The Life and Times of Jim
Hi, there. I'm Jim. Welcome to my phlog!
This site was written for Las Vegas, then LouisVille. Now, it seems to be about anywhere. In these phlogs, you'll see a lot of my personal notes and pictures. I like to post my observations here to remember life and celebrate it. I'm not religious. I don't pray for good fortune. I'm ecstatically grateful for the gift of life and I think our time should be remembered and not taken for granted. I'm not a writer. I think pictures tell stories so much better than words. I love just about everything in this life, and, I guess that would have to include you. So, if you've seen me, don't be surprised if your picture is in here somewhere. Of all the critters, people are absolutely the most interesting. 
<< 10/2007 < 09/2008 Calendar 11/2008 > 10/2009 >>Sign InView Other Logs
Sun 
10/05/2008 20:56:44
 jim  Pittsburgh People
Sun 
10/05/2008 18:18:16
 jim  North Hills Park
Sun 
10/05/2008 17:37:46
 jim  Meet Ruth
This is Ruth. 
We pulled up next to her, and its seemed like she was waiting for us. She has lived in Pittsburgh all of her life.
When she was 16, she joined the Musicians Union and played her the bass. Later she toured with a band where she met her husband. He passed away a years ago, along with most of her friends, but she lives on to tell their story of their days on the road. She lives on a ranch nearby. She said her stew should have been finished crocking when we parted ways (she uses only fresh picked vegetables). She comes to this park every day to walk her pomeranian pooch.
Pittsburgh people are the friendliest I've ever met.
They are honest, open, and colorful people.
They are more than happy to tell you the story of their lives.
Its always a pleasure listening to these people paint their pictures of their lives, and the days gone by.
I've been honored to meet every one of them.
Sat 
10/04/2008 22:10:26
 jim  Pennsylvania Fireworks - 250th Centiniel
Sat 
10/04/2008 20:07:44
 jim  Pittsburgh Fireworks
Sat 
10/04/2008 15:01:56
 jim  The Ross Township Landscape
Sat 
10/04/2008 12:31:13
 jim  I love hackers
Ever since I've owned a website, I've had to deal with hackers.
I LIKE THEM. They make me extra money.
Here's how the hackers help me.
I block certain IP address, so the ones that hit my sites have to have IP changers. It looks like multiple IP addresses are viewing my web pages. I get paid for each unique IP address that views a page on my site, with an ad on it..
Here's how they hurt me.
They don't really. At least not much. LVDarling's database was up to 1.2 gig. I rolled it back.
This database in only 10 meg, so, I usually restore a backup when I get too many Users.
Sat 
10/04/2008 10:18:09
 jim  I think its Beckys birthday today
She woke up, and said "It's Becky's birthday today"
I said, babe, "You're Becky"
She said, "I thought Becky was at the White Capitol"
I said, "No, that's the White House, and she...I mean WE, went last week, or did we go last week?".
She said, "No, I think we went last month.". "So, I wonder what Jim got me for my birthday."
I said, "Jim?".
I'm trying to figure out who and where I am these days
Am I Joe Six-Pack, Joe Lunchbucket, or the White Collar Elite ?
Do I live on Main Street, or am I the McMansion type?
Joe Six-Pack is generally understood to be one heckuva nice guy. He drinks, but he never drinks and drives. When he does drive, he would be the last person to tailgate or cut anybody off in traffic. He just Wants What is Best for America.
He has lunch with a lot of so-called "blue-collar" types - plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, the guy who owns the local car-repair shop. Some make more money than Mr White-Collar Elite. Joe Six-Pack is the one the politicians seem to like best. He's usually married to Soccer-Mom.
Soccer-Mom doesn't logically exist, or I don't know any of them. Soccer Moms work hard for their kids, but soccer is far too expensive for most middle class Moms. I think the middle class mom would be best coined as a Pink Collar Mom since most Mom's have to work these days. Mr and Mrs Cleaver are working so Beaver can spend all of time online.
Joe Lunchbucket  is a working stiff who has to pack his own lunch and can't even afford beer. Nobody seems to mention him much. I don't know any of these guys. Most of the people I know in this class work through lunch.
The White-Collar Elite guys live one subdivision away. In fact, you can catch all these guys after they've taken off their white or blue collars and put on t-shirts to go watch football. They're awfully hard to tell apart.
