DougThompson.Com

Coaches use pre-season scrimmages to pull a team together and discover weaknesses. Based on Floyd County High School’s scrimmage with Hidden Vallen Friday night, the coaches have a lot of work ahead.
Botched handoffs (above) resulting in turnovers, poor tackling, lackluster blocking and an inability to move the ball down the field jinxed the Buffaloes throughout the scrimmage.
Things weren’t much better up in Washington where the inept Redskins lost another pre-season game 24-17 to the Cincinnati Bengals.
Looks like it could be a long year for the football faithful in Chateau Thompson.

Some fresh faces showing up on stage at the Friday Night Jamboree lately but none fresher (or younger) than this group of kids from Maryland (that’s right, Maryland). Calling themselves the Rip Off Con Artists, these kids are fresh off a first place showing in the Old Time Band division of the 2005 Fiddlers’ Convention in Carroll County, Maryand, and they lived up to their name, literally stealing the show Friday night by amazing everyone with their musical skill and mixing traditional bluegrass with some folk-rock ballads.
They grew up in the Martin Family Sring Band, which has been performing nationally for the past 10 years but recently went out on their own to perform their own mix of old time country, Irish, folk, pop and whatever. That’s Emily Martin on Mandolin, Lydia Martin on clawhammer banjo and Claude Martin on fiddle. Patrick Ruffner’s (right) drum set is a variety of pots, pans, buckets, cowbells, and a dishrack (he also plays standup bass).
They hope to come back next week or maybe the week after. If they do, you should make a point to see and hear some musical talent that’s coming out of Maryland.

In today’s “As if you didn’t have enough to do” category, we announce the relaunching of FloydCounty.Com as a multimedia web site on September 1, 2005.
FloydCounty.Com will be a showcase not only for our photography and video work on the county, but I hope other writers, artists and photographers will contribute as well. We plan expanding coverage of the county’s music scene, photo eassays and news about the community. We plan to produce a regular “web cast” video news show on the site along with other features.
The site will utilize the latest technology to deliver streaming video and multimedia presentations to county residents. We’ve installed a Flash Communications Server to supplement our WindowsMedia and Quicktime streaming servers. With broadband capability available to more and more Floyd County homes, we think the time is right for a rich-media web site that provides enjoyment as well as information.
The push will be on to get everything ready by Sept. 1 but we should make it and we will be posting teasers at FloydCounty.Com as the launch date approaches.
If you have ideas, suggestions, gripes, etc., please let us know. The fun is about to begin.

About half of the 43,000 miles on my 2000 Jeep Wrangler have been off-road, bouncing over rocks, logs and ruts or blasting through creeks and mudholes. Such pounding takes its toll on various components, including the driver’s seat which had multiple tears in the fabric.
Andrew, the service manager at Turman-Yeatts Jeep, recommended local auto upholsterer Phillip Reed, who came by the studio last week, examined the battered seat and said “yeah, I can fix that.” He also recommended repadding the seat. Total cost? “Is $45 too much?” Nah, I said. I can handle that. The last time I had a seat reupholstered in Northern Virginia it cost nearly $200.
Phillip said he would pick up the car on Wednesday and have it back by Friday. On Wednesday, he came by first thing in the morning. I told him the keys were in the car and went back to work. A few hours later, I ventured outside to find the Jeep still in the parking lot — minus a driver’s seat. He took the seat and left the car. For the next two days, the Jeep became a mini-tourist attraction. People would walk by, look in the window, and ask: “How do you drive this without a seat?”
On Thursday and Friday, I drove Amy’s Wrangler — the one she seldom drives — and wondered why two people need three Jeeps.
On Friday, I stopped at Cafe del Sol to meet David St. Lawrence and didn’t get to the studio until after 10 a.m. Phillip had come and gone, leaving a newly upholstered and repadded driver’s seat — one far more comfortable than one he had taken just three days earlier.
Phillip didn’t leave a bill. Hopefully, he will drop by today so I can pay him. Then I’ll file this story away for future use when people ask why we like life here in the mountains.

Report from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. The two snakes they bagged from the marshy area around our stream were a copperhead and a mountain rattlesnake. Both poisonous but neither the water mocassin I spotted and photographed earlier. They continue to maintain their position that water mocassins aren’t found in the mountains of Virginia. Too bad they didn’t go upstream as far as our neighbor’s pond because that’s where he and I believe the snake(s) live.
Fred First tells me the president of the Virginia Herp Society, self-appointed reptile experts who are really a bunch of eggheads at Virginia Tech, is “dubious” about me finding a water moccasin in Floyd County, which is Fred’s polite way of saying the guy thinks I made the whole thing up. This guy, whoever he is, is welcome to drop by and call me a liar to my face so he can eat his teeth as well as his words. Then he can put on his Birkenstock sandals and take a walk in the marshy areas of our land.
Terry Krautworth is a seasoned hiker who writes for Backpacker Magazine and says he has encountered water moccasins in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina near the Virginia border (for the unitiated, that’s just south of here — not far as the crow flies or the snake crawls).
“The range of the snake includes much of the eastern half of the United States in almost any kind of wooded habitat, usually near water,” Krautworth says. “Keep an eye out around rocky hillsides in particular.”
Although the North Carolina Herp Society, another group of eggheads (this time from Duke) claims the water moccasin sticks to the Eastern half of the state, MSN Encarta says otherwise:
“Snakes, including poisonous species such as rattlesnakes and water moccasins, are common throughout the state,” Encarta says.
This debate raged in Floyd County when I lived here in the 1960s and I guess I’m not surprised it continues 40 years later. When it comes to what kind of snakes one finds in Floyd County, I’ll take the word of people who have lived here all their lives and have killed more than one of the pit vipers known as water moccasins.
They know the difference between a water moccasin and a water snake. So do I.