Welcome

March 5, 2011

Blog 1 is now underway. I have wanted to do one of these for a long time but never really thought about what I should write. A few of my closest friends know that I enjoy the medium of writing. I enjoy the musings and fiction of others to occasionally writing my own. Up until now, I have limited my writings to things revolved around my profession: real estate valuation. Several opinion pieces are available over at www.appraisalscoop.com.

I hope that the blog page will intrigue a few folks to think, even if it requires you to do so outside of your comfort zone. I find that most people cannot do this. They are so set in the trappings of their upbringing and reasoning that few seldom break free to have thoughts of their own. We are all guilty of this, me included.

I am the product of the parts that combined to make my whole. Like most folks, my parents had the biggest influence on my upbringing. Their decisions to where we would live, and how we would live have resulted in what I am now. I am truly the product of the village that I am from which I hail. Sometimes, I am grateful for it, and sometimes I feel as if it were a village of fools.

My mother is from rural North Carolina. She graduated from a small public high school between what is now Fayetteville and Wilmington. Her parents were farmers. She was and is a devout southern Christian woman. She had four children from a previous marriage, and then met my father and had me. I had the experience of being an only child, but also a sense of family albeit sometimes it was not a good sense. Her belief system and love of family regardless of their deserving it or not, ha shaped me.

My father is from Little Washington, VA. He is also a product of a rural community. My father was not a religious man, was lover of Ronald Regan, and a proud graduate of 8^th grade. I have siblings that see my father as a failure, perhaps he was with them. He was not with me. He put me before himself after my birth, actually, after he stopped drinking when I was a small child. He poured into me things that have been critical in my development.

One thing many of you will see in the blogs that will come is that I am an armchair politician, a self-depreciating humorist, and I have a fierce love or dislike of all things. There is little in my life that exists in the gray mist, but everything usually falls into my black and white compartmentalization that is my perspective.