10:03 – Barbara and I spent the day yesterday scouting out potential relocation areas. We left at 9:35 a.m. and headed for Sparta, NC, which is about 70 miles and 90 minutes from Winston-Salem, most of it by 2-lane road. We picked up a lot of brochures at the welcome center/Chamber of Commerce, and then spent an hour or so walking around town and then driving around some of the residential areas. The people were universally friendly and there wasn’t an underclass person to be seen. Barbara and I both liked the place and thought it was a suitable place for us to live.
After having lunch at a nice little restaurant, we headed for Jefferson/West Jefferson, which is another 20 miles or so down a two-lane, further away from Winston-Salem, but nearer Boone, NC. We liked that area as well. It’s about twice the size of Sparta, and not quite so “mountain-y”.
Both areas have chain businesses like supermarkets, auto parts stores, drugstores, and so on, but Jefferson/West Jefferson has more of them than Sparta. J/WJ also has natural gas service to many areas, fiber-optic broadband in and immediately outside town, and other amenities that Sparta doesn’t offer. Both have decent medical care, and neither has any significant underclass population.
One thing that surprised me was the amount of agriculture. I was expecting Christmas tree farms, chicken factories, fruit orchards, wineries, and not much else, but there’s a great deal of general agriculture. Just driving along main roads, we saw hundreds of dairy and beef cattle and huge fields of general crops. West Jefferson even has a roofed structure set aside for a farmers’ market, which runs every Saturday April through November. Despite being in the mountains, this area can obviously feed itself, if worse ever comes to horrible.
Basically, these areas, particularly J/WJ, provide amenities and resources similar to Winston-Salem, but on a smaller scale. I think these areas suit both Barbara and me. I’ll do a great deal more exploration on line, and I’m sure we’ll be making more trips up to check things out further. We want this to be our last move, so we need to be sure before we jump. At some point, we’ll probably take a week off and rent a place up there as a final check. When we’re sure, we’ll buy a home and some property and move up there.
Outstanding!
Sounds like a pretty good plan.
Sunny and blue skies today and it looks we’re heading into the 70s for the next few days; Spring may be here at last, though we’ve been dumped on with snow and ice in May before more than once.
Off to the dump run and out to lunch with Mrs. OFD who got back around midnight from NC and has to leave tomorrow at O-Dark-Thirty for Wichita Falls, TX. Neither one of us is happy about that.
I’m on a 5:30am flight Monday to Milwaukee to meet MrsAtoz to help on gigs in WI and IA. I’m getting to hate flying these days. All I did my last years in the Army was fly all over the US, Germany and Korea.
Hahaha….my last six months in the AF was flying all over SEA, which sucked rocks. And my last ride in a plane at all was over 20 years ago, in 1994, to and from Sanibel Island, FL with first wife. That also sucked.
I should have added I wasn’t at the controls, just in the back of airliners. Eww.
“Your PBX has been hacked!”
http://www.cringely.com/2015/05/02/your-pbx-has-been-hacked/
“We’ve lost control of our phone network. I’m not lobbying here for a return to the AT&T monopoly of pre-1983, but what we have now is not safe. Haven’t you noticed the uptick in sales calls to your number that you thought was on the National Do Not Call Registry? That registry, and the law that created it, are no longer enforceable. The bad guys won but nobody told us. They are operating from overseas and can’t be traced. If they steal our money it can’t be traced, either.”
Yup, we got our office PDX hacked last year. Now we have passwords on everything. We did not have passwords before the hack.
One thing that surprised me was the amount of agriculture. I was expecting Christmas tree farms, chicken factories, fruit orchards, wineries, and not much else, but there’s a great deal of general agriculture. Just driving along main roads, we saw hundreds of dairy and beef cattle and huge fields of general crops. West Jefferson even has a roofed structure set aside for a farmers’ market, which runs every Saturday April through November. Despite being in the mountains, this area can obviously feed itself, if worse ever comes to horrible.
