FDotDButch, the neighbor’s cat wandered by our backyard BBQ for Mother’s Day.
The key to hunting is to look relaxed.
When he spots something, he hits them with the ol’ hypnotic eye.
Hope you had a most excellent Mother’s Day.
Hope to see you at Kool April Drags this evening, and over the rest of the weekend. The weather is supposed to be perfect.
I’m only a casual fan, but I run their website. This event is their biggest of the year, and with dueling jet cars after dark, no less. Definitely worth coming out. They’ve made a lot of track improvements.
This is oldest continuously operating dragstrip in the US. A longtime Redding tradition.
February is early Spring in Shasta County. We have lots and lots of emerging bulbs.
These showy tulips look wonderful all bunched together. Ironically, Tulip Mania was responsible for an economic bubble and collapse, similar to the housing cycle we are experiencing now. From Wikipedia: “At the peak of tulip mania in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.” It seems our economic history is filled with bubbles and collapses.
It’s hard to capture an image that accurately displays their deep scarlet loveliness.
Such is the transitory nature of beauty.
Click on the image below to see a spellbinding view of the recent innaugural by David Bergman.
The photographer’s blogsite is here:
http://www.davidbergman.net/blog/2009/01/22/how-i-made-a-1474-megapixel-photo-during-president-obamas-inaugural-address/
Or at GigaPan here:
http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374&window_height=867&window_width=1663
Really quite a technical photographic achievement that now has become an amazing artistic accomplishment as well. Well worth your time. Scrolling around, you really get a feel for how cold it was. And it’s also interesting to see just how many cameras were there, between the crowd and the pros. Obviously, it was an important moment, and it was covered. I have done many stitched panoramas for online home virtual tours, but this is more extraordinary by an order of a magnitude. The equivalent of 220 photos stitched.
The other day I wrote about gasoline prices falling twice in one day. It’s fallen again. Before you rejoice too much about the sudden cheap gas, you may want to consider it as a leading indicator of a deflationary economy. They didn’t just find more gas on Gas Point Road or anything. There was no increase in supply. Prices are falling with demand. What’s that mean for us? Well I don’t exactly know, but you might want to read what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said about this possibility 6 years ago today. Take a few minutes and read through his thoughts about the subject HERE. Definitely worth your time. Somewhat frightening, actually. (I got a couple of offline comments about my post scaring people. that wasn’t the intent. If you read the Bernanke piece, it looks like his main weapon of choice to fight deflation will be a printing press, to print a bunch of money to spread around “willy nilly” ((his words)) That’s a prospect worth planning for.)
Apparently, I spent much of my adult life sheltered from what must be a daily reality for some folks. I showed an inexpensive bank-owned house yesterday evening to a curious buyer. Among other issues, it was infested with fleas. Up until the most recent housing cycle, I had never seen fleas swarm one’s ankles when walking into a home with wall to wall carpet. I am sadly familiar with that now. It is still disturbing to think that humans live this way, and maybe even unimaginable for most people until you see it with your own eyes. Imagine Redding summer heat and no electricity for so much as a vacuum cleaner.
Yesterday started me thinking about the health implications, so I browsed over to the CDC website.
Ever heard of Typhus? (2 kinds) Tapeworms? Flea-borne Rickettsiae? I was wondering about plague (Yersinia pestis, known in history as black death) but that’s not prominently mentioned. From the site, “flea-borne diseases could reemerge in epidemic form because of changes in vector-host ecology due to environmental and human behavior modification” and “economic factors, as well as changes in human behavior, have resulted in the emergence of new and the reemergence of existing but forgotten infectious diseases during the past 20 years.” Hmm. Anyway, here’s the website if you’re interested:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol3no3/azad.htm -and thanks to the CDC for the image seen above.
It’s quite sight to behold, fleas leaping from carpet to your feet and legs with such swarming gusto. Not all bank owned properties have fleas, but some do. Its not that bad in the winter, but on a hot day, they have remarkable mobility. It doesn’t even startle me anymore. Maybe it should.
The one that still haunts me is the house in south Redding/north Anderson last year, where it was apparent that the evicted had been doing child day-care. I saw the home pre-eviction, when there were kids there, and then a few days after they had left. Along with fleas were the largest rats I’d ever seen. That one was brutal. It ended my sheltered life forever.
Two Redding area Title and Escrow companies have shut their doors. Alliance Title closed shop statewide, and Chicago Title closed their Redding doors as well. Their respective escrows are being handled by one or another of the 3 remaining companies: Fidelity, First American, or Placer. 
Having 5 competing companies in our market was probably too many anyway, but less choice is never better for the consumer. All those admin and clerical worker folks are out of work now, including the woman I wrote about in my previous post, who fought back tears while helping me as her assistant had been laid off. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. I hope they can all be absorbed back into the local job market, but it must be very difficult for lots of good people. The Redding real estate market can be very cyclical, but I can’t remember losing title companies in the last downturn. 
This is one of the first signs seen by visitors as they roll into Shasta Lake City. I’m all for attracting buyers to your business, but what’s the real message here? Not a welcome sign.
There are always hard times. Even in times when the local real estate market is booming, you can find a hard time story. It’s just humanity. Lately there seem to be more hard time stories than usual. A couple of days ago, I was in a hurry to make an appointment, and stopped into a local Title & Escrow company who shall remain nameless. As I stepped into the lobby, there were about a dozen or so people standing there and looking at me like I just walked in on something important. They weren’t smiling. Looking more closely, it was evident that several were crying. Obviously I interrupted something here, and my first reaction was that I should leave, but I needed to get something done for a client leaving town. One of the women offered to help me, and the group broke up. The tension was evident, but she put on her best game face as she helped me locate the file. She was wearing slippers like you might wear at home, and wiping back her tears as she worked. I guessed she had just gone into the lobby from her desk at whatever news had just hit, and I was the only non-employee in the office. I got what I needed and left, but I felt like she needed a hug. I didn’t hug her, though, because that would be weird to hug a stranger. Which is kind of weird, also.
Anyway, I was haunted all day by the image of her flushed face, tears glistening under the harsh office lighting. No one offered to share what had happened, and I wasn’t going to ask, so I had to pry a bit later in the day with some other folks in our real estate community. As it turns out, she had just lost her assistant to a layoff. Merry Christmas!
There’s a lot of layoffs in housing related services here. Today’s paper had a photo of 84 Lumber closing it’s doors. Merry Christmas to you too. I don’t know if their 5 employees stood in the lobby and cried. Or hugged.
I was once laid off from a company after 20 years, right around the holidays. It stings. I decided to go into another career where the only person who could lay me off was me, and here I am. It hasn’t been easy. It won’t be easy for these folks either.
The Record Searchlight article also said that there were 600 fewer real estate related jobs in October in the Redding Area. I expect that the diminishing number of employed accelerated in November and December. When housing catches a cold, Redding employment gets pneumonia. All those folks will need to find work.
The cliche is “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Perhaps more appropriate, that which doesn’t kill you leaves you standing for the next assault. Best wishes to all in our housing related community.
Hugs, but only if you ask for one.
