Menagerie Redux

Per request by Rambling Speech, I am uploading a few pictures from yet another addition to the Smitty Petting Zoo and Animal Shelter (admission free, parking $2). These would be the Smittychix. They don't have names yet but of course they need them if you have suggestions. In this picture is a three-day-old hatchling in front, and her larger sister, maybe ten to twelve days old, in the back.

Here is a picture of the larger chick shielding her younger sister from the paparazzi.





And this I think is the best picture of them. Aren't they cute? Tribble has been far, far too interested in them, and while I was making breakfast this morning she perched on the dining chair and just stared into the chicken cage. She claimed she was watching to make sure they didn't go anywhere, since I couldn't see them from the kitchen, but I'm not so sure...

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Puppy Pictures

Well. The Smitty household has a new member, and some pictures are in order for those of you who haven't already met her. Her name is Lily. She came from Laurens County Animal Rescue. And here she is. Isn't she a cutie?

Here's another picture. Lily is about three months old. Don't ask what breed; a mix of pit bull and... um... I think of her as a Whatsit, maybe with a little Canttell thrown in.

And here is Jackson, doing his best to look absolutely as pathetic as he possibly can so you won't know he actually likes having Lily around. This is the day we brought her home, I think, and he actually was a little annoyed at first, but now they get along great and play together. She even gives him things! Like kennel cough!

While we're looking for an appropriate crate for her to sleep in, we've been keeping Lily in the half bath attached to our bedroom. She gets a wee mite bored in there during the day while we're at work, but seems to find ways to fill her time...

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Nobody knows...

...the trouble our septic system has seen. But I have some ideas.

First of all, and you can consider this a public service announcement: if you have a septic tank, do not flush condoms down the toilet! I mean, really. They should cover this in sex ed. They clog up the drain line.

And yes, they clog up the drain line. I mean, like... like, dozens. Dozens of condoms in my drain line. Old, too. They had turned black. It was vile; visions of it will keep me up tonight. It's barely 1230 and I'm drinking already.

So at any rate we know that our septic system has not been suffering from simple neglect; this is a case of serious, long-term abuse. The gravel into which the old drain field supposedly drained was basically identical to the driveway gravel, and perhaps came off the same truck. Tough to say.

If you'll recall, the previous septic company to come out here, Carolina Septic of Simpsonville, replaced ten feet of the drain line out the back of our septic tank. Apparently they did this without digging up the entire tank because the lid at the back of the tank is cracked and sagging--sagging by about an inch, and this is concrete. Not supposed to sag. You'd think if they'd dug that up and seen that--and I don't know how they replaced ten feet of drain line without doing so--they would have at least kindly informed the homeowner that the lid needed replacing. The plumbing company we've had problems with in the past at least was kind enough to tell me to replace the other lid.

Fortunately the tank itself seems in good enough shape to last for a while more, but I am going to rebuild that lid next week. Oh, and lest I forget to mention, the ten feet of new drain line they put in connected to about two more feet of the same old brittle drain line they replaced... and there wasn't anything else beyond that, to speak of, just a pile of gravel. Seriously. Drain field? What drain field? Isn't a gravel pit good enough? Makes me wonder if that was the established method for installing a septic tank in the early 1940s.

Carolina Septic screwed us.

What we're getting now to replace the former setup is an actual drain field, with pipes with holes and gravel and recycled tire bits (which actually makes sense to use for this purpose), and it's going pretty much from the property line to the garage, a good sixty feet wide, and probably twenty feet down the hill from the tank. This is going to be a big damn septic field. That said, when the contractor came out here to quote me a price, he said when he was done we wouldn't have any more problems. Here's hoping.

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... And Then the Sky Fell In

No, really, I had the best intentions of posting here Monday and yesterday. Monday I worked, but it wasn't an insane day. However, Monday night the septic tank backed up into the house.

Yeah. Thank goodness our plumber (thank you Josh!) installed a relief point outside. Smittywife took a bath Monday night, and when she pulled the plug to drain the tub, the water didn't go anywhere. Then the toilets started to bubble. Then water started to fill into the sinks. She put the plug back in real fast, and I went outside and opened the relief pipe, and water poured out of that thing. The pipe is just outside the house, and is an upward-pointing pipe attached to the septic line. It's lower than any part of the water system elsewhere in the house so it can be opened any time there's a potential backup--and it's a convenient point to add septic treatment and such.

