Posted on by Anne

Civic duty

Saturday was neighborhood clean-up day!

We moved to SW Virginia from the much more densely-populated northern part of our state, so our neighborhood looks a lot different.

Here’s the old neighborhood.
Our new-ish neighborhood has two streets and they both look kind of like this.

Even our small corner of Wirtz has a property-owners association, though. When we first moved here, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that we didn’t engage with it very much, but as Covid has lifted and folks have started meeting again, I’ve been trying to get out and take part in neighborhood events.

This includes cleaning up the neighborhood common area.

Since we live on a lake, our common area comprises a community dock, a boat ramp, and a steep road that extends down to those facilities. They needed some tidying, so I grabbed my garden gloves and boots, and headed over.

I was joined by Bruce, our POA president, along with Mark, Mark, Curt, and Bob. All very nice guys. All of whom rolled up in golf carts (Jim and I do not have a golf cart or ATV, which puts us in the minority among our Franklin County neighbors). Curt unloaded sort of a chain saw on a stick (I knew someone with a chain saw would show up — I’d never owned a chain saw until we moved here, but that was one of the first pieces of equipment that Jim made sure we had) (there are a lot of trees and branches that fall into local roads and I’ll tell you what, these folks and their chain saws are unparalleled in getting those impediments out of there). My job was to follow Curt down the driveway as he trimmed the trees and throw the branches and foliage deeper into the woods.

I tossed foliage for about an hour and got a nice workout and also dirty while the gents did the real dirty work with a drainage ditch, until Bruce announced we were mission accomplished. I wandered home, cleaned up, then headed into Roanoke for my Saturday chores (it was National Independent Bookstore Day, and the cupcakes at Book No Further were not going to eat themselves, after all).

As I drove out of the neighborhood, I saw the clean-up crew cruising through like a small non-political golf cart parade, and I know our neighborhood is in good hands.

Golf carts, mission-ready. Note the newly-cleaned branches, please.
Posted on by Anne · 2 Comments

The slowest race you’ll ever see

Last Saturday, the Blue Ridge Marathon happened in Roanoke (along with a half marathon and 10K). This race has more than 7,400 feet of elevation change and the series is billed as the toughest road races in America. Even in my brief but fervent running days, I never dared to attempt it!

But…

Back in January, Roanoke Parks and Recreation offered a 100-miles-in-100-days program, where you could sign up to walk an average of one mile per day for a couple of months. Much more my speed! Even better, taking part in the program gave you free registration in the Blue Ridge Marathon Sunday Slow-K, an intentionally relaxed 5K scheduled for the day after the longer races. Now we’re talking.

The Saturday races were beset with really horrendous, scary thunderstorms, but Sunday dawned crisp and clear. I made my way into town, easily nabbed a parking spot, and made it over to the starting line in time to watch the pre-race goat yoga.

This is my official race mug. The feisty goats were head butting each other and running into yogis, so coffee was the better call here.

One of the awesome things about this race was that each participant received a mug full of coffee from Roasters Next Door or Sweet Donkey, two delightful Roanoke coffeeshops. Oh, and a Krispy Kreme donut.

Randy Cooper, one of the nicest folks you’ll ever meet, was bringing coffee goodness to the people!

There were a host of vendors, too. I visited with the Radford University Ceramics Guild, where I bought another mug, and the Self Love ladies, who create natural beauty products over in Rocky Mount. I enjoyed my donut. I passed on the mimosas. I complemented people on their dogs. It was a great morning, even before the race started!

That blue mug in the center has a new home. On my desk.
I met local celebrities John and Sharon — John’s Instagram, HungryAsianRke, deliciously covers the food scene all around the southeast. They were really great folks!

Shortly after 9, the race director kicked off the race with a ceremonial donut bite, and everyone moseyed out along the Roanoke Greenway.

The starting line. Note that no one is piled up itching to start because we were eating donuts. And the mountain in the background was part of the BRM, but not the Slow-K.
Off we go!

There was a prize for the last finisher, so everyone was pretty intentional about their relaxed pace. I jogged a little, but mostly walked because I was carrying my bag of two mugs and the pineapple-scented body butter I picked up from the Self Love ladies.

