It seems like surprisingly little has happened with us, although much has happened with the rest of the world. I will now philosophize for four paragraphs.
A quick search in Google tells me that the average American has a credit card debt between $8000 and $12000. (I found a variety of numbers, but they’re all in that ballpark.) Imagine how long it would take you to pay off a debt of $10000, and what you would have to do to get it all paid off. You’d have to cut WAY back on everything, and you’d have to radically change your spending habits. For most people, just breaking even and not increasing the debt would be a challenge, let alone setting aside an additional $10000. To pay off a debt that large, it's a sure bet that there would be a significant amount of pain involved. Well, collectively, THAT’s what we as a country will have to go through to climb out of this recession. It’s going to take years and years, and is going to require people to rethink their lifestyles and start to live within their means. It took us over a decade to accumulate this debt, and anyone who thinks we’ll be able to just pay it off in a few months is sadly mistaken.
I feel the compulsion to gaze into my crystal ball, so here are my predictions for the next few weeks/months/years. They’re not pretty.
We dig out the word “depression” to describe the state of the economy. We come up with a new term that rivals the “Great Depression” to describe the current one. Two, if not all three, of the automakers in Detroit fail, resulting in a horrendous chain of business closures and job losses that spread to dealerships, auto parts suppliers, and anybody with even a hint of a connection to Detroit. Congress gets fed up with bailing out businesses, and pulls the plug on bailout money. The resulting debt from the current round of bailouts weighs down the U.S. economy for the next 10 or 15 years; other countries with less ambitious bailout plans recover more quickly. The U.S. dollar falls significantly compared to the rest of the world. U.S. wages fall to those comparable in China, so that Chinese workers earn comparable wages to those in the U.S. Cheap imports disappear, but there’s an upside: it becomes economically feasible to return to manufacturing stuff here in the U.S. It’s good to make things close to where they’re used. In the next few years, housing prices continue to fall, based on the laws of supply and demand; much like big cars falling out of favor, there will be little demand for huge McMansions in the distant suburbs (exurbs). The demand for housing will be for modest single-family homes, reasonably close to work. Unfortunately, I don’t foresee builders building developments with modest-sized houses any time soon. I would hope that people would return to some of the tried-and-true rules of thumb for homebuying: don’t spend more than two to three years’ salary on your house. Any more than that and you’re overextended. Likewise, don’t spend more than six months’ salary on your car. And, most importantly: pay cash for everything that depreciates, like furniture, electronics, cars, and virtually everything else that has buried the average American in a sea of debt. You can finance your education and your home, since those don’t depreciate (under normal circumstances). I sincerely hope that this upcoming depression teaches the value of savings, and saving up in advance for a purchase. I’m a cynic at heart, so I predict that any attempts at legislating lending reforms will be shot down. As a result, the only protection we will have against accumulating mountains of debt will be to simply say no to offers of credit. Basically, don’t buy stuff that you can’t afford. Since we Americans have been buying stuff we can’t afford for over a decade, this will be a hard lesson to learn.
So that’s what’s rattling around in MY head. You’d think that with this line of thought, I’d be ready to kill myself at any moment! Not really. On the whole, there’s nothing I can do to affect anything, except have a bunch of cash on hand and try to keep myself employed. Liz and I aren’t overextended by any means – I’m still driving around in my ’96 Corolla (just starting to lose that new car smell at 150,000 miles), and our tiny little house in the first-ring Minneapolis suburb will be paid off in the summer of 2012.
So here is the assortment of flotsam that’s been my life in the last few months…
Early January – We had a humidifier installed on our furnace. Minnesota winters are cold and dry, and it’s better for your health and the woodwork in your house if you keep the humidity at a reasonable level by adding a little moisture to the air. It’s funny how the weather patterns out here demand that you add humidity in the winter, but run a dehumidifier in your basement during the summer.
January 13 – It was –16° F this morning, and –34° F with the wind chill.