So this pipe points up. I unscrew the lid, and water shoots up about a foot high. This is 2.5" diameter pipe here so a vertical foot of water is nothing to scoff at. This was a potential disaster.

I was supposed to work yesterday but of course I stayed home to have septic tank people come out and look at the system. Now, since we moved in here we've had some issues. It's an old system--the house was built in at least 1938, possibly earlier, and the septic tank, which is hand-built, dates from that time. So we're talking about a 70 year old septic system. Lord knows how well it's been cared for in the past (probably not so well, at least under certain owners). Occasionally we'd find that when one toilet was flushed, another would bubble. Several months ago we had the tank pumped and the septic line snaked; the snake revealed a significant belly in the line, where over time the cast-iron pipe had sagged enough to restrict water flow to perhaps half the pipe.

About six weeks ago we went ahead and had a new septic line installed by Carolina Septic. They also pumped the tank again (not a good sign that it needed it) and replaced about ten feet of drain line out the back of the tank into the drain field; the previous line had been crushed at some point in the past. They said to us then that the system looked fine and shouldn't give us any more problems for several years (a tank should be pumped every five years or so, even though you can go much longer without having to; pumping that often helps prevent solids from clogging your drain field lines). They said that when they replaced the drain field line, it "soaked up [the water in the tank] like a sponge." Like a sponge, direct quote there. System was in good shape and wouldn't give us an more problems.

Uh-huh. Until Monday night, of course. (We did get a small warning shot; a couple days before the toilets bubbled as the last of another of Smittywife's baths drained out, but we had a busy weekend and didn't think much more about it.)
So Carolina Septic came out again. Both guys who came out asserted that it was probably the drain field, that the drain field was probably clogged, and that they had known that would be the case after the last time they were here. I said, no no, you told us the system was in good shape. No, they said, we knew the drain field was bad. I said, you told my wife it soaked up the water like a sponge. They turned their heads like confused puppies.

So Carolina Septic lied to us. Either they lied when they said the system was in great shape six weeks ago, or they lied yesterday to make themselves seem smarter. Regardless, we insisted they check the septic line for a clog. Which they found. But after removing said clog, the tank just filled up. Didn't drain. So, indeed, the drain field is shot.

Crap.

That's not exactly cheap. Of course Carolina offered to fix the field for us, at a cost of about five grand, not money we have or plan to have any time soon. We got another estimate (I'd list his name here but I can't remember it) for less than half that--and of course as soon as I started talking to him about the system, he said, now who'd you have out here to do this? Carolina Septic, says I. Oh. I don't like to tell you this, but you're dealing with the wrong folks there. You know he's not even licensed to do this work, all he's licensed for is to pump tanks.

Really? I need to check into that, but... really?

This guy is probably sixty and says he's been doing this work for forty years. I'd like to check references but his comment was, I'll come in here, do all this work in one day, and when it's done you won't have any more problems with it at all. Period. I don't like coming back to a job.

Of course there's also the possibility of getting hooked into the sewer utility. I'm awaiting a callback on that. Could be as cheap as twenty-five hundred, or it could be worse. We'll see. Given the amount we'll be spending, it may be worthwhile--or not. If the sewer system backs up into your house, well, there's usually no relief valve for that. There are good points to having septic.

Anyway. So that's been the continuing excitement in Smitty's World the last couple of days. I was able to clean the kitchen top to bottom yesterday--although, mysteriously, this morning the milk jug had leaked half its contents into its little compartment in the door. I don't remember poking a hole in it yesterday, and it's been in the fridge for a week without leaking. At least its designated compartment is water-tight so I didn't have to clean the whole fridge.

Now I'm not at work again, and have plans for the day--digging up part of the front yard for a vegetable bed, cleaning the living room, doing a big load of laundry, and putting a screen in the bathroom window. With luck I'll get another post written, too!

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Rambling

I have a lot of time to think at work. In a ten hour workday, at least four hours of the FedEx Ground driver's time is spent behind the wheel. The truck has no radio. Even when I ride with somebody, oftentimes the truck is so loud you have to shout to hear one another anyway (I wear earplugs when I drive alone). In a sense it's a lot like flying an uninsulated airplane (say, a KC-135) without an interphone.

