"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." - Alfred Adler

If you've ever watched a Moto GP race you realize how clever this is.

It was 53 degrees in here when I built the fire this morning at about 6 a.m. (I over slept) but at just shy of 10 a.m. it's now up to a balmy 65 degrees in MoHo's living room. Down the hall in the bedroom it's still about 60 but we won't be back there again until bedtime when the electric blankets will have warmed the bed nicely. This is probably a day we'll keep a fire going constantly.

Poor Buddy is SO miserable.

I wonder how Dolly is doing. Grin on her face or total exhaustion from avoiding Chisolm for almost 24 hours? If the latter, by this time Sunday they should be in full blown amore.
My Christmas gift to Dolly.

The UFC staff, including interns and part time employees means that most mornings we have about a dozen people in the building. Four of those are gals who are relative newlyweds and work side-by-side in an open area known as the bull pen. I've chatted with them about their Christmas plans and am struck by how many of them will spend the holiday in significant tension. Just like bringing a baby into a family creates some stress as everyone adjusts to the new dynamics they're going through the same thing as their husband becomes part of the family (or they become part of his family). One of the guys from church I talked with this week has a brother who's a cocaine addict, adding a pretty overwhelming dimension to the family gathering. Last year at Christmas he OD'd on the folks' bathroom floor and my friend had to do CPR to bring him back to life.
Makes me thankful for my relatively normal family.

See the quote above.
Pam and I had a conversation this morning about crazy people. They don't think they are crazy; they think they're perfectly normal and other people just don't "get" them.
I *think* we agreed that some people are culpably crazy. That is, their eccentricities (that is, weirdness short of a diagnosable pathology) are a mess of their own making and which they could and should alter. But a large number of people are just wired to be odd, or weird, or certifiable.
All of that came up because we got to talking about my inability to shut my brain off.
Hard wired or culpable?

I check a couple of car sites in the morning to see what's been added. One, BarnFinds.com, just aggregates interesting vehicles for sale and the other, BringATrailer.com does that and conducts auctions. (That's where I sold my truck.) When a particular car or truck grabs my attention I read the viewer posts to see what others think about it. Often a commenter has particular knowledge about the vehicle that teaches me things I didn't know and which might be red flags on this one.
This morning one of the cars on BarnFinds.com which is being auctioned on eBay with a crazy high Buy It Now price started a discussion of what's wrong with the collector car hobby now.
Years ago this used to be a hobby for people who liked old cars and tinkering with them to get them back to some measure of glory. Now it's mostly an investment device for guys looking to own something they don't really care about and then turn over in a year or two for a handsome profit.

Cf. fine art. People with big bucks buy art they don't really like but that they think is investment grade. That drives prices up beyond the reach of people who genuinely like it and also makes the collector susceptible to the con. The dollar signs in the buyer's eyes blind him to the reality. It is just so in the collector car market today. For example, people are paying WAY too much for low mileage pickup trucks from the 40's to early 70's because they're hot right now. And they're hot precisely because people with too much money perceive them as being hot right now. A guy who found an old Studebaker Lark with a six cylinder engine and four doors puts it on eBay with a starting bid four times it's original selling price...and gets someone to pay it.

Unless I stumble across a barn find or similar I'll never be able to buy another old car. The prices for even plain Jane cars and trucks has gone to collector market levels. Maybe it will crash and return to a more appropriate level but by then I'll probably be way too old to take on another project.

I'm going to the Barrett-Jackson auction in AZ next month where I'll see this dynamic in full bloom. Worse, a buyer pays a 10% buyer's fee and pays to have the thing shipped back to Ohio or New Jersey. Add in another $2,000.
There's too much money in this world and too much of it is in the hands of fools. They should give some of it to me.

Note: yes, I've restored cars and then sold them, typically at a profit. But for me it was the fun of the restoration, the journey not the profit. I enjoy the hands-on work of taking something run down and forlorn and turning it back into a head turner. Just like restoring old houses that we lived in for 5 years and then moved to the next project house. The profit was icing.

According to the weather site I use today was five seconds longer than yesterday. Can summer be far behind?