January 15 – It was –21° F this morning. Didn’t write down the wind chill value. I take an express bus to and from downtown, and I walk about 0.7 miles to and from the bus stop near the house. Fortunately, my winter coat is an old ice fishing jacket from Cabela’s. It’s rated to some obscenely low temperature, like –50°, and it’s got an insulated snap-on hood. Incredibly ugly, but incredibly warm. Aside from my feet, I actually wasn’t too cold on the walks to and from the bus stop. And I really like that Minnesotans don’t care what your coat actually looks like, as long as it keeps you warm.
Mid January – Grandma turned 98, so Liz and I flew out to Washington DC for her birthday party. She turned 98 on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, January 19th. Complicating matters slightly was the Presidential Inauguration, which was also in DC, on Tuesday, January 20th. The city was crowded but giddy, and we didn’t really see anyone in a bad mood anywhere.
Liz and I stayed with family, as did my brother and my mom, who all drove down from NY. Hotels were not a reasonable option, with everything being priced astronomically for the days before the Inauguration. Liz and I were extra pleased with ourselves for using only public transportation to get from our house to my cousin Heidi’s house: a local bus, a short ride on Minneapolis’s light rail to the airport, a flight to National Airport, and a short ride on the Metro that ended just up the block from Heidi’s house. On the way home, the exact same trip in reverse. The little east-west local bus that goes past my house is great – it’s bigger than a van and a little smaller than the mini-buses that airports use to take you to the rental car places. The bus pass that I have is for unlimited rides, so it’s like there’s always a free ride waiting for me. I like that.
While we were there, my cousin Heidi threw a cocktail party at her house, so we got to meet a lot of her friends. Turns out, she has very cool friends. All seem to be connected in some way or another with politics (it is DC after all), and all were looking forward to the new Obama administration. One of her friends had, at one point, been a staffer for impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. She had a few less-than-flattering stories about him, all of which seemed to say that Blago was far more concerned about his own image and how he was perceived than anything else. Fascinating, for those of us who don’t get to watch the Big Political Machine every day.The city of DC itself was pretty bonkers for the Inauguration. There were custom Metro tickets for the month leading up to the Inauguration. All the restaurants had some sort of Inauguration special. T-shirts, hats, and every type of souvenir imaginable. I think our Metro tickets will be all the souvenirs we need.
Mid-January – Liz and I celebrated our second anniversary, which coincided with our trip to DC. My brother (Kenny) and his fiancée (Maria) gave us the best card ever.February – We went bowling with a friend of Liz’s at Park Tavern in St. Louis Park. I bring this up only because the bowling alley was especially kid-friendly: they had bowling balls as light as four pounds! That’s FOUR (4) pounds! I had never seen one lighter than six pounds, anywhere, ever. I didn’t know they even made them that light. So I had to take a frame or two with the four-pound ball. Turns out that you can basically throw them side-arm without hurting yourself. Aiming is another matter, though. If you’re lucky enough to hit a pin, any pin, the ball will immediately bounce into the gutter with the most hilarious “THOCK” sound. There’s no way to knock down any appreciable number of pins with such a light ball, so the novelty wears off quick. If they made a novelty bowling ball that was extra heavy, like 28 pounds, I would be in for that.
March – I’d been having some trouble with the keys and the locks on my car. I tried making copies of the keys a long time ago, at least ten years back, but the originals were too blunted and the copies never worked. So I just toughed it out with the originals. In recent months, the trunk lock would put up a fight, and in recent weeks, the ignition would also put up a fight. Well, I learned a valuable lesson: the ignition of your car is a very delicate mechanical device. If the key is sticking, FOR GOD’S SAKE get a locksmith to look at it!
