I thought this was very funny.

In the 6 days prior to yesterday my stock had lost $13.41 per share. In the past two days so far it's up $12.25. Did we do something spectacularly bad last week and something spectacularly good this week? No. The crazy market just continues to swing wildly in opposing directions.

I hope that it will level out soon, though I have no expectation of that. My solution is to reinstate the short sell up-tick rule, regulate the crap out of hedge funds, and reinstate the 1933 law that bans investment banks from owning "regular" banking institutions. If those things are done, then normalcy will return to the market. Otherwise, it's like the freaking wild west out there.

Today is going to be a BRUTAL day on the stock market. I'm predicting a drop of between 5 and 8% just today on the DOW.

It seems as if everything that can possibly go wrong is going wrong.

As my company is primarily an aerospace driven company, the Boeing strike is hitting us hard (my plant alone is losing 650K per week due to the strike). On top of that, the panic on the market is ridiculous. Warren Buffets favorite saying is "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful." I have no doubt that now is the time that fortunes can be made. It'll just take some courage and a long term outlook.

If you've got 20K to invest, within 5 years you'll be sitting on 100K. I have no doubt whatsoever. The problem is, no matter now much I believe that, going against the grain when all you're being told is that the end is neigh is still tough to do.

The good news is that our backyard is now going to cost more thousands of dollars to fix and we also need to buy a new mattress because the dog peed all over our old one (no stain, but it saturate the interior fibers, so there's odor). Well, we actually did buy a new mattress, but it's just not comfortable (not firm enough -- that's what she said), so we need ANOTHER new mattress. The actual good news is that we can return the king bed and box springs we bought, but the next bed we buy can't be returned. So here's hoping we pick a winner.

Work began on our back yard yesterday. To combat the water problems that we've had over the past 2 years (that the previous owner claimed never happened to them in ~30 years of ownership) we're completely redoing our backyard. We're burying the downspouts and having them empty into a french drain. That same drain will go diagonally across our backyard and then into the front yard where it will empty into the drainage ditch. The back and front yards will be re-graded to run into the drain and away from the house. The back yard will be completely re-seeded and the front will be seeded where necessary. Lastly, a pavers patio is going in and replaces the wood deck that we had.

Now for the bad news. The previous owners have once more completely screwed us. The guy did a lot of work himself, and in some cases it was good work and in others it wasn't. In the back yard he had a gas line just laying on top of the ground under the deck. We had a plumber out today to try to extend the line so that it could be buried. He said that a lot of the pipes and things were rotting as well as the line being completely out of code. As such, he just cut it off so that the pavers could go in. Now we'll have to have a gas line re-run from the meter to our gas fireplace, our gas grill, and the gas furnace that's in the garage. I'm sure that will be cheap too.

In the process of digging a trench they also came across the handiwork of the electrical cable run about 4 inches under ground from the house to the shed. Not only that, but it's not even in conduit! It's just outside electrical cable laying in the ground. A shovel in the wrong place would've electrocuted us. Great job jack hole. So we'll also have to get that fixed, but we've got a problem of having a huge drain in the ground now so we'll either have to go below that (which will cost extra cash) or above it (any it may not be deep enough then). This sucks!

On top of the back yard already being really expensive to fix, now we have to fix the other guys shoddy workmanship. Also, we apparently don't even have a legal case simply because the previous owner denies any problems. Well that's just great. What's to stop a murderer from just saying "No officer, I didn't kill that guy" and getting off.

THIS SUCKS!

If there was anything I learned about the Red Sox last year it's that you need to put them away when you have the opportunity. If you let them hang around they can pull some crap out of their butts and win the series.

Please Tampa, don't be the 2007 Indians.

I went to bed last night thinking that the Tampa Bay Rays were in the World Series. I woke up today shocked that they lost the game. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little apprehensive about the rest of the series. Obviously I'm no fan of either team, but I 100% want the Rays to win the series.

One thing that's really irritating me lately is the use of the word "terrorist." When people are called terrorists it greatly diminishes the word. When people call McCain or Obama terrorists they are really just exposing themselves as idiots. It's the same as when someone with different beliefs is compared to Hitler. The argument holds no water whatsoever and is meaningless once that comparison is made -- regardless of how valid your other points may be.

To call someone a terrorist simply because they believe something different than you not only makes you look foolish and ignorant, but is an insult to anyone whose lives have been affected by a real terrorist.

