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Smoky days

<Smoky skies in Redding
Lightning caused fires fill our skies with smoke this week. One observation is that every piece of property has the same view -none. Smoke, the great equalizer! In fact it’s getting to be downright unhealthy (hack, cough). I was showing property to a couple from Florida and they said it looked like L.A. Oh, the unkindest cut…. anyway I hear it may rain in a few days, and that would be welcome. The photo below is of the County Administrative Building in the haze, sporting a wan orange disk of a sun, that would otherwise be blinding. I took some scary photos of the Motion fire above Shasta Dam. Take a look. Photos at http://www.RedHotHomes.info/Gallery/Fire2008/
Fire is a fact of life (and death) in the Northstate. Be safe.

Smoky skies on redding

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Breakfast for 10,000

Pancake breakfast in Redding CA
We attend the Annual Pancake breakfast in Roaring Gulch (Redding) 2008
Pancake breakfast in Redding CA
I don’t know of any other town that does this. Really fun!
Pancake breakfast in Redding CA
We ate our pancakes while sitting across from Shasta Voice’s Mary Machado and her husband. Really interesting conversation from these civic movers and shakers.

Pancake breakfast in Redding CA

It was a really hot day, but we dressed western, minus the hats.

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Governator comes to town

Arnold Schwarznegger blew into town last week to let us all know that there are budget cuts coming to Cally-fornia. There emerged a rather amusing story of one of our city fathers at the meeting asking Arnold a question out of left field as to why he doesn’t support our right to own 50 caliber weaponry. Welcome to Redding Arnold! Anyway, the gist of the speech centered on a probable 10% cut to everything that the state funds. Sounds fair enough. Across the board. Everybody takes a hit.

Except.

Later that evening, after Arnold blew out again, we attended the Soup Supper of the local League of Women Voters. The speaker was Muffy Berryhill of the Shasta First 5 organization. This group is funded by the apparently never-declining cigarette tax. While they don’t fund pre-natal and early childhood programs directly, their purpose is to help organize and offer resources to those organizations in town that serve the very young. There is much more at their website: http://www.first5shasta.org/ She had some statistical data that was disturbing.
Child in Shasta County
There are 10,441 children in Shasta County (2006 data)
4,340 (40%) live in single parent homes versus 24% statewide.
33% live in poverty, as defined as annual income of $20K or less for a family of 4.

My personal view is that, after national defense, ordinary government serves no higher purpose than overseeing the care of the helpless. The mentally ill, indigent elderly, and very young children. Our state taxes-and-spends loads of money. We can cut budgets across the board. It sounds fair enough, but I wonder. When we cut the programs that serve children, and specifically brain development, won’t we pay dearly for that later, when they grow to become (hopefully) productive citizens? Is that a budget expense, or really an investment?

Right now, Muffy says that children in our county born testing positive for Meth is down to about 5 or 6 a month. I don’t find that hard to believe. Plus other drugs and alcohol, probably. So lets say 50-60 children a year. How is that okay under ANY circumstances in our civilization? We pay now or we pay later.

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Amazing Medical Services in Redding

My knee is sore, so my doc sent me over to MD Imaging for an MRI. It really hits home how well equipped the Redding area is in terms of Medical Services. It’s a very well run operation. Laying on my back, inside this giant loud donut, emitting a really powerful magnetic field, it’s easy to imagine that the iron in your blood lining up in a pattern like iron filings clinging to a magnet. The want to know if you have any metal plates, pins, or metal slivers in you. One can imagine metal particles bursting out of your body and attaching to the magnetic donut. It makes you think hard, laying there completely still, like they ask. I used to do some hobby welding, and there was much metal involved, not always where you expected it. However, I emerged from the donut, none the worse for wear, so apparently I’m non-ferrous throughout.
Mercy in Redding
For a small town we have world-class medical services. In the lobby of MD Imaging, they have a display with medical tools of the trade from years gone by. Scary stuff! it makes you appreciate our current high level of technology all the more. Or, will the giant magnetic donut be the scary display in some future medical office lobby? Anyway, if you simply must be in need of medical care, you can do much worse than my town, with our 2 hospitals and teeming professionals all over the place.