Actually, flying a driving have a great deal in common, with the exception that one is far superior to the other. I'm currently doing the other for a living, and if you don't think that gives me great pause you haven't thought about it much. This would occupy my mind all day, every day (with probably negative side effects for my mental health) if I didn't aggressively come up with other things to think about.

Lately I've been spending some of my time trying to determine whether or not I have a cohesive political philosophy, or just a collection of opinions. I'm not sure whether one is preferable to the other, but when reaching for topics to ponder during a long day this one does present itself. (Smittywife just appeared over my shoulder and noted, "You don't have a coherent philosophy." And there you have it.)

The question has some relevance, though not to anyone but myself. I'm reading this book about Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx, by Joseph Ellis) and he notes repeatedly (paraphrasing) that Jefferson maintained a strict political philosophy that was, in many ways, almost irrationally pure and assumed things about human nature that aren't true; and yet throughout his life he took various actions that clearly ran counter to the philosophy he held (and wrote from). He did this by, in Ellis' view, keeping two halves of himself separated--literally having a philosophical side that knew not what the pragmatic side did. Exactly how he managed this... well, I haven't finished the book yet.

And I'm reminded of our friend Switters (from Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates) who embraced and celebrated his inner contradictions--possibly a way out, a denial of denial if you will, but food for thought. Can one have a core political philosophy and deviate from that on certain issues without being a callous opportunist or thoughtless pragmatist?

Anyway, over the next couple of days I've been thinking I'll write a little about how I've been trying to fit my collection of opinions into a complete arc. This will at least give me something to write about here to get back into the swing of things.

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A New Attempt To Blog Daily Begins... Now!

Whether it will last remains to be seen. Theoretically I should be leaving for work in about four minutes but I haven't even had breakfast yet, haven't packed a lunch, don't even have my boots on.
But I did throw the puppy blanket in the wash on the "sanitize" setting with bleach. She... well, she's a puppy. Puppies can't really make it through the night without pooping, I guess. I don't actually know for sure, but ours certainly doesn't try. She made a mess in her little house last night, got poo all over her blanket, the sides of the house, and herself. Smittywife had to give her a bath this morning before rushing out the door, and I cleaned out the doghouse and put the blanket in the wash.
And what I wanted to say, really, was this: why do all bleach bottles seem to share the same incompetent design? Who thought that up, anyway? I need to put a small amount of bleach into the washing machine's bleach dispenser, and all I have to do that is an open neck that clearly wasn't designed for pouring and all the weight of the bleach in the bottom of the jug. Of course it's going to glug out and splash. And it's bleach, for goodness sake, when it splashes everywhere it's going to cause problems. I just don't understand it. There has to be a better way to package that, but clearly no one has even tried. Grr.

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Neglected but not forgotten

I've been working a lot of 11 hour days lately, and when you come home after eleven hours--twelve with commuting, roughly--you don't want to sit down at the computer and blog. That's all there is to say about that, really, the days are just very long, and unfortunately you don't do much when you get home.

But I'm not working five days a week at this, at least. Not yet; not a move I'd want to make, to be honest. The bigger problem is I haven't been doing any regular writing of any sort, here or on Lauderdale. This bothers me, but at some level, too, I don't want to come home and sit at the desk and do anything at all. I'm saving for a laptop, but it'll be a few months.

Anyway. I know I've been neglecting the blog. I want to write again, regularly, and at some point here I will. But it will be a bit yet.

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Animal Husbands

From the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Smitty's former employer, comes this little piece this morning. Seems Florida is one of 16 states that does not outlaw bestiality (which raises the following two questions: 1) what are the other 15, and 2) why not?), and one of our state senators feels now is the appropriate time to do so, what with economic collapse looming on the sunny Florida horizon. While I question the timing I won't argue about the decision to outlaw it.

But the bill had to include certain items so that, for example, artificially inseminating a cow (Florida has a large cattle industry) doesn't fall afoul of the law. Fair enough. In committee the clauses relating to such things were described as referring to "veterinary practices" and "animal husbandry." Nothing wrong with that.

