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An easy day at the launching ramp.

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Nobody ever expects a hurricane to show up!

Least of all like that at day break!

Just the other day I was commenting that I wanted Santa Ana winds to blow into town, and get rid of the June Gloom that stuck around for August. Now, we have a chance of thunderstorms today. Not bad I suppose, just so long as it doesn’t tease us. Either become a booming thunder head, or go away, don’t just stick around over our heads mugging up the day.

The Associated Press: Tropical Storm Bill forms in the Atlantic

Watch out world, here I come on a rough and stormy day!

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Last weekend, I helped take a Troop of Boy Scouts up to Big Pine Creek, and we stayed in Palisade Group Campsite. While the boys and the rest of the adults went to fish for dinner, Jorge and I hiked up towards Palisade Glacier. That’s an 8 mile one way outing. We didn’t get quite that far, just 6.25 miles in, but it was still a good hike. A little bit of drizzle and rain, and afternoon clearing. Despite the photo above, the sun did not come out till we got almost back to the campsite.

I’ll need to go back and do that trip again, as part of a 3 or 4 day backpack trip.

Well, we have a confession: The man who blew up Wall Street.

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street — New York Magazine .

Good read. A little bit of code, a few interesting ideas, expanded upon over a few decades, and *bam* he causes the entire economy to melt down. His great ideas, done in a conservative fashion worked, but when turned out willy nilly for everyone, caused a few years of over affordable credit, driving up housing prices and the stock market, until it collapsed.

Well worth your time to read!

Don’t you just love it when you get a very important work email on a paid holiday? Hopefully my answer will suffice until Monday when I’m able and willing to put actual effort into researching their question.

It’s a good one though, and I don’t want them to feel blown off. I just want to enjoy my 3 day weekend!

I had thought I had seen or heard of almost everything to happen in small time politics, but this is a new one by me.

Duncanville council member hospitalized, facing charges after heated meeting |

In Homeownersâ?? Latest Woe, Banks Are Skipping Foreclosures – NYTimes.com

Wow. So what happens when the bank decides to cancel the foreclosure auction? The property goes into limbo. The title is still in the “owner’s” name. The city can go after the title holder for maintenance and vandalism problems, which can strike them completely unaware if they vacated the property before the cancelled foreclosure auction.

Maybe we should just bulldoze unwanted houses, if the vacancy rate in certain cities is too high? It’s not going to happen here in Los Angeles I suspect, but it would be one way of propping housing values up. Just eliminating 25% of available homes on the market would have some affect.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. Jamesâ??s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

So if the bank could not find a record of the loan, and everyone involved in collecting the loan is defunct or missing, does the property just revert back to the title holder who couldn’t pay the mortgage?  I never thought housing could be free, but that is an interesting way to get it.