Morning, everyone.
Steve, I've read Chris Martenson's stuff before. He has some good basic things on understanding today's economy but he tends to go overboard on the gloom and doom side. His views on "peak oil" are just plain wrong, as the recent plunge in oil and other commodity prices have shown. I'm much more concerned about the current credit crunch and the effect on the health of banks. I expect we'll have a major bank failure in the next two months and the Fed will have to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep them afloat. I'm a lot more concerned about a deflationary cycle developing than the inflation that seems to be heading the news now. Real estate is a good example of the start of a deflationary cycle.
I don't know how bad the typhoons get in NZ but we had a pretty good one in the Cook Islands, about 800 miles north of NZ. I think NZ tends to get more bad storms from the Antarctic regions because they are closer to South Pole but they can be pretty wild too.
Ken, glad you're home safe and sound. I'm glad you had fun down here but you must be bushed.
Rex, thanks, if I could build a layout like yours and detail it like mine, I'd be in heaven...literally, since I'd probably be dead before I got it all done.
Jeffrey, I wish your thunderstorms would start moving over our way, we haven't had any rain in a week and it's getting hot again.
Tom, I had to play center for one season and hated it too so I know how your son feels. Amazing how much time and money we spend on bike lanes now for the five or six people a day who seem to use them.
Chris, you should at least get enough rain to get those lawns growing again. Fay should stall over North Florida for a day or two and dump some rain on you for the back side. No beer in my train room, unfortunately. One of the things that sets of my Meniere's attacks is alcohol and I don't think Ken would have wanted to watch me flat on my face on the floor, throwing up.

I got my wife a much better camera than the one I've been using so I'm got to do some more layout shots. They still won't be as good as Ken's though. It's not just cameras, it that creative eye, and Ken really has one.
Sunny and warm in Alabama today with the temperature already up to 87. Fay has been a good girl so far, dumping between 3 and 6 inches of rain over south Florida, which needed the rain even more than us. The worst winds were in Key West at 60 mph, so Fay never quite made it to hurricane strength. The computer models are still having a hard time with Fay, which is unusual for a weak tropical storm that's already on land. One set of models wants to bring her to north Florida, stall for two days as a high pressure ridge develops over the east coast, and then turn the remnant low west into Georgia and north. Another set wants to send Fay back over the Atlantic for a day or so, have it recross north Florida and then back into the Gulf as a tropical storm, with landfall somewhere between the Florida Panhandle all the way over to Louisiana. A third set wants to have Fay hang a left from Georgia and then go into Alabama. The only thing the models agree on is that Fay won't be making much forward progress for the next three days. I suspect we'll still be talking about Fay on Sunday at this rate.