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And then there were 3……..

Two Redding area Title and Escrow companies have shut their doors. Alliance Title closed shop statewide, and Chicago Title closed their Redding doors as well. Their respective escrows are being handled by one or another of the 3 remaining companies: Fidelity, First American, or Placer. Alliance Title in Redding Having 5 competing companies in our market was probably too many anyway, but less choice is never better for the consumer. All those admin and clerical worker folks are out of work now, including the woman I wrote about in my previous post, who fought back tears while helping me as her assistant had been laid off. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. I hope they can all be absorbed back into the local job market, but it must be very difficult for lots of good people. The Redding real estate market can be very cyclical, but I can’t remember losing title companies in the last downturn. Chicago Title in Redding

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Hard times hit Redding

There are always hard times. Even in times when the local real estate market is booming, with nany people looking into buying a foreclosed home to renovate and live in you can find a hard time story. It’s just humanity. Lately, there seem to be more hard time stories than usual. The area just isn’t what it once was. It really should come as no surprise that many people are moving away. Some of the Florida homes offered at unionpark.metroplaces.com have proven to be too irresistible. I expect more people to be tempted in the future. Anyway, a couple of days ago, I was in a hurry to make an appointment and stopped into a local Title & Escrow company that shall remain nameless. As I stepped into the lobby, there were about a dozen or so people standing there and looking at me like I just walked in on something important. They weren’t smiling. Looking more closely, it was evident that several were crying. Obviously I interrupted something here, and my first reaction was that I should leave, but I needed to get something done for a client leaving town. One of the women offered to help me, and the group broke up. The tension was evident, but she put on her best game face as she helped me locate the file. She was wearing slippers like you might wear at home and wiping back her tears as she worked. I guessed she had just gone into the lobby from her desk at whatever news had just hit, and I was the only non-employee in the office. I got what I needed and left, but I felt like she needed a hug. I didn’t hug her, though, because that would be weird to hug a stranger. Which is kind of weird, also.
Alliance Title now goneAnyway, I was haunted all day by the image of her flushed face, tears glistening under the harsh office lighting. No one offered to share what had happened, and I wasn’t going to ask, so I had to pry a bit later in the day with some other folks in our real estate community. As it turns out, she had just lost her assistant to a layoff. Merry Christmas!
There’s a lot of layoffs in housing-related services here. Today’s paper had a photo of 84 Lumber closing it’s doors. Merry Christmas to you too. I don’t know if their 5 employees stood in the lobby and cried. Or hugged.
I was once laid off from a company after 20 years, right around the holidays. It stings. I decided to go into another career where the only person who could lay me off was me, and here I am. It hasn’t been easy. It won’t be easy for these folks either.
The Record Searchlight article also said that there were 600 fewer real estate related jobs in October in the Redding Area. I expect that the diminishing number of employed accelerated in November and December. When housing catches a cold, Redding employment gets pneumonia. All those folks will need to find work.
The cliche is “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Perhaps more appropriate, that which doesn’t kill you leaves you standing for the next assault. Best wishes to all in our housing-related community.

Hugs, but only if you ask for one.
Vacant real estate office with skips car in background

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Turkey day, Redding style

No, I’m not talking about Thanksgiving here. This is about real turkeys who wander the streets where I live in suburban north Redding. Seeing them walk by in a small flock, it’s easy to equate modern birds with prehistoric dinosaurs, as the theory goes. Tyranosaur-Turkey, who knows how closely related they are? We have a lot of human walkers where I live. It’s a nice area to get a little exercise by walking around, but lately some folks have been known to carry a stick. It seems the turkeys wandering about can be aggressive. Turkey-Velociraptor perhaps. One of my neighbors drives a little Honda car, and she said a big Tom chased her car one day. Hmmm, they do seem to have a tough old bird look…..Turkeys in Redding Ca
Seen above, a gang, er, flock of menacing omnivores.