Things are progressing nicely in Hutchinson. Real life - well, they're progressing, anyway. I'm now down to a 14 week buffer - Chapter 22 is getting sent out today if I feel like it.
The weather here turned vicious cold. 67 one day, 12 the next. Can you say sinus infection? Absolutely NO temperature at all, just lots of junk, sneezing, and coughing. So I've only been to the office one day this week, barely feel sub-human now. Before you send me all your home remedies (unless they involve alcohol!), I'm married to a nurse and we're better stocked up than some small town pharmacies, it seems like.
Of course, you can't have one without something else, so my wife tripped and fell down, breaking her foot. So she's in a walking cast, with three broken bones and torn ligaments. At least she didn't mess up the knee that she'd just had surgery on earlier this year, so silver linings and all that.
House is progressing nicely, if weather cooperates, tile work and painting will be done this week. Now if we could have more than a 3 week supply of houses for sale, such that my clients that are looking could get an offer accepted (it's getting bad when you offer 10K over and it's NOT the winning offer) so I could start the real estate year off right, that'd be good.
The same inventory crunch is out there on cars, too. My wife's car was on a lease that expired in November, we had to extend it because the new one I ordered in October wasn't going to be in until Christmas. It finally showed up, and we leased the new one. Apparently I'm the first guy that's ever pulled equity out of a car lease. Due to assorted discounts when I got the first leased car, the 'price' was $32K. Lease payoff was $20K, trade value was $29K, so I pulled $4K cash OUT, and still had trade value of $25K. My new lease payment went up $10 a month. Big whoop.
The whole point of that long comment is that if you have a vehicle that you don't necessarily need, right now they're worth a hell of a lot more than you'd think, at least if they're less than 10 years old and under 100K miles. Until the computer chip fiasco gets resolved, it's going to stay that way for a while.