Browns - 35
Giants - 14

I didn't see that coming. In my head I predicted it would be about 30 - 12 with NY on top. The Browns actually looked good last night. They looked like they could actually play offense instead of just play 3 and out. They still had stupid penalties, but they really looked like an actual football team.

I was shocked.

I wish it were possible to make magazines and TV shows just disappear and never come back.

What's the featured article on Yahoo? It's how HUGE Eva Longoria has become. Wow. She's really fat now. She gained 7 pounds. She's still a size 0 though, so I guess there's hope yet that she can turn it around and stop being so fat.

Give me a break.

Why is this news? Why does most of America know more about Eva Longoria than about John McCain?

It drives me crazy.

Let's take a look at the way back machine. I said this a few short weeks ago.

Doesn't anyone ever think for just one freaking minute that when the ban is finished on October 2nd that those very same stocks are going to plummet? It's going to be a blood bath that day. How short sided can people possibly be? The government has intruded for a few weeks of "normalcy" and has leveraged the future as payment.

Since then, the Fed extended the short sale ban a week. It expired today. Hmm. What happened today? Oh that's right, the DJI plummeted over 7%. In the past week it's dropped over 20%. In a week! Fear, uncertainly, and doubt rule the current financial landscape. Ever since the government stepped in and bought Bear Stearns, no one has known what the gov't will or will not do. That's never good. If they had merely kept their noses out of the private sectors business maybe we wouldn't have this problem.

The feds likes to say that some institutions are just too big to fail. What the crap does that mean? In my opinion there's no such thing as too large to fail. If a company is poorly run, then why rescue it? It's obvious that rescuing poor companies isn't exactly instilling confidence in people. Pull the plug. Let's start over. Whichever banks survive the fall are the ones that deserve to stick around.

Last night we watched the "town hall" debate. I'm not sure whose town hall looks like that, but I know ours doesn't.

There were lots of gaffes on both parts. McCain got way too close to people when talking to them and made some poor assumptions (like that a young black guy had never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac before the recent troubles). Obama turned his back to the audience several times and used some snide remarks that made him appear bitter.

Overall, I don't really care because I already know who I'm voting for.

For that bit of info, you'll have to wait though.

Lindsay is convinced that I'm voting for neither of them. Is she right? Like I said, you'll have to wait.

I'm back from a fun weekend and a terrible game in Indiana. We didn't do anything of particular interest yesterday. We visited my grandparents, made dinner, watched a movie, watched about 20 minutes of TV and went to bed.

We watched Bucket List, which I was hesitant about viewing given the current situation within my family. I thought it was pretty good though. Somewhere around 6/10.

Last week we saw My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which was beyond super terrible. It was really awful. Not funny. Not well acted. Not well written. Not well anything. If I could give it a 0 out of 10 I would. Because I can't, it gets a solid and well deserved 1 out of 10. If you have the choice of watching that movie or stabbing yourself in the chins with forks then you should choose the forks.

Lots of stuff has been going on this week, and I've been too busy to talk about any of it.

The bailout plan was shot down on Monday and the market tanked. Then on Tuesday the market rebounded. Now we have new talk of a revised bailout taking shape. Regardless of what happens, it appears that my companies stock will continue to erode and plummet even though there's talk of yet another record profit this quarter. So far we're only down about 60% over the past year and have only grown our profits by 25%. Usually when you make more money, your stock price goes up. Not us. Welcome to the exception. It's great, let me tell you.

CC Sabathia almost single handedly pitched the Brewers into the playoffs. Good for him. I like seeing him feast on the inferior NL.

The Browns are still terrible. They struggled to beat one of the worst teams in the NFL and therefore have shown themselves to merely be a shadow of their expected selves. Of course, having a ridiculous schedule doesn't help either.

My grandmother was moved to the hospice care center last Friday. She's due to come home today, but all signs point to her passing not being far away. Her spirits are as high as can be expected, and it seems like we've come to grips with the near future, but it's still going to be very rough on all of us.

We tore out our deck this past weekend in preparation for repairing our back yard and hopefully ridding ourselves of the water problems that have plagued us the past two years. Within the next few weeks the rest of the work will be finished and we'll have a new french (aw-haw-hawn) drain taking water away, a re-graded backyard that funnels to the french drain, newly seeded grass in the back, a new patio with pavers, a filled in front swale, re-seeded grass in the front, and buried downspouts. I'm pretty excited about seeing the finished product. I'll be more excited if we get through a 20 inch snow storm followed by a week of rain and don't have a single drop of water in our ducts.