Along the way I got to chat with the guy fishing in the Roanoke River, and to admire the folks who were out collecting litter along the path (some of them in waders so they could pick up stuff along the river line). Unlike the routes for the other BRM races, this one was relatively flat and it made for a pleasant stroll. And gave me a lovely morning for planning the group I want to gather to do this next year.

Thanks, Roanoke Parks and Rec!

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Late to the (Covid) party

I started this blog to write about my new experiences living down here in southwest Virginia. Well, on Wednesday I had the new experience of testing positive for Covid.

I dodged that stuff for three years! I’ve gotten every shot and booster I could get my hands on. I even kind of wondered if I was possibly Covid-proof, like one of my friends at work (his story is actually kind of amazing).

But alas, no. I started feeling run down on Tuesday, with a scratchy throat that got worse as the day went on. I woke up a little stuffy on Wednesday, and chalked it up to a cold, until I heard the radio news saying that Covid cases were up in Roanoke. And surprise, surprise! I got those dreaded double lines.

I have a mild case, where it has just felt like a doozy of a cold for the last couple of days. And as I write this on Saturday, I’m feeling much better and very, very lucky. I’ve got a nice set-up in the basement to avoid infecting Jim, and the cats LOVE Camp Covid.

This is not so bad

And the benefit of having it this late is that everyone knows what I’m going through. It could be much, much worse.

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A fresh new year

The first morning of 2023 dawned a little bit misty over Smith Mountain Lake, and it’s always a good look.

This mist wasn’t so cute last night, though. It derailed our family’s flight into Roanoke’s tiny airport, so much so that our rattled American Airlines flight crew diverted the plane full of rattled passengers to Richmond, Virginia, which is three hours down the road. After some back and forth and a hasty reboarding, the whole thing was canceled.

This is not a New Years Eve hot spot

Instead of decamping to a hotel to try again this morning, the Reynolds crew was rescued by the kind folks at Enterprise Rent-a-Car: we piled in a Camry and drove home, arriving about an hour and a half into the New Year.

On the bright side: we did NOT wake up with hangovers this morning.

And seriously, it’s hard to complain, because we were coming from an amazing destination. Jim and I had enticed our grown-up kids to spend the week after Christmas with us on a trip to Cancun, Mexico.

A very nice sunrise from last week

I took a trip to Cancun back in 1992, right after I’d started my first grown-up job. One of my college friends had just graduated from business school, and she and four friends were going to Cancun to celebrate. My buddy invited me along. While waiting for out taxi to the hotel, one of the friends started talking enthusiastically about playing pinochle during the trip. Trying to be a good sport, I enthusiastically said that I’d love to learn how to play.

“It’s a four-person game,” she replied coolly. And that was just about how the rest of the trip went.

But that was then, this was now. This time around, we absolutely delighted in spending time with the grown-up kids.

And Cancun was lovely. We stayed at the Wyndham Alltra Cancun, an establishment that probably has the nicest people in the whole field of hospitality working for it.

The passageway to our rooms. And also the hot tub

So, lessons for the new year: travel companions make all the difference, a Plan B can save the day, and fog looks a whole lot better in daytime than in the dark.

Happy New Year (and Feliz Año)!

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Breakfast in the Country

Since it’s Friday, I decided to treat myself to a fancy, store-bought cup of coffee this morning. As I might have mentioned, our nearest Starbuck’s is 35 minutes away in Vinton (at least until they finish the much-anticipated store in Rocky Mount, bringing that classic cup 15 minutes closer!), and the drive-through at our nearest shop had a line, so I visited the fine folks at the Smith Mountain Lake Coffee House, where I decamp when our home wifi is iffy. After having lived here for more than four years, I shouldn’t be so surprised at the absolute quiet of the post-summer season here at the lake, but the contrast is pretty stark at the Coffee House, which is really hopping from May – September. More dark roast for me, I guess…

Driving home, too, I saw a welcome sight: it’s going to be a bagel day tomorrow! For all the New Yorkers we have living around here, you couldn’t get a good bagel and it was a darned shame. Until this summer. The Bagel & I is a new-ish bagel shop up in Lynchburg, and hallelujah, they bring a pop-up to the lake on Saturdays! These folks are super nice and the bagels are extremely delicious. They’re really popular; on any given Saturday, you can see a line form outside their tent. And it looks like they’re adding a Friday bagel day to their line up this week.

See you in the morning, bagel friends!

Tomorrow’s breakfast is sorted. Hope you have a great weekend!

