The leaves are falling, and the temperature has already hit 29 degrees.
I'm thinking this is going to be a very cold winter with lots of slushy snow.
Words of Wisdom from the Locals
- Get windshield washer fluid with an antifreeze ingredient in it. It makes the snow turn yellow...lol
- Keep a heavy jacket in your vehicle

I still can't believe how friendly Pittsburgh people are.
They offer kind words, good advice, pure honesty, and have a positive outlook on life.
They're family values are the highest I've ever seen, and their love for sports in undying.
Through my travels, I've noticed unfriendly pockets of places in friendly towns.
I haven't found any pockets like that in Pittsburgh, and we've been all over.
Even the bums (which they're aren't many of) tell you their story.
I think I'd hate being alone here, but Becky and I meld in whereever we go.
This is an incredible place.

I just gotta say this. I've seen pictures of atoms...and they're funny.
If gravity affects them at all, they're shaped like kidney beans...lol
Theory is great, but it may lack important items like GRAVITY.
Don't trust every thing you read. Don't trust pictures.
Everything you need to know is in your mind.

Two things have happened in this century which are phenominal:
- The cost of houses have doubled or tripled.
- The cost of transportation / fuel has doubled.
The powers that be, could try to bring home prices down to what people can afford...
- yea, that might work..
Relief loans could be provided for loans in trouble...
- yea, that might work..
But it seems to me that what really needs to happen in this country is
Incomes must rise, to meet the rise in cost of  everything else.
It's been a long time since my salary doubled. I'm making less than I was in 1996. How about you ?
I think inflation must occur for all areas that haven't caught up to the housing and transportation inflations.
I think we need to grow our own food and produce our own products.
We need to produce own our oil...don't you think ?
We need to produce SOMETHING besides slavery for the other impoverished countries of the world.
I also want to add this,
How could buying oil from Iran and Iraq ever have helped the free world?
We built the monster.

22 July 2008 , By MICHAEL THEODOULOU IN CYPRUS
An Iranian mother of four faces death by stoning "at any moment", human rights campaigners have warned. Kobra Najar has spent more than ten years behind bars after being convicted of adultery and encouraging another man to murder her violent and heroin-addicted husband, who forced her into prostitution. If her sentence is carried out, Najar will be ritually washed, wrapped in a white shroud and carried on a stretcher with her hands tied behind her back to an open space in the prison at dawn. There she will be buried up to the armpits and stoned to death in the presence of prison officials.

Numbers 22:21-29 (New King James Version)
Balaam got up in the morning, saddled his ass and went with the princes of Moab.
But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him.
Balaam was riding on his ass, and his two servants were with him.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand,
his ass turned off the road into a field.
Balaam beat his ass to get his ass back on the road.
Then the angel of the LORD stood in a narrow path between two vineyards, with walls on both sides.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD, his ass pressed close to the wall, crushing Balaam's foot against it.
So he beat his ass again.
Then the angel of the LORD moved on ahead and stood in a narrow place where there was no room to turn, either to the right or to the left.
When his ass saw the angel of the LORD, his ass lay down under Balaam, and he was angry
and beat his ass with his staff.
Then the LORD opened his ass's mouth,
and his ass said to Balaam, "What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?"
Balaam answered his ass, "You have made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now."

When the US sneezes, the whole world catches colds.
Live today as if its your last. Plan tommorrow as if  you're going to live forever.
No matter how much reason you offer a person with faith, they don't get it.
Make the most amount of money in the least amount of time.
When your occupation, vocation, and vacation are the same, you're set for life
I take that back. If your happy in your head, you're set for life.
The eleventh commandment 'Thou Shall Not Get Caught'
Do unto others (before they do unto you).
Eat, Drink and be Merry (for tommorrow everything might suck).
The best formula for wealth is to be born wealthy, which wasn't my option.
Success is dictated by being born wealthy, being attractive, having a good voice or being just plain lucky. Intelligence doesn't seem to have much to do with it.
Being a doctor or lawyer is a great idea, if you can afford working 8 years through college.
I'd sue everyone who has ripped me off, if lawyer's didn't rip me off.
I wonder what the chairman of Lehman Brothers did to make a half a billion dollars a year. The company went under.
Path of least resistance is the reason for how the rock rolled down the hill into the road. The dent in my truck was its purpose.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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".