The Cross City Trail is an eight food wide path, alongside but separate from the auto road, that walkers, runners, cyclists and others can use to get around. It will eventually connect with the Eastwood Road leg of the Cross City trail and with paths leading downtown to make a set of car-less arteries for the Cape Fear region.

As with the Island Greenway project in Carolina Beach, however — and against all the evidence — some residents near the trail believe the trail will endanger or devalue their property, and are opposing the development. (Nothing could be more wrong! Trail systems like this raise property values of nearby neighborhoods and of whole regions, and of course they also enrich the lives of residents that use them.)

And so the Cape Fear Cyclists have sent out the following message to their mailing list, about a public meeting this Thursday, where proponents and opponents will go to learn more and discuss the impact of the trail:

Mark your calendars to attend the Transportation Planning Meeting on Thursday from 5 to 7 P.M. at the County Government Offices off of S.College Rd. and near Racine Drive (in the Human Resources Training Center near the fish tank!). The WMPO will be presenting maps and plans for the College Acres segment of Wilmington’s Cross City Trail. (You can come and go as is convenient for you.)

Please participate to help residents of the area to understand the many values in having such a trail in their neighborhood. Currently there is some opposition to having the trail routed through their neighborhood. Throughout the country many such residents that have previously opposed rail trails and greenways near their homes, subsequent to the opening of the trails, have become enthusiastic users and cheerleaders of trails and greenways. They have realized increases in their property values because of the proximity of the trails in their communities…or in “their own backyards”. Mostly they have come to appreciate the enhancements to their family’s and community’s quality of life…health & fitness; cleaner air; easier access to schools, libraries, churches, stores, workplaces, friends, athletic fields, beach, or other local attractions. Trails will provide means of transportation to members of our community regardless of age, mobility, capability, or economic status. Increasing modes of access helps to relieve traffic congestion and the costs of transportation. Trails and green space help to nurture our bodies and spirits, while they help to build community connectedness and attractive neighborhoods with a neighborly spirit.

Wilmington and New Hanover County are gradually becoming a bicycle and pedestrian friendly region. A well planned, extensive network of trails such as the River-to-the-Sea Bike Route, the Cross City Trail, Greenfield Lake & Haliburton Park paths, and the Historic Scenic Byway will make alternate means of transportation safer, more convenient, and accessible to all. Wilmington will also be distinguished as a Destination City along the East Coast Greenway, a link in the 3000 mile off-road route that someday will host travelers along the coast from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida.

The College Acres link will be an important segment of our local trail network. Come out to the meeting to support the concept as well as, the staff and volunteers who have helped to design this proposal. Listen and speak up. Explain how the trail will benefit you, your family, and the whole community. If you live in or near the College Acres area, it is especially important that you lend your ideas and support! Come learn how the Cross City Trail will provide connectivity throughout our region…and share your ideas and enthusiasm.

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Are Roller Girls such as yourself professionals, as in you get paid for your work? We do this for the love of the sport. We pay for our own gear and monthly dues go toward practice time.

I love the nicknames you come up with. Can you mention some of your teammate’s professional names and how they came about? Derby names are fun, aren’t they? One of my league favorites is our referee Waylon Honor. We’ve also got Toe Up, Busty Rhymes, Ann T. Gravity, and Hawaiian Puncher to name a few. Our names pay homage to musicians, are puns, occur in dreams, and can be just about everything in between…

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Greater Good Productions put on and got lots of good sponsors for what was essentially a giant yard sale at Legion Stadium that raised money for a number of good environmental causes — Cape Fear Riverwatch, Penderwatch, and the Coastal Federation — and featured a recycled art show and booths by local “green living” businesses. A canny combination of things that has people reusing, trading, gifting, learning, meeting.

