What a Difference the Economy Makes

By Deray

Jul

12

Summertime is in full swing but you can hardly tell from the traffic this year. Our little seaside town is usually thronged with people in July to the point that many locals can’t wait for winter when most tourists and visitors return home and they can once again go to the grocery store without fighting traffic jams. Not this year…. or last. As one downtown store after another closes it’s doors, it seems to be bringing back the friendly welcome that once made Southport famous. Visitors are again recognized for the value they bring to a place whose only industry, fishing, is dead…… and where nothing is made…… but babies.
The town fathers have certainly done their part by selling out most of our picturesque waterfront for a quick buck to a handful of carpetbagging swindlers who left nothing but cheap condos, vacant lots and eyesores in their wake. Thank God they couldn’t develop the water!
But wait…… Now the state Ports Authority has purchased 600 acres on the water and announced plans to build a super port to rival any other on the East coast. They just blandly announced that it was going to happen without the slightest consideration of how the people who live here might feel about it. Multiple invitations were extended to them to come and present their side of the issue to the folks here. All were refused and the head man went so far as to refer to the local population as “a bunch of transplants and know nothings.”
BAD mistake. He brought together the community in force. One group in particular, “No Port Southport” was successful enough to galvanize citizens and was even awarded several grants to fund their resistance. Their barrage on city hall was so relentless even our beloved city fathers stopped throwing their hats in the air, slammed on the brakes, and prudently reversed their formal approval into formal opposition. Better to wait for another chance to enrich themselves with something they can sneak by the rabble than to be tarred and feathered for being too blatant. I never said they were stupid.…just dishonest and greedy.

Yes, we had not one, but two business that were shut down by the lousy economy and the idiots who have trashed our town. Our downtown gallery and our little deli. Oh well, water over the dam. So now let’s look on the bright side.

Our nationwide wholesale business, which has always provided the bulk of our income, is booming. Our neighbors who had drifted apart have become united (well..almost) by a common cause and visitors are feeling more welcome again. We’ve gained almost as much as we have lost.

Spring… the season of renewal.

By Deray

Mar

24

It’s official. It is now spring, and the equinox has passed. The days are now longer than the nights and that pair of heavy gloves we wore on morning walks can put in storage. We still get waves of chilly weather, but in between have days when the jacket stays in the closet as the warm sunlight and mild breeze caress bare skin that has felt neither for months. The daffodils nod in the same breeze and the birds sing their courtship songs. And the smell! The fragrance of spring is a welcome respite to noses that have been too cold to notice any outdoor aromas since November.

Yet these are only the physical manifestations of the season. There are deeper psychological responses we almost universally recognize as occurring within ourselves. A sense of relief that the dreary winter is winding down…. a sense  of purpose….a sense of hope….a sense of renewal. It’s been a long, cold winter for most of us. Let’s make the most of this spring.

Murphy’s Law

By Deray

Feb

28

Okay, we know we haven’t kept to our resolution to post at least once a week, but we have been reintroduced to the joys of  Murphy’s Law. i.e.- Nothing is as easy as it looks, everything takes longer than you think, anything that can go wrong will at the worst possible time, etc.   Let us explain.

We were recently invited to share the facility of a much better established and more well known gallery than our own. One look at the overhead cost of maintaining our independent gallery settled the matter. We are moving up. A gift from Heaven!

The only problem here was D. Once everything is packed, he’ll lift carry and load like a work horse, but the picking, sorting and packing process brings out the absolute worst in him. First he whines, then gets grumpy, and finally starts ranting about shovels, wheelbarrows and landfills.

Very unpleasant. Kendall is understandably put off by this nonsense and banishes him from the gallery until she needs nothing but brute strength.

D. thinks, “Great! This will give me a chance to set up the dream website I’ve always wanted.” and gets right to work on it. Now he had played around with simple sites and software and figured it would be a snap. But he grossly underestimated the chasm that exists between a simple information site and an e-commerce site.

Setting up the merchant account, merchant gateway, and shopping cart were bad enough (each as simple in themselves as mastering quantum mechanics), but then getting all of them to work together…….. Oh Boy! He’s still struggling, as you can tell from the rest of this site.

Here’s where Murphy comes in. In the middle of all this a very nasty virus attacked his computer causing it (and him) to go completely berserk. It crashed repeatedly, destroying data every time, and wiping out almost everything he had done to that point.

Meanwhile, steady, solid Kendall continued to toil away at the gallery, bringing home load after load of stuff that was not going to the new location and (temporarily, we hope!) piling it in the den, kitchen, dining room, living room, and spare bedroom until our normally lovely home looks like a flea market that has been hit by a hurricane!

How did our little gallery (under 2000 square feet) hold so much stuff? Especially when over half of it went to the new location! It defies the laws of physics.

Not to be distracted by such details, D. finally tracked down and joyfully  murdered the nasty bug, then went to work restoring files and generally repairing the damage. Things were looking up!

Back to Murphy….People move here in droves because of our mild climate and benign winters. Local tradition states that we get to see a brief dusting of snow about every seven years. This must have been our year, because just as D. was getting his momentum (and sanity!) back and Kendall was finally ready to start moving in earnest…it began to snow.

Not a nice, fluffy, dry snow, but heavy, wet sticky snow, the kind that breaks large limbs off trees and turns power lines into snakes in the road. Our local power grid (personally installed by Thomas Edison and never updated since) collapsed.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the power went out, and stayed out. The chilly house we woke to felt like a freezer by noon.  We couldn’t put enough clothes on. Now before somebody starts calling us crybabies, let’s make something clear. We’re southerners, born and bred.  When it gets below fifty degrees, we dress like eskimos and are still miserable. It’s our thin blood. We can’t help it.

Even though D. managed to make some substandard coffee on the propane grill, we started  getting pretty hungry by early afternoon.  Having no idea when power would be restored, we didn’t want to open the refrigerator and had no way to cook anyway (except for the grill, but it was too darned cold out there!) so we drove to find a restaurant that still had power and found one. The food was pretty good, but the heat was the most memorable part of the meal.

The heat was, unfortunately, short lived. Did we mention that the heater in our van doesn’t work? It quit a couple of years ago and we never bothered getting it fixed because we rarely drive far enough for it to warm up anyway, and again, it rarely gets cold enough here to really need it.

So we were well cooled before walking into a frigid house. The power came on late in the day, but it took us two days to thaw out.

And those are just a couple of reasons we got behind on our blog.

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