Cast off!

After three and a half long months, basically encompassing the entire summer, I am finally out of my air cast after a visit to the ankle specialist confirmed that I am making definite progress with my ankle injury. I have increased flexibility and I can do light jogging without too much pain and I am more than ready to get back to wearing both shoes again and starting some fall hiking. The county next door to us, Summit County, sponsors a hiking spree every autumn through their park system, and many of the parks fall within the scenic Cuyahoga Valley National Park. These trails are filled with breathtaking scenery and take you through all kinds of terrain - steep, rocky, flat, smooth and everything in between. Fall here is so beautiful with its splash of brilliant colors - scarlet, orange, gold, green, primarily from the maples that are so common in these parts. I always look forward to the hiking spree each year because of the gorgeous scenery I encounter along the trails, and now that my cast is off for good, I can get started in earnest hiking on the spree. I usually begin with a nearby park, Munroe Falls, which is only a few short miles from here. Its 2.2 mile trail takes you through some dense woods, a couple of beautiful ponds, some old growth trees, up and down moderate hills, along a spring and into at least one clearing. I always love walking along this trail and listening to the sounds of the water and the woods. So many of the parks have streams and ponds and there are plenty of waterfowl that frequent these places. You see herons, ducks, geese and other birds fishing in the streams and ponds in so many of these parks. I look forward to the serenity of nature as a balm against the hurly-burly of the city noise I encouter so often. It's very healing emotionally and it brings me back to myself when I feel like I need something of a touchstone to make me appreciate how wonderful life is, even when I'm feeling a bit down or low. So now that I have achieved enough healing physically to get started, I look forward to what hopefully will be some hiking friendly weather this weekend to get started on the spree while the weather is still favorable. I try to finish before October gets too far gone because the weather starts to turn in earnest in mid to late October and develop a downright chill in the air and the beginnings of bad weather with occasional early snows and sleet. Saturday is when I intend to get started, if not sooner, depending on the weather forecast the next few days. If it looks like it will be dry, then I will begin hiking maybe as early as tomorrow after work, depending on how I feel at the end of my workday. It all depends on Mother Nature and her eccentric whims here in Northeast Ohio.

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN.........

Yesterday's stock market nosedive of over 500 points caused many shockwaves through the financial sector. I can't say I really understand a great deal about the economy or anything having to do with economics, but I know that when I hear news like this, it makes me very nervous. I think that the stock market made some small recovery today, but a crash like that can still cost a lot of investors a lot of lost money. I don't understand how this whole subprime mortgage and credit crisis thing happened, but still, I always thought that there was some regulation in place to prevent such things from happening. I'm so baffled how these things got so out of hand in the first place. All I know is that every time I saw a "For Sale" sign out in front of a house with a "No Money Down" below it, something in my gut felt like there was something wrong about letting someone buy a house with no down payment. It sounded too good to be true. And it was. Those were the homes sold on subprime mortgages, and they are the same ones that are now being foreclosed on and leaving people homeless. There has also been a glut of what we call "McMansions" being built in every farmer's field and people took advantage of too easy credit to buy more house than they could realistically afford. So they, too, are losing their homes, and there is glum talk of those homes becoming "McMansion slums" of homes that are subdivided into apartments and rented out to less than desirable people, causing formerly upscale neighborhoods to become "the 'hood" of low income renters. Homes that formerly sold for $250,000 and up are sitting on the market not selling. People are realizing the error of their ways and not buying more home than they can realistically afford. The real estate market right now is so soft that homes just aren't selling because credit is so tough to obtain because banks are tightening up their credit standards in the wake of this whole subprime crisis. I suppose it's a buyer's market right now because if you have the money, you could probably snap up a lot of house for a lot less than they used to go for, so long as you get a good fixed rate mortgage and not an adjustable rate one like so many people got who are now losing their homes in the wake of this crisis. So the bloodbath continues on Wall Street, but as I see it, this is a necessary correction of an overly inflated market that spiraled out of control on a wave of easy credit. Now the time has come to pay the piper, and a lot of high flyers on Wall Street are losing their jobs as venerable old banks and investment houses go bust. These things happen from time to time, and it should serve as a LOUD wake up call about the dangers of flirting with too much easy credit and massive speculation. But then, since this happens over and over and over again, it's obvious that people just don't learn. Maybe this time they will, but I rather doubt it.