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I-5 SUCKED this weekend

August 28, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

For some reason, my drive up to PAX and a friend’s ordination was the worst drive I’ve ever taken on I-5 from Portland to Seattle. Granted, they are tearing up the Tacoma ramps (an area which always backs up) but then there was a crash on I-5 southbound that shut down the interstate for 5 hours. A guy jumped the median and created an eight car pile-up when he went head-on into southbound traffic. Amazingly nobody died, but they pulled down the median barrier and turned all 4 lanes of southbound traffic into the 4 northbound lanes. Then, some fool rear-ended a guy 2 miles past the accident and shut down 2 more lanes of the northbound traffic. 8 lanes -> 4 lanes -> 2 lanes. I got there just after both accidents happened and still managed to get through only an hour late. Still, they shut the interstate down for 4+ hours and some people were stuck there most of that time by the looks of it. Seattle to Everett was also closed down for construction and I got to take a 20-mile detour through town at 1am. More fun.

On the way back, traffic was heavy from Seattle almost all the way to Portland. The northbound lanes were even worse – random pockets of just slow/stopped traffic in the middle of nowhere. I made it back in 4 hours – which wasn’t bad considering. But at one point I was sitting completely idle for over 40 minutes on a hot interstate miles from the nearest town. Man was that exhausting driving. I’m just glad I filled up before hitting the road.

This whole trip has just solidified my desire not to drive to Seattle anymore but to take the train, or even the Greyhound. It’s just too tiring and frustrating when the traffic gets like that. At least with the train/bus you can sleep and arrive relaxed (or take a nap!) When you lose about half a day just because you need to recover, it’s just not worth it anymore.

What’s the real story anyway? Thoughts of a potential buyer

August 8, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

So, I started a little research into buying my first place. After doing a little number crunching, it looks like at least next year before it would be feasible. But I’m having difficulty trying to find an honest appraisal and state of Portland’s housing/condo market. It’s pretty clear that the meteoric rise of housing prices we saw the last 5-10 years has stopped. But things beyond that get very fuzzy. Previously very desirable neighborhoods seem to be seeing stagnation, new areas seem to be gentrifying fast, other areas are very hard to read, etc. Condos vs houses have conflicting anecdotal evidence. And that’s the problem – I can’t find any solid information other than what is gleaned from news stories and looking at the latest for-sale lists. Problem is, individual selling prices are all over the map – disproportionately high/low levels depending on the sellers motivation. It’s hard to get a read if a location is losing favor since people are all trying to sell at pre-slowdown prices. And that’s what I need to know as I make a minimal 5-10 year investment – will it be going up or down in the next 5-10 years? What’s the trending by location? What’s the trending by type: home vs condo?

It’s curious that local realtors’ websites are still quoting figures from the boom 2-3 years ago while updating their for sale lists every day. It kind of makes you think they know something you don’t. How come they could get those numbers in the heat of the boom, but they can’t seem to get them now? Why all the hush-hush? It makes me as a future buyer feel uncertain – and uncertainty is not a good thing when buying – makes me want to keep my money on the sidelines until patterns become clearer. The fed just announced no rate change, and inflation is ‘not a concern’. Sure, investors are pulling their money out of these high-risk, fast-and-loose mortgage places – so money is going to be tougher to get if you have tarnished credit. But if you’ve got good credit, there isn’t much to worry about. Prices are definitely not meteorically rising anymore and interest rates are likely to stay flat – so the pressure to buy isn’t there either. If I can save/invest my down payment and earn 8%, that’s roughly the same as investing in a housing market that’s growing by ~5% (for tax breaks, etc).

My concern is that I don’t want to pay a bunch of money and find out my property/area is in the middle of a decline that will probably last 3-5 years – and I just got in at the top of that drop. The few real estate agents I’ve talked with all seem overly up-beat about everything and don’t say squeak about any place’s declining values, etc. All three realtors I’ve chatted with were like: go ahead and buy now! It’s all good! And their not totally wrong, but they get more quiet when I ask where isn’t a good place to invest in.