Wall Street is where all of those stock brokers go to have panic attacks, heart failures, and mental breakdowns just before they get soused at a local bar, then take the subway home. Nobody I know, knows these guys.
Main Street I think is where we are supposed to live. I can't usually afford to live downtown.
I think I'd call my self Joe Cubical,
I live in Back Street America. You never hear about that. 
Most of the people I work with don't take lunch breaks. Who takes lunch breaks these days?
Sat 
10/04/2008 06:35:11
 jim  Home foreclosures - My point of view
In the quarter ending September 2008 :
In the United States overall, home foreclosure filings were .5%.
In Nevada, home foreclosure filings were 1.4%  (that's the highest in the nation).
During the first nine months of last year, of all the troubled home loans, only 1% of the lenders rewrote their customers' home loans. To me, that means an ARM loan is more apt to go into foreclosure, than it is to be rewritten. ( msnbc.msn.com )
I'm thinking a bad loan is:
An ARM that lets a poorly qualified homeowner over-refinance his home for say $1,000 a month, then in 3 years goes up to $1,350 a month. ( MasonryConstruction.com ). The lure for a getting an ARM was easy money (more money than a borrower could ever have saved).
I would be one of those ARM loan borrowers, BTW.
- On my first refi, I realized paying off a mortgage was a mistake. My utilities, homeowners insurance and property taxes ran $500 a month. So I refinanced for a $600 mortgage payment. I got $80,000 cash for that. Easy money, right? 
- On my second refi, my thinking back then was: I needed the money. I wasn't working, and I was getting low on cash. Lenders were bombarding my phone and email with incredible offers and I said, "what-the-heck, if I'm going to lose my home anyway, why not have a last fling with it".  I got $60,000 for that.
- On both occasions, I was allowed borrow more money than I knew my house was worth. I wasn't working, but still, I was allowed to refinance my home. Lastly, I couldn't sell my house for the amount of money that my house was appraised for. The mortgage companies were speculating that Las Vegas homes would continue to inflate in value. I guess they were wrong.
- I would think my house today should be worth $140,000, and not the $260,000 it appraised for two years ago.
- I would have had to struggle for 10 years to save the kind of cash these companies were throwing at me.
The bad loans were written based on inflated appraisels, and bad lending policies.
I'm not alone and I think there is only two solutions.
And it stinks for the lenders.  The ways out are:
1) Let the bad loans be foreclosed on and let the homes be resold for their real value
2) Buy back the mortgages, with an assumable loan that has a substantially reduced interest rate.
I think the government is going for the first option, which will cream the borrowers credit ratings, while bailing out the lending companies.
For me, I'd rather keep my home.
I don't think buying the house next door for $75,000, then going into foreclosure on my house (with its $200,000 loan) is cool idea at all. But ya know, if I were to go with the flow, that's what I should do.
I'll wait to see what offers float to the top.
Thu 
10/02/2008 04:04:01
 jim  What should the price of a home be?..
Shouldn't the price of a home be about twice the family's income. I always thought that was a good rule of thumb.
At least that way, the family has the option of paying it off. But when a family can borrow 10 times their income to buy a house, that seems crazy, doesn't it. So, how did that ever happen ? The loan people lost their minds...that's how. 
I think all of us who refinanced know why we did it.
We took advantage of the insane loan companies. For once in our lives, we could have money to play with.
Me, I took five years off. My neighors reinvested their refi money into their houses. I think thats great. What I should do, is buy all of their houses (after they default) for 1/4 of their loan's value, then  default on my house's mortgage.
One of my neighbor's refi'd his house.
It was valued at $250,000. He bought cars, fixed up his property, bought a new $15,000 air conditioner, then defaulted on his loan. A guy from San Francisco picked up the house for $75,000.
Now think about this...
If my neighbor could have defaulted on his loan, and could have bought his house back for $75,000, he could have afforded the mortgage payments. Wouldn't he be crazy if he didn't. But, unfortunately, he didn't have that option.
He had to go into foreclosure, and then someone else had to buy it.
Tue 
09/30/2008 02:32:54
 jim  Not having followed much of the news
And just taking a wild assed guess...I'd have to think this country's major downfall right now is defaulted mortgages. All of those ARM's are maturing to a whopping big house payment. When I look around Vegas and Pittsburgh, I see foreclosed homes everywhere. They are wasted resources.