The last straw was after my radio show on a Friday night. I could get the key into the ignition, but no amount of jiggling could get the key to turn. So I couldn’t get the car started. I called Liz at around 12:30 am and she retrieved me and my CDs at the station. Did I mention this was during a snowstorm and the plows hadn't been out yet? The next morning I had a locksmith drive out to my car at the station and replace the whole ignition. So now my car has a key for the doors/trunk and a separate key for the new ignition. I tied a piece of string around the right side of the steering wheel to remind me to use the correct key. You always hear the story about tying a string around your finger to remind you to do something, but it actually works.
February – Coined a new word for the aches and pains of an old car: “Carthritis”.
February – My old home computer died. It had been Frankensteined together over the years from existing parts, and its death couldn’t have been more sudden if an anvil had fallen on it. Without any warning at all, the motherboard failed completely, as if someone had pulled the plug out of the wall. So I pulled out the hard drive, which was the only part worth saving, and brought the rest of the machine to the Hennepin County recycling center. I don’t know exactly how they recycle the parts, but I’d like to think that they process the stuff like the old car crushers, where my old machine was turned into a cube.
I checked with several of my many computer-geek friends, and bought a new machine. It’s a tiny little thing, sort of the computer equivalent of the Smart Cars. Here are some of the details: Hewlett Packard Compaq CQ2009F, Intel® Atom 230 processor, 1GB DDR2-533 RAM, 160GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive, SuperMulti DVD Burner, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition installed. And all for $269.99. Mind you, that’s the entire machine, including the XP operating system, for $269.99. Quite a deal.It’s tiny. Official dimensions are 4.41" x 10.71" x 9.69", but if you have a hard time thinking in inches, it’s about the size of two three-ring binders stacked on top of each other. Weight: 8.16 lbs. The old case and power supply that I recycled was probably close to 40 pounds.
To give a sense of scale, here’s a picture of my computer and stereo setup on my desk. At the left edge of my desk is a Technics 1200 turntable. In front of the turntable is an external 100 GB hard drive, affectionately known to me as the hamburger drive, because it’s about the size of a hamburger. At the center is a small LCD monitor sitting on top of the computer. To the right of that is an external 500 GB hard drive. At the right edge of the desk is a small pile of old-school stereo equipment. From bottom up, that’s an early-‘80s era Realistic receiver, which should be immediately recognizable to my college friends – it still works! On top of that is a very old single-disc CD player, also from Realistic. I have about ten first-generation CD players, all of which still work. No particular reason why I use this one here. On top of that is a Technics AM/FM tuner, which I use to pick up 90.3 so I can record my own show. At the top of the heap is a little Realistic switchy box with an extra set of RCA jacks, so I can plug in whatever else I need, like a cassette deck or a VCR. To the left and right of the desk are a pair of fantastic Advent speakers. Note how tiny the actual computer is, compared to everything else on the desk!One minor issue with the machine is that the CD drive is vertically oriented, which is not too practical for someone who uses the CD drive as much as I do. So I bought a set of four rubber feet, mounted them at the corners of the computer, and turned the whole machine on its side, so that the CD drawer opens properly. An easy fix.
The little package that held the rubber feet was extremely helpful, and recommended that I wear safety goggles when installing the rubber feet on my stereo equipment.
My friends told me that the Atom processor in my new computer was designed to be used in portable, battery-operated devices, and used very little power. I had to check this out, and I borrowed a friend’s voltmeter/ammeter/power meter to investigate.The power meter is a cute little thing about the size of my carbon dioxide detector. It plugs into the wall, and you plug the device you’re testing into the power meter. It’s got a digital display that reads the power in watts used by your device. Cool toy! Naturally, I tested essentially everything in the house.
First, I tried some light bulbs to make sure the readout was in the ballpark. A 60 watt incandescent was 58 watts, a 24 watt compact fluorescent bulb read 25 watts, and a new LED bulb, which was supposed to use 1.5 watts, read between 1 and 2 watts.
