14 June 2009 - Here are the pictures from the July 2007 trip to Boston.
4 June 2009 - Catching up with some picture posting. I was going strong until I hit the 2007 Boston trip. 622 pictures in that bunch. Will take a while...
16 May 2009 - I just returned from another trip to our CCC conference, this time hosted by University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I can now add Michigan to my list of states visited! I also made an unplanned overnight stay in Salt Lake City, Utah, so I thought I could add that, but I found Utah was already colored in on my map. Turns out the drive from Boston to Portland brought me through there. I had forgotten.
Here is my updated map...
8 March 2009 - Back in the early 2000s, I remember my father lamenting the slow increase in value of my home in Portland as compared to the skyrocketing values in Boston. I told him I was happy with moderate, steady growth. Well, eventually even Portland started to see unreasonable gains and I knew that eventually it would pull back here as it did in Las Vegas and Boston. Of course, we now know it has pulled back everywhere. Old news, yes.
While I understand that having virtual wealth disappear rapidly can put a stranglehold on the economy, things aren't looking all that bad to me... at least if you look at the value of my home.
Wouldn't you say this is a "pleasing" growth in value?
Well, sure, that looks good! Consistent growth. But... it's fake. I made it up. I took the growth curve from the first half of the graph and simply repeated it. Here is what really happened...
The psychology of the real graph is such that if you saw it first, you'd be bummed about the last couple years it shows. But because you saw the other graph first, it softens the blow a bit.
Here's an overlay of the fake graph with the real graph. As of right now, even with all this pullback, we're still "ahead of the game" so to speak. We've still got time, room and reason to go lower, but let's hope that doesn't happen.
Now, don't get me started on the other house I bought at the peak. Talk about dumb! I will pass blame to my personal circumstances at the time so that I don't feel bad about it. ;-)
