Thursday night’s ice storm left a thin layer of ice on our driveway, a 450-foot long stretch of gravel road that climbs a 35-degree grade. With care I made it down the driveway Friday morning without going into a skid.
Friday night the Jeep slipped a few times on the trip back up the driveway but still made the climb without much trouble.
Continue reading …Nice coating of frozen water over the landscape this morning. Inched down the driveway in Amy’s Wrangler (mine’s in the shop) to find Sandy Flats Road still covered. A half-mile down the road, Floyd County Rescue Squad ambulance in mdidle of road, transferring a neighbor from his frozen SUV for transport to the hospital for dialysis. Stopped to help.
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Floyd kicked off its Christmas season last weekend with a "Dickens Night" downtown, which is an excuse for town and county officials to dress up as Charles Dickens characters and wander the streets. It also gave me a chance to play with the limited lighting downtown for what I hoped would be a dreamlike effect. It worked…sort of.
Floyd County High School’s girls’ varsity basketball team made it to the state playoffs last year and are off to a strong start this season.
They opened a three-day tourney at FCHS this week by stomping Pulaski (leading 21-0 at the end of the first quarter).
David St. Lawrence, the Charlottesville-based author and blogger who is moving to Floyd County this month, is our houseguest this week while he works on the new home for he and wife Gretchen and he tagged along Tuesday night as I covered the opening night of the tournament.
David chronicles just about everything he does on his popular blog and I should have known he was snapping away while in the stands (he shot the photo at right).
As a photographer, I enjoy shooting high school sports and cover a lot of games for The Floyd Press. After a lifetime in photojournalism, I find shooting local events equally, if not more, satisfying than covering news events around the world.
In 13 months of shooting for the local paper, I’ve received far more comments and compliments from readers than from 40 years of taking photos for newspapers and magazines around the world.
From time to time, someone will ask: "Do you miss the action that came from all the travel and excitement?" Not really.
Maybe it comes from having bene there and done that. Photojournalism is the perfect career for an adrenaline junkie but I’ve found the need for danger diminished as I got older.
After a while, the death and despair that makes up so much of a journalist’s work on the national and international scale starts to wear on you. And a bum hip and two bad knees can slow you down.
I’ve lost the need for the thrill and excitement that comes from covering wars, disasters and earth-shaking events. I just hope I never lose the thrill and excitement that comes from being a photographer.
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The snow started strong but turned into drizzle by day’s end while accumulation fell far short of the 6-12 inches orginally forecast. The lonely cow stands amid tracks of a day in the snow (above) on the DeHart cattle firm along U.S. 221 north of Floyd while tracks mark what little traffic ventured out on the gravel area of Sandy Flats Road between Harvestwood and Shooting Creek roads (left). So, we have more slush than anything else and the promise of ice when temperatures plumment overnight. The talking heads on the tube say there still is a chance of more snow tonight so we may be looking at hazardous conditions on Tuesday morning. However, VDOT promises crews will work through the night on the main drags so those roads should be open on Tuesday while some back roads will still be covered with ice and slush. Schools closed in Floyd County on Monday and opened two hours late today. A number of businesses closed early in town as people headed home before darkness and colder weather turned the slush into ice. If you believe the wooly worms (and the wooly worms are seldom wrong), Monday’s snow is just the start of what will be a long, cold and nasy winter.
The winter storm watch runs until midnight amid dire predictions of 6-12 inches of snow before it moves on. Welcome to winter.
Winter rain has a cold, lonely feel to it, aided by the starkness of the season. It chills you to the bone. Yet I find the solitude of winter rain comforting – a time for contemplation and reflection on a life both lived and yet to live.
One year ago today, we sat in a lawyer’s office in Christiansburg and closed the deal on purchase of our home in Floyd County. This wasn’t our first home purchase: We had bought and sold other properties in other towns and states but this would be our last home purchase. This, a rambling Cape Cod/Saltbox, 27-year-old house three-quarters the ways up a hill about five miles north of Floyd, is destined to be our home for the rest of our lives.
Didn’t start out that way: For years, we talked about building a new home on our farm in Carroll County – 105 acres tucked away along Burks Fork Creek near the Floyd County line. We looked at model homes, talked with architects, considered manufactured vs. stick-built and got estimates for site clearing. That remained the plan when we sold the condo in Arlington and started moving our belongings into storage units.
But the plan changed when we saw the house. Amy found it first while looking at properties for friends who also planned to leave Washington and move to the mountains. It was, she said, something we should look into. We did, loved it, and made an offer, singing a contract just days after accepting another one on sale of our home in Arlington.
On November 29, 2004, we left Arlington the last time as residents, our SUV packed to the roof rack with the remains of our belongings, and stopped at another lawyer’s office to close on the sale. Three days later, December 2, we completed the walk through of the home in Floyd. The next morning, we drove to Christiansburg for the closing, had breakfast, stopped at Lowe’s to order a washer and dryer, and then drove to our new home to take down the “For Sale†sign and celebrate with a bottle of sparkling cider.
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The modules that make up the base of David & Gretchen St. Lawrence’s “stick-built modular home” went on the foundation Thursday as workmen from the Rocky Mount firm that built the home took advantage of a rare, rainless day.
December already? November came and went in a flash. November was month one for the great weight loss challenge: 10 pounds a month for six months. Lost 13 pounds. It would have been more but Morgan Caine’s sinful Oreo cheesecake seduced me at Oddfellas Wednesday night.
Will step up the pace in December with more trips to Shortt’s Fitness Center and increased walks in the morning.
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