Unless you're Senator Larcenia Bullard of Miami, who clearly never spent a weekend on the farm growing up.

Upon hearing that the law designed to prevent bestiality made allowance for the practices of animal husbandry, Bullard asked, "People are taking animals as their husbands?"

Your elected officials. Saving you from... um... we'll get back to you on that.

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Something Old

I was digging through my Giant File O' Crap (it's like a File-o-fax except not) for something specific today relating to Lauderdale. I did not find what I was looking for (did it ever exist? Good question), but as usually happens when I dig into the File O' Crap I found something amusing.

One of the great things about being a "writer" is that you have a tendency, because you think you can write, to write a lot. And save everything you write. Computers make this much easier than I'm sure it used to be. In any event from time to time it's fun to dig through the old files and look at what I was writing--and thus often what I was thinking--a few years ago. I thought I'd post one of those old bits here.

This came out of a larger project that was never finished--and that almost certainly never will be--called This Fucking Town (I was probably going to change that title), subtitled "Observations on Life NOT in America." I wrote several pieces and stuck them in there under this heading, including a lengthy and philosophically contorted introduction that was actually difficult for me to follow and which I probably wrote while drunk. We'll skip that.

In any event, this piece would have been written in the summer of 2004, almost certainly in August. I enjoyed rereading and thought some reader somewhere might get a kick out of it.

I wonder how Burger King feels about themselves. At 0830 in the morning at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the only food available on base to the hungry young airman is a Whopper at the Burger King. The picture above the order window—and it is just a window, a window into what looks like a single-wide trailer—has an animated drill sergeant admonishing us to “Have a burger for breakfast!”

What the hell kind of dietary advice is that? Exactly why does the Air Force (and the Army) allow Burger King to propagate that kind of disinformation to all their young soldiers and airmen who may not know much about healthy eating and living? And why does Burger King feel it’s a good idea?

Certainly we all enjoy a fatty fast food burger now and then; they taste good after all. They taste good because they’re loaded with saturated fat in the form of beef fat, mayonnaise, ketchup, cheese, and the like. I love Whoppers. I also love KFC fried boneless chicken breasts, but I can eat one of those without having to pay penance for my sins. A Whopper is not the same.

I don’t blame fast food restaurants for making us all fat. For starters, although it may look that way when we go to Wal-Mart or Disney World, we aren’t all fat. Most of us feel fat. Hell, I’m definitely not fat, but when I look down I can see that I’m carrying a little bit of all that beer and vodka I drink around the midsection, enough to cover up the abs that I know used to be there. But I’m not fat. And neither are fully a third of the rest of us Americans. The ones who are fat, well, they can’t blame fast food either. Often, they can blame themselves.

Not that this will stop fat people from suing McDonald’s. At least the judge threw that case out. But if people would just not eat crap all the time, they wouldn’t have problems with their weight. Weight management is easy, at least if you’re reasonably smart. I blame fat people for ignorance more than anything else; it's not even laziness half the time. And they can’t possibly all be that stupid; the problem is, we don’t teach anything approaching healthy living in schools, and if we did, I can guarantee you we’d screw it up. It would all be government mandated and based on that stupid 7-level pyramid scheme they created to bolster the prices Midwestern farmers can get for their grain crops. And it wouldn’t work anyway. All Americans do not fit into the same peghole, though that is exactly what national health education in high school would try to do.

So we produce a bunch of 18-year-olds every year who join the military and go out to their friendly BX one morning and see a perky animated drill sergeant ordering them to have burgers for breakfast. Well shoot, the Army wouldn't tell me to do it if it wasn’t good. And then we wonder why we’re having problems with overweight troops.

This is of course a bigger problem in the Air Force than in the Army, since Army people stay more active with daily unit PT and the like. The Air Force has tried this in the past, but it always fails. I’ll admit that I’m part of the problem. I haven’t been to a unit PT day since December of 2003. I’m hoping to avoid them until I PCS in 2006. If I wanted to get up every morning at the ass crack of dawn and run myself silly and destroy my knees, by God I’d join the Army. I joined the Air Force because we take a more reasonable approach to such things—or at least we used to.

The Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. John Jumper, who is himself an avid runner (like many insane people), recently revamped our yearly physical fitness test. Now, instead of sitting on a bicycle peddling slowly until our hearts and lungs reach a certain mythical point of capacity defined by pencil-necked geeks in a laboratory in Washington, we actually have to go out and run, and do pushups and situps. I hate running and situps, but I still think the General has the right idea and support it. If you’re going to measure my fitness, why not do it by measuring what I can do? Lung capacity, which is what the bike test measured, was always four fifths genetic anyway.

But then there is that pesky fourth part of the equation, the tape test. Now, as a skinny little white boy, I don’t fear the tape test. The test is worth 30 points, and to get all 30 your waist measurement has to be under 32 ½ inches. Even when I was a drunk I had never had a waist that big. No problemo.

But I’m also all of 5’9” or so. A guy who’s as skinny as me but 6’3”, by nature he’s going to have about a 33 inch waist. Ergo he can’t max out the test, even if he’s in better shape than everybody else in his squadron. (Never mind that if your goal is to max out the annual fitness test, you need bigger goals.) Once again, it seems we’re trying force everybody in the Air Force into the same peghole. No problem for me, since I’m small and can fit most anywhere, but it’s a big problem for many of my colleagues. And what’s to say a person can’t be in decent shape and still carry a little bit extra around the gut? Hell, half the generals and chiefs in the AF today can balance their coffee cups on their beer guts. That’s just the way the Air Force is. I think Jumper doesn’t really like those guys and wants to be rid of them, which soon enough he will be.

But what does the Air Force do to help you out if you’re not passing the test? They tell you to figure it out yourself. You go on a mandatory visit to the health and wellness center, and they put you on a program, and hopefully it works. Meanwhile, there’s a Burger King on every Air Force base in the country, where people are being ordered to have burgers for breakfast.

I have nothing against Burger King. As I said, I enjoy a Whopper now and then because it tastes good. But I also exercise and ensure that 90% of my meals are prepared in my home with healthy fresh ingredients. Few if any of my colleagues can say that, and many of them will argue that it’s because they don’t have time. Well, maybe not, but if I have time I wonder how other young officers without much more responsibility don’t. It can’t be because I’m single; if anything, I have less spare time because I have to do everything myself (this of course only applies to the married and childless, since children really do take up all your time). Yet I’m capable of a reasonably healthy (barring the drinking and the high-stress job) lifestyle. The simple fact that I can do this makes me assume pretty much everyone else can, whether they do or not.

But I also know that most people don’t live healthy. Many may try, but they don’t succeed. This is a big part of why Gen. Jumper wanted to revamp the fitness program. He encouraged wing and squadron-level fitness activities, and ordered that all supervisors were to ensure that their people had an hour every workday for exercise—and he didn’t mean an hour before or after work or instead of lunch break, he meant one hour at any point during the workday. Jumper’s no fool; he doesn’t want his people working 9 and 10 hour days at home and then deploying for 179 days out of every year. Whether that’s what our squadron commander wants or not, it wasn’t Jumper’s intent, and he’d tell you that if you asked him. Jumper may work those kinds of hours, and I’ve no doubt that he does far more, but that’s the price of command and any intelligent commander accepts it as his burden. (This is also why I don’t seek any command.)

Still, that hour per day is hardly mandatory. One can argue that perhaps it should be, but I’d balk at the suggestion that I need to go to the gym every day for an hour. What would I do there? I’m trying to gain weight, not lose it; you can’t lift weights every day and get any results. But at least Jumper is trying, as few before him have. He’s made some rather questionable decisions, but this isn’t one of them.

So why then is there no place anywhere at Al Udeid to get a decent meal at 0830 in the morning, except at the Burger King, where all you can have is a Burger For Breakfast? How on Earth did the idea of promoting a new healthier lifestyle for Air Force personnel result in this situation?

I don’t like sounding provincial, but at least at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, where I’m supposed to be right now, the chow hall is open 24/7. They aren’t serving all 24 hours, just during the posted meal times, and the food is beyond awful. But if I wake up at 0800 and put some clothes on and go take a pee and then want something to eat, I can walk over to the chow hall and grab a bowl of Wheaties and some orange juice and canned pears and make a peanut-butter and banana sandwich, and now at least I’ve had a good breakfast. Here at Al Udeid, I have no choice but to eat a Burger for Breakfast. And I have to pay for that, which brings to mind the missed meals problem. But that’s another issue entirely.