If I were to guess, there is a lot of re-adjusting going on as the money leaves the market. And money is leaving the market as a whole; but there is no crash going on. Overall, things are probably cooling in some spots of Portland more than they thought. But where are those places? The hot and not spots of town are definitely moving around – just based on watching how much foot-traffic and cars wander through. If I had to guess, NW Portland is cooling – 23rd and 21st aren’t nearly as busy and hopping as they used to when I moved in a few years back. Alberta on the east side is going nuts with activates, new businesses, bars, fairs, etc. Hawthorn is flat to down. Condos? With lots of new buildings half-done, I suspect that unless they stagger their openings, there could be a glut. This condo developer seems to think so. But he did it too – oh – everything’s perfectly fine. I’m completely changing my business model – but there’s nothing going on at all. Yeah. I don’t think that’s the whole story.

I have been left with a bad taste in my mouth from the realtors. It almost feels like there’s this big inside secret – an elephant in the room – they won’t talk about. Because if someone does, then folks will start being told that their properties up in NW or the Pearl or Hawthorn, or wherever will -gasp- not be as good a buy as the area is slowing (or even declining) in value a bit more than other areas. And if somebody stands up to say the emperor’s clothes are off, and that certain areas are not such a good ‘buy’ – that might mean the prices for the whole area drop. And if the prices for one place drop, maybe the curtains will come down other places that are slower too. And then what will happen to our business as sellers? It’ll get tougher. What is going to happen to all those realtors that were coming out of the woodwork from real-estate school during the boom as there are less folks to sell to or a more competitive market? You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot needlessly. It’s simply not in their interest to be honest – it’s in there interest (and indirectly the seller) to get the sale. They’re long gone by the time you come around to sell again. So there is incentive from everyone in the industry to just shush, and let people wander around on their own.

This probably isn’t as dire as I’m painting it. The few figures I have found say the market is growing at the 5-7% year on year rate – pretty darn good really. But the lack of information that certainly MUST be out there and being done by these condo/housing developers isn’t getting out. It sure got out during the boom of how good things were, now, not so much – which tells you something in itself.

Woot for summer goals

August 1, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Well, I hit the first big milestone of the summer. My goal this year is to get down to my pre-seminary weight. 5 years of grad school saw me put on about 35 lbs. I started my workouts at Easter and I just hit the 20lb mark; which was a great psychological milestone for me. Interestingly enough, changing my diet alone didn’t do much. It wasn’t until I started exercising every day that I started losing weight. Here’s a few things I discovered:

Start eating breakfast – Just a bagel is fine. But you’ll eat less during the day if you already ate. Starving yourself makes you eat more later, so just have more infrequent bites.
Exercise is worth 10x dietary changes. I didn’t really start taking lbs off until I started regularly getting physical activity.
Exerice only what you feel like – but do it every day. If you’re tired, just walk that day, if not, run. I run about 2-4 miles each night now.
Start where you’re at. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re out of shape. Just enjoy what you can and start easy. I started the first 2-3 weeks by just walking around the neighborhood. Then jogging a lap/run a lap at the track, then running a mile, then running two. DON’T push hard – it just makes you more reluctant to do it next time. The goal is regularity, not intensity.
Get involved in new hobbies/activities. If you’re sitting at home in front of the tube/computer – you’ll eat. Go hang out with friends or a new sport instead.
Eat a filling light meal at night. I sit down with a huge bowl of fruit salad at night. By the end, I’m stuffed – but it was watermellon, or cherries, or melons, or the like. It adds up to almost no calories, but it feels like I ate a solid dinner.
Drink lots of water/tea/Gatorade – drop the pop. But not so much for calories, but for hydration. I needed to drink a LOT more water to keep hydrated when I worked out every day. That and it makes you feel much more full and I think helps you lose weight.
Don’t be a calorie counter/Don’t sweat the small stuff. If you get a craving for some salty chips – have a few. If you’re craving a pop – get one. Don’t start beating yourself up over little things you would like to eat; or keeping a count to ‘work it off’ later. That said, I don’t scarf a whole bag of potato chips or stuff a quart of Hagen-das down my neck. Moderation implies that you may eat less, but that you also equally don’t just cut certain foods off entirely. Relax, enjoy life, and slowly build healthy, sustainable habits. You may not lose weight as fast, but as long as you’re pulling a few poiunds off each week or so, you’re doing fine. Sustainability is what will keep it off later anyway.

Can you guess what it was?