Why can't the government bailout the homeowners that fell for those questionable loans ? Wouldn't that trickle upward ? FHA loans used to be the best deal around. I say, populate these empty houses with people. Make home ownership affordable. Offer consumers a way out. A buy out of bad loans could save the banks.
Sat 
09/27/2008 21:33:04
 jim  Baltimore, when crabs are out of season
Sat 
09/27/2008 21:15:52
 jim  Baltimore Maryland - 2008/09/27
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:57:56
 jim  Washington,DC-CapitolHill
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:37:14
 jim  Washington,DC-Monument
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:16:30
 jim  Washington DC
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:16:08
 jim  Washington,DC-Jefferson Memorial
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:10:14
 jim  Washington Monument - 2008/09/27
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:10:14
 jim   (Reply)Washington,DC-Washington Monument
Sat 
09/27/2008 17:00:40
 jim  Washington,DC-CapitolHill
Sat 
09/27/2008 14:01:30
 jim  Virginia - Colors of the fall
Sat 
09/27/2008 13:56:42
 jim  Allegheny,PA-
Sat 
09/27/2008 13:30:22
 jim  Washington DC - 2008/09/27
Sat 
09/27/2008 13:26:42
 jim  Appalacians,PA-To DC
Fri 
09/26/2008 03:39:22
 jim  Only Venice has more bridges
Thu 
09/25/2008 01:52:12
 jim  Disasterous events
Its been a long life of disasterous things happening
For me, I grew up in a shack with an outhouse. I enjoyed those times, but the news was full of  Hippies Flower Children LSD Vietnam War Racial Wars  and the  Kent State shootings . Then it went on to  Food Shortages Stagflation Oil Spills  and  Gas shortages . Then there was the horrible  Aids  and the  Ebola  viruses. In Vegas, the  Mgm Grand Fire  killed 100 people. There was the  Gulf War . The  '.com' bubble  broke. In this decade, there was the fear of  Y2K  which ended up doing nothing, and the  Twin Towers  which ended up changing a lot of things. I'd guess Wall Street going bonkers isn't that interesting. I have camping gear with me. If everything crashes, we're going camping! YEA!
Thu 
09/25/2008 01:23:26
 jim  About my new job
Well, I just can't talk about. All I can say is, we deal with the stock market, and as you probably know already, the stock world is crashing to its knees. Work aside, I'm getting that same strange feeling that I had after I saw those planes crash into the twin towers. I just know everything is going to change.
We haven't caught much of the news lately.
We've been too busy checking out our new environment to be that bored.
Sometimes, I think ignorance is bliss.
Maybe I'd rather not know that the one-way trail we all are walking down ends at a cliff. I'd assume that somehow, all of the credit so lavishly acquired and abruptly defaulted upon, will be forgiven. I should have borrowed the maximums. I didn't though. I would think the the sound of Lehman Brothers crashing is the sound made by money going into the pockets of the middle class, all cashing in on their home equity loans, then heading off to bankruptcy court. I just wonder how houses got over inflated in value in the first place.
If someone told me my $80,000 home was worth $1,000,000
wouldn't I be crazy not to borrow against its equity, then default on the loan? For those that did, my hats off to ya floating around the waters in your yatchs. For all of us others that have pride in ownership I say, "should of, could have, but didn't".
Wed 
09/24/2008 18:12:56
 jim  The Driving Range and Tomato Pie

We blew a whole $5 for a bucket of balls here. Try it some time. I actually hit a ball 1,000 feet.

Across the street from the driving range is a restaurant called 'The Tomato Pie Cafe'. What's odd about it is, everybody was drinking wine. The restaurant doesn't serve alcohol. Hmmmm.
Tue 
09/23/2008 02:17:04
 jim  .Bark... Wheres Jimmys new BLOG entries?
They're comin! Ahhhh....I went home for lunch. I'm in the mountains and it only took 6 minutes.
You just can't beat that!!!
Sun 
09/21/2008 21:08:27
 jim  Our Backyard (not bad, huh?)
