Thursday, August 24, 2006
I slept reasonably
alright from 5:30am-noon. My wife’s alarm went off at 11am so she could do a bottle run. Otherwise, I’m doing alright. I was going to go into work for this afternoon but because of Anne’s bottle run, couldn’t manage but I will go in for tomorrow afternoon and Saturday. Isn’t this interesting, Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Mainly because of it’s wobbly orbit and astronomers found several other “planetoids” earlier like Xena. Now, we have 8 planets instead of 9. I wonder what the astrological implications of downgrading Pluto’s status is?
In just a few days Atlantis is heading up into space. Seems Nasa is going to provide a new truss the size of 1.7 times the size of a city bus. I wish Nasa would wake up and smell the coffee and utilize Bigelow aerospace habitats as their space station source. But getting back to the space shuttle, the next Gen “shuttle” system looks like the old Apollo vehicle. I think what Nasa is concerned about is something like a paint chip object hurtling through orbit colliding with one of these inflatable habitats. So far though, nothing has (as far as I know) has damaged the ISS.
God those people upstairs are horrible neighbors. Their walking all over the place and their almost giving me a head ache. Especially their little daughter. She runs around up there like its a playground and we hear every footfall like it’s a heard of cattle over our heads. The place below us was vacant just before the quiet old couple moved out in June, management should have moved the people above us down there saying this place is spoken for. That’s why management has ground floor apartments, for kids.
In a related story, vacancy rates are down like 1.5% here in Alberta. We haven’t seen anything like this since the mid 1970’s during the first oil boom. I don’t know what Alberta’s unemployment rate currently is at but it’s probably around 3%. So long as the price of a barrel of crude oil remains over $50 a barrel the economy will continue to grow and I doubt that oil will drop to those levels. So far this year alone, 90,000 people have migrated into Alberta but because of the low Vacancy rate people are forced to sleep outside in the summer. Add high rents and we have a problem here. But when the boom goes bust many of these people like they did in the 1970’s will migrate back where they came from. It’s not a question of if the boom goes bust but when. But at least when the bust happens it won’t be as bad as it was in 1982. When the unemployment rate adjusts back to something like 6% housing vacancies will be more plentiful. When will the current Alberta economy bust again? I’d say by the end of this decade. Unemployment might not be 6% but about 5% and the economy will cool off significantly. It goes in cycles.
Anyway, time to make my Blog rounds.
e.Jim
alright from 5:30am-noon. My wife’s alarm went off at 11am so she could do a bottle run. Otherwise, I’m doing alright. I was going to go into work for this afternoon but because of Anne’s bottle run, couldn’t manage but I will go in for tomorrow afternoon and Saturday. Isn’t this interesting, Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Mainly because of it’s wobbly orbit and astronomers found several other “planetoids” earlier like Xena. Now, we have 8 planets instead of 9. I wonder what the astrological implications of downgrading Pluto’s status is?
In just a few days Atlantis is heading up into space. Seems Nasa is going to provide a new truss the size of 1.7 times the size of a city bus. I wish Nasa would wake up and smell the coffee and utilize Bigelow aerospace habitats as their space station source. But getting back to the space shuttle, the next Gen “shuttle” system looks like the old Apollo vehicle. I think what Nasa is concerned about is something like a paint chip object hurtling through orbit colliding with one of these inflatable habitats. So far though, nothing has (as far as I know) has damaged the ISS.
God those people upstairs are horrible neighbors. Their walking all over the place and their almost giving me a head ache. Especially their little daughter. She runs around up there like its a playground and we hear every footfall like it’s a heard of cattle over our heads. The place below us was vacant just before the quiet old couple moved out in June, management should have moved the people above us down there saying this place is spoken for. That’s why management has ground floor apartments, for kids.
In a related story, vacancy rates are down like 1.5% here in Alberta. We haven’t seen anything like this since the mid 1970’s during the first oil boom. I don’t know what Alberta’s unemployment rate currently is at but it’s probably around 3%. So long as the price of a barrel of crude oil remains over $50 a barrel the economy will continue to grow and I doubt that oil will drop to those levels. So far this year alone, 90,000 people have migrated into Alberta but because of the low Vacancy rate people are forced to sleep outside in the summer. Add high rents and we have a problem here. But when the boom goes bust many of these people like they did in the 1970’s will migrate back where they came from. It’s not a question of if the boom goes bust but when. But at least when the bust happens it won’t be as bad as it was in 1982. When the unemployment rate adjusts back to something like 6% housing vacancies will be more plentiful. When will the current Alberta economy bust again? I’d say by the end of this decade. Unemployment might not be 6% but about 5% and the economy will cool off significantly. It goes in cycles.
Anyway, time to make my Blog rounds.
e.Jim
// posted by E.Jim Shannon @ 1:25 PM 
