. Perhaps there is another winter blizzard waiting in the wings, ready to pounce after a few days of decent weather lulls us into a false sense of security.

God, I hope not. This winter of extremes has left most of us emotionally and physically drained. Amy and I endured several brutal winters during our time in the Midwest but this one has left us worn out. I still need to rescue her car from the precipice of our driveway. I need to spend warmer days repairing a screen that the wind ripped loose on the back porch and repair dozens of minor damages from the winter that has brutalized us since Dec. 18.

Joe Kinny, a friend and biker who runs a machine shop in Floyd, sends photos from his trip to Daytona Bike Week. That’s his modified Harley Super Glide in the photo above, enjoying the sun and warm weather in the state of my birth. It’s time like this that I wish I still lived in Florida. Hopefully, that desire will pass once this winter becomes a memory.

All of us need a good dose of Spring Fever. We need to cut grass, work in gardens and plant flowers. I need to put about 500 miles on my Harley to clear my head and get regain some perspective.

Let’s hope Spring drops in for a visit…and decides to stay.

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