We had a really rough December. We had the slowest December in our business' history and fell way short of our projected income. Things are getting tight for everyone. The cost of living, high oil prices and the housing crash have everyone holding on to those greenbacks (as well they should - it's only going to get much, much worse). I feel sorry for the next president - the current idiot in charge has screwed up so many things that it's going to take twice as many years as he's been in office to curtail the damage thats been done. The new president is in for some serious bashing if they can't make major changes in miraculous time and I am afraid that the general public is still not aware of just how bad it is going to get before things level off again...
The fact that Becky and I don't work at traditional jobs has some benefits. No matter what happens to the economy, nobody is going to lay us off and make us more chum in the job pond. Not having your entire life in the hands of another individual is a really nice feeling. Our business keeps going - it slows down to a crawl sometimes, but our lifestyle lets us change modes and sit still for a little while until things pick back up. The sitting still is the hard part...
So, here we are in Minnesota, sitting still and making the best of our situation. I'm learning how to chainsaw carve and making a bit of money on the side. Becky's homeschooling the kids and running the home business. It's not an exciting time, but then there's still a lot to learn. Becky had fears that she was not doing the homeschooling correctly while we were traveling this last year, so she enrolled them in on-line public school (Connections Academy) which uses Calvert materials. The structure and schedule of classes has made it much easier to plan ahead and work the girls school into our mobile lifestyle. That has lessened the stress for us both considerably.
I am doing my best to keep moving. It's hard to resist the temptation to just "hibernate" through the winter - sitting on my ass in front of the idiot box playing armchair philosopher - which just pisses me off to the point where I find myself yelling... It's time for this country to get pissed off at itself and make some major changes before it's too late. The middle class is about to be demoted to upper-lower or lower class very soon and the upper class is going to divide up the remains of their worldly possessions right in front of them. Bad news for the upper class too - they're about to lose their free piggy back ride. You can only exploit a resource while it's in abundance and once the middle class can't make the credit card and mortgage payments there's nothing to stop the markets from hitting the bottom and crashing right on through to oblivion. Seems that the bankers forgot that you can't keep adding more debt to the economy if nobody can afford to pay the bills. All of this while we're in a war economy which should have normally fed the middle class, but then it's all been hired out to private upper class families and their businesses, and the labor has been farmed out... So here we sit pouring our future emergency cash into a handful of pockets. Really sad...
So, hang tight to your assets (not your d-evaluating-ollars) and get ready to be creative and change quickly as the future is quite uncertain indeed.
Daily Pill
My parents treated us to a really nice (almost 2 week) vacation in Mexico. We spent 11 days traveling around large portions of the Yucatan Peninsula looking at Mayan ruins and sampling the local cuisine from as many restaurants as possible. My mom knows the best spots to check out the ruins and taught us a lot about Mayan culture. All I can say is WOW!
We learned a lot about our own life in the process of discovering what we could learn about life in the Yucatan... We feel somewhat lost in the U.S. - Becky and I are definitely not your typical couple and we don't really understand the whole big car, big house, multiple TV, football, throw everything in the trash lifestyle. We tried the American dream for 15 years and it really didn't add up to anything that resembled happiness.
Down in Mexico, we see that we're right on track - living simply and as independently as possible. They recycle - we only scratch the surface of recycling... I love the obviously recycled bottles (they sanitize and refill vs. crushing, melting, casting and reprinting each time they are returned). The fact that our morning eggs didn't come in a carton made me smile... No individual plastic vegetable bags - and everything didn't come pre-wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. Simple inexpensive and smart!
