Still here

A view of the Oregon Inlet Coast Guard Station.

This seems to be the slow time for local blogs. OBR and Ronnie Roach's Outer Banks Real Estate have been moribund and I have been downright lazy about posting. Thanks to those who have sent regards.
Mostly I have been taking pictures and working on several public service projects including the Outer Banks Community Development Corp. and bringing some nonprofit training classes to the Outer Banks. Going to the beach, doing some cheap beach reading and messing with pictures can fill a pretty good day.
The best way to see my photos is the Flickr slideshow.
A few thoughts:
National Politics: How desperate is John McCain? His recent video attacks on Obama have the eerie resemblance to Bush's attacks on him before the SC primary a few years back. Going negative this early just makes McCain look like the tired old-line politician he really is. I have to believe that the American public is smarter than that.
ORV in CHNS - good to see Cape Point open but the latest violation in the Salvo area sounds really violent. Why run over an egg unless you are trying to trigger a reaction. Don't count on the bill overturning the consent decree going very far. Even if it makes it out of the Senate (some chance) It will go nowhere in the House. Walter Jones doesn't have the clout to get it passed nor does he have enough friends on either side of the aisle to move it out of committee much less pass it.
It hurt to hear the NPS say they supported the consent decree, one more sign that it represents to minimum restriction that will come from neg-reg.
Real Estate - Ronnie Roach posted the truth about local real estate sales. For a little perspective read the article in Vanity Fair about the market in the Hamptons on Long Island. The very high end (over $25 mil) remains strong but the middle market ($2-$20 mil is very soft). Here is what they market was like.

In hindsight, which is the only sight there is in real estate, the giddy Hamptons market hit its peak three years ago this month. That was when any fool who’d paid $2 million for a house a few years before was doubling or tripling his money. Every carpenter and electrician was a spec-house builder, and all their wives were brokers, and the similarity to shoeshine boys trading stock tips in 1929 was lost on all. As sales flattened through 2006 and 2007 for houses in the $1-million-to-$9-million range—which is to say, for 90 percent of the market in this privileged preserve—the story was obscured, not merely by brokers eager to keep the party going, but also by the headline-grabbing sales of houses at the high end. That changed last March. “Once Bear Stearns happened,” says one real-estate broker, “the high end came to a screeching halt.”

Sound familiar.
I keep waiting for the Euro to become the common currency of Outer Banks real estate. Property here is a steal compared to beach homes overseas. If the Dutch can buy Budweiser they can buy the beach road.
More from Vanity Fair:

Europeans are circling, that much is for sure. A sign in the window of the Loaves & Fishes Cookshop catering business on Bridgehampton’s Main Street says it all: we accept euros. (At Loaves & Fishes’ wildly extravagant food shop in Sagaponack, the price of lobster salad, always the annual benchmark for Hamptons excess, is thus either $100 or 63 euros per pound this season.) Prudential’s Jane Gill, a former Ralph Lauren model, reports “a lot of Germans, a lot of Brits” for high-end rentals. “A hundred thousand dollars is nothing to them.”

If I were renting or selling I know where I would be looking for growth.

More when I get back from the beach... and work on my photos.... and read that trashy novel ... and take a nap....and ......
Ciao

This shot was the picture of the week on The State of Things radio on WUNC FM.