Land and plenty of water mean agriculture. Even though only one or two percent of the population is still involved in it, most land that qualifies is being farmed. New York State scares me since you have to file an environmental impact statement to farm there nowadays. That is absolutely freaking crazy.
Are you going to checkout the medical services in the area? Is there a hospital there that you would trust if you have heart problems or get cancer?
Yes, there are good regional hospitals in both Sparta and Jefferson/West Jefferson.
Is there a hospital there that you would trust if you have heart problems or get cancer?
For cancer, unless you need SOTA treatment (advanced chemo or radiation), which is probably only available in one or two places per average state, you can be fine in a regional hospital. It’s pretty much get tested to see what kind you have, then look up the treatment.
For heart surgery, the key is how many cases they do each week. If they only do a few per week, go elsewhere. There is significant improvement in outcomes if the entire team (surgeon, anesthesia, nurses, CCU staff, etc.) is not only experienced but gets frequent practice. IIRC, it’s mortality rates that 50%+ lower. We’re lucky here in Houston to be on the cutting edge of both areas. My mom had a procedure a week ago that is only done in a handful of places in the US (a Transfemoral Aortic Valve Replacement – imagine a stent that can put a new heart valve in place).
Just checked – each of the towns has one hospital, neither does hearts.
“We’re lucky here in Houston to be on the cutting edge of both areas.”
Yeah, but you live in Houston.
The Houston metro statistical area would not be my first or even my 50th choice of a place to ride out the coming storms.
As for surgical procedures, I just saw an email today from Gary North’s site about the increasing squeeze on doctors and the rise of market pricing and bidding for their services on e-Bay-like sites. Gigantic cost savings, apparently. Instead of $80,000, how about $13,000? Plus the increase in Murkans and Euros traveling to places like Bangkok to have stuff done, by eminently qualified MD’s and nurses who are actually polite and nice to them and treat them very well.
OFD, I’ll vouch for your claim re surgical procedures.
Ray Thompson has been bugging me for years to get cataract surgery, not only because of cataracts but extreme myopia.
So I saw the optometrist the other day for what I described as “the last set of glasses before I get “it” done. After confirming my cataracts were getting pretty bad, he heartily agreed with Ray and said, “Just do it. You’ll wish you’d done it years ago.”
So… I go looking online for prices here in Seattle. Guess what? Couldn’t find anything beyond vague descriptions ranging from $800 to $3500 per eye. Once the pricing for procedures opens up, there’s going to be a sea change in medical care. Insurance companies, beware!
Luckily, I know a few eye hospitals in India, so will have them done there and visit all my friends, too. The only thing you have to watch out for when travelling overseas are the bacteria. Your body gets used to certain bacteria and strains, and unless your immune system is equipped to deal with the little buggers, it can cause problems. Spend a few weeks there first — whether it’s eye surgery or hip replacement, or bunion removal. Let your body adjust. Eat local foods, expose yourself to the biosphere, and let nature do its thing. Sure, there are antibiotics, but after a few million years of evolution I think the human body knows more than big pharma.
There is definitely something screwed up in the health-care market – here as well as there. My little thrombosis adventure at the end of last year led to all sorts of follow-up tests this year. The doc just orders them off a menu, but the menu has no prices on it. Of course, when it’s your health, you don’t terribly care either, but price never even enters the discussion, and that is definitely wrong.
Now I’ve used up my deductible for this year already, so anything else this year would be fully paid. Mind, I hope there is nothing else, but a doctor acquaintance of mine said that this is really a problem – the last half or third of the year, he is always swamped by people who don’t need to be there – but they’re past their deductible, and have no disincentive not to visit the doc with every little sniffle.
I may visit the sites that Dr. North listed just to see what’s going on with them and maybe going prices for cataracts and suchlike; Mrs. OFD probably needs the surgery pretty soon.
