When Amy and I attended the inaugural Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis in 1994, a NASCAR official arrogantly predicted the race would “be bigger than the Indy 500 in the coming years.” An overflow crowd of more than 300,000 packed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that year. A decade and a half later, empty seats outnumbered those [...]
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Lance Terpenny’s controversial move to the Floyd Town Manager’s job after his ouster from a similar post in Christiansburg adds another player to the county’s growing motorcycle mafia — an increasing group of government officials, business leaders and other prominent citizens who ride. Terpenny not only owns three Harley-Davidsons (two customized Softails and a restored [...]
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In the go-go days earlier in this decade, Smith Mountain Lake stood proud as the poster child for conspicuous economic consumption with million dollar homes, six-figure speedboats and a lavish lifestyle that revolved around good times, easy credit and stretched finances. But the economic recession brought reality to the lifestyle of the not-so-rich and more [...]
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The severe thunderstorms that roared through Floyd County and much of the rest of Southwestern Virginia Thursday didn’t drop that much rain on our property but the howling wind snapped a Poplar in half along our driveway and ripped the inner part of the tree from his bark. The falling core narrowly missed a trailer [...]
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Lance Terpenny, Floyd’s new Town Manager, took an $80,000 pay cut to move from Christiansburg — where the Town Council told him to resign after saying they had “lost confidence” in his ability to serve their needs — but he’s not about to go broke. New details of his severance package from Christiansburg shows he [...]
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After a decade of addiction and dependence on a Blackberry (AKA “Crackberry”), I have broken free of my habit and dumped the phone-cum-email device. For 11 years, I have carried a Blackberry and become dependent on its instant email delivery and ability to communicate from all parts of the globe. No more. It have broken [...]
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With everything that has happened lately, I took a pre-dawn ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway to think and reflect. As daylight and dawn approached, the beauty of our area emerged. This was a grab shot with the Canon G9 camera that I carry in my motorcycle saddlebags. It reminds me that — even in [...]
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Lance Terpenny spent his first day on the job as Floyd’s new town manager Monday. The former Christiansburg administrator moves from managing the third largest incorporated town in Virginia to one of the smallest and takes an $80,000-a-year pay cut. When I drove into town Monday I did not see a “Wall Mart Coming” sign [...]
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Things started going from bad to worse on Tuesday of last week when our refrigerator died, leaving us with a mess of spoiling food. With mine and Amy’s schedule, it was Thursday before we could venture over to C’Burg to look for a replacement fridge. The old one came with the house when we bought [...]
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