John Burkholder

A longer rant about another topic that I rarely talk about...but needed to be said. The stock market has been wildly erratic and dropping. To most of the populous, this really has not meaning unless it starts affecting them directly. What means something to everyone is how much they pay in taxes, how much the bread, milk, toilet paper and gas costs, and how much money they make personally. With unemployment rising, local and state governments running out of money, and the continued dollar falling, the citizen is beginning to feel the affects. Credit is harder to get. Houses are plentiful. Construction is down. Energy prices are rising. People are stopping investing in the 401K plans and are sinking it into keeping the status quo, status quo. The holiday season is expected to see huge shortfalls thereby continuing the downward spiral. In a futile effort to regain consumer confidence and restore some political sponsors, the government is going to bail out the banks thereby inserting them

Even though the song read "Our house is a very, very, very fine house", our house is rapidly shrinking. If you have read any previous blog entries, you may know that my 20 year old daughter joined us here in Virginia after being away from us for 3 weeks. Since then, we have been joined by the 18 year old waiting to enter the Navy. Our last house was 2600 square feet not counting the full basement. We now live in 1400 square feet total. When we moved here, we figured this was more than enough room for me, the Queen and the 5 year old. We even have swing space for a child to come visit. Soon, the last of the "out of the house" children will be arriving here to stay with us until she and her boyfriend move into their own place. In the meantime, we are going to move into a slightly larger but better carved up townhouse in the community. It has a garage included. Soon after moving, the eldest will be moving out on her own again. The 18 year old is here until March. Needl