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The Automatic Sprinkler Syndrome

Summer Rain
Summer Rain

Modern life is a mine field of behavioral traps that can turn intelligent humans into people who don’t even understand when it is raining.

While I respect the right of people to waste as much of their money as they want, I find it hard to remain calm when I am walking in the rain and notice someone’s lawn sprinklers running.

Once in a while, everyone goes off on a trip and leaves their sprinklers set to run.  As fate would have it, rain usually comes on days when you are traveling and your sprinklers are set to run.

It is not the unlucky travelers that drive me crazy, it is the folks who are too lazy to turn off their automatic sprinklers after a major rainstorm has passed through our neighborhood.

I often walk by a home where the sprinklers usually run three times a day no matter what the weather is.  The homeowner has drilled his own well and installed his own pump so it is his money.  However, unless I am mistaken he has drilled into the same aquifer that supplies our county with water.  So while he is spending his own money, I would argue that he is wasting “our” water.

I wonder whether the homeowner doesn’t know how to turn off his sprinklers or whether he is just too lazy to do it.  Recently I saw his sprinkler running during a storm that dropped nearly two inches of rain on us in just a few hours.  Even worse his sprinklers were running the next morning after the storm.

The homeowner isn’t alone.  I am surprised by the number of people who either don’t care enough to turn their sprinklers off or just don’t know how to flip the switch.

Did the invention of sprinklers make modern humans unable to understand how to tell if the ground is wet?

It is a little like the problem of  remembering phone numbers that has been brought about by the increasing use of cell phones.  If all your phone numbers are stored in your cell phone instead of your head, there is very little likelihood that you will remember any of the numbers.

Is it a good thing that modern conveniences strip us of some of our skills?  I doubt it.  While I know that there are people who are unable to mow their yards because of physical problems, I have to question if the typical riding lawn mower has been a good thing for modern men.

Once you start using a riding lawn mower it is hard to go back to pushing one.

Between GPS devices that have gradually taken the place of maps and web based driving directions, few young people have the skills to read maps.

Society will continue to hunger for the quick and easy way to get things done.  Unfortunately sometimes the device causes more harm than one might imagine.  I wonder if the folks who have lost the ability to turn off their sprinklers will eventually forget how to use a garden hose?

That is it from the Crystal Coast where summer is in full swing, and our new book, “A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide” is now available.  It is a great way to plan a wonderful family vacation in our Coastal Paradise.

The Neighborhood Table

The Neighborhood Table
The Neighborhood Table

Years ago when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties just outside of Winston-Salem, NC, we managed to get together with friends and/or relatives on a weekly basis.

Often it was under the shade trees at my Aunt Molly’s home in Yadkin County.  In the summer there was watermelon and homemade ice cream.

It was part of life, it was expected, and everyone enjoyed it.  Depending on where we have lived, we have seen varying degrees of this over the years.

When we were living on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, neighbors would drop by regularly.  I often wondered if we got visitors because we were the only ones in the settlement with a private phone line which I had fought hard to get.

Our experiences with a party line in a much more isolated and not so friendly community in Saint Croix Cove, Nova Scotia were not my idea of fun.  It was also a different community.  One which was not nearly so open to outsiders.  Sometimes scenic beauty comes with a price.  While people dropped by then, I am pretty sure it was more of a spying operation then than a friendly visit.   As always there were exceptions like Joe, our sheep farming neighbor, whose visit were all part of just being neighborly.

When we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, we were in a wonderful neighborhood with lots of young children, sidewalks, and an inviting front yard strategically located on a corner.  As a result we often saw our neighbors.  I can even remember a couple of impromptu dinners where we all migrated to the kitchen and called for a pizza.  The neighborhood table ended up in our kitchen.

For some strange reason as we moved back to the states, gatherings all took place on the back decks of homes.  Even in the short time we lived in Columbia, MD, I can remember some nice crab cracking events.  Our house there had come with a board across the deck doors when we bought it.  Decks were optional in Columbia, and since for over half our time in Columbia, we were still paying the mortgage on our Halifax home which took a while to sell, we didn’t get a deck in Columbia until the summer before we moved.

The home we bought in Roanoke, Virginia is on the side of mountain overlooking the Roanoke Valley and downtown Roanoke.  It has a wonderful view and the house came with a huge deck.  In 2000, we did some major remodeling and made a our deck which is pictured above, a much more cozy spot.  It turned out to be a favorite gathering place for our neighborhood friends.  Many evenings were spent discussing our growing children and the issues of importance to the Roanoke Valley.

The sense of intimacy and privacy that we got from our deck was wonderful, but as our children have grown and our neighbors have drifted or moved away, it is now a rare occasion when we get together with friends on the deck. Some of that comes from spending most of our own time on the North Carolina coast where I am happy to report that I enjoy perching on the front porch and receiving visitors.