Then I tried the new computer. When it’s on, it uses 28 watts. I wanted to see if thinking really hard uses more power, so I opened a bunch of programs all at once while I was burning a CD, and I got it up to 30 watts. That seems reasonable, although I don’t know how much power my old machine used. I tested the machine in standby mode, and it only uses 2 watts. Very nice! My small LCD monitor uses 15 watts when it’s on, and 3 watts in sleep mode. For comparison, the back of my big LCD monitor at work says it uses 1 amp, so that would be 120 watts. So my tiny little system at home is power efficient, too!
I then tested the rest of my stereo equipment, which shares desk space with the computer. The early ‘80s-era receiver uses 8 watts when it’s on, about 10 watts at a reasonable volume, and 15 watts when it’s deafeningly loud. The early ‘80s-era CD player uses 6 watts when it’s idle and between 9 and 12 watts when it’s playing. Making the servos jump around is what spikes the power to 12 watts. My mid-‘80s AM/FM tuner uses 2 watts. My Technics 1200 turntable uses 9 watts when it’s on, and 11 watts if you turn on the little lamp. Interestingly, the turntable uses the same amount of power when it’s running as when it’s idle – the bearings are efficient enough so that it takes basically no power to keep them running at 33-1/3 or 45 rpm. I assume that the power spikes a tiny bit when you power up from idle to full speed, but the power meter didn’t respond quickly enough to catch it.
Then I tested some other things in my basement office. My plug-in wall clock, which I got as surplus from my high school summer job in the maintenance department of a large office building in Montvale, NJ, uses a grand total of 1 watt. My little space heater, in stark contrast, uses 600 watts on low, and around 1200 watts on high! Yikes! To be used sparingly, for sure!
Then the kitchen. Toaster: 860 watts. Answering machine: 2 watts. Didn’t feel like rolling the fridge away from the wall, but I’d expect 1000-2000 watts. They say if you want to significantly cut down the overall energy consumption in your house, start with buying a new refrigerator. (That is, after you replace all the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, which use about ¼ the amount of power for the same light output.)
Then the bedroom. Big stand-alone fan: 58 watts on low, 75 watts on high. Little window fan: 28 watts on low, 36 watts on high. Cell phone charger: 0 watts if there’s no phone plugged into it, 3 watts when charging my phone. Laptop computer: 62 watts when it’s on, 39 watts when it’s off (I assume that the power goes to recharging the battery). Computer printer: 5 watts in idle mode, a whopping 900 watts when it powers up and when it’s printing! Holy moly! I can now see why it dims the lights when we print!
Walking around the house with the power meter was pretty enlightening (no pun intended), and served as a good reminder to unplug or turn off your electronic doodads when you’re not using them. My new computer has a “hibernate” mode, where it saves its state to the hard drive and then turns completely off. When you power back up, it picks up right where you left off. That’s even better than the low-power standby mode – it’s hard to argue with zero. And just like mom taught us, turn off the lights when you leave a room.
February – Liz and I found ourselves in the scary Wal-Mart in Bloomington. We’d only been in that store once before, and I can’t remember exactly why we were there for this visit, but we ended up buying a whole lot of cat food. We noticed that the store had a few self-checkout lines, so we pulled up to one of them with our 3 cases of cat food and began scanning. We didn’t know if there was a “quantity” button for the scanner, which would have allowed us to scan one can, and enter a quantity of 24. So we ended up individually scanning 72 cans of cat food, while the receipt and the angry queue behind us grew and grew. It took longer than you’d think. We haven’t been back since. Actually, I think the place is closed now. I wonder if we had anything to do with that...March – I attended a Richfield City Council meeting, just for giggles. I had a few questions about houses and zoning, and thought it would be enlightening to sit in on a meeting. A few days later, I got in touch with our City Manager, who was able to look up the following for me:
In June 1964, my house was moved from its original location at 714 Lake Shore Drive to its current location at 7520 Washburn Avenue. How cool is that? I can’t quite pin it down to an exact lot, though. A check of the current maps shows that there is no 714 Lake Shore Drive, and it’s not clear where such a house number would be. If Lake Shore Drive is considered a north-south street, then the house number would be 7014, or 7140, or something like that, and the house would be right up against I-35W near 70th Street. It would make sense that the house was moved when the highway was put in. If Lake Shore Drive is an east-west street, then 714 might be on the edge of Wood Lake Nature Center Park. Either way, it was moved about 2 miles to where it is now, and we can pin it down to a particular month. Life is good.April – Five months after the elections, we still don’t know who won one of Minnesota’s Senate races. 2.9 million votes cast, and at the end of election night, Norm Coleman ahead by 725 votes. That’s 725 out of nearly 3,000,000. State law triggers an automatic recount when the margins are that tight, so as the tallies came in on election night, it was officially too close to call, and we all knew that there would be a recount in the coming weeks.
