Cascades

Some days, traveling to the Seattle Metro area can be a real drag. Today the weather was wonderful and Glacier Peak and Mt. Baker all the Cascades were strikingly resplendent. And so were the Olympic Mountains across the Sound. And my travels of calling on businesses took me into Redmond to see Microsoft's campus. I wonder if the company, likes its shoddy operating system, just shuts down for no apparent reason. And I wonder if the employees just never seem to work quite right after the first week.

But as always, it's nice to return to Bellingham and make it to the food bank to see the friends that I've made there over the past years. IT is also one of the two remaining things of regularity in my life: volunteering at the food bank on Wednesdays and putting the recycling oout on Tuesday mornings. But it's a life that I would not trade for anything esle.

And business just might be picking up. Pretty good considering the prolong lack of economic vigor that persists. And all indicators suggest that it will be until 2015 until we see any serious improvement. Others say that we will never see a return to the boom years and bubbles of your. Out financial markets are in shambles, and America is broke on all levels. I wonder when the media will assume its responsible role in society by addressing the true woes of the economy versus the broad indexes being driven by the hedge funds and institions versus the market fundamentals. Also, here is an interesting link showing the trillion dollars of garbage that the fed added to its coffers over the past few years. This is merely a slight example of the crummy debt out there. And than there's private equity debt (a trillion dollars), commercial real estate (another trillion), and the Option-ARMs recasting and Alt-A's resetting (another trillion). But at least the Dow Thiry was up .4% today, so things must be okay.

Uh-oh, something got me started...