July 16, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a little clip of information taken directly from a recent article I was reading. I replaced the parts that would give away what it is, see if you can guess what it is:

Even as project proposals were being submitted, a 53-year-old structural engineer secretly already had the job sewn up. He had met with the government official in charge of funding and the official had rigged the process so that only this engineer could possibly win the bid. When the construction was started, more than 300 prominent [inhabitants] signed a petition protesting the [construction]. They claimed that [it] would “disfigure and dishonor” the city.

There was a great deal of protest surrounding the construction as well. A [prominent] mathematics professor predicted that when the structure passed the 748-foot mark, it would inevitable collapse; another expert predicted that the [construction]’s lightening rods would kill all the fish in the [nearby river].

The [local] edition of the New York Herald claimed the [construction] was changing the weather; and a daily newspaper ran a headline story claiming The [construction] was sinking. “If it has really begun to sink,” [local paper] pontificated, “any further building should stop and sections already built should be demolished as quickly as possible.”

What was this abominable construction that would destroy the environment and be a disfigurement to the city? It was none other than the Eiffel tower.I always try to keep things like this in mind when confronted with the scads of ‘disaster is imminent’ reports on everything from new public/religious social programs, to dams, to global warming, to whatever. Whatever you’re in the middle of, by nature you are going to be very myopic. Now, this is not to say that disastrous human endeavors do occur and are often foreseen but warnings ignored, but it reminds me that you need to look at the real data and know that expert ‘opinions’ are just that – and are just as equally wrong as right on both sides.

Instead, the only way to denounce critics or lend credibility for a plan is in a *lot* of careful research and number crunching before one begins. A great example is a task force in Portland that have done some great research on homelessness patterns and found that often times the current feed/shelter system simply prolongs and perpetuates the homeless’ problems (this is not to say that homeless help should go away – but that their influence and role needs to change in a new way). Some of their findings

There has also been all this talk of carbon-neutral obsession, bio-fuels, etc. This is all good, but simply reducing environmental impact down to your ‘carbon-load’ doesn’t take into account scads of other toxic stuff you release. Use an air conditioner in your car/home? What about your freon load? What about your arsenic load? What about your estrogen loads ? (yes, estrogens from shampoos and birth control pills goes right though water treatment and has long been known to be mutating fish/river life. That one sure doesn’t get as much press as blowing up damns now does it) Now we hear that bio-fuels aren’t that much better than other fossil fuels as far as the environment goes.

I guess my point is that productive change in the right direction requires people not being reactionary, over-simplifying the problem, or lately appealing to sentimentality or emotionalism, or even spiritualism about ‘mother earth’ (I could go on about that one being even worse than the religious appeals made in the middle-ages that everyone loves to decry) – but really put some pencils and pens to paper and do the math and science. Real science that isn’t myopic ‘experts’- or we’ll end up looking as silly as the Parisians did to future generations.

It’s Summertime, Summertime, sum-sum-summertime

June 25, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Summer is here. Summer is great.

Summer is always way the heck too busy.

I find my daily social calendar gets double and triple-booked more often than a flight from Cali to New York on Christmas eve. Current events about to come up in the next 3-4 weeks: A trip to Alaska for a friend’s ordination and hiking in Denali, daily running excursions, wine parties, roller-derbies, church picnics, BBQ’s, more ordinations (3 in total!), weddings, hiking friends/groups, beach trips, movie nights, bachelor parties, journals to read, house parties, local festivals about every weekend, folks visiting from out of town, last Thursday, first Thursdays, weekly brewpub meetups with coworkers/friends, great local summer bands to go see just about every night, personal coding projects, climbing and hiking clubs I’d like to get involved with (I want to climb Hood and St. Helens), taking photographs, etc, etc, etc. I seem to turn down 4x the number of things I can make it too. It’s been wearing on me a bit. As a person that loves their quiet and down time, I usually find that by summer’s end I’m ready for a couple long months of rainy indoor activities.
Still, all this activity has brought another interesting set of questions with it. See, every year up till this one for the last 4-5 years, my summer has been figured out. I was usually doing stuff at a parish, hospital, or other seminary assignment. But now my time is all my own, and I find myself kind of floundering as to how to spend my time. I have been doing a lot of running lately to get back in shape, and as I was thinking about it a priest friend’s sermon came to mind. In one homily, he simply asked, “What will you do with this one, beautiful, wacky life you’ve been given?” It really sums up the question I’m asking myself. So. Where will it be?