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Bail Me Out!

I read a few articles in Florida newspapers this morning about the mortgage bailout plan and how it will affect Florida homebuyers. I don't claim to be an expert here, but I did buy a home in Florida just a few years short of the top of the housing price bubble, in autumn 2003. I did four things correctly: I bought as much home as I needed, not 1000 sf more because my realtor* talked me into it; I paid less than I could afford to for a home instead of maxing out my available financing and then some because my mortgage underwriter said I could; I paid less than my home appraised for instead of getting into a bidding war with other buyers and paying grossly over what the home was worth in the hopes that it would appreciate; and I made paying down the principle on my home a priority with my extra money instead of spending it on $10,000 overpriced home entertainment systems and $3200 overpriced Ethan Allen sofas to go with my overpriced home.

Now some of my tax money is going to be spent bailing out people who did NOT do those smart things I did. But you know what? I'm okay with that (especially considering that this year at any rate I didn't pay any taxes (apart from a few bucks to the state of South Carolina, not even enough for them to change a light bulb in a traffic signal). Our government encouraged people to become homeowners, but failed to regulate the people writing the mortgages to prevent what was already clearly by 2003 an unsustainable asset-price bubble in the real estate market (in Florida, certainly; maybe not here in SC) from developing into the situation we have now. I'd love to blame mortgage companies for this but many of mortgage underwriters and realtors who misbehaved over the past five years are out of jobs now so they're getting theirs.

I do think we need to bail out certain homeowners, but let's not go overboard here. I made smart decisions when I bought a home and I bought during the bubble; making smart decisions meant that when I sold my home, after the bubble had burst, I actually still made money on the deal, enough to pay of my mortgage and pay down some of our other debt. Thus I will never see a dime of bailout money even though, frankly, smart people like me are the ones the government should be helping. People who got caught in the bubble are not the same as people who played a part in the bubble.

So let's be honest here. Let's say you bought a home on an interest-only mortgage. Ouch. That was stupid. I mean, that was really stupid. I have a lot of trouble saying any interest-only mortgages should be refinanced by the government, because, frankly, you shouldn't have bought one. What annoys me is that I know people who have such mortgages, and I know they knew better. But let's go ahead and say if you meet other requirements below and are in danger of losing your home to foreclosure we might consider bailing you out after the other people who were smarter about their loans get their money first.

Let's say you bought a home for more than it appraised for at the time you bought it. Nowadays of course no responsible lender (that is to say, credit unions or USAA) would give you a mortgage for more than the appraised value of the home, but during the bubble such mortgages were being written right and left because the people who should have known better decided to count on continued 20+% annual home price inflation, leaving it up to the consumer to back off and be the intelligent one. This annoys me; I dislike stupid people, but finance and real estate are complex fields and when the so-called experts in those fields are telling you to go for it, I can't really blame people for doing so. As long as they didn't overdo it; finance may be complex but I'm not going to absolve you of failing to budget your own money. Anyway, so if you bought a house that appraised for less than you paid for it at the time you bought it, I have no interest in helping you at all. But if the appraisal came in higher or equal to what you paid, okay. You certainly can't be faulted for paying what something was worth.

Unless, of course, you paid what the home was worth but it was way outside any rational budget of yours. Realtors and mortgage brokers definitely are guilty of trying to put people into more home than they could really afford, and mortgages were written that would stretch peoples' budgets simply because people let themselves be convinced that they were making an investment whose value would grow at a ridiculous rate so that the 40+% of their gross income they were paying to service their mortgage wouldn't seem so bad when they sold it at immense profit a few years later.
Oops.
We don't teach basic financial literacy in schools. Didn't when I went to school, or when Smittywife went to school, and we don't do it now. Maybe if your kid's lucky they'll get one financial literacy assembly taught by a friendly credit union employee during 11th grade or something, but that's hardly enough; and the fact is, since most people are financially illiterate, their kids end up that way, too.