I often keep track of old friends through a variety of electronic methods from Facebook to LinkedIn and Twitter.  I am old fashioned enough to even use email, the telephone, and even personal visits.  I prefer personal visits, but I will use text messages to communicate with our grown children since that seems to be what they respond to best.

It occurs to me that often the kind of communication that we have on social networking sites is superficial at best.  Some people know how to work it better than others, but usually Facebook is at best a stopgap measure to prevent people you know or might have known from completely disappearing until you really get to visit or talk with them.

This year we have had a couple of long neglected friends come visit with us in North Carolina. I guess all my taunts about warm weather finally pulled them down from Canada.   It was really nice to renew the true personal connection and see how we have all changed. It had been twenty-three years since we had seen one couple and twenty-six years since we had seen the other.

One of the things I like about living in Bluewater Cove near Emerald Isle is that the climate is friendly to people being outside and to having visitors. This year April was a great time to be at the beach.  Even the changing patterns of spring weather didn’t stop the fun and warmth on the Crystal Coast after what was a harsh winter.

Our subdivision  is also a place where people enjoy walking either with a dog, alone, or with a partner.  Then there is the clubhouse with the pool where people love to gather in the summertime.  Still with a much wider span of ages than in our old neighborhood, pulling together a neighborhood table is a little more challenging.

I love to walk over on the Point where the sound, river, and ocean meet, and I do consider the beach part of my neighborhood.  Unfortunately most of the people you see there are strangers.  And even stranger is that many area residents don’t visit the beach as much as you might expect.  I am pretty sure that some residents hardly ever walk the sands over on Emerald Isle.

In talking to some older relatives recently, I found that even they have a hard time getting together with extended  family much less neighbors.  Modern society does a lot to connect us, but at the same time it also isolates us.

In our old farming village of Tay Creek, today’s newspaper came in the mail the next day, there were only two channels on the TV, and there was no Internet.  People got together to find out what was happening.  On our hill in Roanoke, a lot of information was passed about schools and children than never made it to the daily newspaper, and the Internet had yet to become a part of every kitchen. In those days, there were compelling reasons to gather and talk with neighbors.

There still are good reasons to keep working towards a neighborhood table where friends see each other eye to eye and pass on information that might not fit very well on Facebook or Twitter.

I hope to be part of the conversation instead of part of the problem.

What is it with faxes?

I often think of technology as a wave that washes everything before it away.  The reality is a little different.

Years ago when I was working as a higher education rep for Apple Computer, I covered Va. Tech.  One of the tools of my job at that time was a fax machine.  I often had to fill out several bids a day and fax them to the procurement people.  This was in the late eighties.  I would get the bids by mail and have to fax them back.  It was not a lot of fun.

I moved up the ladder at Apple, and I suspect purchasing from the universities also moved beyond paper bids.  When I went to work in real estate, I expected that I would find some technology resistant people.  I had no idea that I was headed for the last stand of the fax machines.

Real estate law does require some type of signature on documents.  There are some acceptable electronic signatures, but most older clients are highly resistant to anything that requires anything but basic computer skills.

The net result is that we often work with contracts which have been faxed multiple times which results in the contracts being almost unreadable.

It is not like there is no technology to help us from this situation. Unfortunately few people make the effort to get away from faxes.  From the beginning of my real estate career, I have been fax resistant.  I have seen clients struggle to get an eighteen page document sent.

So here is how I have been proactively trying to cut down on the number of faxes.  First of all if my client has a computer and not all do, I sent any documents that need to be signed as PDFs with detailed signing instructions.  The real estate software that I use, RealFast, has the ability to convert documents to faxes, but typically I use CutePDF writer on my Windows 7 laptop to turn the forms into PDFs.

I then give my clients the choice of faxing them back to me and then mailing the originals or immediately sending the originals by FedEx.

Once I receive a signed, written and complete contract I convert it to a multiple page PDF.  I have a HP AIO 6180 fax, printer, and scanner.  It is hooked to a Mac running OS X and VueScan.  VueScan has this wonderful option of automatically scanning documents through the document feeder on the HP AIO 6180.  It saves each page as an individual PDF.

Once VueScan is done, I open the first page of the scan using Preview on the Mac.  I save it under an intelligent name and make certain the page sidebar is open.  Then one after another I drag the scanned PDFs in order to the page side bar.

Then I save it, voila I have a multiple page PDF which I send by email to the bank and the law offices.  They greatly appreciate a document that they can actually read.

I have tried eFax, but I like my system better.  I just wish more people would figure out that the fewer faxes we have, the clearer things are in this world.