Wipping Clean The Slate Once Again

I've been meaning to write a few lines since Christmas, but a lack of enthusiasm for the subject matter and a general malaise has kept me from getting it done. If you're looking for a warm and fuzzy seasonal post I'd stop now.

So anyhow, as far as the holiday season has gone...pretty much lackluster. With no cash really for gifts there was not much point to being out and about in a crush of people at the mall just to wander around. Thanks to the more than crummy weather around christmas we didn't even make the trip to the folks house, opting instead for a future time when the whole damn world wasn't one big snowball. Heck, we didn't even get around to putting up a tree this year for the first time ever. That's not a big deal though...with no little feet around there's not much point to pretending, plus, the wife was headed to Florida the day after Christmas to chaperon the band bus trip to Disney again so there was nobody here but me to deal with it.

The weather for the month of December has been a monster. By the end of the month we'd had 58" of snow, considerably more than our normal 23" amount. There was so much in such a short amount of time that I simply couldn't keep up with the downfall and until we finally caved in and paid for a snowplow to stop by, we had one lane open at the end of the driveway to get out and the rest of it was buried waste high in county snowplow residue. And then, after two weeks of almost constant snow, the day after Christmas it started warning up and by late Saturday it was almost 60° and raining cats and dogs. By the time it cooled off again a day later, most all the snow but the piles was gone and you could see ground again. The downside to that of course was flooding. There was major flooding up and down the Grand River including an area not 2 miles away from the house. We've only had a couple inches of snow since the thaw and I'm hoping that will last for awhile.

I used my last 3 days of vacation from work to have off from the 24th to January 5th. Due to the economic meltdown that the country is in the middle of dealing with, when I go back on the 5th there's only going to be about a dozen folks out on the floor, running production. Not good. We have to generate enough income for the company to keep the place heated and the lights on, not to mention cover the payroll and if that don't happen I'll be on the street again with the rest of what's left of the crew. We also lost one of our 2 biggest customers this past month and they've been busy pulling their dies out of house the last few weeks. The other big customer is GM and that ain't exactly the best deal in town these days....whether or not they get their billion dollar government bailout. I'm not real clear on how this whole thing is gonna turn around, if it ever does, just because we have a new president. From what I've been reading in the money magazines we headed at a high rate of speed back to 1929 again. Except this time we're not 70% rural, it's more like 20% and so there's gonna be more folks that don't have the capability to feed themselves this time around. Not good.

On the "up" side I just started my 57th orbit around the sun a few days ago. Ri and Adam took me out to dinner and a movie to celebrate the event, which was real nice of 'em with me being here by myself and all.......I was back over to their place again the next evening to play Wii and watch the new year come in. That's better done with company too.

Real early this morning, about 3am to be exact, I was at the high school to pick up the wife on her return to the frozen north country. By the time I got to bed it was almost 5am. While she and the kid were gone I was able to get the laundry room floor painted again and over the past week did a bunch of cleaning so the place has less of that white trash feel to it. I also set my drums back up and been beating the hell outa them the last several nights.

I've got no resolutions for the new year. I have hopes, but they're guarded with a fair amount of reality. I don't see things getting any better in the next 12 months, more than likely they'll get worse and my own selfish self only hopes that it doesn't have to effect us here to the point we're not both working. With all the BS the last couple years from the kid and other sources our cushion is pretty much gone and it wouldn't take much of a bump to fall off the edge of the knife.

Like always though, time will tell and I plan to keep on truckin' until they pull the plug. Stay tuned.

Tc