Hello, Daylight Savings Time

I know people hate switching to Daylight Savings Time because they lose an hour of sleep, but I welcomed it because now my body has stopped feeling like it was fighting an abnormal schedule. The fact that we have to figure out how to pass laws to get previous dumb laws repealed—Washington state has been trying to eliminate the time change for several years now and can’t seem to get it through the legislature—is a ridiculous commentary on just how useless government can be.

I don’t care which time change we eliminate, as long as we stop this nonsense. Also, it wasn’t the farmers who wanted this, because cows cannot tell time.

I came home from church yesterday and worked on quilting Big Top for a few hours. I made enough progress that now I’m motivated to get it done. I just needed to get over that “middle of the project” hump and get to a point where I could see the finish line. My ruler work continues to improve:

I’ve got to do a thread resupply soon. I am keeping a list of colors I need and will get them from the longarm quilt store in Spokane that carries Signature 40wt. I wish the stores here had it, but they all seem to be fans of Mettler thread. I am not.

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It was warm enough yesterday for the husband and I to reinstate our late afternoon habit of drinks on the veranda. I’ll need to hang up the shade curtain and the hummingbird feeders soon.

We use that time for daily briefings and strategic planning. I asked the husband what he thought about the current building boom here. Northwest Montana has a history of boom-and-bust cycles. We ran into that when we moved here in 1993. We deposited a huge chunk of money from the sale of our Pennsylvania house into one of the local banks, intending to use it as a down payment. A few months later, I went back to that same bank and attempted to get a mortgage for $30,000—an amount that was less than half the purchase price of this property because we had such a big down payment—and they refused. The loan officer told me that they wouldn’t loan money to self-employed contractors because the bank had gotten burned in the previous housing boom in the 1980s. That same bank did, however, give a much larger mortgage to some people we knew who moved here from the east coast, because the guy was employed by the local semiconductor company. That couple also had a mortgage on a house in Maryland, and he was laid off by the semiconductor company less than a year after they moved here. Apparently, though, the bank saw them as a better risk than the husband, who has never been unemployed in his entire working life and is now one of the most sought-after concrete contractors in the valley.

[No, I’m not bitter. Needless to say, we switched to a different local bank.]

In terms of building and real estate, 2020 was nuts. Out-of-staters were buying property sight unseen. Interestingly, the paper had an article last week about a 455-home development west of Kalispell that had gone through the entire planning and permitting process, and at the last second, the developer pulled the plug, citing lack of labor and lumber prices as the primary reasons for halting the project. (I am not sorry about this, for obvious reasons, but it was a shock to see the story.) I wondered to the husband if we are at or near the top of one of those boom-and-bust cycles. I just don’t think this is sustainable. I think that part of the reason we haven’t been completely overrun is that we do not have adequate internet service here for people to work remotely. We can’t even get YouTube videos to play during our church service without a “your internet connection is unstable” message appearing on the screen. Also, we have snow. And bears.

The husband is already booked well into the summer, so it doesn’t appear that 2021 is going to be less nuts than 2020 was. He doesn’t think this is sustainable, either. I guess we’ll find out.