But I'm not going to blame the schools. I'm going to blame us. We need to be smarter about our finances, all of us, every American; if we were we might not be so impressed by the willingness of our government to rack up a debt that will be close to 100% of our annual GDP by the time this recession is over (this is the point at which your government's sovereign debt becomes a "bad risk," barring 3+% annual GDP growth (which we don't have right now). We're heading that way quickly. I leave it to your imagination what the results of this will be; but I don't support GOP efforts to paint the stimulus package as a budget-buster, since they had six years of untrammeled power to do something about the debt and what they did was make it significantly bigger; you can't claim a "principled stand" when you clearly only have those principles when out of power)

Anyway. People need to understand their budget, where and how they spend their money, and how much of anything they can afford. It takes little more than basic math skills to do this; you know how big your paycheck is each month, and you know how much your bills are. You can buy a calculator at the dollar store that will do the subtraction for you if you're not good at math, and that's all it takes. Subtract what you know you pay from what you know you make, and see what's left. Figure out how much house you can afford, then buy less. It's not hard. But most people failed to even consider this. So let's face it. If when you bought your house, you were paying 40% or more of your gross income on housing, you bought too much house. The fact is that your house may now be worth little enough that, with a government bailout and refinance, you could actually afford the payments.

Let me be clear: if that's the case, I want bail you out. I want you to stay in your home, I want the mortgage to be refinanced so it's no longer "toxic," no longer a negative on a bank's balance sheet and a cause of potential bankruptcy to either you or the bank. The more foreclosures that go on the deeper and longer the house price slump will continue to be, and that's not going to help the economy. Throwing you out of your home and forcing your bank to take a loss--thousands of such losses--are not good for the economy. They're not what we should be doing in this country.

But I don't like the idea. We're rewarding your stupidity and the bank's greed and lack of concern for your ability to pay your debts. I don't want to reward your stupidity. I don't want to reward the bank's venality. No one learns any lessons that way and the next asset-price bubble will be just as bad. Yet I feel that for the health of the economy, for the sake of recovery, we need to do it. And that's what they're going to do, that's what this bailout will do (although I understand it's only for mortgages written by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which while helpful doesn't seem to be enough to really fix the damage in the credit market).

But dammit let's have some regulation! Let's require that everyone who gets a bailout must attend a six-week financial literacy course at their local community college (and yes, let's fund that; it won't cost very much and the benefits will be enormous). And let's put it into law right now: in future, the U.S. government will not bail out homeowners who purchased homes that were too expensive for them to afford. Live within your means, in other words; don't look to the nanny state for help. And let's regulate the hell out of the mortgage industry: no interest-only loans for owner-occupied housing; no adjustable-rate mortgages that will adjust by more than a certain percentage of the monthly payment; no sub-prime lending at all without requiring the borrowers to attend credit counseling and financial literacy courses and limit their payment to 30% or less of their monthly income; and so on. I'm sure people who are actually qualified to come up with such regulations could do better than me, but clearly such people either A) don't exist, or B) were MIA during the housing bubble, which is a serious concern. As soon as there's a buck to be made the responsible people vanished, it seems, if they were ever there.

Anyway. I felt like rambling about that. We do need to bail out some mortgages, but I'm going to reiterate that it's smart people who did the four things I did when I bought my house who really deserve government help, not stupid people. It's cruel to say it, but people don't learn from getting government bailouts (well, they do, but they learn the wrong things); they learn from screwing up and getting foreclosed on. Sucks to be them. The key is to ensure that the ones who did at least some things right don't lose everything because of other peoples' greed.





* Why is realtor supposed to be capitalized? We don't capitalize real estate; nor do we capitalize property developer, or lawyer, or mortgage broker, or high school teacher, or military officer, or fireman, or soldier, or astrophysicist. What makes realtors so damned special? I refuse to capitalize it. The NAR says Realtor implies a member of their organization, who must be licensed, and is more than simply someone selling a house; but since in most states you must be licensed to sell a house (and to practice law or medicine or education), all realtors must legally be Realtors. Lawyers are just about the most self-important career group I can think of and even they don't argue that simply because they pass the bar exam and join the state Bar organization they should be called Lawyers. It's a sales gimmick, nothing more, and a pretty stupid one at that. Besides, no group who had as direct a hand in creating the current economy as realtors did deserves any sort of special grammatical treatment.