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The right place, the very wrong time

Jim and I took a road trip last weekend to visit our boy in Lexington, Kentucky.

We love Lexington but don’t love the journey there from our home in SW Virginia. It’s a long haul up I-77 in West Virginia. Don’t get me wrong, the highway is a smooth conduit that connects Rt. 460 in Giles County, VA, to Charleston, WV, where we catch I-64 west out to the Lex. The problem is, all the trucks love it, too. So this time we thought we’d mix it up.

Google Maps option #2 took us deeper into the western tip of Virginia to the (beautiful) town of Abingdon, at which point we turned hard right and headed straight into southeastern Kentucky, with no venture into West Virginia at all. We were looking for mountain vistas, smaller roads, and fewer 18-wheelers.

Southeastern Kentucky is famous for its coal mines; I read that coal has been mined there since 1790. But on Thursday, July 28, the day of our trip, it became famous for flooding. Days of unprecedented, powerful rainfall brought devastating floods that wiped out houses, roads, bridges, and at the time of this writing, has killed 28 people. We didn’t see that news early Thursday morning as we set out. We hauled down I-81, stopped for coffee in Abingdon, turned right, and headed up over the mountains.

The views over Clinch Mountain were stunning. As we crossed into Kentucky, we could see waterfalls on the towering stone walls that border northbound route 23. But as we turned west onto 119, we started noticing the water in the creek next to the highway was very, very active. Churning and brown. Then we went through a town and saw folks in camo who were clearly National Guard, and not hunters.

Not long after that, the traffic stopped. The bridge on 119 had washed out. Like our fellow drivers, we turned around.

I was navigating, and at this point, I didn’t want to completely retrace our steps, but instead tried to find an alternate route north, along those picturesque mountain roads. This was the wrong choice.

We muddled north; every road seemed to follow an overflowing creek and we started seeing houses and bridges in ruins. Mud and water filled yards. At one house a car was wedged up against the front porch like it had been thrown there by a huge, angry toddler. We drove through the town of Fleming-Neon, whose Main Street was under water; we followed a side street with a stream of pick-up trucks and ATVs (y’all, so many ATVs) to get to the road on the other end of town. That road was blocked by a mudslide.

For two hours we drove back and forth like a rat in a maze, trying multiple routes that turned out to be blocked, before we finally worked our way back to a clean highway. We drove through the branches of trees that had fallen across roads, and skirted blacktop that was cracking because the dirt underneath it was washing away. We drove through water that was deep enough that we could see that other cars had been swept out of their path (by the time we got there, it had receded: “If that Subaru can do it, we can, too”).

It was a disaster. We had no business being there.

We should have backtracked immediately at the first closed road. We easily could have been stuck in Pike County. And you know what? We would have been stupid tourists draining the resources of an area that already has plenty of stress of its own. We found ourselves in a natural disaster and I thought I could be clever and find a work-around on mountain roads that I do not know. Jim’s driving got us out of that mess. And I hope I’ve learned my lesson that I need to respect bad situations a lot better.

Now I sit here safe and dry at home, fully knowing that our experience is nothing compared to what these folks will be dealing with for the next few years, at least. If you are able to donate to help, Kentucky’s Governor Beshear’s office has set up a site where you can do so. It only takes a minute. I’ve never seen any situation like what we saw on Thursday and hope you never do, either.

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The beginning of big things

We had the excellent experience last weekend of going to our nephew’s high school graduation. It is more fun going to a beloved nephew’s event because as an aunt and uncle, Jim and I can enjoy being supporting characters. Also, we didn’t have to put together the post-graduation brunch.

Our nephew went to a very large high school up in Northern Virginia. Like many local high schools, his commencement exercises were held in the arena located at the university where I work, so it felt a little bit like deja vu from a couple of weeks ago.

I found a large person to sit behind

The ceremony itself was well organized. There was an interesting speech from a member of the school’s security team (“I didn’t know he ever said anything other than ‘Why aren’t you in class?'” remarked Nephew later), and some sincere reminiscences from one of the graduates. As all 680 graduates made their way across the stage, I had time to think about the work that goes into an event like this, as the school tries to balance the students’ (and parents’) desire to get that diploma and get out of there with the need for some solemnity to make the event meaningful. By the time they’d gotten to the second bank of students, some in the stands were leaving their seats and coming back with popcorn.

