Virginia Breeze

Last night I was glued to the tube watching Frontline and their documentary about life in China. It is not reality tv. It is harsh reality television.

It is “Thank God I don’t live there” television. I was walking around today thinking about the young woman who had to fight off her parents and her community to avoid an arranged marriage. And finally managed to do it.

The alternative? She has a job working in the city in some sort of high tech factory. And she works eleven hours per day seven days per week. Her task is to put four wires into a receptacle six hundred times per hour. That is ten times per minute for eleven hours. Over and over again.

Maybe she gets a half hour for lunch.

But the good news is that she meets someone she genuinely likes and they fall in love. So she has some happiness in her life. And she is a cute little thing. I feel like sending her a wedding present.

She will probably insert millions of wires into receptacles before she is done.

AAggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway. Moving on. There are many interesting characters that we discover. There is a young guy with a winning smile and a very attractive shirt who plans to tailor shirts for individuals and sell them on the internet. And the next time we see him he has ten women working on sewing machines and boxes of shirts ready to go. Amazing!

He becomes a Christian and seems totally satisfied. There’s no girlfriend in the picture so he doesn’t have to worry about supporting a family. It’s just him and dear old mom.

Smart guy!

Most of them are not so lucky. Loneliness takes its toll. But everything revolves around money. Relationships suffer. It’s a hard life. I couldn’t handle it. I would have to take a slow boat to the United States. And that option is available to some of them. But the parents exert an amazing influence on them and they stay.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

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We are off in a few hours for the beach and on the way plan to stop at Colonial Williamsburg. It’s time to wave good-bye to the family and dogs and accelerate down the road.

We have been watching the HBO miniseries John Adams and are pretty impressed with the job they are doing to bring back earlier times in American history. Of course we are also on the lookout for my son Zachary who was in extra in the series which was made here in Richmond and in the surrounding area.

So it will be interesting to go down there and be immersed for a few hours in a different world. How did they manage without cell phones and computers? For that matter how did we manage without them when we were growing up?

The terrible state of the economy has finally intruded upon my consciousness. It has come up in conversations a few times and now it looks like the time has come to leave the stock market for awhile. If we had wise economic policies in the world these corrections would be so much easier to bear. But as things stand it looks to me like a major event is in the making.

And I really do hate standing in line. But if it comes down to that in order to get some milk or bread I guess it will have to be. I will just think about Colonial Williamsburg and be grateful we have a few things that they could not have imagined.

I guess. Hopefully.

So stay tuned for photos of something other than ducks or the James River. Grab a feed for adventures this summer in the Bahamas and other travel destinations. But for now our goal is to take photos of the cherry blossoms in DC and much else. It will be good. I promise.

Here’s the Slide Show from our trip to Williamsburg. 

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I have been talking to Beth about buying some vacation property down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I love the Outer Banks. I especially like those huge dunes that mark the location of the first flight made by the Wright brothers. The beaches are wonderful too.

But vacation property is not cheap. So I have come up with a plan and am presenting it to the board, pardon me, I mean bored expression that is on the face of my lovely wife Beth. She’s not buying what I’m selling. And it’s a shame because we could probably have two or three vacation homes in just a couple of years if she would jump on the band wagon.

Timing is the thing. All we need to do is sell all of our property now and rent a small apartment downtown. Or maybe get a trailer out in the woods. I can see us now living under the trees with a campfire burning and crickets chirping so loud we can’t even hear the twelve inch B and W television in the kitchen.

Then we sit back and wait for these smart businessmen to put all their empty houses on the market at half price. Six months from now when they are all still on the market the floodgates will open. Housing prices will really tumble and we will be able to purchase beach front property for pennies on the dollar. I wasn’t aware of how bad things really have gotten until reading this article about Hovnanian. But if you are a home owner don’t worry about it too much. Things will eventually come back to normal. The government is not going to let the housing market suffer too long. They want it to hurt but they don’t want it to die. So we are looking at a dip in prices that will afford opportunities to folks like me who don’t mind camping out in the woods or moving downtown near a college campus or two. Hey, maybe we can live near my son. He thought he escaped when he moved out last summer. This could be a helpful reminder to him that things don’t always turn out as planned.

When I was Zach’s age I was reading books about economic upheaval. I read about Germany prior to World War II and I read about other examples of hyperinflation followed by depression. Back in the 1970’s I thought it was going to happen here. I even bought a bunch of dried food so we would have something to eat.

Silly me. The shelf date passed and the food was never eaten. Maybe there was a depression in the seventies and early eighties. But the government paved the way out of it and most were not aware it had even happened. We had stagflation for awhile which was a stagnating economy that was not responding well to inflationary policies like Keynes said it would. And then we had Paul Volker and Ronald Reagan. They decided to forget that and try something else. The recession got worse and then it got better. They stopped giving the patient antibiotics and his fever spiked. Maybe he would die! Oh, well! But he got better instead. You just have to be willing to place a big bet and wait. President Reagan was always acting like he enjoyed doing that. It was pretty funny to watch him casually talk about WW3. I nearly died laughing a few times.

Anyway, all of this was so long ago. I was proved so wrong for so many years that I no longer believe any of it is possible. Now it’s just an opportunity to buy beachfront property and to catch up on my camping skills.

Hey, I bet I could get some really good pictures. Do they have broadband out in the woods?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aMY4kexu4198&refer=home