Pam took her dog off of all food yesterday which we read would give his digestive track time to "calm down." Today he's had a rice broth and tomorrow will go to a mix of that with his regular dry food before going back to his normal diet. So far this seems to be solving the problem, for which we are VERY thankful! This place was really stinky, and cleanup on Aisle Six was getting old.
This morning I drove Pam into the women's Bible study so I could run up to Harbor Freight to return the well pump I got there a couple of weeks ago. I told the gal at the register that I'd prepared myself for a hassle and was very pleasantly surprised for how easily it went. I'd never returned anything there before, and by policy they're not supposed to take pumps back; I'm supposed to return it to the manufacturer. She said that's because some people use them to pump flammable liquids which then makes that pump sitting in their back room a fire hazard. But apparently I looked honest because she took it back without question and credited my card with the full purchase price.
Props to Harbor Freight.
I'll have to pay more for a more powerful pump at Coastal Farm and Feed. Phooey.
The current section of my writing project is fairly technical - the timing of the Rapture relative to the Tribulation - so writing it is slow going. I did, however, make good progress while working at Starbucks waiting for Pam to be done at the Bible study.
We've been invited to join a couple from church - Pam met the wife at that study - for Thanksgiving dinner. I confess to feeling a little hesitant at socializing for the afternoon with people I've never met, but their graciousness and hospitality is sure commendable.
We lived through the bust of the housing bubble in Phoenix, second only to Las Vegas for the size of the expansion and subsequent crash. I had friends there who were bankers and who were in real estate, and knew people who got way upside down when they found their houses were worth a fraction of what they owed. The one thing I eventually figured out is that the financial mess that resulted from the collapse is that the blame belonged to everyone involved.
Home buyers got greedy and bought houses bigger and fancier than common sense allowed. Banks saw that those buyers got qualified for mortgages through shady, and sometimes illegal procedures. Realtors saw the opportunity for almost unlimited commission checks and parlayed the combination of greedy buyers and complicit bankers into record sales figures and developers threw up subdivisions as fast as they could to keep up with demand.
Looking back, the blame is primarily placed on the lenders. Some of that may be because they broke laws, and probably also because they're "big business," always an easy target when something goes wrong. Also, greed is too universal to make for a good basis for blame. The foolishly greedy home buyer is better portrayed as a victim of predatory lenders.
CBS News did a story tonight on the student debt problem, profiling recent graduates with loans of as much as $100,000 from their four year degree. Those poor young adults are saddled with a financial burden it will take them decades to pay off. That's why Congress is looking into new regulations on the lenders that prey on the students and their parents.
Never mind that the colleges and universities are raising costs far faster than the cost of living so (among other things) they can lure prestigious faculty, pay them crazy salaries, and then let them sit in their offices doing pointless studies so they can write articles to get published in journals so the university gets an even bigger reputation. Meanwhile, classes are taught by teaching assistants - doctoral students - as a requirement for getting their Ph.D.
And the parents and students choose the university based on that reputation so the school's name will appear on their resume'. "We'll figure out how to pay for it later, but the right school will mean dividends the rest of their lives." Two years at community college before transferring to the university is considered almost degrading, demeaning.
I don't have data, but based on my experience as a college student and then college professor I can tell you that the number of college students who finish their classes for the day and then head for their 20-hour a week job is a small fraction of what it used to be. The "college experience" can't be compromised with time spent bussing tables or stocking shelves.
I'm not a prophet, but I suspect that the student loan situation will experience something similar to the housing crisis. My only fear is that the portion of the culpability that should be laid on the schools, the students, and the parents will get ignored, with the lending institutions taking the rap.
FWIW
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