Sun 
09/21/2008 18:24:50
 jim   Hickory Hills Apt - 2008/09/21
Thu 
09/18/2008 02:42:41
 jim  We move into our apartment this Saturday
Its on a hill side in the forest. Our sliding glass door opens up to an open patio where theres a sloped yard, lots of trees and a creek. We expect to see plenty of wild life, like deer and racoon. What makes this location really great is, when we look through the forest, there's some shimming lights. They come from a shopping center with a Giant Eagle, Taco Bell, KFC, an interesting restaurant/bar and some very interesting shops. We can take a trail down the hill and through the forest we can cross over a bridge and a highway, and be shopping in 10 minutes. It's only 6 minutes from work.
Some of the people I've met live nearby on ranches
One girl complained about her two horses. She said all they ever do with them is feed them. The damage caused by the pollutants decades ago has hurt the nutrients in the soil, so they have to feed the horses hay and grain.
The days are shorter here, due to the hills.
So driving to work is shady and bright. The air is humid. The weather is perfect when its 60 degrees. At 90 degrees, going outside is almost intolerable. I'd expect this winter will be rough, with lots of slushy snow.
Last Sunday, 70 mph winds blew down power lines all over Pittsburgh. A lot of areas are having to boil their water. Tree limbs are in the roads. Some of the high shrubbery has been blown flat to the ground.
This morning, the fog was so thick, I could hardly see the stop lights.
I LIKE IT.
Thu 
09/18/2008 02:18:41
 jim  My internet is so slow that...
- my internet mail is slower than real mail
- a sneak peek at a TV episode on http://www.tnt.tv takes an hour
- http://www.LVDude.com  takes a minute to load
- If I watch a video on http://www.YouTube.com , all I get three pictures
If the pop-ups are mostly all I get, why can't google be a pop-up.
Sorry if I haven't posted much lately. Lately, I get all of my email on my IPhone.
It all works out though. There's been so much to be done here that I've hardly had time for internet.
Tue 
09/16/2008 22:17:51
 jim  Carnege, Pennsylvannia and around
Tue 
09/16/2008 07:40:57
 jim  Power Outages all over the Pittsburgh area.
We had 70 mph winds Sunday. Power lines and trees went down everywhere.
Schools were closed on Monday. People were being told to boil their water in some areas.
The best story I've heard so far about it:
A coworker attended his brother-in-law's wedding that day. Twelve of them were in a basement watching a football game in their Tuxedos. When the power went out, it went completely black.
I couldn't imagine that. In all my travels, in all my experiences, I've never watched a football game with a bunch of other guys. It sounded GREAT!
Sun 
09/14/2008 20:09:59
 Jim  We are riding the snake
Its a train and its going 60 mph..
Our track ends after 40 million miles, where our ride takes us off the side of a mountain in the clouds.
We know it ends, but we don't care. On our ride, we can look out the window at all of the beautiful things.
We can't become a part of them because our train won't stop.
But we can love all that we see.
And it is beautiful.
Sat 
09/13/2008 21:56:16
 jim  Pittsburgh Downtown
Sat 
09/13/2008 16:08:23
 jim  Penn Ave 2008/09/13
Wed 
09/10/2008 17:23:28
 jim   SquirrelHill - 2008/09/10
Tue 
09/09/2008 21:19:21
 Jim  Squirrel Hill
Tue 
09/09/2008 20:41:46
 jim  North Hills Park - 1 mile away
Tue 
09/09/2008 16:59:10
 jim  NorthPark,PA
Sun 
09/07/2008 13:45:38
 jim  RideTheDuck - 2008/09/07
Sun 
09/07/2008 13:45:04
 jim  Pittsburgh-PA-RideTheDuck
Sun 
09/07/2008 08:56:31
 jim  Olympic Quotes from Commentators
- Weightlifting: 'This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing.'
- Dressage: 'This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother.'
- Paul Hamm: 'I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.'
- Boxing: 'Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.'
- Softball: 'If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.'
- Basketball: 'He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces.'
- Rowing medal ceremony: 'Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the IOC president is hugging the cox of the British crew.'
- Soccer: 'Julian Dicks is everywhere. It's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field.'
- Tennis: 'One of the reasons Andy is playing so well is that, before the final round, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them...
Oh my God, what have I just said?'
Sat 
09/06/2008 19:05:02
 jim   Pittsburgh Strip - 2008/09/06
Sat 
09/06/2008 16:31:26
 jim  Station Square
  
Fri 
09/05/2008 22:23:55
 jim  Pittsburgh at Night

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