Excerpted from Minnesota Public Radio, “Coleman declares win, recount looms”, November 6, 2008:
Coleman declared himself the winner of Tuesday's election but Franken said he would let the recount play out, hoping it would erase the incumbent's 439-vote lead out of nearly 2.9 million ballots. State officials said the recount wouldn't start until mid-November and would likely take weeks.
"Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed," Coleman said Wednesday at a news conference. He noted Franken could opt to waive the recount.Excerpted from CNN, “Franken declares Senate race win after state ruling”, January 6, 2009:
"It's up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct," Coleman said, telling reporters he would "step back" if he were in Franken's position. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the recount would cost 3 cents per ballot, or almost $90,000.
It’s nice that Mr. Coleman is so concerned about the $90,000 expense for the recount.
The Minnesota State Canvassing Board on Monday certified the results of the recount of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's fight to retain his seat against Franken. The results showed Franken with a 225-vote lead.Excerpted from MSNBC, “Coleman sues over Minnesota Senate recount”, January 7, 2009:
Republican Norm Coleman said Tuesday he is suing to challenge Democrat Al Franken's apparent recount victory in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, delaying a resolution of the contest for weeks or months.Excerpted from Minnesota Public Radio, “Who's paying for the Senate trial?”, March 8, 2009:
At a Capitol news conference filled with cheering supporters, Coleman said he won't accept a board's determination a day earlier that Franken won 225 more votes in the November election. He had a seven-day window to file the lawsuit.
"We are filing this contest to make absolutely sure every valid vote was counted and no one's was counted more than anyone else's," Coleman said.
Republican Norm Coleman's Senate election lawsuit enters its seventh week today as attorneys for Democrat Al Franken continue to present his side of the case. The trial is costing the two campaigns millions of dollars. It is also placing extra costs on the state court system and on many counties around Minnesota.Excerpted from The Star Tribune, “Senate recount trial: Judges' ruling is boon to Franken”, April 1, 2009:
Norm Coleman's lawyers all but conceded defeat Tuesday and promised to appeal after a panel of three judges ordered no more than 400 new absentee ballots opened and counted, far fewer than the Republican had sought to overcome the lead held by DFLer Al Franken.I fully expect that Mr. Coleman will be appealing this decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court, although nothing is yet announced one way or the other at the time of this writing. Funny that Mr. Coleman, who said back in November he would "step back" if he were in Franken's position, seems to be doing quite the opposite nowadays. It should be interesting to see how this affects Mr. Coleman’s long-term national political aspirations. Stay tuned…
March – Saw a familiar-looking display hanging in the SuperTarget in Edina. Hmmm…April – Couldn’t be a Big Life Update without cat pictures, right? Liz showed me one of the doodles from her class notes, which is her artistic impression of Noodge. We contrast that with an earlier sketch I did of Poohead, who hadn’t really been named at the time and was ignoring the name “Izzy”. It’s clear who is the artist in the family.
Hope spring springs sometime soon for all of you!
Ron & Liz Gerber
