Scrambled ramblings served sunny side up!

Good morning and welcome to Thursday, September 3, 2009. It's my younger brother's birthday today and I certainly wish him a very good day. The temperatures have moderated slightly and I have been riding into work with my windows down trying to soak up as much of the mid-sixties fresh air as possible. My older buddy here at work, Bro. Jim, and I sat out on the porch yesterday morning and enjoyed a hot cup of coffee as we shared fellowship one with the other. That cooler air is not like that up in McCall, Idaho where the low was in the thirties yesterday, but we will certainly take it over the waking up to eighty that we have been experiencing this summer. I told my class last evening that I was sitting on the porch and dreaming of a white Christmas. While that was a joke, it's not that far off in how much I am looking forward to some cooler weather. Some folks get excited about the start of football season, others are ready for some major concert or other coming attraction. In my case, I am tuned into the first real cold front that will bring with it a change of seasons and usher in my favorite time of year. My Granny Mac's birthday is also coming up this Saturday. She went on to her reward twenty six years ago but I still remember us joking forth and back about the cold. She didn't like it and I did. She was a remarkable woman and many of us owe much of who we are to all that she did to influence our lives.

I know the spin coming from all corners tells us the recession is over and things are getting better but to tell you the truth, we haven't seen that to be the case in our manufacturing segment. It is very slow. It's about as slow as that pure cane syrup being poured or pulled out of a can on a very cold morning. We thank God for the trickle in of jobs that we are getting but other than talk we haven't really seen too much in the way of positive proof that things are on the mend. Yesterday I heard about the huge oil discovery some two hundred miles off the coast of Louisiana where they may have a deposit of billions of barrels of oil. This is a major find but it is not without its own set of issues. The well itself is over two miles deep and cost $200 million dollars to drill. The infrastructure required to retrieve this oil and get it to shore would be hugely expensive and they would have to have an idea of what they could get for the oil before proceeding in a big way. This lack of confidence in what to expect going forward causes people to hold up and I believe it continues to be our biggest obstacle to getting things back on track. We build instrumentation panels and other structures for the offshore drilling market but when will they be ready to risk major development in the current economic outlook? We can talk about it all day long but nothing happens until someone issues a purchase order to get the ball rolling.

Unfortunately, lately the only purchases of any size has been by our government and they don't have a penny on hand to spend which means everything they buy is paid for with new debt. I heard a fellow has invented a calculator that will actually display the amount of debt we the American people owe. None are currently available with enough digits to display 12 trillion dollars in red ink. His new device will cost $13 and it is named, Big Red. Good for him! He certainly has taken a negative and turned it into something marketable, although, I think I will settle for trying to just guess how big that number is. All of this may sound like sour grapes but it's never that bad for a believer because our worst day here on the planet is just one more step closer to that time when we will live forever in the presence of our Savior. We are not immune from the ups and downs that surround our globe but we do have the abiding presence of our God and we have His assurance that He is with us and this is something we can count on every minute of every hour regardless of the stock market, job market, or any other market. Jesus said, "Let not your hearts be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in Me." (John 14) That's the source of our hope. Not a hope so but a confident expectation based on the faithfulness of our God. Amen. .....More later.