Well, here we are at the eve of 2006, not sure if I am happy to see it go, but then I am excited to ring in the new and enthusiastic to make 2007 a success. Dear God bless me with health and bless my family and friends too. To all I wish a Happy and Blessed NEW YEAR!

Charlotte, The Reigning Queen of the South!
All year we have heard about the bubble bursting. It's scary to think that the economy has placed all it's consumer eggs in one basket. A sigh of relieve for us Charlotteans', the real estate market shows no such evidence, here in Charlotte we have not experienced slow downs as compared to the Northeast, California or Florida. Why some area's are seller markets, due to limited inventory of homes.

In Charlotte whole neighborhoods are purchased and are being re-developed, it is a big change in the way they used to look. We only have to look towards our ever changing skyline. Investor and new industries are moving into the area. Baby boomers heading for that retirement ranch are now calling Charlotte home. Why? because it's ideal, mild climate, city sophistication, life-style options; yes it's not so long ago Charlotte was quite a different type of town. We now have hub's in the outer areas (Fort Mill, Tega Cay, Lake Wylie, Ballantyne, Lake Norman, University area), where one can catch a movie, dine on classy cuisine and shop chic boutiques. Our communities are still evolving, some areas are on the fast track and other are trying to play catch-up. What will our city look like in another 10 years?

Who we are?

Has anyone ever looked for relatives of the past. I have and what a treat, I have found folks that I thought would never be possible. Of course our internet is sooo helpful in that; before the internet it was a tedious process and you either had to make a trip to the area you thought your ancestors populated or write to some archiver and wait month for a return. Not any more! It is amazing what you can discover. A great big thank you to those that put this information on the big wide web.

My father had two great uncles immigrate from Germany before world warI, 1911 and 1913 and the stories that were given out thru the decades were flawed. I actually found their passenger records and copies of their WWI draft registration. At that moment I felt connected to them, as if I had met them and they were no longer lost in limbo. That euphoria was quickly squashed when I located one of the missing decendants and talked to him about were his folks came from and that there are many cousins still living in the same place where their great- grandfather was from; or that 10 years ago one of their sisters was still living. He seemed not interested and it goes to show that some sleeping dogs should not be waken. I do hope that I inspired him to think about his lineage and maybe one of these days his children will find the same facination as I have.

Like I said some folks spend years trying to find even a shred of evidence and here this guy was given the information without effort. I have only scrabed the surface I found out that there were two boys in that family and the one had many children so I am once again on a mission to locate them and hope I receive a warmer welcome to my information. Of interesting note... he knew this but is unwilling to share this information.

Our past is our window into the future.....

Growing pains....

What's missing.... Vision?
I live in one of the fastest growing counties in the state, although by profession you might say I contribute to the growing problem. The building boom is now the way of life, totally out of concept with what brought me and many other out into the country several decades long ago .

No longer are drives through small rural roads beautiful and leisurely, gone are fields of soybean and corn, gone are the farms and also gone is the weather beaten wrinkled farmer given you that nod and Hi sign barely lifting his hand from the wheel of that old truck he was driving. It's the way country folks used to greet each other, it did not matter if they knew you. I said used to. Now if you don't drive fast enough someone eats your bumper because they are in a hurry to make the one hour commute into the city. The young people can't make a living farming any longer, they have moved on to factory jobs and others. Who can blame them, it's a hard way to earn a living. So now we are raising a new bumper crop, housing developments were we clear cut the remaining large trees, put them in a chipper and then later replace those once proud and tall hardwoods by spindly small trees that are mere shadows of what once stood.

Progress is good it provides jobs for our children, but it's not good when it spirals out of control. We have small roads that are getting beat up by huge construction trucks hauling equipment and supplies to that new shopping center that is growing out of the once soybean field. Holes that can swallow a car's wheel, roads that were not made to hold heavy loads. Water lines and sewer lines are being put in as an afterthought. A quick patch of a turning lane into a new community, that should keep traffic moving. An infrastructure that is fragile and crackeled like an egg shell, What were they thinking? It will take years to recover, because lack of funding and stressed resources.

Future reports will include fun adventures for the not so adventuresome.