In Novemeber of 2009, Olivia Marshburn, a Certified Nurse Midwife and long time local opened the first legal home birth practice in the area since she can remember. “I don’t know of a legal homebirth practice here in my lifetime.” Marshburn said. There have been, she added, numerous CPMs (Certified Professional Midwives) working underground in and around Wilmington since the early 70’s.
Her Hampstead-based homebirth practice, Midwifery Services, Marshburn said, is one of four legal home birth practices in the state. Her staff includes assistant midwife, Meredith Christie, and midwife apprentice Antoinette Palmer.

Marshburn’s home-based office, designed and built by she and her husband, rambles from the front of the house to the back and is complete with a small desk near the entrance, a wooden massage table and an entire wall of books relating to women’s health, both current and historical texts. The office is facing south and welcomes the light through three windowed walls. Remnants of a robust summer garden can be seen from the back window. A wooden doll house and several other wooden toys lay next to the desk on the floor provided to entertain the children of clients.

After opening the French doors on the North side of the office revealing a spacious living room with vaulted ceilings that seem limitless, Marshburn said she always knew she’d return to homebirth. “I decided long ago that when I retired I would open a homebirth practice.” She said.

She entered midwifery in the early 80’s as a direct-entry midwife or lay midwife (known then as “granny” midwives). Later, as a single mother raising two young sons, Marshburn needed a more dependable income and decided to take her passion down a different road. She received her Nurse Midwifery certification from UCSan Fransisco in 1993 after six years of education and training. She has since worked as a midwife for the National Health Service Corp., for Dr. Helen Sandland – a former Wilmington obstetrician, and at the naval hospital at Camp Lejeune.

She would have retired from her CNM position at the Naval Hospital in August 2012. But her plans changed suddenly last summer when more than a hundred women in and around Wilmington found themselves without midwifery options. “Our only local homebirth practice ended suddenly and the void in available homebirth services was not acceptable to me,” Marshburn said. Then, in August, came the termination of Carolina OBGYN’s midwifery program. “Suddenly there were all these women without options. I couldn’t sit back and let that happen.” She said. “I chose to leave my job early because I believe women have a fundamental right to choose where, when and with whom they have their babies.”

Marshburn comes from a long line of similarly strong women who also played an active part in serving this community. Her grandmother was a midwife and a nurse, and her mother a nurse. Her drive to serve the underserved is likely rooted in the example of service her predecessors provided. “My grandmother lived in Sampson County in her younger years and the closest doctor was in Wallace. Back then, birth wasn’t an emergency. Birth was to be attended and my grandmother was there for many mothers who may have otherwise gone unattended,” Marshburn said.

Marshburn believes that the idea of “attending” women through the many transitions in their lives needs to be renewed. In over twenty years of birth experience she has invariably seen, she says, that there two polar categories of birth attendants. “There are those who love, honor and respect the process, and then there are those who want to control it, who are afraid of it, like it’s a train wreck waiting to happen.” This area, she says, needs more of the former.

Marshburn has been “approved to practice” by a supervising obstetrician currently practicing in North Carolina. North Carolina is one of only six states in the U.S. that requires midwife supervision. Midwives in most states are required to “collaborate, consult, and refer” with practicing physicians but are considered autonomous and are at liberty to practice independently.
In addition to frequent contact with her supervising physician, Marshburn has an open professional relationship with several other physicians. “I have the ability to informally consult with eight physicians in the state, three of whom practice in Wilmington.” Marshburn said.

Per a signed agreement between she and her supervising physician, Marshburn’s “evidence-based” practice follows protocols outlined in section 88 of New Zealand’s Public Health and Disability Act. Eighty percent of births in New Zealand are attended by midwives. New Zealand is statistically a great place to have a baby having better outcomes for mothers and babies than other developed nations including the United States.

The road ahead, she confides, has yet to be paved. “There will challenges regarding hospital transfer and other necessary collaboration with the local medical community,” Marshburn said. “But, there are challenges in every endeavor. If it’s the right thing to do, you just keep doing it.” Marshburn feels hopeful that, together, she and hospital care -providers will work out the kinks and enable women efficient, smooth transfer to a higher level of care by a hospital obstetrician or hospital-based midwife if the need should arise. “Wasting time due to fear and political concerns is not safe practice and cannot be tolerated or accepted by our local women and families.” She said.

