Misc Rambling

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy: We were in Austin,TX for our youngest son's final J2M. Didn't get to do half the stuff I wanted to do but it went well, overall.

We also have my in-law's from Japan since last week until the end of this month so I have been and will continue to be a chauffeur during the weekends. Saturday we went to Death Valley National Park as a day trip (I thought I would be about 3 hours but took 4 hours of driving since where we used to live was 1 hour closer to where we are now -- so much for my math degree) and put in 620 miles overall. The smoke from Zaca fire made the park smoggy and a bit smelly.

Market is pretty crazy these days. I was doing well financially (since I'm 60% short: I'm betting that the stock market will crash and burn in the next few months), but since Fed took down the discount rate on Friday, I feel less wealthy. Not that I believe anything fundamental has changed. If you notice the mortgage market, they are eliminating all kinds of toxic loans or ninja loans or neutron-bomb loans. It's only a matter of time before the housing market freezes up (since new buyers cannot get new loans which means old sellers cannot sell their homes and buy yet another home). Homeowners will feel less wealthy and less money will go towards realtors, construction workers (remodelers), home inspectors, mortgage brokers, title companies, property tax office, furniture stores, home improvement stores, appliance makers to name a few industries tied to home ownership. The only questions remaining are: how long will it take to hit bottom and how bad will the bottom be?

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