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Three Things

I checked this book out of the library when I lived in Valdosta. I don't remember the name of it but it was something along the lines of Finding Happiness in America or some such (editor's note: he has no idea, he just made that title up). Some years later I read a book called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, and the two books had similar purposes and frankly similar messages; I suspect both were written by Jungians.

Anyway. One of the points in that book--not the focus of it, but about the only real point I remember--was that an adult needs to have some things that are personally important that he or she does every day (or tries to). The notion is that you find three things (that's the number I remember, but it may have just been a suggestion) that matter a lot to you and you find a few minutes every day to do those things.

The point was that the things should not be spending time with your kids, or with your spouse, or networking, or anything like that; they should be things that are purely for you, for yourself. Me time, in other words. Seems part of the problem with people not being happy is fear or guilt about self-indulgence. The point was not to become a hedonistic jerk, but simply to remember that mature adults are not purely creatures of their society, work, or relationships, but that to be complete they also need to have things they do just for themselves.

I mentioned Finding Meaning etc above because the message was similar, and I actually remember more about that book, but a couple days ago the notion of "three things" returned to me. Now that I think about it, it may have been that you should find time every day to do at least one of the three things, or something. And of course I assume the three things are changeable, I mean, one of your three things may become less important to you. And I don't think the point was to set aside two hours a day, I think the point was that if you spent even five minutes on your three things you'd feel more complete and, importantly, be better able to project yourself positively in all the other areas of your life.

It sucks that I can't remember any more about this book because I'd like to look it up again. Anyway. I've decided what my three things are, at least for the time being. It's not that I feel the need to shout about what they are, but one of them of course is writing, and I was initially saying that I wanted my writing time to be spent necessarily on one of two projects I'm toying with. But some days, today being one, I only have a few minutes (I'm six minutes into this post so far and so should be wrapping it up, actually), and I think blogging is a perfectly good substitute for more substantive writing. Perhaps that is what this blog can be good for. Or, maybe I'll come up with something else. Anyway. So this was my writing me time today.

I think having three things is good. For someone in my position it actually is working opposite to the way it's intended; I figure I should spend my personal time--there's rather a lot of it--on these three things only, and spend the rest of the day working for other people--for my wife, say, or at Habitat for Humanity. Or being serious about job searching. And since writing is the only one of the three things likely to take longer than twenty minutes by itself I can spend a lot of time doing that on days where it makes sense to. Hey, wow. Organization for my structureless life.

This is why I read. You never when something you read eons ago in a book you can't even remember may come back to you and actually be worthwhile.

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Romantic Dinner?

I just had an ad pop on gmail while I was reading a message from Smittywife. It said

Live Maine Lobsters
Romantic dinner for two delivered right to your front door!

Seriously? Live Maine lobsters? Is lobster romantic? More to the point, is boiling a live invertebrate to death romantic? I mean, I like lobster; we might even make some lobster bisque here soon, but I would never consider whole lobster a romantic dish. Would you?

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A bit premature, perhaps

Maybe the previous post was a bit premature. Smitty's Library is up and running, but perhaps it was too early to give up on this blog just yet.

Smittywife and I had a come to Jesus talk last night. (Actually, she did the talking and I did the listening, and Jesus wasn't part of it at all. There must be a similar phrase in use in non-Christian countries, but I don't know what it would be; a come to Vishnu talk doesn't really make sense.) I won't go into it. She did make mention of the fact that there must be something wrong with me if I can't even think of anything to do with the blog anymore. A fair point, certainly.

After such a talk I would have expected that I'd spend most of the night awake in bed, thinking. But I didn't. Instead I got a really solid night's sleep, which was odd but a pleasant surprise. And I thought, when I got up, that maybe a good way to keep myself motivated on other things is to use the blog as a kind of daily journal of what I've done each day to be... useful. To get out of the house and do something, to spend time out, in the community, and not just here at the house.

And if I'm in the habit of blogging about that it should keep me motivated to do it; otherwise what would I have to do?

I would like to say, maybe, I could post in the morning about the previous day or at night about that day, depending. And maybe as time goes on I'll feel more like posting about other stuff, too. So maybe this blog isn't dead quite yet. I'm not dead yet, after all.

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