Women deserve the right to choose, Marshburn said. “Women hold 99% of household leadership. They are largely in control of how their families enter the systems of society. If we let establishments – medical, religious, political – dictate how women use and share their personal power, then those establishments control the population,” she said.
Marshburn sees nothing but hope in the future of birth. “Things are changing,” she said. “Awareness is growing. I think more and more people are realizing that birth is not to be feared, but rather loved and celebrated.”

Related links

• Where’s My Midwife
• Midwifery Services
• Wilmington Homebirth Meetup Group

Since moving to Greenfield Lake, we have longed for a good neighborhood bar.  Let’s face it, there are a lot of bars in and around Wilmington.  Since downtown is less than 4 miles away from my front door, any of the bars in downtown could theoretically be a contender.  But then I realized that the application of the word “good” was a qualitative one which raised an important question.  Aside from distance, how do you judge the quality of a neighborhood bar?  I got a call from a friend recently suggesting that I join him at the opening of a great new watering hole near the Lake.  I was indisposed that evening so I took a rain check.  I take recommendations very seriously, so a week later my wife, Tanya and I stopped by.  It was there that my question was answered.

120 Greenfield Street is an address with a history of community service.  For many years it served the residents of Nesbitt Court and beyond as a neighborhood market.  Veteran bar owner Dustin Ricks seized the opportunity to purchase the property in July 2009 and after working 14 hour days for 6 months reintroduced the understated brick building to the residents of Wilmington as Satellite Bar & Lounge, Wilmington’s latest best kept secret…until now.

The décor is hip and sophisticated but not pretentious, vintage but not junky; warm and inviting.  The nuances of the owner’s artistry shine in the chic use of automobile parts as bar stools and door handles.   A grab bar from a city bus extends along the front of the bar providing a foot rest.  The interior was completely gutted revealing massive timber trusses above and a surplus of wood products which were reused in large neo-medieval barn doors and bar surfaces.  A single bank of draft levers that emerge from off-the shelf pipe fittings are reflected in the heavily epoxied wood countertops along with the subdued light from exposed incandescent pendent lights.  The scene is somewhere between an early industrial warehouse and an Alpine ski lodge.  Comfortable reclaimed furniture provides an ample setting for lucid fellowship and best of all, there are no TVs!

A copious selection of 80 varieties of beer combine with a fully stocked bar to quench thirst on any budget.  Sunday afternoons are punctuated with live acoustic bluegrass and a build-your-own Bloody Mary bar.  Future improvements will include an outdoor movie garden and more live entertainment.

Satellite is truly a grass roots endeavor germinating from the salient values of comfort, fellowship, sophistication, and variety.  Most importantly, where gratitude is often lost in the vacuum of mediocre expectations, the owners have clearly stated its importance with a brightly lit yellow sign above the beer coolers; simply stated, “Thank you for shopping with us.”  Ricks sees this project as an asset to the community and is optimistic that it will be in operation well into the foreseeable future, setting a new precedent of quality for the ideal neighborhood bar.

Downtown Wilmington Advocate.

Among other things, he’s posted some updates about the Front Street Improvement Project, which broke ground yesterday.

Set back on Goodman Road in Brunswick County, Shelton Herb Farm is a storied garden and forest where produce connoisseurs and nature fanatics alike can find something to their liking. The land has been family-owned for 200 years, but its current proprietor, Margaret Goodman Shelton, has turned the area into a profitable business.

Hope you get this on time,sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip in UK for a Program, I’m presently in UK and am having some difficulties here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept. presently i have limited access to internet,I will like you to assist me with a loan of $700 to sort-out my hotel bills and to get myself back home.

i have spoken to the embassy here but they are not responding to the matter effectively,I will appreciate whatever you can afford to assist me with,I’ll Refund the money back to you as soon as i return,let me know if you can be of any help.I don’t have a phone where i can be reached.

Please let me know immediately.
Best Regards