Afterwards, my sister and brother-in-law hosted the family at their house, and visiting with those folks was obviously the best part of the day.

Nephew is a bit younger than our two kids and the day felt like we were saying goodbye to the kid part of our lives. But despite being (typically) Anne-nostalgic for some of those memories, it really does feel like a commencement. That guy will soon be off to a large university with large adventures ahead. I can’t wait to see where it takes him.

Posted on by Anne · 2 Comments

We’re doing our best

I’ve written here before about running out of words for the past year or so. Not knowing what to write, and even wondering how much the world needs my voice, given all of the people who need to be heard, seen, understood.

The view this morning from my favorite construction site.

That’s a thought that has been poking me as we start 2022’s Pride Month. At my day job, I had the opportunity to write about my university’s Lavender and Women and Gender Studies Graduation, which is an opportunity for the university’s LGBTQ+ community, allies, and the Women and Gender Studies program (which supports LGBTQ+ resources at our school) to celebrate as the the university prepares for commencement exercises. A chance for a group of people to rejoice in the loving community that they themselves fostered during their college years, a haven for when they might have felt marginalized or ignored by the larger university environment.

The article was a chance for me to talk with a number of the really incredible people who support the community at our university. They are people full of kindness, honor, and respect, and they helped me — I hope — to impart that same kindness, honor, and respect in the folks I wrote about.

And that right there is why I’m writing this today, nudged further along by the poke I got from the blog post of a terrific writer I admire, Melissa Ostrum, who wrote today about why she writes. What resonated with me was the discovery of “surprises, epiphanies, and keenly felt feelings” that came up when she put words to paper (or computer screen).

We’re living in interesting times, for sure, with bad news all around us, people in dire straits all around the world, and friends saying things in social media that oh, I didn’t like to know about them. What can one middle-age lady living in the country say that has a bearing on any of that?

I’m not sure, but I am over here doing the best I can, and I bet you are, too.

Posted on by Anne

Not Wordle

When I start to type “Wordle” into my browser, the predictive text sends me to “WordPress” instead, and many times, I’ve thought, whoa, I should write a blog post! But then I override the suggestion and go to Wordle instead.

And the funny thing is, I really don’t like Wordle. Despite the fact that I know a handful of five letter words, I find this game really frustrating and immediately get that panicky feeling that I am wasting time I should be spending with work. Or on anything else. I know I’m likely in the minority here, but there you go.

So if I am saving all this Wordle time, how have I been spending it? Good question.

Today’s Daily Stoic email asked very much the same question, but in terms of the two years we’ve been living with the pandemic. Do you have any W’s? or big L’s? Some definite food for thought, but I’m going to count this blog post as a W.

Posted on by Anne · 5 Comments

Spicing up a quiet week

The week between Christmas and New Year is probably my favorite sneaky week of the year. It’s sneaky because I forget how much I like it until it rolls around again, all quiet and peaceful after the frenzy of trying to get ready for the holiday and the big day itself. I’m doubly fortunate because my employer, a university, closes its administrative offices for two weeks surrounding Christmas, so I can loaf almost guilt-free.

This year is quiet, too, because our New Yorker daughter, who spent a nice long break with us last year, realized that New Year’s Eve in the city was going to be more fun than New Year’s Eve in Franklin County. (Can’t blame her for that.) Her younger brother, our Kentuckian son, is going to mosey back to Lexington early next week.

It’s so quiet that I almost welcomed the tooth I broke last week that occasioned a trip to the dentist this morning.

We have a good dentist, but he’s a solid 45 minutes away, on the other side of Roanoke. I saw him at the beginning of December for my regular check-up, which was uneventful except for Tammy the hygienist loudly announcing, “She’s doing MUCH BETTER on her flossing this time, Dr. ______,” when Dr. ________ came in to poke around my teeth. That’s judgy, Tammy. There is nothing wrong with my flossing, nor was there anything (all that) wrong back in June.

This visit was uneventful, too, with just a little bit of filing on the chipped corner of the rebellious tooth. I was out of the office with plenty of time to stop in to Target, Barrel Chest, and Starbuck’s (which are also 45 minutes from our house) and home before the Lexingtonian woke up.

And all off the clock.

Back to slowly dismantling Christmas. See you next year, Hohoho mugs!