About to take her to the airport for the flight to Dallas and then she has to drive three hours to Wichita Falls today. It’s 04:30 here and pretty dahk, in the high fotties….
but they’re past their deductible, and have no disincentive not to visit the doc with every little sniffle
I have done that myself. I needed a couple items done that were not critical. Waited until my wife had her hip replacement which exhausted not only my deductible but also my maximum out of pocket. What I had done cost me nothing.
I don’t run to the doctor for just any sniffle. In this case I used my insurance wisely. My deductible is currently $5,000 and maximum out of pocket is $10,000.
I know some people that get welfare and they go to the hospital five or six times a month because their child has the sniffles. Cost to welfare is about $800 which the rest of us are paying. These people have no doctor because a doctor won’t deal with the people as patients. These people are truly leaches without any concern about cost.
Plus the increase in Murkans and Euros traveling to places like Bangkok to have stuff done, by eminently qualified MD’s and nurses who are actually polite and nice to them and treat them very well.
Be careful of such stories. A reporter looked into them and found that almost all were sourced from one individual. Also, the blood supply overseas (even in the EU) is …. questionable at best.
Gigantic cost savings, apparently. Instead of $80,000, how about $13,000?
Damn few surgeries are going to have a surgical fee that high. The bigger expense is the hospital stay and all the other fees.
Couldn’t find anything beyond vague descriptions ranging from $800 to $3500 per eye.
The cost varies all over the place for a couple of reasons:
– the type of lens being put in. There are several choices and they have varying costs. (My mom opted for a more expensive lens and it cost her an additional $750 out of pocket per eye, IIRC.)
– the risk of doing the procedure can involve extra cost. If you are in poor health and need monitored sedation, it may need to be done in an outpatient surgical center and that costs more.
So it’s like asking the price of a steak dinner. $20 at Outback for a generic steak, $100 at a high-end steakhouse for a dry aged choice ribeye.
“The Houston metro statistical area would not be my first or even my 50th choice of a place to ride out the coming storms. ”
Ah, but TEXAS is. If anyone has a chance of seceding, or acting as the functional equivalent, it’s Texas. We export food, energy (raw and refined), and goods. We have manufacturing. We control ports. We are a transportation nexus. We have a traditional belief system that includes the idea of our independence and ‘specialness’. We have a military, including air, ground, and sea power. We are big enough and strong enough to do our own thing if we had to.
What we don’t have is control over our borders. Part of that is Fed interference. Comes the shooting war, and we WILL stop immigration from the south. Tom Kratman takes a good look at secession in his book A State of Disobedience . We could certainly control cities, west Texas might be impossible. And if we went, some of the surrounding states would go too, and their borders might be a little easier to defend. It wouldn’t take much to close the interstate highways at border checkpoints. Some slick social engineering along the lines of convincing the liberal states to “just let the hick-billys go” shouldn’t be too hard. They already think they could do without us.
I’ll take my chances in TX. It just might be a little further out from Houston 🙂
nick
Good points, but I am skeptical about controlling the big cities, the border, and the flood of incoming immigrants.
I have one of my intel operators down there right now (Mrs. OFD); she’s driving from Dallas to Wichita Falls this afternoon. I asked her to keep eyes and ears open for any unusual stuff going on, and esp. anything to do with “Jade Helm.”
Our new governor called out the National Guard to watch the “Jade Helm” troops. I know that he is doing ok since the Houston Chronicle called him a radical paranoid in today’s paper.
That drive from DFW to Wichita Falls is awful boring. Or at least it was 20+ years ago. I doubt that it has changed very much.
BTW Nick, Bastrop is just a little too close to Austin for me. You might look at Smithville, El Campo, etc. I’ve heard that there are a lot of nice people out in La Grange. Or maybe there are a lot of nice girls in La Grange.
“And I hear it’s tight most ev’ry night,
but now I might be mistaken.”